MODERN ESSAYS 
 FOR SCHOOLS 
 
 selecteO by 
 CHRISTOPHER MORLEY 
 
 m 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
 
^DUCA-nON DEPT. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, I92I, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 
 
 PRINTED IN THC U. S. A. BY 
 
 THB OUINN a BOOKN COMPANY 
 
 RAHWAY, N. J. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 It had been my habit, I am now aware, to speak 
 somewhat lightly of the labors of anthologists: to 
 insinuate that they led lives of bland sedentary ease. 
 I shall not do so again. When the publisher suggested 
 a collection of representative contemporary essays, I 
 thought it would be the most lenient of tasks. But 
 experience is a fine aperitive to the mind. 
 
 Indeed the pangs of the anthologist, if he has con- 
 science, are burdensome. There are so many consid- 
 erations to be tenderly weighed; personal taste must 
 sometimes be set aside in view of the general plan; 
 for every item chosen half a dozen will have been 
 affectionately conned and sifted; and perhaps some 
 favorite pieces will be denied because the authors have 
 reasons for withholding permission. It would be en- 
 joyable (for me, at any rate) to write an essay on the 
 things I have lingered over with intent to include them 
 in this little book, but have finally sacrificed for one 
 reason or another. How many times — twenty at least 
 — I have taken down from my shelf Mr. Chesterton's 
 The Victorian Age in Literature to reconsider whether 
 
 iii 
 
iv Preface 
 
 his ten pages on Dickens, or his glorious summing-up 
 of Decadents and -Esthetes, were not absolutely essen- 
 tial. How many times I have palpitated upon certain 
 passages in The Education of Henry Adams and in 
 Mr. Wells's Outline of History, which, I assured my- 
 self, would legitimately stand as essays if shrewdly 
 excerpted. 
 
 But I usually concluded that would not be quite 
 fair. I have not been overscrupulous in this matter, 
 for the essay is a mood rather than a form ; the fron- 
 tier between the essay and the short story is as imper- 
 ceptible as is at present the once famous Mason and 
 Dixon line. Indeed, in that pleasant lowland country 
 between the two empires lie (to my way of think- 
 ing) some of the most fertile fields of prose — fiction 
 that expresses feeling and character and setting rather 
 than action and plot; fiction beautifully ripened by the 
 lingering mild sunshine of the essayist's mood. This 
 is fiction, I might add, extremely unlikely to get into 
 the movies. I think of short stories such as George 
 Gissing's, in that too little known volume The House 
 of Cobwebs, which I read again and again at midnight 
 with unfailing delight; fall asleep over; forget; and 
 again re-read with undiminished satisfaction. They 
 have no brilliance of phrase, no smart surprises, no 
 worked-up 'situations' which have to be taken at high 
 speed to pass without breakdown over their brittle 
 
Preface V 
 
 bridge work of credibility. They have only the mod- 
 est and faintly melancholy savor of life itself. 
 ^^ ^iimk it is a mere quibble to pretend that the essay 
 does not have easily recognizable manners. It may 
 be severely planned, or it may ramble in ungirdled 
 mood, but it has its own point of view that marks it 
 from the short story proper, or the merely personal 
 memoir. That_distinction, easily felt by the sensi- 
 tive reader, is not readily expressible. Perhaps the 
 true meaning of the word essay — an attempt — gives 
 a clue. No matter how personal or trifling the topic 
 may be, there is always a tendency to generalize, to 
 walk round the subject or the experience, and view 
 it from several vantages; instead of (as in the short 
 story) cutting a carefully landscaped path through a 
 chosen tract of human complication. So an essay can 
 never be more than an atternpt, jfor it is an excursion 
 ^nto th e endless, j Any student of fiction will admit that 
 in the composition of a short story many entertaining 
 and valuable elaborations may rise in the mind of the 
 author which must be strictly rejected because they 
 do not forward the essential motive. But in the essay 
 (of an informal sort) we ask not relev^ce to plot, 
 but relevance to mood. That is why there are so 
 many essays that are mere marking time. The familiar » 
 essay is easier to write than the short story, but it im- 
 poses equal restraints on a scrupulous author. For in 
 
vi Preface 
 
 fiction the writer is controlled and limited and ..smept 
 along by his material; but in the essay, lh£-,writer rides 
 his pen. A good story, once clearly conceived, almost 
 "writes itself; but essays are written. 
 
 There also we find a pitfall of the personal essay — 
 the temptation to become too ostentatiously quaint, 
 too deliberately 'whimsical* (the word which, by 
 loathsome repetition, has become emetic). The fine 
 flavor and genius of the essay — as in Bacon and 
 Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, Thackeray, Thoreau; per- 
 haps even in Stevenson — is the rich bouquet of per- 
 sonality. But soliloquy must not fall into monologue. 
 One might put it thus: that the perfection of the 
 familiar essay is a conscious revelation of self done 
 inadvertently. 
 
 The art of the anthologist is the art of the host : his 
 tact is exerted in choosing a congenial group ; making 
 them feel comfortable and at ease; keeping the wine 
 and tobacco in circulation; while his eye is tenderly 
 alert down the bright vista of tablecloth, for any lapse 
 in the general cheer. It is well, also, for him to hold 
 himself discreetly in the background, giving his guests 
 the pleasure of clinching the jape, and seeking only, by 
 innocent wiles, to draw each one into some charac- 
 teristic and felicitous vein. I think T can offer you, in 
 this parliament of philomaths, entertainment of the 
 
Preface vii 
 
 most genuine sort; and having said so much, I might 
 well retire and be heard no more. 
 
 But I think it is well to state, as even the most bashful 
 host may do, just why this particular company has been 
 called together. My intention is not merely to please 
 the amiable dilettante, though I hope to do that too. 
 I made my choices, first and foremost, with a view to 
 stimulating those who are themselves interested in 
 the arts of writing. I have, to be frank, a secret am- 
 bition that a book of this sort may even be used as a 
 small but useful weapon in the classroom. I wanted to 
 bring it home to the student that as brilliant and sin- 
 cere work is being done to-day in the essay as in any 
 period of our literature. Accordingly the pieces re- 
 printed here are very diverse. There is the grand 
 manner; there is foolery; there is straightforward 
 literary criticism; there is pathos, politics, and the pic- 
 turesque. But every selection is, in its own way, 
 a work of art. And I would call the reader^s atten- 
 tion to this: that the greater number of these essays 
 were written not by retired aesthetes, but by practising 
 journalists in the harness of the daily or weekly press. 
 The names of some of the most widely bruited essay- 
 ists of our day are absent from this roster, not by 
 malice, but because I desired to include material less 
 generally known. 
 
viii Preface 
 
 I should apologize, I suppose, for the very informal 
 tone of the introductory notes on each author. But I 
 conceived the reader in the role of a friend spending 
 the evening in happy gossip along the shelves. Pulling 
 out one*s favorites and talking about them, now and 
 then reading a chosen extract aloud, and ending (some 
 time after midnight) by choosing some special volume 
 for the guest to take to bed with him — in the same 
 spirit I have compiled this collection. Perhaps the edi- 
 torial comments have too much the manner of dress- 
 ing gown and slippers; but what a pleasant book this 
 will be to read in bed! 
 
 And perhaps this collection may be regarded as a 
 small contribution to Anglo-American friendliness. 
 Of course when I say Anglo-, I mean Brito-, but that 
 is such a hideous prefix. Journalists on this side are 
 much better acquainted with what their professional 
 colleagues are doing in Britain, than they with our 
 concerns. But surely there should be a congenial fra- 
 ternity of spirit among all who use the English tongue 
 in print. There are some of us who even imagine a 
 day when there may be regular international exchanges 
 of journalists, as there have been of scholars and stu- 
 dents. The contributions to this book are rather evenly 
 divided between British and American hands ; and per- 
 haps it is not insignificant that two of the most pleas- 
 
Preface ix 
 
 ing items come from Canada, where they often com- 
 bine the virtues of both sides. 
 
 It is a pleasant task to thank the authors and pub- 
 lishers who have assented to the reprinting of these 
 pieces. To the authors themselves, and to the follow- 
 ing publishers, I admit my sincere gratitude for the use 
 of material copyrighted by them: — Doubleday Page 
 and Company for the extracts from books by John 
 Macy and Pearsall Smith; Charles Scribner's Sons 
 for Rupert Brooke's Niagara Falls; the George H. 
 Doran Company for the essays by Joyce Kilmer and 
 Robert Cortes Holliday; Mr. James B. Pinker for per- 
 mission to reprint Mr. Conrad's Preface to A Personal 
 Record; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the essays by H. 
 M. Tomlinson, A. P. Herbert and Philip Guedalla; 
 Lady Osier for the essay by the late Sir William Osier ; 
 the New York Evening Post for the essay by Stuart 
 P. Sherman; Harcourt, Brace and Company for the 
 essay by Heywood Broun ; The Weekly Review for the 
 essays by O. W. Firkins, Harry Morgan Ayres and 
 Robert Palfrey Utter. The present ownership of the 
 copyright of the essay by Louise Imogen Guiney I 
 have been unable to discover. It was published in 
 Patrins (Copeland and Day, 1897), which has long 
 been out of print. Knowing the purity of my motives 
 I have used this essay, hoping that it might introduce 
 
'X Preface 
 
 Miss Guiney^s exquisite work to the younger genera- 
 tion that knows her hardly at all. 
 
 Christopher Morley 
 October, igsi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 'Er 
 
 Us- 
 
 Preface 
 
 American Literature 
 Mary White . 
 Niagara Falls 
 "A Clergyman" 
 *'The Man o' War's 
 
 band" .... 
 The Market . . 
 Holy Ireland . . 
 A Familiar Preface 
 On Drawing . . 
 O. Henry . . . 
 The Mowing of a 
 The Student Life 
 The Decline of the Drama . 
 America and the English 
 
 Tradition 
 
 The Fifty-first Dragon . . 
 
 Some Historians 
 
 Samuel Butler 
 
 Bed-Books and Night-Lights . 
 The Precept of Peace . . . 
 
 Winter Mist 
 
 Trivia 
 
 The Fish Reporter .... 
 
 Field 
 
 J^hn Macy . . . 
 William Allen White 
 
 Rupert Brooke . . 
 Max Beerbohm 
 
 David W. Bone . 
 William McFee 
 
 Joyce Kilmer . . 
 
 Joseph Conrad . . 
 
 A. P. Herbert . . 
 
 O. W. Firkins . . 
 
 Hilaire Belloc . . 
 
 William Osier . . 
 
 Stephen Leacock , 
 
 Harry Morgan Ayres 
 Heywood Broun . 
 Philip Guedalla . . 
 Stuart P. Sherman . 
 H. M. Tomlinson . . 
 Louise Imogen Guiney 
 Robert Palfrey Utter . 
 Logan Pearsall Smith 
 Robert Cortes Holliday 
 
 PAGE 
 
 iii 
 3 
 
 22 
 30 
 
 39 
 
 49 
 60 
 
 67 
 81 
 
 04 
 100 
 113 
 
 128 
 145 
 
 153 
 160 
 
 174 
 187 
 210 
 219 
 229 
 
 235 
 242 
 
MODERN ESSAYS 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 By John Macy 
 
 This vigorous survey of American letters is the first chapter 
 of John Macy's admirable volume The Spirit of American Lit- 
 erature, published in 191 3 — a book shrewd, penetrating and salty, 
 which has unfortunately never reached one-tenth of the many 
 readers who would find it permanently delightful and profitable. 
 Mr. Macy has no skill in vaudeville tricks to call attention to 
 himself: no shafts of limelight have followed him across the 
 stage. But those who have an eye for criticism that is vivacious 
 without bombast, austere without bitterness, keen without malice, 
 know him as one of the truly competent and liberal-minded ob- 
 servers of the literary scene. 
 
 Mr. Macy was born in Detroit, 1877 ; graduated from Harvard 
 in 1899; did editorial service on the Youth's Companion and the 
 Boston Herald; and nowadays lives pensively in Greenwich Vil- 
 lage, writing a good deal for The Freeman and The Literary 
 Review. Perhaps, if you were wandering on Fourth Street, east 
 of Sixth Avenue, you might see him treading thoughtfully along, 
 with a wide sombrero hat, and always troubled by an iron-gray 
 forelock that droops over his brow. You would know, as soon 
 as you saw him, that he is a man greatly lovable. I like to 
 think of him as I first saw him, some years ago, in front of the 
 bright hearth of the charming St. Botolf^ -^luban Boston, j»/^'here 
 he was usually the center of an animated" group of hocLurnal 
 philosophers. >'* ^ , , ..„,»•', •,• » ", 
 
 The essay was written in 1912, before the Very real i'ea«vakcn; 
 ing of American creative work thac began in the 'teens of 'this 
 century. The reader will find it interesting to consider how far 
 Mr. Macy's remarks might be modified if he were writing to-day. 
 
 The Spirit of American Literature has been reissued in an 
 inexpensive edition by Boni and Liveright. It is a book well 
 worth owning. 
 
 American literature is a branch of English litera* 
 ture, as truly as are English books written in Scotland 
 or South Africa. Our literature lies almost entirely 
 in the nineteenth century when the ideas and books of 
 
 3 
 
4 John Macy 
 
 the western world were freely interchanged among 
 the nations and became accessible to an increasing num- 
 ber of readers. In literature nationality is determined 
 by language rather than by blood or geography. M. 
 Maeterlinck, born a subject of King Leopold, belongs 
 to French literature. Mr. Joseph Conrad, born in 
 Poland, is already an English classic. Geography, 
 much less important in the nineteenth century than 
 before, was never, among modern European nations, 
 so important as we sometimes are asked to believe. 
 Of the ancestors of English literature "Beowulf" is 
 scarcely more significant, and rather less graceful, than 
 our tree-inhabiting forebears with prehensile toes ; the 
 true progenitors of English literature are Greek, Latin, 
 Hebrew, Italian, and French. 
 
 American literature and English literature of the 
 nineteenth century are parallel derivatives from pre- 
 cediiiig. centviHfe^, pf; English literature. Literature is a 
 suo:ession of books from books. Artistic expression 
 isprings from life U'ltirnately but not immediately. It 
 may be likened to a river which is swollen throughout 
 its course by new tributaries and by the seepages of 
 its banks; it reflects the life through which it flows, 
 taking color from the shores; the shores modify it, 
 but its power and volume descend from distant head- 
 waters and affluents far up stream. Or it may be 
 likened to the race-life which our food nourishes or 
 
American Literature 5 
 
 impoverishes, which our individual circumstances 
 foster or damage, but which flows on through us, 
 strangely impersonal and beyond our power to kill or 
 create. 
 
 It is well for a writer to say: "Away with books! 
 I will draw my inspiration from lifeT* For we have 
 too many books that are simply better books diluted 
 by John Smith. At the same time, literature is not 
 born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its 
 literary parentage, and students find it so easy to trace 
 genealogies that much criticism reads like an Old 
 Testament chapter of "begats." Every novel was 
 suckled at the breasts of older novels, and great 
 mothers are often prolific of anaemic offspring. The 
 stock falls off and revives, goes a-wandering, and re- 
 turns like a prodigal. The family records get blurred. 
 But of the main fact of descent there is no doubt. 
 
 American literature is English literature made in 
 this country. Its nineteenth-century characteristics 
 are evident and can be analyzed and discussed with 
 some degree of certainty. Its "American" character- 
 istics — no critic that I know has ever given a good 
 account of them. You can define certain peculiarities 
 of American politics, American agriculture, Ameri- 
 can public schools, even American religion. But what 
 is uniquely American in American literature? Poe is 
 just as American as Mark Twain; Lanier is just as 
 
6 John Macy 
 
 American as Whittier. The American spirit in litera- 
 ture is a myth, Hke American valor in war, which is 
 precisely like the valor of Italians and Japanese. The 
 American, deluded by a falsely idealized image which 
 he calls America, can say that the purity of Longfellow 
 represents the purity of American home life. An Irish 
 Englishman, Mr. Bernard Shaw, with another falsely 
 idealized image of America, surprised that a face does 
 Tiot fit his image, can ask: "What is Poe doing in 
 that galley?" There is no answer. You never can 
 tell. Poe could not help it. He was born in Boston, 
 and lived in Richmond, New York, Baltimore, Phila- 
 delphia. Professor van Dyke says that Poe was a 
 maker of "decidedly un-American cameos," but I do 
 not understand what that means. Facts are uncom- 
 fortable consorts of prejudices and emotional gener- 
 alities ; they spoil domestic peace, and when there is a 
 separation they sit solid at home while the other party 
 goes. Irving, a shy, sensitive gentleman, who wrote 
 with fastidious care, said: "It has been a matter of 
 marvel, to European readers, that a man from the 
 wilds of America should express himself in tolerable 
 English." It is a matter of marvel, just as it is a 
 marvel that Blake and Keats flowered in the brutal 
 city of London a hundred years ago. 
 
 The literary mind is strengthened and nurtured, is 
 influenced and mastered, by the accumulated riches of 
 
American Literature 7 
 
 literature. In the last century the strongest thinkers 
 in our language were Englishmen, and not only the 
 traditional but the contemporary influences on our 
 thinkers and artists were British. This may account 
 for one negative characteristic of American literature 
 — its lack of American quality. True, our records 
 must reflect our life. Our poets, enamored of night- 
 ingales and Persian gardens, have not altogether for- 
 gotten the mocking-bird and the woods of Maine^ 
 Fiction, written by inhabitants of New York, Ohio, 
 and Massachusetts, does tell us something of the ways 
 of life in those mighty commonwealths, just as Eng- 
 lish fiction written by Lancashire men about Lanca- 
 shire people is saturated with the dialect, the local 
 habits and scenery of that county. But wherever an 
 English-speaking man of imagination may dwell, in 
 Dorset or Calcutta or Indianapolis, he is subject to 
 the strong arm of the empire of English literature; he 
 cannot escape it; it tears him out of his obscure bed 
 and makes a happy slave of him. He is assigned to 
 the department of the service for which his gifts 
 qualify him, and his special education is undertaken by 
 drill-masters and captains who hail from provinces far 
 from his birthplace. 
 
 Dickens, who writes of London, influences Bret 
 Harte, who writes of California, and Bret Harte in- 
 fluences Kipling, who writes of India. Each is in- 
 
8 John Macy 
 
 tensely local in subject matter. The affinity between 
 them is a matter of temperament, manifested, for ex- 
 ample, in the swagger and exaggeration characteristic 
 of all three. California did not "produce" Bret Harte ; 
 the power of Dickens was greater than that of the 
 Sierras and the Golden Gate. Bret Harte created a 
 California that never existed, and Indian gentlemen, 
 Caucasian and Hindoo, tell us that Kipling invented an 
 army and an empire unknown to geographers and war- 
 ofBces. 
 
 The ideas at work among these English men of let- 
 ters are world-encircling and fly between book and 
 brain. The dominant power is on the British Islands, 
 and the prevailing stream of influence flows west 
 across the Atlantic. Sometimes it turns and runs the 
 other way. Poe influenced Rossetti; Whitman influ- 
 enced Henley. For a century Cooper has been in com- 
 mand of the British literary marine. Literature is 
 reprehensibly unpatriotic, even though its votaries are, 
 as individual citizens, afflicted with local prides and 
 hostilities. It takes only a dramatic interest in the 
 guns of Yorktown. Its philosophy was nobly uttered 
 by Gaston Paris in the College de France in 1870, 
 when the city was beleaguered by the German armies : 
 "Common studies, pursued in the same spirit, in all 
 civilized countries, form, beyond the restrictions of 
 diverse and often hostile nationalities, a great country 
 
American Literature 9 
 
 which no war profanes, no conqueror menaces, where 
 souls find that refuge and unity which in former times 
 was offered them by the city of God." The cathoHcity 
 of English language and literature transcends the tem- 
 poral boundaries of states. 
 
 What, then, of the "provincialism" of the American 
 province of the empire of British hterature? Is it an 
 observable general characteristic, and is it a virtue or 
 a vice ? There is a sense in which American literature 
 is not provincial enough. The most provincial of all 
 literature is the Greek. The Greeks knew nothing out- 
 side of Greece and needed to know nothing. The Old 
 Testament is tribal in its provinciality; its god is a 
 local god, and its village police and sanitary regulations 
 are erected into eternal laws. If this racial localism is 
 not essential to the greatness of early literatures, it is 
 inseparable from them; we find it there. It is not 
 possible in our cosmopolitan age and there are few 
 traces of it in American books. No American poet 
 has sung of his neighborhood with naive passion, as if 
 it were all the world to him. Whitman is pugnaciously 
 American, but his sympathies are universal, his vision 
 is cosmic ; when he seems to be standing in a city street 
 looking at life, he is in a trance, and his spirit is racing 
 with the winds. 
 
 The welcome that we gave Whitman betrays the lack 
 of an admirable kind of provincialism; it shows us 
 
lO John Macy 
 
 defective in local security of judgment. Some of us 
 have been so anxiously abashed by high standards of 
 European culture that we could not see a poet in our 
 own back yard until European poets and critics told 
 us he was there. This is queerly contradictory to a 
 disposition found in some Americans to disregard 
 world standards and proclaim a third-rate poet as the 
 Milton of Oshkosh or the Shelley of San Francisco. 
 The passage in Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about 
 "The American Bulwers, Disraelis and Scotts" is a 
 spoonful of salt in the mouth of that sort of gaping 
 village reverence. 
 
 Of dignified and self-respecting provincialism, such 
 as Professor Royce so eloquently advocates, there 
 might well be more in American books. Our poets 
 desert the domestic landscape to write pseudo-Eliza- 
 bethan dramas and sonnets about Mont Blanc. They 
 set up an artificial Tennyson park on the banks of the 
 Hudson. Beside the shores of Lake Michigan they 
 croon the love affairs of an Arab in the desert and his 
 noble steed. This is not a very grave offence, for poets 
 live among the stars, and it makes no difference from 
 what point of the earth's surface they set forth on 
 their aerial adventures. A Wisconsin poet may write 
 very beautifully about nightingales, and a New Eng- 
 land Unitarian may write beautifully about cathedrals; 
 if it is beautiful, it is poetry, and all is well. 
 
American Literature li 
 
 The novelists are the worst offenders. There have 
 been few of them; they have not been adequate in 
 numbers or in genius to the task of describing the 
 sections of the country, the varied scenes and habits 
 from New Orleans to the Portlands. And yet, small 
 band as they are, with great domestic opportunities 
 and responsibilities, they have devoted volumes to 
 Paris, which has an able native corps of story-makers, 
 and to Italy, where the home talent is first-rate. In 
 this sense American literature is too globe-trotting, it 
 has too little savor of the soil. 
 
 Of provincialism of the narrowest type American 
 writers, like other men of imagination, are not guilty 
 to any reprehensible degree. It is a vice sometimes 
 imputed to them by provincial critics who view litera- 
 ture from the office of a London weekly review or 
 from the lecture rooms of American colleges. Some 
 American writers are parochial, for example, Whittier. 
 Others, like Mr. Henry James, are provincial in out- 
 look, but cosmopolitan in experience, and reveal their 
 provinciality by a self-conscious internationalism. 
 Probably English and French writers may be similarly 
 classified as provincial or not Mr. James says that 
 Poe's collection of critical sketches "is probably the 
 most complete and exquisite specimen of provincialism 
 ever prepared for the edification of men." It is noth- 
 ing like that. It is an example of what happens when 
 
12 John Macy 
 
 a hack reviewer's work in local journals is collected 
 into a volume because he turns out to be a genius. The 
 list of Poe's victims is not more remarkable for the 
 number of nonentities it includes than "The Lives of 
 the Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, who was 
 hack for a bookseller, and "introduced" all the poets 
 that the taste of the time encouraged the bookseller 
 to l)rint. Poe was cosmopolitan in spirit ; his prejudices 
 were personal and highly original, usually against the 
 prejudices of his moment and milieu. Hawthorne is less 
 provincial, in the derogatory sense, than his charming 
 biographer, Mr. James, as will become evident if one 
 compares Hawthorne's American notes on England, 
 written in long ago days of national rancor, with Mr. 
 James's British notes on America ("The American 
 Scene"), written in our happy days of spacious vision. 
 Emerson's ensphering universality overspreads 
 Carlyle like the sky above a volcanic island. Indeed 
 Carlyle (who knew more about American life and 
 about what other people ought to do than any other 
 British writer earlier than Mr. Chesterton) justly com- 
 plains that Emerson is not sufficiently local and con- 
 crete; Carlyle longs to see "some Event, Man's Life, 
 American Forest, or piece of creation which this 
 Emerson loves and wonders at, well Emersonised." 
 Longfellow would not stay at home and write more 
 about the excellent village blacksmith ; he made poetical 
 
American Literature 13 
 
 tours of Europe and translated songs and legends from 
 several languages for the delight of the villagers who 
 remained behind. Lowell was so heartily cosmopolitan 
 that American newspapers accused him of Anglomania 
 — which proves their provincialism but acquits him. 
 Mr. Howells has written a better book about Venice 
 than about Ohio. Mark Twain lived in every part of 
 America, from Connecticut to California, he wrote 
 about every country under the sun (and about some 
 countries beyond the sun), he is read by all sorts and 
 conditions of men in the English-speaking world, and 
 he is an adopted hero in Vienna. It is difficult to 
 come to any conclusion about provincialism as a char- 
 acteristic of American literature. 
 
 American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, 
 delicate, nicely finished. There is little of it which 
 might not have appeared in the Youth's Companion, 
 The notable exceptions are our most stalwart men o4 
 genius, Thoreau, Whitman, and Mark Twain. Any 
 child can read American literature, and if it does not 
 make a man of him, it at least will not lead him into 
 forbidden realms. Indeed, American books too seldom 
 come to grips with the problems of life, especially the 
 books cast in artistic forms. The essayists, expounders, 
 and preachers attack life vigorously and wrestle with 
 the meaning of it. The poets are thin, moonshiny, 
 meticulous in technique. Novelists are few and feeble. 
 
14 John Macy 
 
 and dramatists are non-existent. These generalities, 
 subject to exceptions, are confirmed by a reading of 
 the first fifteen volumes of the Atlantic Monthly, which 
 are a treasure-house of the richest period of American 
 literary expression. In those volumes one finds a sur- 
 prising number of vigorous, distinguished papers on 
 politics, philosophy, science, even on literature and art. 
 Many talented men and women, whose names are not 
 well remembered, are clustered there about the half 
 dozen salient men of genius; and the collection gives 
 one a sense that the New England mind (aided by the 
 outlying contributors) was, in its one Age of Thought, 
 an abundant and diversified power. But the poetry is 
 not memorable, except for some verses by the few 
 standard poets. And the fiction is naive. Edward 
 Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country'* is al- 
 most the only story there that one comes on with a 
 thrill either of recognition or of discovery. 
 
 It is hard to explain why the American, except in his 
 exhortatory and passionately argumentative moods, has 
 not struck deep into American life, why his stories and 
 verses are, for the most part, only pretty things, nicely 
 unimportant. Anthony Trollope had a theory that the 
 absence of international copyright threw our market 
 open too unrestrictedly to the British product, that the 
 American novel was an unprotected infant industry; 
 we printed Dickens and the rest without paying royalty 
 
American Literature 1 5 
 
 and starved the domestic manufacturer. This theory 
 does not explain. For there were many American 
 novelists, published, read, and probably paid for their 
 work. The trouble is that they lacked genius; they 
 dealt with trivial, slight aspects of life; they did not 
 take the novel seriously in the right sense of the word, 
 though no doubt they were in another sense serious 
 enough about their poor productions. "Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin" and "Huckleberry Finn" are colossal exceptions 
 to the prevailing weakness and superficiality of Ameri- 
 can novels. 
 
 Why do American writers turn their backs on life, 
 miss its intensities, its significance? The American 
 Civil War was the most tremendous upheaval in the 
 world after the Napoleonic period. The imaginative 
 reaction on it consists of some fine essays, Lincoln's 
 addresses, W^hitman's war poetry, "Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin" (which came before the war but is part of it), 
 one or two passionate hymns by Whittier, the second 
 series of the "Biglow Papers," Hale's "The Man With- 
 out a Country" — and what else? The novels laid in 
 war-time are either sanguine melodrama or absurd 
 idyls of maidens whose lovers are at the front — a 
 tragic theme if tragically and not sentimentally con- 
 ceived. Perhaps the bullet that killed Theodore Win- 
 throp deprived us of our great novelist of the Civil 
 War, for he was on the right road. In a general 
 
1 6 John Macy 
 
 speculation such a might-have-been is not altogether 
 futile; if Milton had died of whooping cough there 
 would not have been any "Paradise Lost"; the reverse 
 of this is that some geniuses whose works ought in- 
 evitably to have been produced by this or that national 
 development may have died too soon. This suggestion, 
 however, need not be gravely argued. The fact is 
 that the American literary imagination after the Civil 
 War was almost sterile. If no books had been written, 
 the failure of that conflict to get itself embodied in 
 some masterpieces would be less disconcerting. But 
 thousands of books were written by people who knew 
 the war at first hand and who had literary ambition and 
 some skill, and from all these books none rises to dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 An example of what seems to be the American habit 
 of writing about everything except American life, is 
 the work of General Lew Wallace. Wallace was one 
 of the important secondary generals in the Civil War, 
 distinguished at Fort Donelson and at Shiloh. After 
 the war he wrote "Ben-Hur," a doubly abominable 
 book, because it is not badly written and it shows a 
 lively imagination. There is nothing in it so valuable, 
 so dramatically significant as a week in Wallace's war 
 experiences. "Ben-Hur," fit work for a country clergy- 
 man with a pretty literary gift, is a ridiculous inanity 
 to come from a man who has seen the things that 
 
American Literature 17 
 
 Wallace saw! It is understandable that the man of 
 experience may not write at all, and, on the other hand, 
 that the man of secluded life may have the imagination 
 to make a military epic. But for a man crammed with 
 experience of the most dramatic sort and discovering 
 the ability and the ambition to write — for him to make 
 spurious oriental romances which achieve an enormous 
 popularity! The case is too grotesque to be typical, 
 yet it is exceptional in degree rather than in kind. 
 The American literary artist has written about every- 
 thing under the skies except what matters most in his 
 own life. General Grant's plain autobiography, not art 
 and of course not attempting to be, is better literature 
 than most of our books in artistic forms, because of 
 its intellectual integrity and the profound importance 
 of the subject-matter. 
 
 Our dreamers have dreamed about many wonderful 
 things, but their faces have been averted from the 
 mightier issues of life. They have been high-minded, 
 fine-grained, eloquent in manner, in odd contrast to 
 the real or reputed vigor and crudeness of the nation. 
 In the hundred years from Irving's first romance to 
 Mr. Howells's latest unromantic novel, most of our 
 books are eminent for just those virtues which Amer- 
 ica is supposed to lack. Their physique is feminine; 
 they are fanciful, dainty, reserved; they are literose, 
 sophisticated in craftsmanship, but innocently unaware 
 
1 8 John Macy 
 
 of the profound agitations of American life, of life 
 everywhere. Those who strike the deeper notes of 
 reality, Whitman, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Mrs. Stowe 
 in her one great book, Whittier, Lowell and Emerson 
 at their best, are a powerful minority. The rest, beau- 
 tiful and fine in spirit, too seldom show that they are 
 conscious of contemporaneous realities, too seldom vi- 
 brate with a tremendous sense of life. 
 
 The Jason of western exploration writes as if he 
 had passed his life in a library. The Ulysses of great 
 rivers and perilous seas is a connoisseur of Japanese 
 prints. The warrior of 'Sixty-one rivals Miss Marie 
 Corelli. The mining engineer carves cherry stones. 
 He who is figured as gaunt, hardy and aggressive, 
 conquering the desert with the steam locomotive, 
 sings of a pretty little rose in a pretty little garden. 
 The judge, haggard with experience, who presides over 
 the most tragi-comic divorce court ever devised by 
 man, writes love stories that would have made Jane 
 Austen smile. 
 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett is reported to have said that if 
 Balzac had seen Pittsburgh, he would have cried : 
 "Give me a pen !'* The truth is, the whole country is 
 crying out for those who will record it, satirize it, 
 chant it. As literary material, it is virgin land, ancient 
 as life and fresh as a wilderness. American literature 
 is one occupation which is not over-crowded, in which. 
 
American Literature 19 
 
 indeed, there is all too little competition for the new- 
 comer to meet. There are signs that some earnest 
 youn^ writers are discovering the fertility of a soil 
 that has scarcely been scratched. 
 
 American fiction shows all sorts of merit, but the 
 merits are not assembled, concentrated; the fine is 
 weak, and the strong is crude. The stories of Poe, 
 Hawthorne, Howells, James, Aldrich, Bret Harte, are 
 admirable in manner, but they are thin in substance, 
 not of large vitality. On the other hand, some of the 
 stronger American fictions fail in workmanship; for 
 example, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which is still vivid 
 and moving long after its tractarian interest has faded : 
 the novels of Frank Norris, a man of great vision and 
 high purpose, who attempted to put national economics 
 into something like an epic of daily bread; and Herman 
 Melville's "Moby Dick," a madly eloquent romance of 
 the sea. A few American novelists have felt the mean- 
 ing of the life they knew and have tried sincerely to 
 set it down, but have for various reasons failed to 
 make first-rate novels ; for example, Edward Eggleston, 
 whose stories of early Indiana have the breath of ac- 
 tuality in them; Mr. E. W. Howe, author of "The 
 Story of a Country Town" ; Harold Frederic, a man of 
 great ability, whose work was growing deeper, more 
 significant when he died; George W. Cable, whose 
 novels are unsteady and sentimental, but who gives a 
 
20 John Macy 
 
 genuine impression of having portrayed a city and its 
 people; and Stephen Crane, who, dead at thirty, had 
 given in "The Red Badge of Courage" and "Maggie" 
 the promise of better work. Of good short stories 
 America has been prolific. Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, 
 Mrs, Annie Trumbull Slosson, Sarah Orne Jewett, 
 Rowland Robinson, H. C. Bunner, Edward Everett 
 Hale, Frank Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, and "O. 
 Henry" are some of those whose short stories are per- 
 fect in their several kinds. But the American novel, 
 which multiplies past counting, remains an inferior 
 production. 
 
 On a private shelf of contemporary fiction and 
 drama in the English language are the works of ten 
 British authors, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G. Wells, 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Eden Phillpotts, Mr. George 
 Moore, Mr. Leonard Merrick, Mr. J. C. Snaith, Miss 
 May Sinclair, Mr. William De Morgan, Mr. Maurice 
 Hewlett, Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Bernard Shaw, yes, 
 and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Beside them I find but 
 two Americans, Mrs. Edith Wharton and Mr. Theo- 
 dore Dreiser. There may be others, for one cannot 
 pretend to know all the living novelists and dramatists. 
 Yet for every American that should be added, I would 
 agree to add four to the British list. However, a con- 
 temporary literature that includes Mrs. Wharton's 
 "Ethan Frome" and Mr. Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt** 
 
American Literature 21 
 
 both published last year, is not to be despaired of. 
 In the course of a century a few Americans have 
 said in memorable words what life meant to them. 
 Their performance, put together, is considerable, if 
 not imposing. Any sense of dissatisfaction that one 
 feels in contemplating it is due to the disproportion be- 
 tween a limited expression and the multifarious im- 
 mensity of the country. Our literature, judged by the 
 great literatures contemporaneous with it, is insuffi- 
 cient to the opportunity and the need. The American 
 Spirit may be figured as petitioning the Muses for 
 twelve novelists, ten poets, and eight dramatists, to be 
 delivered at the earliest possible moment. 
 
MARY WHITE ' 
 By William Allen White 
 
 Mary White — ons seems to know her after reading this sketch 
 written by her father on the day she was buried — would surely 
 have laughed unbelievingly if told she would be in a book of 
 this sort, together with Joseph Conrad, one of whose books lay 
 on her table. But the pen, in the honest hand, has always been 
 mightier than the grave. 
 
 This is not the sort of thing one wishes to mar with clumsy 
 comment. It was written for the Emporia Gazette, which Wil- 
 liam Allen White has edited since 1895. He is one of the best- 
 known, most public-spirited and most truly loved of Am.erican 
 journalists. He and his fellow-Kansan, E. W. Howe of Atchison, 
 are two characteristic figures in our newspaper world, both 
 masters of that vein of canny, straightforward, humane and 
 humorous simplicity that seems to be a Kansas birthright. 
 
 Mr. White was born in Emporia in 1868. 
 
 The Associated Press reports carrying the news of 
 Mary White's death declared that it came as the 
 result of a fall from a horse. How she would have 
 hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her 
 life. Horses have fallen on her and with her — *T'm 
 always trying to hold 'em in my lap," she used to say. 
 But she was proud of few things, and one was that 
 she could ride anything that had four legs and hair. 
 Her death resulted not from a fall, but from a blow 
 on the head which fractured her skull, and the blow 
 came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the 
 parking. 
 
 22 
 
Mary White 23 
 
 The last hour of her Hfe was typical of its happi- 
 ness. She came home from a day's work at school, 
 topped off by a hard grind with the cogy oit the High 
 School Annual, and felt that a ride would refresh her. 
 She climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother 
 about the work she was doing, and hurried to get her 
 horse and be out on the dirt roads for the country air 
 and the radiant green fields of the spring. As she rode 
 through the town on an easy gallop she kept waving at 
 passers-by. She knew everyone in town. For a dec- 
 ade the little figure with the long pig-tail and the red 
 hair ribbon has been familiar on the streets of Em- 
 poria, and she got in the way of speaking to those who 
 nodded at her. She passed the Kerrs, walking the 
 horse, in front of the Normal Library, and waved at 
 them ; passed another friend a few hundred feet further 
 on, and waved at her. The horse was walking and, 
 as she turned into North Merchant Street she took off 
 her cowboy hat, and the horse swung into a lope. She 
 passed the Tripletts and waved her cowboy hat at them, 
 still moving gaily north on Merchant Street. A 
 Gazette carrier passed — a High School boy friend — 
 and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand; the 
 horse veered quickly, plunged into the parking where 
 the low-hanging limb faced her, and, while she still 
 looked back waving,! tliQ blow came. But she did not 
 fall from the horse; she slipped off, dazed a bit, 
 
 \ 
 
24 William Allen White 
 
 staggered and fell in a faint. She never quite re- 
 covered consciousness. 
 
 But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she 
 riding fast. A year or so ago she used to go like the 
 wind. But that habit was broken, and she used the 
 horse to get into the open to get fresh, hard exercise, 
 and to work off a certain surplus energy that welled 
 up in her and needed a physical outlet. That need has 
 been in her heart for years. It was back of the impulse 
 that kept the dauntless, little brown-clad figure on the 
 streets and country roads of this community and built 
 into a strong, muscular body what had been a frail 
 and sickly frame during the first years of her life. 
 But the riding gave her more than a body. It released 
 a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in 
 the world. And she was happy because she was en- 
 larging her horizon. She came to know all sorts and 
 conditions of men ; Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, 
 was one of her best friends. W. L. Holtz, the Latin 
 teacher, was another. Tom O'Connor, farmer-poli- 
 tician, and Rev. J. H. J. Rice, preacher and police 
 judge, and Frank Beach, music master, were her spe- 
 cial friends, and all the girls, black and white, above 
 the track and below the track, in Pepville and String- 
 town, were among her acquaintances. And she brought 
 home riotous stones of her adventures. She loved to 
 rollick ; persiflage was her natural expression at home. 
 
Mary White 25 
 
 Her humor was a continual bubble of joy. She seemed 
 to think in hyperbole and metaphor. She was mis- 
 chievous wtihout malice, as full of faults as an old 
 shoe. No angel was Mary White, but an easy girl to 
 live with, for she never nursed a grouch five minutes 
 in her Hfe. 
 
 With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she 
 loved books. On her table when she left her room 
 were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy, "Creative 
 Chemistry" by E. E. Slosson, and a Kipling book. She 
 read Mark Twain, Dickens and Kipling before she was 
 ten — all of their writings. Wells and Arnold Ben- 
 nett particularly amused and diverted her. She was 
 entered as a student in Wellesley in 1922; was assis- 
 tant editor of the High School Annual this year, and 
 in line for election to the editorship of the Annual 
 next year. She was a member of the executive com- 
 mittee of the High School Y. W. C. A. 
 
 Within the last two years she had begun to be moved 
 by an ambition to draw. She began as most children 
 do by scribbling in her school books, funny pictures. 
 She bought cartoon magazines and took a course— 7 
 rather casually, naturally, for she was, after all, a 
 child with no strong purposes — and this year she tasted 
 the first fruits of success by having her pictures ac- 
 cepted by the High School Annual. But the thrill of 
 delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the Normal An- 
 
26 William Allen White 
 
 nual, asked her to do the cartooning for that book this 
 spring, was too beautiful for words. She fell to her 
 work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings 
 were accepted, and her pride — always repressed by a 
 lively sense of the ridiculousness of the figure she was 
 cutting — was a really gorgeous thing to see. No suc- 
 cessful artist ever drank a deeper draught of satisfac- 
 tion than she took from the little fame her work was 
 getting among her schoolfellows. In her glory, she 
 almost forgot her horse — but never her car. 
 
 For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her 
 social life. She never had a "party" in all her nearly 
 seventeen years — wouldn't have one; but she never 
 drove a block in the car in her life that she didn't begin 
 to fill the car with pick-ups! Everybody rode with 
 Mary White — white and black, old and young, rich 
 and poor, men and women. She liked nothing better 
 than to fill the car full of long-legged High School 
 boys and an occasional girl, and parade the town. She 
 never had a "date," nor went to a dance, except once 
 with her brother, Bill, and the "boy proposition" didn't 
 interest her — yet. But young people — great spring- 
 breaking, varnish-cracking, fender-bending, door- 
 sagging carloads of "kids" gave her great pleasure. 
 Her zests were keen. But the most fun she ever had 
 in her life was acting as chairm.an of the committee 
 that got up the big turkey dinner for the poor folks 
 
Mary White 27 
 
 at the county home; scores of pies, gallons of slaw; 
 jam, cakes, preserves, oranges and a wilderness of tur- 
 key were loaded in the car and taken to the county 
 home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she 
 risked her own Christmas dinner by staying to see that 
 the poor folks actually got it all. Not that she was a 
 cynic; she just disliked to tempt folks. While there 
 she found a blind colored uncle, very old, who could 
 do nothing but make rag rugs, and she rustled up from 
 her school friends rags enough to keep him busy for a 
 season. The last engagement she tried to make was 
 to take the guests at the county home out for a car 
 ride. And the last endeavor of her life was to try to 
 get a rest room for colored girls in the High School. 
 She found one girl reading in the toilet, because there 
 was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it 
 inflamed her sense of injustice and she became a 
 nagging harpie to those who, she thought, could 
 remedy the evil. The poor she had always with her, 
 and was glad of it. She hungered and thirsted for 
 righteousness; and was the most impious creature in 
 the world. She joined the Congregational Church with- 
 out consulting her parents; not particularly for her 
 soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her 
 life, and would have hooted at a "testimony." But 
 even as a little child she felt the church was an agency 
 for helping people to more of life's abundance, and she 
 
28 William Allen White 
 
 wanted to help. She never wanted help for herself. 
 Clothes meant little to her. It was a fight to get a 
 new rig on her ; but eventually a harder fight to get it 
 off. She never wore a jewel and had no ring but her 
 High School class ring, and never asked for anything 
 but a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair up; 
 though she was nearly seventeen. "Mother," she pro- 
 tested, "you don't know how much I get by with, in my 
 braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up." 
 Above every other passion of her life was her passion 
 not to grow up, to be a child. The tom-boy in her. 
 
 t which was big, seemed to loathe to be put away for-^ 
 
 I ever in skirts. She was a Peter Pan, who refused to 
 
 ! grow up. 
 
 X^^.^^'^^r funeral yesterday at the Congregational Church 
 was as she would have wished it ; no singing, no flowers 
 save the big bunch of red roses from her Brother Bill's 
 Harvard classmen — Heavens, how proud that would 
 have made her! and the red roses from the Gazette 
 force — in vases at her head and feet. A short prayer, 
 Paul's beautiful essay on "Love'^from the Thirteenth 
 Chapter of First Corinthians, some remarks about her 
 democratic spirit by her friend, John H. J. Rice, pastor 
 and police judge/ whicK she would have deprecated if 
 she couldj^ a prayer sent down for her by her friend, 
 Carl Nauyknd opening the service the slow, poignant 
 movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which 
 
Mary White 29 
 
 she loved, and closing the service a cutting from the 
 joyously melancholy first movement of Tschaikowski's 
 Pathetic Symphony, which she liked to hear in certain 
 moods on the phonograph ; then the Lord's Prayer by 
 her friends in the High School. 
 
 That was all. 
 
 For her pall-bearers only her friends were chosen: 
 her Latin teacher — W. L. Holtz ; her High School prin- 
 cipal. Rice Brown; her doctor, Frank Foncannon; her 
 friend, W. W. Finney; her pal at the Gazette office, 
 . Walter Hughes; and her brother Bill. It would have 
 ^— 'made her smile to know that her friend, Charley 
 O'Brien, the traffic cop, had been transferred from 
 Sixth and Commercial to the corner near the church 
 to direct her friends who came to bid her good-by. 
 
 A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of 
 sunlight upon her coffin as her nervous, energetic little 
 body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the 
 glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was 
 flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn. 
 
 -\ 
 
NIAGARA FALLS 
 By Rupert Brooke 
 
 The poet usually is the best reporter, for he is an observer not 
 merely accurate but imaginative, self-trained to see subtle sug- 
 gestions, relations and similarities. This magnificent bit of de- 
 scription was written by Rupert Brooke as one of the letters 
 sent to the Westminster Gazette describing his trip in the United 
 States and Canada in 1913. It is included in the volume Letters 
 from America to which Henry James contributed so afifectionate 
 and desperately unintelligible a preface— one of the last things 
 James wrote. Brooke's notes on America are well worth read- 
 ing: they are full of delightful and lively comments, though 
 sometimes much (oh, very much!) too condescending. The last 
 paragraph in this essay is interesting in view of subsequent 
 history. 
 
 Brooke was born in 1887, son of a master at Rugby School; 
 was at King's College, Cambridge; died of blood-poisoning in 
 the ^gean, April 2Z, 19 15- 
 
 Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But for 
 him, a modern traveler could spend his time peacefully 
 admiring the scenery instead of feeling himself bound 
 to dog the simple and grotesque of the world for the 
 sake of their too-human comments. It is his fault if 
 a peasant's naivete has come to out*/eigh the beauty 
 of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen are more 
 than mountains. It is very restful to give up all effort 
 at observing human nature and drawing social and 
 political deductions from trifles, and to let oneself 
 relapse into wide-mouthed worship of the wonders of 
 nature. And this is very easy at Niagara. Niagara 
 
 30 
 
Niagara Falls 31 
 
 means nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does 
 not result from anything. It throws no light on the 
 effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for Divorce 
 in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on 
 Canadian character, nor even on the Navy Bill. It is 
 merely a great deal of water falling over some cliffs. 
 But it is very remarkably that. The human race, apt 
 as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best 
 to surround the Falls with every distraction, incon- 
 gruity, and vulgarity. Hotels, powerhouses, bridges, 
 trams, picture post-cards, sham legends, stalls, booths, 
 rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And 
 there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and 
 breeding-place for all the touts of earth. There are 
 touts insinuating, and touts raucous, greasy touts, 
 brazen touts, and upper-class, refined, gentlemanly, 
 take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who intimidate and 
 touts who wheedle; professionals, amateurs, and dilet- 
 tanti, male and female; touts who would photograph . 
 you with your arm round a young lady against a 
 faked background of the sublimest cataract, touts who 
 ! would bully you into cars, char-a-bancs, elevators, or 
 tunnels, or deceive you into a carriage and pair, touts 
 who would sell you picture post-cards, moccasins, sham 
 Indian beadwork, blankets, tee-pees, and crockery, and 
 touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the 
 world, but just purely, simply, merely, incessantly, in- 
 
32 Rupert Brooke 
 
 defatigably, and ineffugibly to tout. And in the midst 
 of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls. He 
 who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are 
 not very high, but they are overpowering. They are 
 divided by an island into two parts, the Canadian and 
 the American. 
 
 Half a mile or so above the Falls, on either side, the 
 water of the great stream begins to run more swiftly 
 and in confusion. It descends with ever-growing 
 speed. It begins chattering and leaping, breaking into 
 a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful fingers of spray. 
 Sometimes it is divided by islands and rocks, some- 
 times the eye can see nothing but a waste of laughing, 
 springing, foamy waves, turning, crossing, even seem- 
 ing to stand for an instant erect, but always borne im- 
 petuously forward like a crowd of triumphant feasters. 
 Sit close down by it, and you see a fragment of the 
 torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and foaming, 
 leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of 
 water. Perpetually the eye is on the point of descry- 
 ing a pattern in this weaving, and perpetually it is 
 cheated by change. In one place part of the flood 
 plunges over a ledge a few feet high and a quarter of a 
 mile or so long, in a uniform and stable curve. It gives 
 an impression of almost military concerted movement, 
 grown suddenly out of confusion. But it is swiftly 
 lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment. 
 
Niagara Falls 33 
 
 Here and there a rock close to the surface is marked 
 by a white wave that faces backwards and seems to be 
 rushing madly up-stream, but is really stationary in 
 the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluct- 
 ance, the waters seem to fling themselves on with some 
 foreknowledge of their fate, in an ever wilder frenzy. 
 But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience. They prove, 
 rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are 
 preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. 
 Leaping in the sunlight, careless, entwining, clam- 
 orously joyful, the waves riot on towards the 
 verge. 
 
 But there they change. As they turn to the sheer 
 descent, the white and blue and slate color, in the heart 
 of the Canadian Falls at least, blend and deepen to a 
 rich, wonderful, luminous green. On the edge of dis- 
 aster the river seems to gather herself, to pause, to 
 lift a head noble in ruin, and then, with a slow 
 grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder and white 
 chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower it is 
 a kind of violet color, but both violet and green fray 
 and frill to white as they fall. The mass of water, 
 striking some ever-hidden base of rock, leaps up the 
 whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes 
 of spray. The spray falls back into the lower river 
 once more ; all but a little that fines to foam and white 
 mist, which drifts in layers along the air, graining it, 
 
34 Rupert Brooke 
 
 and wanders out on the wind over the trees and gar- 
 dens and houses, and so vanishes. 
 
 The manager of one of the great power-stations 
 on the banks of the river above the Falls told me that 
 the center of the riverbed at the Canadian Falls is 
 deep and of a saucer shape. So it may be possible to 
 fill this up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot of water 
 for the power-houses. And this, he said, would supply 
 the need for more power, which will certainly soon 
 arise, without taking away from the beauty of Niagara. 
 This is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to 
 ordinary sight-seers. Yet, I doubt if we shall be satis- 
 fied. The real secret of the beauty and terror of the 
 Falls is not their height or width, but the feeling of 
 colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by 
 the plunge of that vast body of water. If that were 
 taken away, there would be little visible change, but 
 the heart would be gone. 
 
 The American Falls do not inspire this feeling in 
 the same way as the Canadian. It is because they are 
 less in volume, and because the water does not fall so 
 much into one place. By comparison their beauty is 
 almost delicate and fragile. They are extraordinarily 
 level, one long curtain of lacework and woven foam. 
 Seen from opposite, when the sun is on them, they 
 are blindingly white, and the clouds of spray show 
 dark against them? With both Falls the color of the 
 
Niagara Falls 35 
 
 water is the ever-altering wonder. Greens and blues^ 
 purples and whites, melt into one another, fade, and 
 come again, and change with the changing sun. Some- 
 times they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, 
 and glow from within with a deep, inexplicable light. 
 Sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam be- 
 come opaque and creamy. And always there are the 
 rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from 
 above, a great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning 
 the extent of spray from top to bottom, is the first 
 thing you see. If you wander along the cliff opposite, a 
 bow springs into being in the American Falls, accom- 
 panies you courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies 
 as the mist ends, and awakens again as you reach the 
 Canadian tumult. And the bold traveler who attempts 
 the trip under the American Falls sees, when he dare 
 open his eyes to anything, tiny baby rainbows, some 
 four or five yards in span, leaping from rock to rock 
 among the foam, and gamboling beside him, barely 
 out of hand's reach, as he goes. One I saw in that 
 place was a complete circle, such as I have never seen 
 before, and so near that I could put my foot on it. It 
 is 3 terrifying journey, beneath and behind the Falls. 
 The senses are battered and bewildered by the thunder 
 of the water and the assault of wind and spray; or 
 rather, the sound is not of falling water, but merely 
 of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So, if you are 
 
36 Rupert Brooke 
 
 close behind the endless clamor, the sight cannot recog- 
 nize liquid in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly 
 and pitifully aware that sheets of light and darkness 
 are falling in great curves in front of you. Dull 
 omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther away, in 
 the roar and hissing, clouds of spray seem literally to 
 slide down some invisible plane of air. 
 
 Beyond the foot of the Falls the river is like a 
 slipping floor of marble, green with veins of dirty 
 white, made by the scum that was foam. It slides very 
 quietly and slowly down for a mile or two, sullenly 
 exhausted. Then it turns to a dull sage green, and 
 hurries more swiftly, smooth and omnious. As the 
 walls of the ravine close in, trouble stirs, and the 
 waters boil and eddy. These are the lower rapids, a 
 sight more terrifying than the Falls, because less in- 
 telligible. Close in its bands of rock the river surges 
 tumultuously forward, writhing and leaping as if in- 
 spired by a demon. It is pressed by the straits into a 
 visibly convex form. Great planes of water slide 
 past. Sometimes it is thrown up into a pinnacle of 
 foam higher than a house, or leaps with incredible 
 speed from the crest of one vast wave to another, along 
 the shining curve between, like the spring of a wild 
 beast. Its motion continually suggests muscular ac- 
 tion. The power manifest in these rapids moves one 
 with a different sense of awe and terror from that of 
 
Niagara Falls 37 
 
 the Falls. Here the inhuman life and strength are 
 spontaneous, active, almost resolute; masculine vigor 
 compared with the passive gigantic power, female, help- 
 less and overwhelming, of the Falls. A place of fear. 
 One is drawn back, strangely, to a contemplation of 
 the Falls, at every hour, and especially by night, when 
 the cloud of spray becomes an immense visible ghost, 
 straining and wavering high above the river, white and 
 pathetic and translucent. The Victorian lies very close 
 below the surface in every man. There one can sit 
 and let great cloudy thoughts of destiny and the pas- 
 sage of empires drift through the mind; for such 
 dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out 
 of my mind the thought of a friend, who said that thf 
 rainbows over the Falls were like the arts and beauty 
 and goodness, with regard to the stream of life- 
 caused by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay 
 or direct or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In 
 all comparisons that rise in the heart, the river, with 
 Its multitudinous waves and its single current, likens 
 itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a com- 
 munity. A man's life is of many flashing moments, 
 and yet one stream; a nation's flows through all its 
 citizens, and yet is more than they. In such places, one 
 is aware, with an almost insupportable and yet com- 
 forting certitude, that both men and nations are hur- 
 ried onwards to their ruin or ending as inevitably as 
 
38 Rupert Brooke 
 
 this dark flood. Some go down to it unreluctant, and 
 meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And as 
 incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray 
 that hangs over the Falls, is the white cloud of human 
 crying. . . . With some such thoughts does the plati- 
 tudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder 
 of a Niagara peace that the quietest plains or most 
 stable hills can never give. 
 
"A CLERGYMAN" 
 By Max Beerbohm 
 
 Max Beerbohm, I dare say (and I believe it has been said 
 before), is the most subtly gifted English essayist since Charles 
 Lamb. It is not surprising that he has Cnow for many years) 
 been referred to as "the incomparable Max," for what other con- 
 temporary has never once missed fire, never failed to achieve 
 perfection in the field of his choice? Whether in caricature, 
 sTiort story, fable, parody, or essay,^ he has always been con- 
 summate in grace, tact, insouciant airy precision. I hope you 
 will not miss "No. 2 The Pines" (in And Even Now, from which 
 this selection also comes), a reminiscence of his first visit to 
 Swinburne in 1899. That beautiful (there is no other word) 
 essay shows an even ampler range of Mr. Beerbohm's powers: 
 a tenderness and lovely grace that remind one, almost against 
 belief, that the gay youth of the '90's now mellows deliciously 
 with the end of the fifth decade. He was so enormously old 
 in 1896, when he published his first book and called it his Works; 
 he seems much younger now : he is having his first childhood. 
 
 This portrait of the unfortunate cleric annihilated by Dr. 
 Johnson is a triumphant example of the skill with which a 
 perfect artist can manoeuver a trifle, carved like an ivory trinket; 
 in such hands, subtlety never becomes^ mere tenuity. 
 
 Max Beerbohm was born in London in 1872; studied at Char- 
 terhouse School and Merton College, Oxford; and was a bril- 
 liant figure in the Savoy and Yellow Book circles by the time 
 he was twenty-four. His genius is that of the essay in its 
 purest distillation: a clear cross-section of life as seen through 
 the lens of self; the pure culture (in the biological sense) of 
 observing personality. 
 
 I have often wondered how it came about (though the matter 
 is wholly nonpertinent) that Mr. Beerbohm married an Ameri- 
 can lady — quite a habit with English essayists, by the way: 
 Hilaire Belloc and Bertrand Russell did likewise. Who's Who 
 says she was from Memphis, which adds lustre to that admira- 
 ble city. 
 
 He now lives in Italy. 
 
 Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; 
 glimpsed and gone; as it were, a faint human hand 
 thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the rolling 
 
 39 
 
40 Max Beerbohm 
 
 waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and 
 solicits my weak imagination. Nothing is told of him 
 but that once, abruptly, he asked a question, and re- 
 ceived an answer. 
 
 This was on the afternoon of April 7th, 1778, at 
 Streatham, in the well-appointed house of Mr. Thrale. 
 Johnson, on the morning of that day, had entertained 
 Boswell at breakfast in Bolt Court, and invited him to 
 dine at Thrale Hall. The two took coach and arrived 
 early. It seems that Sir John Pringle had asked Bos- 
 well to ask Johnson "what were the best English 
 sermons for style.*' In the interval before dinner, 
 accordingly, Boswell reeled off the names of several 
 divines whose prose might or might not win commen- 
 dation. "Atterbury?'* he suggested. "Johnson : Yes, 
 Sir, one of the best. Boswell : Tillotson ? Johnson : 
 Why, not now. I should not advise any one to imi- 
 tate Tillotson's style; though I don't know; I should 
 be cautious of censuring anything that has been ap- 
 plauded by so many suffrages. — South is one of the 
 best, if you except his peculiarities, and his violence, 
 and sometimes coarseness of language. — Seed has a 
 very fine style; but he is not very theological. Jortin*s 
 sermons are very elegant. Sherlock's style, too, is 
 very elegant, though he has not made it his principal 
 study. — And you may add Smalridge. Boswell: I 
 
^^A Clergyman*' 41 
 
 like Ogden's Sermons on Prayer very much, both for 
 neatness of style and subtihty of reasoning. Johnson : 
 I should like to read all that Ogden has written. 
 Boswell: What I want to know is, what sermons 
 afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence." 
 Johnson : We have no sermons addressed to the pas- 
 sions, that are good for anything; if you mean that 
 kind of eloquence. A Clergyman, whose name I do 
 not recollect : Were not Dodd's sermons addressed 
 to the passions? Johnson: They were nothing. Sir, 
 be they addressed to what they may.'* 
 
 The suddenness of it! Bang! — and the rabbit that 
 had popped from its burrow was no more. 
 
 I know not which is the more startling — the debut 
 of the unfortunate clergyman, or the instantaneousness 
 of his end. Why hadn't Boswell told us there was a 
 clergyman present? Well, we may be sure that so 
 careful and acute an artist had some good reason. 
 And I suppose the clergyman was left to take us una- 
 wares because just so did he take the company. Had 
 we been told he was there, we might have expected 
 that sooner or later he would join in the conversation* 
 He would have had a place in our minds. We may 
 assume that in the minds of the company around 
 Johnson he had no place. He sat forgotten, over- 
 looked; so that his self-assertion startled every one 
 
42 Max Beerbohm 
 
 just as on Boswell's page it startles us. In John- 
 son's massive and magnetic presence only some very 
 remarkable man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply dis- 
 tinguishable from the rest. Others might, if they 
 had something in them, stand out slightly. This un- 
 fortunate clergyman may have had something in him, 
 but I judge that he lacked the gift of seeming as if he 
 had. That deficiency, however, does not account for 
 the horrid fate that befell him. One of Johnson's 
 strongest and most inveterate feelings was his ven- 
 eration for the Cloth. To any one in Holy Orders 
 he habitually listened with a grace and charming def- 
 erence. To-day, moreover, he was in excellent good 
 humor. He was at the Thrales', where he so loved 
 to be; the day was fine; a fine dinner was in close 
 prospect; and he had had what he always declared 
 to be the sum of human felicity — a ride in a coach. 
 Nor was there in the question put by the clergyman 
 anything likely to enrage him. Dodd was one whom 
 Johnson had befriended in adversity; and it had al- 
 ways been agreed that Dodd in his pulpit was very 
 emotional. What drew the blasting flash must have 
 been not the question itself, but the manner in which 
 it was asked. And I think we can guess what that 
 manner was. 
 
 Say the words aloud: "Were not Dodd's sermons 
 addressed to the passions?" They are words which, 
 
''A Clergyman" 43 
 
 if you have any dramatic and histrionic sense, cannot 
 be said except in a high, thin voice. 
 
 You may, from sheer perversity, utter them in a 
 rich and sonorous baritone or bass. But if you do so, 
 they sound utterly unnatural. To make them carry 
 the conviction of human utterance, you have no choice: 
 you must pipe them. 
 
 Remember, now, Johnson was very deaf. Even the 
 people whom he knew well, the people to whose voices 
 he was accustomed, had to address him very loudly. 
 It is probable that this unregarded, young, shy clergy- 
 man, when at length he suddenly mustered courage to 
 'cut in,' let his high, thin voice soar too high, inso- 
 much that it was a kind of scream. On no other 
 hypothesis can we account for the ferocity with which 
 Johnson turned and rended him. Johnson didn't, we 
 may be sure, mean to be cruel. The old lion, startled, 
 just struck out blindly. But the force of paw and 
 claws was not the less lethal. We have endless testi- 
 mony to the strength of Johnson's voice ; and the very 
 cadence of those words, "They were nothing, Sir, be 
 they addressed to what they may," convinces me that 
 the old lion's jaws never gave forth a louder roar. 
 Boswell does not record that there was any further 
 conversation before the announcement of dinner. Per- 
 haps the whole company had been temporarily 
 deafened. But I am not bothering about them. My 
 
44 Max Beerbohm 
 
 heart goes out to the poor dear clergyman exclu- 
 sively. 
 
 I said a moment ago that he was young and shy; 
 and I admit that I slipped those epithets in without 
 having justified them to you by due process of in- 
 duction. Your quick mind will have already supplied 
 what I omitted. A man with a high, thin voice, and 
 without power to impress any one with a sense of his 
 importance, a man so null in effect that even the reten- 
 tive mind of Boswell did not retain his very name, 
 would assuredly not be a self-confident man. Even 
 if he were not naturally shy, social courage would 
 soon have been sapped in him, and would in time 
 have been destroyed, by experience. That he had not 
 yet given himself up as a bad job, that he still had 
 faint wild hopes, is proved by the fact that he did 
 snatch the opportunity for asking that question. He 
 must, accordingly, have been young. Was he the 
 curate of the neighboring church? I think so. It 
 would account for his having been invited. I see 
 him as he sits there listening to the great Doctor's 
 pronouncement on Atterbury and those others. He 
 sits on the edge of a chair in the background. He has 
 colorless eyes, fixed earnestly, and a face almost as 
 pale as the clerical bands beneath his somewhat reced- 
 ing chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair 
 mouse-colored. His hands are clasped tight before 
 
''A Clergyman" 45 
 
 him, the knuckles standing out sharply. This con- 
 striction does not mean that he is steeling himself to 
 speak. He has no positive intention of speaking. 
 Very much, nevertheless, is he wishing in the back of 
 his mind that he could say something — something 
 whereat the great Doctor would turn on him and say, 
 after a pause for thought, "Why, yes, Sir. That is 
 most justly observed" or **Sir, this has never occurred 
 to me. I thank you" — thereby fixing the observer for- 
 ever high in the esteem of all. And now in a flash the 
 chance presents itself. "We have," shouts Johnson, 
 "no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good 
 for anything." I see the curate's frame quiver with 
 sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and — ^no, I 
 can't bear it, I shut my eyes and ears. But audible, 
 even so, is something shrill, followed by something 
 thunderous. 
 
 Presently I reopen my eyes. The crimson has not 
 yet faded from that young face yonder, and slowly 
 down either cheek falls a glistening tear. Shades of 
 Atterbury and Tillotson! Such weakness shames the 
 Established Church. What would Jortin and Smal- 
 ridge have said? — what Seed and South? And, by 
 the way, who were they, these worthies ? It is a solemn 
 thought that so little is conveyed to us by names which 
 to the palaeo-Georgians conveyed so much. We dis- 
 cern a dim, composite picture of a big man in a big 
 
46 Max Beerbohm 
 
 wig and a billowing black gown, with a big congre» 
 gation beneath him. But we are not anxious to hear 
 what he is saying. We know it is all very elegant. 
 We know it will be printed and be bound in finely- 
 tooled full calf, and no palseo-Georgian gentleman's 
 library will be complete without it. Literate people 
 in those days were comparatively few ; but, bating that, 
 one may say that sermons were as much in request as 
 novels are to-day. I wonder, will mankind continue 
 to be capricious ? It is a very solemn thought indeed 
 that no more than a hundred-and-fif ty years hence the 
 novelists of our time, with all their moral and political 
 and sociological outlook and influence, will perhaps 
 shine as indistinctly as do those old preachers, with 
 all their elegance, now. "Yes, Sir," some great pundit 
 may be telling a disciple at this moment, "Wells is 
 one of the best. Galsworthy is one of the best, if 
 you except his concern for delicacy of style. Mrs. 
 Ward has a very firm grasp of problems, but is not 
 very creational. — Caine's books are very edifying. I 
 should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss 
 Corelli, too, is very edifying. — And you may add 
 Upton Sinclair." "What I want to know," says the 
 disciple, "is, what English novels may be selected as 
 specially enthralling." The pundit answers : "We have 
 no novels addressed to the passions that are good 
 for anything, if you mean that kind of enthralment." 
 
''A Clergyman'' 47 
 
 And here some poor wretch (whose name the disciple 
 will not remember) inquires: "Are not Mrs. Glyn's 
 novels addressed to the passions ?" and is in due form 
 annihilated. Can it be that a time will come when 
 readers of this passage in our pundit's Life will take 
 more interest in the poor nameless wretch than in all 
 the bearers of those great names put together, being 
 no more able or anxious to discriminate between (say) 
 Mrs. Ward and Mr. Sinclair than we are to set 
 Ogden above Sherlock, or Sherlock above Ogden? 
 It seems impossible. But we must remember that 
 things are not always what they seem. 
 
 Every man illustrious in his day, however much he 
 may be gratified by his fame, looks with an eager eye 
 to posterity for a continuance of past favors, and 
 would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity 
 if by so doing he could insure that future generations 
 would preserve a correct attitude towards him forever. 
 This is very natural and human, but, like so many very 
 natural and human things, very silly. Tillotson and 
 the rest need not, after all, be pitied for our neglect 
 of them. They either know nothing about it, or are 
 above such terrene trifles. Let us keep our pity for 
 the seething mass of divines who were not elegantly 
 verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted. 
 And let us keep a specially large portion for. le whose 
 lot was so much worse than merely undistinguished. 
 
48 Max Beerbohm 
 
 If that nameless curate had not been at the Thrales' 
 that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so 
 well became him, his life would have been drab enough, 
 in all conscience. But at any rate an unpromising 
 career would not have been nipped in the bud. And 
 that is what in fact happened, I'm sure of it. A robust 
 man might have rallied under the blow. Not so our 
 friend. Those who knew him in infancy had not ex- 
 pected that he would be reared. Better for him had 
 they been right. It is well to grow up and be orr 
 dained, but not if you are delicate and very sensitive, 
 and shall happen to annoy the greatest, the most 
 stentorian and roughest of contemporary personages. 
 "A Clergyman" never held up his head or smiled 
 again after the brief encounter recorded for us by 
 Boswell. He sank into a rapid decline. Before the 
 next blossoming of Thrale Hall's almond trees he was 
 no more. I like to think that he died forgiving Dr. 
 Johnson, 
 
"THE MAN-O'-WAR^S 'ER 'USBAND" 
 By David W. Bone 
 
 Those who understand something of a sailor's feeling for his 
 ship will appreciate the restraint with which Captain Bone de- 
 scribes the loss of the Cameronia, his command, torpedoed in 
 the Mediterranean during the War. You will notice (forgive 
 us for pointing out these things) how quietly the quoted title 
 pays tribute to the gallantry of the destroyers that stood by the 
 sinking ship; and the heroism of the chief officer's death is not 
 less moving because told in two sentences. This superb picture 
 of a sea tragedy is taken from Merchantmen-at-Arms, a history 
 of the British Merchants' Service during the War; a book of 
 enthralling power and truth, illustrated by the author's brother, 
 Muirhead Bone, one of the greatest of living etchers. 
 
 David William Bone was born in Partick (near Glasgow) 
 in 1873; his father was a well-known Glasgow journalist; his 
 great-grandfather was a boyhood companion of Robert Burns. 
 Bone went to sea as an apprentice in the City of Florence, an 
 old-time square-rigger, at the age of fifteen; he has been at 
 sea ever since. He is now master of S.S. Columbia of the 
 Anchor Line, a well-known ship in New York Harbor, as she 
 has carried passengers between the Clyde and the Hudson for 
 more than twenty years. Captain Bone's fine sea tale, The Brass- 
 bounder, published in 1910, has become a classic of the square- 
 sail era; his Broken Stowage (1915) is a collection of shorter 
 sea sketches. In the long roll of great writers who have re- 
 flected the simplicity and severity of sea life, Captain Bone 
 will take a permanent and honorable place. 
 
 A SENSE of security is difficult of definition. Largely, 
 It is founded upon habit and association. It is induced 
 and maintained by familiar surroundings. On board 
 ship, in a small world of our own, we seem to be 
 contained by the boundaries of the bulwarks, to be 
 sailing beyond the influences of the land and of other 
 ships. The sea is the same we have known for so 
 
 49 
 
50 David W. Bone 
 
 long. Every item of our ship fitment — the trim ar- 
 rangement of the decks, the set and rake of mast and 
 funnel, even the furnishings of our cabinr — ^has the 
 power of impressing a stable feeling of custom, nor- 
 mal ship life, safety. It requires an effort of thought 
 to recall that in their homely presence we are endan- 
 gered. Relating his experiences after having been 
 mined and his ship sunk, a master confided that the 
 point that impressed him most deeply was when he 
 went to his room for the confidential papers and saw 
 the cabin exactly in everyday aspect — his longshore 
 clothes suspended from the hooks, his umbrella stand- 
 ing in a corner as he had placed it on coming aboard. 
 
 Soldiers on service are denied this aid to assur- 
 ance. Unlike us, they cannot carry their home with 
 them to the battlefields. All their scenes and sur- 
 roundings are novel; they may only draw a reliance 
 and comfort from the familiar presence of their com- 
 rades. At sea in a ship there is a yet greater incite- 
 ment to their disquiet. The movement, the limitless 
 sea, the distance from the land, cannot be ignored. 
 The atmosphere that is so familiar and comforting 
 to us, is to many of them an environment of dread 
 possibilities. 
 
 It is with some small measure of this sense of secu- 
 rity — tempered by our knowledge of enemy activity 
 in these waters — we pace the bridge. .Anxiety is not 
 
''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband" 51 
 
 wholly absent. Some hours past, we saw small flot- 
 sam that may have come from the decks of a French 
 mail steamer, torpedoed three days ago. The passing 
 of the derelict fittings aroused some disquiet, but the 
 steady routine of our progress and the constant friendly 
 presence of familiar surroundings has effect in allay- 
 ing immediate fears. The rounds of the bridge go on 
 — the writing of the log, the tapping of the glass, the 
 small measures that mark the passing of our sea-hours. 
 Two days out from Marseilles — and all well! In 
 another two days we should be approaching the Canal, 
 and then — to be clear of ^submarine waters' for a 
 term. Fine weather! A light wind and sea accom- 
 pany us for the present, but the filmy glare of the sun, 
 now low, and a backward movement of the glass fore- 
 tells a break ere long. We are steaming at high speed 
 to make the most of the smooth sea. Ahead, on each 
 bow, our two escorting destroyers conform to the 
 angles of our zigzag — spurring out and swerving with 
 the peculiar "thrown-around'* movement of their class. 
 Look-out is alert and in numbers. Added to the watch 
 of the ship's crew, military signalers are posted; the 
 boats swung outboard have each a party of troops on 
 guard. 
 
 An alarmed cry from aloft — a half -uttered order 
 to the steersman — an explosion, low down in the bowels 
 of the ship, that sets her reeling in her stride ! 
 
52 David W , Bone 
 
 The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of im- 
 pact. Hatches, coal, a huge column of solid water go 
 skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent on the 
 bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning 
 spars and hangs — watch-keepers are borne to the deck 
 by the weight of water — the steersman falls limply 
 over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on his 
 forehead. . . . Then silence for a stunned half-minute, 
 with only the thrust of the engines marking the heart- 
 beats of the stricken ship. 
 
 Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits', 
 they have been but two days on the sea. The tor- 
 pedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour 
 of our calculated drill. The troops are at their even- 
 ing meal when the blow comes, the explosion killing 
 many outright. We had counted on a proportion of 
 the troops being on the deck, a steadying number to 
 balance the sudden rush from below that we foresaw 
 in emergency. Hurrying from the mess-decks as en- 
 joined, the quick movement gathers way and intensity : 
 the decks become jammed by the pressure, the gang- 
 ways and passages are blocked in the struggle. There 
 is the making of a panic — tuned by their outcry, *'God! 
 O God! Christ r The swelling murmur is neUher 
 excited nor agonized — rather the dull, hopeless expres- 
 sion of despair. 
 
 The officer commanding troops has come on the 
 
''The Man-o'-Wa/s 'Er 'Usband'' 53 
 
 bridge at the first alarm. His juniors have oppor- 
 tunity to take their stations before the struggling mass 
 reaches to the boats. The impossibility of getting 
 among the men on the lower decks makes the mili- 
 tary officers' efforts to restore confidence difficult. 
 They are aided from an unexpected quarter. The 
 bridge-boy makes unofficial use of our megaphone. 
 "Hey! Steady up you men doon therr," he shouts. 
 "Ye'll no' dae ony guid fur yersels croodin' th' led- 
 dersr 
 
 We could not have done it as well. The lad is 
 plainly in sight to the crowd on the decks. A small 
 boy, undersized. "Steady up doon therr !" The effect 
 is instant. Noise there still is, but the movement is 
 arrested. 
 
 The engines are stopped — we are now beyond range 
 of a second torpedo — and steam thunders in exhaust, 
 making our efforts to control movements by voice im- 
 possible. At the moment of the impact the destroyers 
 have swung round and are casting here and there 
 like hounds on the scent: the dull explosion of a 
 depth-charge — then another, rouses a fierce hope that 
 we are not unavenged. The force of the explosion has 
 broken connections to the wireless room, but the aerial 
 still holds and, when a measure of order on the boat- 
 deck allows, we send a message of our peril broadcast 
 There is no doubt in our minds of the outcome. Our 
 
54 David W, Bone 
 
 bows, drooping visibly, tell that we shall not float long. 
 We have nearly three thousand on board. There are 
 boats for sixteen hundred — then rafts. Boats — rafts 
 — and the glass is falling at a rate that shows bad 
 weather over the western horizon ! 
 
 Our drill, that provided for lowering the boats with 
 only half-complements in them, will not serve. We 
 pass orders to lower away in any condition, however 
 overcrowded. The way is off the ship, and it is with 
 some apprehension we watch the packed boats that 
 drop away from the davit heads. The shrill ring of 
 the block-sheaves indicates a tension that is not far 
 from breaking-point. Many of the life-boats reach 
 the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the 
 strain on the tackles — far beyond their working load 
 — is too great for all to stand to it. Two boats go 
 down by the run. The men in them are thrown vio- 
 lently to the water, where they float in the wash and 
 shattered planking. A third dangles from the after 
 fall, having shot her manning out at parting of the 
 forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights, 
 disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to 
 the life-lines. We can make no attempt to reach the 
 men in the water. Their life-belts are sufficient to 
 keep them affoat: the ship is going down rapidly by 
 the head, and there remains the second line of boats 
 to be hoisted and swung over. The chief officer, paus- 
 
''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband'' 55 
 
 ing in his quick work, looks to the bridge inquiringly, 
 as though to ask, "How long?" The fingers of two 
 hands suffice to mark our estimate. 
 
 The decks are now angled to the deepen hig pitch 
 of the bows. Pumps are utterly inadequate to make 
 impression on the swift inflow. The chief engineer 
 comes to the bridge with a hopeless report. It is only 
 a question of time. How long? Already the water 
 is lapping at a level of the foredeck. Troops massed 
 there and on the forecastle-head are apprehensive: it 
 is indeed a wonder that their officers have held them for 
 so long. The commanding officer sets example by a 
 cool nonchalance that we envy. Posted with us on the 
 bridge, his quick eyes note the flood surging in the 
 pent 'tween-decks below, from which his men have 
 removed the few wounded. The dead are left to the 
 sea. 
 
 Help comes as we had expected it would. Leaving 
 Nemesis to steam fast circles round the sinking 
 ship. Rifleman swings in and brings up alongside 
 at the forward end. Even in our fear and anxiety 
 and distress, we cannot but admire the precision of 
 the destroyer captain's manoeuver — the skilful avoid- 
 ance of our crowded life-boats and the men in the 
 water — the sudden stoppage of her way and the cant 
 that brings her to a standstill at the lip of our brim- 
 ming decks. The troops who have stood so well to 
 
56 David W, Bone 
 
 orders have their reward in an easy leap to safety. 
 Quickly the foredeck is cleared. Rifleman spurts 
 ahead in a rush that sets the surrounding life-boats to 
 eddy in her wash. She takes up the circling high- 
 speed patrol and allows her sister ship to swing in 
 and embark a number of our men. 
 
 It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we 
 realize fully the gallant service of the destroyers. There 
 remain the rafts, but many of these have been launched 
 over to aid the struggling men in the water. Half 
 an hour has passed since we were struck — thirty min- 
 utes of frantic endeavor to debark our men — yet 
 still the decks are thronged by a packed mass that 
 seems but little reduced. The coming of the destroyers 
 alters the outlook. Rifleman's action has taken over 
 six hundred. A sensible clearance! Nemesis swings 
 in with the precision of an express, and the thud and 
 clatter of the troops jumping to her deck sets up a 
 continuous drumming note of deliverance. Alert and 
 confident, the naval men accept the great risks of their 
 position. The ship*s bows are entered to the water 
 at a steep incline. Every minute the balance is weigh- 
 ing, casting her stern high in the air. The bulkheads 
 are by now taking place of keel and bearing the huge 
 weight of her on the water. At any moment she may 
 go without a warning, to crash into the light hull of 
 the destroyer and bear her down. For all the circling 
 
''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband'' 57 
 
 watch of her sister ship, the submarine — if still he 
 lives — may get in a shot at the standing target. It is 
 with a deep relief we signal the captain to bear off. 
 Her decks are jammed to the limit. She can carry 
 no more. Nemesis lists heavily under her burdened 
 decks as she goes ahead and clears. 
 
 Forty minutes! The zigzag clock in the wheel- 
 house goes on ringing the angles of time and course 
 as though we were yet under helm and speed. For 
 a short term we have noted that the ship appears to 
 have reached a point of arrest in her foundering 
 droop. She remains upright as she has been since 
 righting herself after the first inrush of water. Like 
 the lady she always was, she has added no fearsome 
 list to the sum of our distress. The familiar bridge, 
 on which so many of our safe sea-days have been 
 spent, is canted at an angle that makes foothold un- 
 easy. She cannot remain for long afloat. The end 
 will come swiftly, without warning — a sudden rup- 
 ture of the bulkhead that is sustaining her weight. 
 We are not now many left on board. Striving and 
 wrenching to man-handle the only remaining boat — 
 rendered idle for want of the tackles that have parted 
 on service of its twin — ^we succeed in pointing her 
 outboard, and await a further deepening of the bows 
 ere launching her. Of the military, the officer com- 
 manding, some few of his juniors, a group of other 
 
58 David W, Bone 
 
 ranks, stand by. The senior officers of the ship, a 
 muster of seamen, a few stewards, are banded with 
 us at the last. We expect no further service of the 
 destroyers. The position of the ship is over-menac- 
 ing to any approach. They have all they can carry. 
 Steaming at a short distance they have the appear- 
 ance of being heavily overloaded ; each has a stagger- 
 ing list and lies low in the water under their deck 
 encumbrance. We have only the hazard of a quick 
 out-throw of the remaining boat and the chances of a 
 grip on floating wreckage to count upon. 
 
 On a sudden swift sheer. Rifleman takes the risk. 
 Unheeding our warning hail, she steams across the 
 bows and backs at a high speed: her rounded stern 
 jars on our hull plates, a whaler and the davits catch 
 on a projection and give with the ring of buckling 
 steel — she turns on the throw of the propellers and 
 closes aboard with a resounding impact that sets her 
 living deck-load to stagger. 
 
 We lose no time. Scrambling down the life-ropes, 
 our small company endeavors to get foothold on her 
 decks. The destroyer widens off at the rebound, but 
 by clutch of friendly hands the men are dragged 
 aboard. One fails to reach safety. A soldier loses 
 grip and goes to the water. The chief officer follows 
 him. Tired and unstrung as he must be by the de- 
 voted labors of the last half -hour, he is in no con- 
 
"The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband'' 59 
 
 dition to effect a rescue. A sudden deep rumble from 
 within the sinking ship warns the destroyer captain 
 to go ahead. We are given no chance to aid our ship- 
 mates : the propellers tear the water in a furious race 
 that sweeps them away, and we draw off swiftly from 
 the side of the ship. 
 
 We are little more than clear of the settling fore- 
 end when the last buoyant breath of Cameronia is 
 overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to the debarking 
 of the last man. There is no further life in her. 
 Evenly, steadily, as we had seen her leave the launch- 
 ing ways at Meadowside, she goes down. 
 
THE MARKET 
 By William McFee 
 
 William McFee's name is associated with the sea, but in his 
 writing he treats the life of ships and sailors more as a back- 
 ground than as the essential substance of his tale. I have chosen 
 this brief and colorful little sketch to represent his talent be- 
 cause it is different from the work with which most of his readers 
 are familiar, and because it represents a mood very characteristic 
 of him — an imaginative and observant treatment of the workings 
 of commerce. His interest in fruit is intimate, as he has been 
 for some years an engineer in the sea service of the United 
 Fruit Company, with a Mediterranean interim — reflected in much 
 of his recent writing — during the War. 
 
 The publication of McFee's Casuals of the Sea in 191 6 was 
 something of an event in the world of books, and introduced to 
 the reading world a new writer of unquestionable strength and 
 subtlety. His earlier books, An Ocean Tramp and Aliens (both 
 republished since), had gone almost unnoticed — which, it is safe 
 to say, will not happen again to anything he cares to publish. 
 His later books are Captain Maccdoine's Daughter, Harbours of 
 Memory, and An Engineer's Notebook. He was born at sea in 
 1881, the son of a sea-captain ; grew up in a northern suburb 
 of London, served his apprenticeship in a big engineering shop, 
 and has been in ships most of the time since 1905. 
 
 There is a sharp, imperative rap on my outer door ; 
 a rap having within its insistent urgency a shadow of 
 delicate diffidence, as though the person responsible 
 were a trifle scared of the performance and on tiptoe 
 to run away. I roll over and regard the clock. Four- 
 forty. One of the dubious by-products of continuous 
 service as a senior assistant at sea is the habit of 
 waking automatically about 4 a. m. This gives one sev- 
 eral hours, when ashore, to meditate upon one's sins, 
 
 60 
 
The Market 6i 
 
 frailties, and (more rarely) triumphs and virtues. 
 For a man who gets up at say four-thirty is regarded 
 with aversion ashore. His family express themselves 
 with superfluous vigor. He must lie still and med- 
 itate, or suffer the ignominy of being asked when he 
 is going away again. 
 
 But this morning, in these old Chambers in an 
 ancient Inn buried in the heart of London City, I 
 have agreed to get up and go out. The reason for 
 this momentous departure from a life of temporary 
 but deliberate indolence is a lady. "Cherchez la 
 femme," as the French say with the dry animosity of 
 a logical race. Well, she is not far to seek, being 
 on the outside of my heavy oak door, tapping, as al- 
 ready hinted, with a sharp insistent delicacy. To 
 this romantic summons I reply with an articulate growl 
 of acquiescence, and proceed to get ready. To relieve 
 the anxiety of any reader who imagines an impend- 
 ing elopement it may be stated in succinct truthfulness 
 that we are bound on no such desperate venture. Wq 
 are going round the corner a few blocks up the Strand, 
 to Covent Garden Market, to see the arrival of the 
 metropolitan supply of produce. 
 
 Having accomplished a hasty toilet, almost as prim- 
 itive as that favored by gentlemen aroused to go on 
 watch, and placating an occasional repetition of the 
 tapping by brief protests and reports of progress, I 
 
62 William McFee 
 
 take hat and cane, and drawing the huge antique bolts 
 of my door, discover a young woman standing by t3ie 
 window looking out upon the quadrangle of the old 
 Inn. She is a very decided young woman, who is 
 continually thinking out what she calls "stunts" for 
 articles in the press. That is her profession, or one 
 of her professions — writing articles for the press. 
 The other profession is selling manuscripts, which con- 
 stitutes the tender bond between us. For the usual 
 agent^s commission she is selling one of my manu- 
 scripts. Being an unattached and, as it were, unpro- 
 tected male, she plans little excursions about London 
 to keep me instructed and entertained. Here she is 
 attired in the flamboyant finery of a London flower- 
 girl. She is about to get the necessary copy for a 
 special article in a morning paper. With the excep- 
 tion of a certain expectant flash of her bright black 
 Irish eyes, she is entirely businesslike. Commenting 
 on the beauty of an early summer morning in town, 
 we descend, and passing out under the ponderous an- 
 cient archway, we make our leisurely progress west- 
 ward down the Strand. 
 
 London is always beautiful to those who love and 
 understand that extraordinary microcosm; but at five 
 of a summer morning there is about her an exquisite 
 quality of youthful fragrance and debonair freshness 
 which goes to the heart. The newly-hosed streets are 
 
The Market 63 
 
 shining in the sunlight as though paved with "patines 
 of bright gold." Early 'buses rumble by from neigh- 
 boring barns where they have spent the night. And, 
 as we near the new Gaiety Theatre, thrusting forward 
 into the great rivers of traffic soon to pour round its 
 base like some bold Byzantine promontory, we see 
 Waterloo Bridge thronged with wagons, piled high. 
 From all quarters they are coming, past Charing Cross 
 the great wains are arriving from Paddington Ter- 
 minal, from the market-garden section of Middlesex 
 and Surrey. Down Wellington Street come carts 
 laden with vegetables from Brentwood and Cogge- 
 shall, and neat vans packed with crates of watercress 
 which grows in the lush lowlands of Suffolk and Cam- 
 bridgeshire, and behind us are thundering huge four- 
 horse vehicles from the docks, vehicles with peaches 
 from South Africa, potatoes from the Canary Islands, 
 onions from France, apples from California, oranges 
 from the West Indies, pineapples from Central 
 America, grapes from Spain and bananas from 
 Colombia. 
 
 We turn in under an archway behind a theatre 
 and adjacent to the stage-door of the Opera House. 
 The booths are rapidly filling with produce. Gentle- 
 men in long alpaca coats and carrying formidable 
 marbled note-books walk about with an important 
 air. A mountain range of pumpkins rises behind a 
 
64 William McFee 
 
 hill of cabbages. Festoons of onions are being sus- 
 pended from rails. The heads of barrels are being 
 knocked in, disclosing purple grapes buried in cork- 
 dust. Pears and figs, grown under glass for wealthy 
 patrons, repose in soft tissue-lined boxes. A broken 
 crate of tangerine oranges has spilled its contents in 
 a splash of ruddy gold on the plank runway. A 
 wagon is driven in, a heavy load of beets, and the 
 broad wheels crush through the soft fruit so that the 
 air is heavy with the acrid sweetness. 
 
 We pick our way among the booths and stalls until 
 we find the flowers. Here is a crowd of ladies, young, 
 so-so and some quite matronly, and all dressed in 
 this same flamboyant finery of which I have spoken. 
 They are grouped about an almost overpowering mass 
 of blooms. Roses just now predominate. There is 
 a satisfying solidity about the bunches, a glorious 
 abundance which, in a commodity so easily enjoyed 
 without ownership, is scarcely credible. I feel no 
 desire to own these huge aggregations of odorous 
 beauty. It would be like owning a harem, one imag- 
 ines. Violets, solid patches of vivid blue in round 
 baskets, eglantine in dainty boxes, provide a foil to 
 the majestic blazonry of the roses and the dew- 
 spangled forest of maiden-hair fern near by. 
 
 "And what are those things at all?" demands my 
 companion, diverted for a moment from the flowers. 
 
The Market 65 
 
 She nods towards a mass of dull-green affairs piled 
 on mats or being lifted from big vans. She is a 
 Cockney and displays surprise when she is told those 
 things are bananas. She shrugs and turns again to 
 the musk-roses, and forgets. But to me, as the harsh, 
 penetrating odor of the green fruit cuts across the 
 heavy perfume of the flowers, comes a picture of the 
 farms in distant Colombia or perhaps Costa Rica. 
 There is nothing like an odor to stir memories. I see 
 the timber pier and the long line of rackety open- 
 slatted cars jangling into the dark shed, pushed by a 
 noisy, squealing locomotive. I see the boys lying 
 asleep between shifts, their enormous straw hats cov- 
 ering their faces as they sprawl. In the distance rise 
 the blue mountains; behind is the motionless blue sea. 
 I hear the whine of the elevators, the monotonous 
 click of the counters, the harsh cries of irresponsible 
 and argumentative natives. I feel the heat of the 
 tropic day, and see the gleam of the white waves 
 breaking on yellow sands below tall palms. I recall 
 the mysterious impenetrable solitude of the jungle, a 
 solitude alive, if one is equipped with knowledge, 
 with a ceaseless warfare of winged and crawling hosts. 
 And while my companion is busily engaged in getting 
 copy for a special article about the Market, I step 
 nimbly out of the way of a swarthy gentleman from 
 Calabria, who with his two-wheeled barrow is the last 
 
66 William McFee 
 
 link in the immense chain of transportation connecting 
 the farmer in the distant tropics and the cockney pedes- 
 trian who halts on the sidewalk and purchases a ban- 
 ana for a couple of pennies. 
 
HOLY IRELAND 
 By Joyce Kilmer 
 
 This echo of the A.E.F. is probably the best thing Joyce Kil- 
 mer ever wrote, and shows the vein of real tenderness and 
 insight that lay beneath his lively and versatile career on Grub 
 Street. In him, as in many idealists, the Irish theme had become 
 legendary, it was part of his religion and his dream-life, and he 
 treated it with real affection and humor. You will find it crop- 
 ping out many times in his verses. The Irish problem as it is 
 reflected in this country is not always clearly understood. 
 Ireland, in the minds of our poets, is a mystical land of green 
 hills, saints and leprechauns, and its political problems are easy. 
 
 Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick in 1886; studied at 
 Rutgers College and Columbia University ; taught school ; worked 
 on the staff of the Standard Dictionary; passed through phases 
 of socialism and Anglicanism into the Catholic communion, and 
 joined the Sunday staff of the New York Times in 1913. He was 
 killed fighting in France in 1918. This sketch is taken from 
 the second of the three volumes in which Robert Cortes Holliday, 
 his friend and executor, has collected Joyce Kilmer's work. 
 
 We had hiked seventeen miles that stormy December 
 day — the third of a four days' journey. The snow 
 was piled high on our packs, our rifles were crusted 
 with ice, the leather of our hob-nailed boots was 
 frozen stiff over our lamed feet. The weary lieutenant 
 led us to the door of a little house in a side street. 
 
 "Next twelve men," he said. A dozen of us dropped 
 out of the ranks and dragged ourselves over the 
 threshold. We tracked snow and mud over a spot- 
 less stone floor. Before an open fire stood Madame 
 and the three children — a girl of eight years, a boy of 
 
 67 
 
68 Joyce Kilmer 
 
 five, a boy of three. They stared with round fright- 
 ened eyes at les soldats Americans, the first they had 
 ever seen. We were too tired to stare back. We at 
 once cHmbed to the chill attic, our billet, our lodging 
 for the night. First we lifted the packs from one an- 
 other's aching shoulders: then, without spreading our 
 blankets, we lay down on the bare boards. 
 
 For ten minutes there was silence, broken by an 
 occasional groan, an oath, the striking of a match. 
 Cigarettes glowed like fireflies in a forest. Then a 
 voice came from the corrier: 
 
 "Where is Sergeant Reilly?" it said. We lazily 
 searched. There was no Sergeant Reilly to be 
 found. 
 
 "I'll bet the old bum has gone out after a pint," 
 said the voice. And with the curiosity of the Amer- 
 ican and the enthusiasm of the Irish we lumbered 
 downstairs in quest of Sergeant Reilly. 
 
 He was sitting on a low bench by the fire. His 
 shoes were off and his bruised feet were in a pail of 
 cold water. He was too good a soldier to expose them 
 to the heat at once. The little girl was on his lap 
 and the little boys stood by and envied him. And in 
 a voice that twenty years of soldiering and oceans of 
 whisky had failed to rob of its Celtic sweetness, he 
 was softly singing: "Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More." 
 We listened respectfully. 
 
Holy Ireland 69 
 
 "They cheer the King and then salute him/' said 
 Sergeant Reilly. 
 
 "A regular Irishman would shoot him," and we 
 all joined in the chorus, "Ireland Isn't Ireland Any 
 More.'' 
 
 "Ooh, la, la!" exclaimed Madame, and she and all 
 the children began to talk at the top of their voices. 
 What they said Heaven knows, but the tones were 
 friendly, even admiring. 
 
 "Gentlemen," said Sergeant Reilly from his post of 
 honor, "the lady who runs this billet is a very nice 
 lady indeed. She says yez can all take off your shoes 
 and dry your socks by the fire. But take turns and 
 don't crowd or I'll turn yez all upstairs." 
 
 Now Madame, a woman of some forty years, was 
 a true bourgeoise, with all the thrift of her class. And 
 by the terms of her agreement with the authorities she 
 was required to let the soldiers have for one night the 
 attic of her house to sleep in — nothing more ; no light, 
 no heat. Also, wood is very expensive in France — 
 for reasons that are engraven in letters of blood on 
 the pages of history. Nevertheless — 
 
 "Asseyez-vous, s'il vous plait," said Madame. And 
 she brought nearer' to the fire all the chairs the estab- 
 lishment possessed and some chests and boxes to be 
 used as seats. And she and the little girl, whose name 
 was Solange, went out into the snow and came back 
 
70 Joyce Kilmer 
 
 with heaping armfuls of small logs. The fire blazed 
 merrily — more merrily than it had blazed since Aug- 
 ust, 19 1 4, perhaps. We surrounded it, and soon the 
 air was thick with steam from our drying socks. 
 
 Meanwhile Madame and the Sergeant had gener- 
 ously admitted all eleven of us into their conversation. 
 A spirited conversation it was, too, in spite of the 
 fact that she knew no English and the extent of his 
 French was "du pain," "du vin," "cognac" and "bon 
 jour." Those of us who knew a little more of the 
 language of the country acted as interpreters for the 
 others. We learned the names of the children and 
 their ages. We learned that our hostess was a widow. 
 Her husband had fallen in battle just one month be- 
 fore our arrival in her home. She showed us with 
 simple pride and affection and restrained grief his 
 picture. Then she showed us those of her two brothers 
 — one now fighting at Salonica, the other a prisoner 
 of war — of her mother and father, of herself dressed 
 for First Communion. 
 
 This last picture she showed somewhat shyly, as if 
 doubting that we would understand it. But when one 
 of us asked in halting French if Solange, her little 
 daughter, had yet made her First Com.munion, then 
 Madame's face cleared. 
 
 "Mais oui 1" she exclaimed, "Et vous, ma foi, vous 
 etes Catholigues, n'est-ce pas?" 
 
Holy Ireland ^l 
 
 At once rosary beads were flourished to prove our 
 right to answer this question affirmatively. Tattered 
 prayer-books and somewhat dingy scapulars were 
 brought to light. Madame and the children chattered 
 their surprise and delight to each other, and every ex- 
 hibit called for a new outburst. 
 
 "Ah, le bon S. Benoit! Ah, voila, le Conception 
 Immacule! Ooh la la, le Sacre Cceur!" (which last 
 exclamation sounded in no wise as irreverent as it 
 looks in print). 
 
 Now other treasures, too, were shown — treasures 
 chiefly photographic. There were family groups, there 
 were Coney Island snapshots. And Madame and the 
 children were a gratifyingly appreciative audience. 
 They admired and sympathized; they exclaimed ap- 
 propriately at the beauty of every girl's face, the tender- 
 ness of every pictured mother. We had become the 
 intimates of Madame. She had admitted us into her 
 family and we her into ours. 
 
 Soldiers — -American soldiers of Irish descent — ^have 
 souls and hearts. These organs (if the soul may be 
 so termed) had been satisfied. But our stomachs re- 
 mained — and that they yearned was evident to us: 
 We had made our hike on a meal of hardtack and 
 "corned willy." Mess call would sound soon. Should 
 we force our wet shoes on again and plod through 
 the snowy streets to the temporary mess-shack? We 
 
7a Joyce Kilmer 
 
 knew our supply wagons had not succeeded in* climb- 
 ing the last hill into town, and that therefore bread 
 and unsweetened coffee would be our portion. A 
 great depression settled upon us. 
 
 But Sergeant Reilly rose to the occasion. 
 
 "Boys/' he said, "this here lady has got a good fire 
 going, and I'll bet she can cook. What do you say 
 we g^ her to fiy: us up a meal ?" 
 
 The proposal was received joyously at first. Then 
 some one said : 
 
 "But I haven't got any money." "Neither have I 
 — not a damn sou!" said another. And again the 
 spiritual temperature of the room fell. 
 
 Again Sergeant Reilly spoke: 
 
 "I haven't got any money to speak of, meself," he 
 said. "But let's have a show-down. I guess we've 
 got enough to buy somethin' to eat." 
 
 It was long after pay-day, and we were not hopeful 
 of the results of the search. But the wealthy (that is, 
 those who had two francs) made up for the poor 
 (that is, those who had two sous). And among the 
 coins on the table I noticed an American dime, an 
 English half-crown and a Chinese piece with a square 
 hole in the center. In negotiable tender the money 
 came in all to eight francs. 
 
 It takes more money than that to feed twelve hungry 
 soldiers these days in France. But there was no harm 
 
Holy Ireland 73 
 
 in trying. So an ex-seminarian, an ex-bookkeeper 
 and an ex-street-car conductor aided Sergeant Reilly 
 in explaining in French that had both a brogue and a 
 Yankee twang that we were hungry, that this was all 
 the money we had in the world, and that we wanted 
 her to cook us something to eat. 
 
 Now Madame was what they call in New England 
 a "capable" woman. In a jiffy she had the money in 
 Solange's hand and had that admirable child cloaked 
 and wooden-shod for the street, and fully informed 
 as to what she was to buy. What Madame and the 
 children had intended to have for supper I do not 
 know, for there was nothing in the kitchen but the 
 fire, the stove, the table, some shelves of dishes and 
 an enormous bed. Nothing in the way of a food cup- 
 board could be seen. And the only other room of the 
 house was the bare attic. 
 
 When Solange came back she carried in a basket 
 bigger than herself these articles: (i) two loaves of 
 war-bread; (2) five bottles of red wine; (3) three 
 cheeses; (4) numerous potatoes; (5) a lump of fat; 
 (6) a bag of coffee. The whole represented, as was 
 afterward demonstrated, exactly the sum of ten francs, 
 fifty centimes. 
 
 Well, we all set to work peeling potatoes. Then 
 with a veritable French trench-knife Madame cut the 
 potatoes into long strips. Meanwhile Solange had put 
 
74 Joyce Kilmer 
 
 tlie lump of fat into the big black pot that hung by a 
 chain over the fire. In the boiling grease the potatoes 
 were placed, Madame standing by with a big ladle 
 punched full of holes (I regret that I do not know the 
 technical name for this instrument) and keeping the 
 potato-strips swimming, zealously frustrating any at- 
 tempt on their part to lie lazily at the bottom of the 
 pot. 
 
 We forgot all about the hike as we sat at supper 
 that evening. The only absentees were the two little 
 boys, Michael and Paul. And they were really absent 
 only from our board — they were in the room, in the 
 great built-in bed that was later to hold also Madame 
 and Solange. Their little bodies were covered by 
 the three- foot thick mattress-like red silk quilt, but 
 their tousled heads protruded and they watched us 
 unblinkingly all the evening. 
 
 But just as we sat down, before Sergeant Reilly 
 began his task of dishing out the potatoes and starting 
 the bottles on their way, Madame stopped her chat- 
 tering and looked at Solange. And Solange stopped 
 her chattering and looked at Madame. And they both 
 looked rather searchingly at us. We didn't know 
 what was the matter, but we felt rather embarrassed. 
 
 Then Madame began to talk, slowly and loudly, as 
 one talks to make foreigners understand. And the 
 gist of her remarks was that she was surprised to see 
 
Holy Ireland 75 
 
 that American Catholics did not say grace before 
 eating like French Catholics. 
 
 We sprang to our feet at once. But it was not 
 Sergeant Reilly who saved the situation. Instead, the 
 ex-seminarian (he is only temporarily an ex-semin- 
 arian; he'll be preaching missions and giving retreats 
 yet if a bit of shrapnel doesn't hasten his journey to 
 Heaven) said, after we had blessed ourselves : "Bene- 
 dicite; nos et quae sumus sumpturi benedicat Deus, 
 Pater et Fihus et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen." 
 
 Madame and Solange, obviously relieved, joined 
 us in the Amen, and we sat down again to eat. 
 
 It was a memorable feast. There was not much 
 conversation — except on the part of Madame and 
 Solange — but there was plenty of good cheer. Also 
 there was enough cheese and bread and wine and 
 potatoes for all of us — half starved as we were when 
 we sat down. Even big Considine, who drains a can 
 of condensed milk at a gulp and has been known to 
 eat an apple pie without stopping to take breath, was 
 satisfied. There were toasts, also, all proposed by 
 Sergeant Reilly — toasts to Madame, and to the chil- 
 dren, and to France, and to the United States, and to 
 the Old Gray Mare (this last toast having an esoteric 
 significance apparent only to illuminati of Sergeant 
 Reilly's circle). 
 
 The table cleared and the "agimus tibi gratias" duly 
 
76 Joyce Kilmer 
 
 said, we sat before the fire, most of us on the floor. 
 We were warm and happy and full of good food and 
 good wine. I spied a slip of paper on the floor by 
 Solange's foot and unashamedly read it. It was an 
 accounting for the evening's expenditures — ^totaling 
 exactly ten francs and fifty centimes. 
 
 Now when soldiers are unhappy — during a long, 
 hard hike, for instance- — they sing to keep up their 
 spirits. And when they are happy, as on the even- 
 ing now under consideration, they sing to express 
 their satisfaction with life. We sang "Sweet Rosie 
 O'Grady." We shook the kitchen-bedroom with the 
 echoes of "Take Me Back to New York Town." We 
 informed Madame, Solange, Paul, Michael, in fact, 
 the whole village, that we had never been a wanderer 
 and that we longed for our Indiana home. We grew 
 sentimental over "Mother Machree." And Sergeant 
 Reilly obliged with a reel — in his socks — to an accom- 
 plishment of whistling and handclapping. 
 
 Now, it was our hostess's turn to entertain. We 
 intimated as much. She responded, first by much talk, 
 much consultation with Solange, and finally by going 
 to one of the shelves that held the pans and taking 
 down some paper-covered books. 
 
 There was more consultation, whispered this time, 
 and much turning of pages. Then, after some pre- 
 liminary coughing and humming, the music began 
 
Holy Ireland 77 
 
 — the woman's rich alto blending with the child's 
 shrill but sweet notes. And what they sang was 
 "Tantum ergo Sacramentum." 
 
 Why she should have thought that an appropriate 
 song to offer this company of rough soldiers from a 
 distant land I do not know. And why we foimd it 
 appropriate it is harder still to say. But it did seem 
 appropriate to all of us — ^to Sergeant Reilly, to Jim 
 (who used to drive a truck), to Larry (who sold 
 cigars), to Frank (who tended a bar on Fourteenth 
 Street). It seemed, for some reason, eminently fit- 
 ting. 'Not one of us then or later expressed any sur- 
 prise that this hymn, familiar to most of us since 
 our mothers first led us to the Parish Church down 
 the pavements of New York or across the Irish hills, 
 should be sung to us in this strange land and in these 
 strange circumstances. 
 
 Since the gracious Latin of the Church was in 
 order and since the season was appropriate, one of 
 us suggested "Adeste Fideles" for the next item on 
 the evening's program. Madame and Solange and our 
 ex-seminarian knew all the words and the rest of us 
 came in strong with "Venite, adoremus Dominum." 
 
 Then, as if to show that piety and mirth may live 
 together, the ladies obliged with "Au Clair de la Lune" 
 and other simple ballads of old France. And after 
 taps had sounded in the street outside our door, and 
 
78 Joyce Kilmer 
 
 there was yawning, and wrist-watches were being 
 scanned, the evening's entertainment ended, by general 
 consent, with patriotic selections. We sang — as best 
 we could — the "Star- Spangled Banner," Solange and 
 her mother humming the air and applauding at the 
 conclusion. Then we attempted "La Marseillaise." 
 Of course, we did not know the words. Solange came 
 to our rescue with two little pamphlets containing the 
 song, so we looked over each other's shoulders and got 
 to work in earnest. Madame sang with us, and So- 
 lange. But during the final stanza Madame did not 
 sing. She leaned against the great family bedstead 
 and looked at us. She had taken one of the babies 
 from under the red comforter and held him to her 
 breast. One of her red and toil-scarred hands half 
 covered his fat little back. There was a gentle dignity 
 about that plain, hard-working woman, that soldier's 
 widow — we all felt it. And some of us saw the tears 
 in her eyes. 
 
 There are mists, faint and beautiful and unchang- 
 ing, that hang over the green slopes of some moun- 
 tains I know. I have seen them on the Irish hills and 
 I have seen them on the hills of France. I think that 
 they are made of the tears of good brave women. 
 
 Before I went to sleep that night I exchanged a few 
 words witb Sergeant Reilly. We lay side by side 
 gn the floor, now piled with straw. Blankets, shelter- 
 
Holy Ireland 79 
 
 halves, slickers and overcoats insured warm sleep. 
 Sergeant Reilly's hard old face was wrapped round 
 with his muffler. The final cigarette of the day burned 
 lazily in a comer of his mouth. 
 
 "That was a pretty good evening, Sarge," I said. 
 "We sure were in luck when we struck this billet." 
 
 He grunted affirmatively, then puffed in silence for 
 a few minutes. Then he deftly spat the cigarette into 
 a strawless portion of the floor, where it glowed for a 
 few seconds before it went out. 
 
 "You said it," he remarked. "We were in luck is 
 right. What do you know about that lady, anyway ?" 
 
 "Why," I answered, "I thought she treated us pretty 
 white." 
 
 "Joe," said Sergeant Reilly, "do you realize how 
 much trouble that woman took to make this bunch 
 of roughnecks comfortable ? She didn't make a damn 
 cent on that feed, you know. The kid spent all the 
 money we give her. And she's out about six francs 
 for firewood, too — I wish to God I had the money 
 to pay her. I bet she'll go cold for a week now, and 
 hungry, too. 
 
 "And that ain't all," he continued, after a pause 
 broken only by an occasional snore from our blissful 
 neighbors. "Look at the way she cooked them pomme 
 de terres and fixed things up for us and let us sit 
 down there with her like we was her family. And 
 
8o Joyce Kilmer 
 
 look at the way she and the little Sallie there sung 
 for us. 
 
 "I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to 
 hear a woman sing them church hymns to me that 
 way. It's forty years since I heard a hymn sung in 
 a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that 
 sang them. I sort of realize what we're fighting for 
 now, and I never did before. It's for women like 
 that and their kids. 
 
 "It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting there singing 
 them hymns. I remembered when I was a boy in 
 Shangolden. I wonder if there's many women like 
 that in France now — telling their beads and singing 
 the old hymns and treating poor traveling men the 
 way she's just after treating us. There used to be 
 lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I 
 think that's why it was called 'Holy Ireland.' " 
 
A FAMILIAR PREFACE 
 By Joseph Conrad 
 
 This glorious expression of the credo of all artists, in what- 
 ever form of creation, lastingly enriches the English tongue. It 
 is from the preface to A Personal Record, that fascinating auto- 
 biographical volume in which Conrad tells the curious story of 
 a Polish boy who ran away to sea and began to write in Eng- 
 lish. As a companion piece, those who have the honor of the 
 writer's craft at heart should read Conrad's preface to The 
 Nigger of the Narcissus. 
 
 "All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward 
 on the miseries or credulities of mankind." Is it permissible to 
 wonder what some newspaper owners — say Mr. Hearst — would 
 reply to that? 
 
 Mr. Conrad's career is too^ well known to be annotated here. 
 If by any chance the reader is not acquainted with it, it will be 
 to his soul's advantage to go to a public library and look it up. 
 
 As a general rule we do not want much encourage- 
 ment to talk about ourselves; yet this little book * is the 
 result of a friendly suggestion, and even of a little 
 friendly pressure. I defended myself with some spirit : 
 but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice 
 insisted, "You know, you really must." 
 
 It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. 
 If one must! . . . 
 
 You perceive the force of a word. He who wants 
 to persuade should put his trust not in the right argu- 
 ment, but in the right word. The power of sound 
 
 * A Personal Record. \ 
 
 8i 
 
82 Joseph Conrad 
 
 has always been greater than the power of sense. I 
 don't say this by way of disparagement. It is better 
 for mankind to be impressionable than reflective. 
 Nothing humanely great — great, I mean, as affecting 
 a whole mass of lives — has come from reflection. On 
 the other hand, you cannot fail to see the power of 
 mere words; such words as Glory, for instance, or 
 Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not far 
 to seek. Shouted with perseverance, with ardor, 
 with conviction, these two by their sound alone hav^ 
 set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry, 
 hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric, 
 There's "virtue" for you if you hke! ... Of couise, 
 the accent must be attended to. The right accent. 
 That's very important. The capacious lung, the thun- 
 dering or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me 
 of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded 
 person with a mathematical imagination. Mathemat- 
 ics commands all my respect, but I have no use for 
 engines. Give me the right word and the right ac- 
 cent and I will move the world. 
 
 What a dream for a writer ! Because written words 
 have their accent, too. Yes! Let me only find the 
 right word ! Surely it must be lying somewhere among 
 the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations 
 poured out aloud since the first day when hope, the 
 undying, came down on earth. It may be there, close 
 
/L Familiar Preface 83 
 
 by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. But it's no 
 good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of 
 a needle in a pottle of hay at the first try. For my- 
 self, I have never had such luck. 
 
 And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. 
 For who is going to tell whether the accent is right 
 or wrong till the word is shouted, and fails to be 
 heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, leaving the world 
 unmoved? Once upon a time there lived an emperor 
 who was a sage and something of a literary man. He 
 jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts, maxims, reflec- 
 tions which chance has preserved for the edification of 
 posterity. Among other sayings — I am quoting from 
 memory — I remember this solemn admonition: "Let 
 all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." The 
 accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am 
 thinking that it is an easy matter for an austere em- 
 peror to jot down grandiose advice. Most of the 
 working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic; 
 and there have been times in the history of mankind 
 when the accents of heroic truth have moved it to 
 nothing but derision. 
 
 Nobody will expect to find between the covers of 
 this little book words of extraordinary potency or 
 accents of irresistible heroism. However humiliating 
 for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels 
 of Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more 
 
84 Joseph Conrad 
 
 fit for a moralist than for an artist. Truth of a 
 modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. 
 That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while 
 it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as 
 likely as not to embroil one with one's friends. 
 
 "Embroil'* is perhaps too strong an expression. I 
 can't imagine among either my enemies or my friends 
 a being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel 
 with me. "To disappoint one's friends" would be 
 nearer the mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the 
 writing period of my life have come to me through 
 my books; and I know that a novelist lives in his 
 work. He stands there, the only reality in an in- 
 vented world, among imaginary things, happenings,, 
 and people. Writing about them, he is only writing 
 about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. 
 He remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind the 
 veil ; a suspected rather than a seen presence — ^a move- 
 ment and a voice behind the draperies of fiction. In 
 these personal notes there is no such veil. And I 
 cannot help thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of 
 Christ" where the ascetic author, who knew life so 
 profoundly, says that "there are persons esteemed on 
 their reputation who by showing themselves destroy 
 the opinion one had of them." This is the danger 
 incurred by an author of fiction who sets out to talk 
 about himself without disguise. 
 
A Familiar Preface 85 
 
 While these reminiscent pages were appearing seri- 
 ally I was remonstrated with for bad economy; as if 
 such writing were a form of self-indulgence wasting 
 the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am 
 not sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never 
 wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six cannot 
 bring himself to look upon his existence and his ex- 
 perience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations, and 
 emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the 
 whole possession of his past, as only so much material 
 for his hands. Once before, some three years ago, 
 when I published 'The Mirror of the Sea," a volume 
 of impressions and memories, the same remarks were 
 made to me. Practical remarks. But, truth to say, I 
 have never understood the kind of thrift they recom- 
 mend. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its 
 ships and its men, to whom I remain indebted for so 
 much which has gone to make me what I am. That 
 seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer 
 it to their shades. There could not be a question in 
 my mind of anything else. It is quite possible that I 
 am a bad economist; but it is certain that I am in- 
 corrigible. 
 
 Having matured in the surroundings and under the 
 special conditions of sea life, I have a special piety 
 toward that form of my past; for its impressions were 
 vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be 
 
86 Joseph Conrad 
 
 responded to with the natural elation of youth and 
 strength equal to the call. There was nothing in them 
 to perplex a young conscience. Having broken away 
 from my origins under a storm of blame from every 
 quarter which had the merest shadow of right to 
 voice an opinion, removed by great distances from 
 such natural affections as were still left to me, and 
 even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally 
 unintelligible character of the life which had seduced 
 me so mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely 
 say that through the blind force of circumstances the 
 sea was to be all my world and the merchant service 
 my only home for a long succession of years. No 
 wonder, then, that in my two exclusively sea books 
 — "The Nigger of the Narcissus," and "The Mirror 
 of the Sea" (and in the few short sea stories like 
 "Youth" and "Typhoon") — I have tried with an 
 almost filial regard to render the vibration of life in the 
 great world of waters, in the hearts of the simple men 
 who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also 
 that something sentient which seems to dwell in ships 
 — the creatures of their hands and the objects of their 
 care. 
 
 One's literary life must turn frequently for sus- 
 tenance to memories and seek discourse with the 
 shades, unless one has made up one's mind to write 
 only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or 
 
A Familiar Preface 87 
 
 praise it for what it is not, or — generally — to teach it 
 how to behave. Being neither quarrelsome, nor a 
 flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these things, 
 and I am prepared to put up serenely with the in- 
 significance which attaches to persons who are not 
 meddlesome in some way or other. But resignation is 
 not indifference. I would not like to be left stand- 
 ing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream 
 carrying onward so many lives. I would fain claim 
 for myself the faculty of so much insight as can be 
 expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion. 
 
 It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative 
 quarter of criticism I am suspected of a certain unemo- 
 tional, grim acceptance of facts — of what the French 
 would call secheresse du coeur. Fifteen years of un- 
 broken silence before praise or blame testify suffi- 
 ciently to my respect for criticism, that fine flower 
 of personal expression in the garden of letters. But 
 this is more of a personal matter, reaching the man 
 behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to 
 in a volume which is a personal note in the margin 
 of the public page. Not that I feel hurt in the least. 
 The charge — if it amounted to a charge at all — was 
 made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of re- 
 gret. 
 
 My answer is that if it be true that every novel con- 
 tains an element of autobiography — and this can hardly 
 
88 Joseph Conrad 
 
 be denied, since the creator can only express himself 
 in his creation — then there are some of us to whom 
 an open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would 
 not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often 
 merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of 
 coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing 
 more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emo- 
 tion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Noth- 
 ing more humiliating! And this for the reason that 
 should the mark be missed, should the open display 
 of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoid- 
 ably in disgust or contempt. No artist can be re- 
 proached for shrinking from a risk which only fools 
 run to meet and only genius dare confront with im- 
 punity. In a task which mainly consists in laying one's 
 soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for 
 decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard 
 for one's own dignity which is inseparably united 
 with the dignity of one's work. 
 
 And then — it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or 
 wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, 
 soon takes upon itself a face of pain ; and some of our 
 griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for 
 suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) 
 have their source in weaknesses which must be recog- 
 nized with smiling compassion as the common in- 
 heritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world 
 
A Familiar Preface 89 
 
 pass into each other, mingHng their forms and their 
 murmurs in the twilight of Hfe as mysterious as an 
 overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of 
 supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on 
 the distant edge of the horizon. 
 
 Yes! I, too, would like to hold the magic wand 
 giving that command over laughter and tears which 
 is declared to be the highest achievement of imagina- 
 tive literature. Only, to be a great magician one must 
 surrender oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, 
 either outside or within one's breast. We have all 
 heard of simple men selling their souls for love or 
 power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary 
 intelligence can perceive without much reflection that 
 anything of the sort is bound to be a fooFs bargain. 
 I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because of my 
 dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may be 
 my sea training acting upon a natural disposition to 
 keep good hold on the one thing really mine, but the 
 fact is that I have a positive horror of losing even 
 for one moving moment that full possession of myself 
 which is the first condition of good service. And I 
 have carried my notion of good service from my ear- 
 lier into my later existence. I, who have never sought 
 in the written word anything else but a form of the 
 Beautiful — I have carried over that article of creed 
 from the decks of ships to the more circumscribed 
 
90 Joseph Conrad 
 
 space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have 
 become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the in- 
 effable company of pure esthetes. 
 
 As in political so in literary action a man wins 
 friends for himself mostly by the passion of his 
 prejudices and by the consistent narrowness of his 
 outlook. But I have never been able to love what was 
 not lovable or hate what was not hateful out of defer- 
 ence for some general principle. Whether there be 
 any courage in making this admission I know not. 
 After the middle turn of lifers way we consider dan- 
 gers and joys with a tranquil mind. So I proceed 
 in peace to declare that I have always suspected in 
 the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions 
 the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move 
 others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to 
 be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sen- 
 sibility — innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, 
 like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above 
 the pitch of natural conversation — but still we have 
 to do that. And surely this is no great sin. But the 
 danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his 
 own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sin- 
 cerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself 
 as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose — as, 
 in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. 
 
A Familiar "Preface 91 
 
 From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivel- 
 ling and giggles. 
 
 These may seem selfish considerations; but you 
 can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking 
 care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And 
 least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, how- 
 ever humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that 
 interior world where his thought and his emotions go 
 seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, 
 there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of cir- 
 cumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within 
 bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his tempta- 
 tions if not his conscience? 
 
 And besides — this, remember, is the place and the 
 moment of perfectly open talk — I think that all ambi- 
 tions are lawful except those which climb upward on 
 the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellec- 
 tual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and 
 even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can 
 hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much the worse 
 for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such 
 ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very 
 mad presumption to believe in the sovereign power 
 of one's art, to try for other means, for other ways 
 of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's 
 work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. 
 
92 Joseph Conrad 
 
 A historian of hearts is not a historian of emotions, 
 yet he penetrates further, restrained as he may be, 
 since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter 
 and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves ad- 
 miration and pity. They are worthy of respect, too. 
 And he is not insensible who pays them the undemon- 
 strative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and 
 of a smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not mys- 
 tic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, 
 and informed by love, is the only one of our feel- 
 ings for which it is impossible to become a sham. 
 
 Not that I think resignation the last word of wis- 
 dom. I am too much the creature of my time for 
 that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to will 
 what the gods will without, perhaps, being certain 
 what their will is — or even if they have a will of their 
 own. And in this matter of life and art it is not the 
 Why that matters so much to our happiness as the 
 How. As the Frenchman said, ''II y a toujours la 
 manieref Very true. Yes. There is the manner. 
 The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indig- 
 nations and enthusiasms, in judgments — and even in 
 love. The manner in which, as in the features and 
 character of a human face, the inner truth is fore- 
 shadowed for those who know how to look at their 
 kind. 
 
 Those who read me know my conviction that the 
 
A Familiar Preface 93 
 
 world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple 
 ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. 
 It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity. 
 At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in 
 some way or other can expect to attract much atten- 
 tion I have not been revolutionary in my writings. 
 The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, 
 that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. 
 Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind 
 by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it con- 
 tains. No doubt one should smile at these things; 
 but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. 
 All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that 
 scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind 
 should be free. 
 
ON DRAWING 
 By A. P. Herbert 
 
 A. P. Herbert is one of the most brilliant of the younger Eng- 
 lish writers, and has done remarkable work in fields appar- 
 ently incompatible : light verse, humorous drolleries, and a beau- 
 tifully written tragic novel, The Secret Battle. This last was 
 unquestionably one of the most powerful books born of the War, 
 but its sale was tragically small. The House by the River, a 
 later book, was also an amazingly competent and original tale, 
 apparently cast along the lines of the conventional "mystery 
 story," but really a study of selfishness and cowardice done 
 with startling irony and intensity. 
 
 Mr. Herbert went to Winchester School and New College, 
 Oxford, where he took his degree in 1914. He saw military 
 service at the Dardanelles and in France, and is now on the 
 staff of Punch. There is no young writer in England from 
 whom one may more confidently expect a continuance of fine 
 work. This airy and delicious little absurdity is a perfect ex- 
 ample of what a genuine humorist can do. 
 
 H there is still any one in doubt as to the value of the old- 
 fashioned classical training in forming a lusty prose style, let 
 him examine Mr. Herbert's The Secret Battle. This book often 
 sounds oddly like a translation from vigorous Greek — e.g., 
 Herodotus. It is lucid, compact, logical, rich in telling epithet, 
 informal and swift, li these are not the cardinal prose virtues, 
 what are? 
 
 It is commonly said that everybody can sing in the 
 bathroom; and this is true. Singing is very easy. 
 Drawing, though, is much more difficult. I have 
 devoted a good deal of time to Drawing, one way 
 and another; I have to attend a great many committees 
 and public meetings, and at such functions I find 
 that Drawing is almost the only Art one can safis- 
 
 94 
 
On Drawing 95 
 
 factorily pursue during the speeches. One really can- 
 not sing during the speeches; so as a rule I draw. 
 I do not say that I am an expert yet, but after a few 
 more meetings I calculate that I shall know Drawing 
 as well as it can be known. 
 
 The first thing, of course, is to get on to a really 
 good committee; and by a good committee I mean 
 a committee that provides decent materials. An ordi- 
 nary departmental committee is no use : generally they 
 only give you a couple of pages of lined foolscap and 
 no white blotting-paper, and very often the pencils 
 are quite soft. White blotting-paper is essential. I 
 know of no material the spoiling of which gives so 
 much artistic pleasure — except perhaps snow. Indeed, 
 if I was asked to choose between making pencil-marks 
 on a sheet of white blotting-paper and making foot- 
 marks on a sheet of white snow I should be in a thing- 
 ummy. 
 
 Much the best committees from the point of view 
 of material are committees about business which meet 
 at business premises — shipping offices, for choice. One 
 of the Pacific Lines has the best white blotting-paper 
 I know ; and the pencils there are a dream. I am sure 
 the directors of that firm are Drawers; for they al- 
 ways give you two pencils, one hard for doing noses, 
 and one soft for doing hair. 
 
 When you have selected your committee and the 
 
{ 
 
 96 A, P. Herbert 
 
 speeches are well away, the Drawing be- 
 gins. Much the best thing to draw is a man. 
 Not the chairman, or Lord Pommery Quint, 
 or any member of the committee, but just A 
 Man. Many novices make the mistake of se- pic. i 
 lecting a subject for their Art before they 
 begin; usually they select the dhairman. And when 
 they find it is more like Mr. Gladstone they are dis- 
 couraged. If they had waited a little it could have been 
 Mr. Gladstone ofBcially. 
 
 As a rule I begin with the forehead and 
 work down to the chin (Fig. i). 
 
 When I have done the outline I put in the 
 eye. This is one of the most difficult parts 
 of Drawing; one is never quite sure where 
 
 ^^^' ^ the eye goes. If, however, it is not a good 
 eye, a useful tip is to give the man spectacles; this 
 generally makes him a clergyman, but it helps the 
 eye (Fig. 2). 
 
 Now you have to outline the rest of the head, and 
 this is rather a gamble. Personally, I go in 
 for strong heads (Fig. 3). 
 
 I am afraid it is not a strong neck; I 
 expect he is an author, and is not well fed. 
 But that is the worst of strong heads ; they 
 make it so difficult to join up the chin and 
 the back of the neck. ^^' ^ 
 
On Drawing 97 
 
 The next thing to do is to put in the ear ; and once 
 you have done this the rest is easy. Ears are much 
 more difficult than eyes (Fig. 4). 
 
 I hope that is right. It seems to me to be a little 
 too far to the southward. But it is done now. And 
 once you have put in the ear you can't go back; not 
 unless you are on a very good committee which pro- 
 vides india-rubber as well as pencils. 
 
 Now I do the hair. Hair may either be very fuzzy 
 or black, or lightish and thin. It de- 
 pends chiefly on what sort of pencils are 
 provided. For myself I prefer black hair, 
 because then the parting shows up bet- 
 ter (Fig. 5). 
 ^ Until one draws hair one never real- 
 
 FlG. 4 
 
 izes what large heads people have. Doing 
 the hair takes the Whole of a speech, usually, even one 
 of the chairman's speeches. 
 
 This is not one of my best men; I am sure the ear 
 is in the \vrong place. And I am inclined to think 
 he ought to have spectacles. Only then he would 
 be a clergyman, and I have decided that 
 he is Mr. Philip Gibbs at the age of 
 twenty. So he must carry on with his eye 
 as it is. 
 
 I find that all my best men face to the 
 W€St; it is a curious thing. Sometimes I ^°* ^ 
 
98 A, P. Herbert 
 
 draw two men facing each other, but the one facing 
 east is always a dud. 
 
 There, you see (Fig. 6) ? The dne on the right 
 is a Bolshevik; he has a low forehead and beetling 
 brows — a most unpleasant man. Yet he has a power- 
 ful face. The one on the left was meant to be an- 
 other Bolshevik, arguing with him. But he has turned 
 
 ft 
 
 Fig. 6 
 
 out to be a lady, so I have had to give her a "bun." 
 She is a lady solicitor ; but I don't know how she came 
 to be talking to the Bolshevik. 
 
 When you have learned how to do men, the only 
 other things in Drawing are Perspective and Land* 
 scape. 
 
 PERSPECTIVE is great fun : the best thing to do 
 is a long French road with telegraph poles (Fig. 7). 
 
 I have put in a fence as well. 
 
 LANDSCAPE is chiefly composed of hills and trees. 
 Trees are the most amusing, especially fluflfy trees. 
 
 Here is a Landscape (Fig. 8). 
 
 Somehow or other a man has got into this land- 
 
On Drawing 99 
 
 scape; and, as luck would have it, it is Napoleon. 
 Apart from this it is not a bad landscape. 
 
 Fig. 7 
 
 But It takes a very long speech to get an ambitious 
 piece of work like this through. 
 
 Fig. 8 
 
 There is one other thing I ought to have said. 
 Never attempt to draw a man front-face. It can't 
 be done. 
 
O. HENRY 
 By O. W. Firkins 
 
 Several years ago I turned to Who's Who in America in hope 
 f)f finding some information about O. W. Firkins, whose brilHant 
 reviews — chiefly of poetry — were appearing in The Nation. I 
 found no entry, but every few months I would again rummage 
 that stout red volume with the same intention, forgetting that 
 I had done so before without success. It seemed hardly credible 
 that a critic so brilliant had been overlooked by the industrious 
 compilers of that work, which Includes hundreds of hacks and 
 fourflushers. When gathering the contents of this book I tried 
 Who's Who again, still without result. I wrote to Mr. Firkins 
 pleading for biographical details; modestly, but firmly, he de- 
 nied me. 
 
 So all I can tell you is this, that Mr. Firkins is to my mind 
 one of the half-dozen most sparkling critics in this country. 
 One sometimes feels that he is carried a little past his destina- 
 tion by the sheer gusto and hilarity of his antitheses and para- 
 doxes. That is not so, however, in this essay about O. Henry, 
 an author who has often been grotesquely mispraised (I did not 
 say overpraised) by people incompetent to appreciate his true 
 greatness. Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, in an essay called "The 
 Amazing Failure of O. Henry," said that O. Henry created no 
 memorable characters. Mr. Firkins suggests the obvious but 
 satisfying answer — New York itself is his triumph. The New 
 York of O. Henry, already almost erased physically, remains a 
 personality and an identity. 
 
 Mr. Firkins is professor of English at the University of 
 Minnesota, and a contributing editor of The Weekly Revic7v, 
 in which this essay first appeared in September, 1919. The 
 footnotes are, of course, his own. 
 
 There are two opinions concerning O. Henry. The 
 middle class views him as the impersonation of vigor 
 and brilliancy; part of the higher criticism sees in him 
 little but sensation and persiflage. Between these views 
 there is a natural relation; the gods of the heathens 
 
 ICO 
 
O. Henry loi 
 
 are ipso facto the demons of Christianity. Unmixed 
 assertions, however, are commonly mixtures of truth 
 and falsehood; there is room to-day for an estimate 
 which shall respect both opinions and adopt neither. 
 There is one literary trait in ^which I am unable 
 to name any wiiter of tales in^^iiy v.litei.'ajture-.who 
 surpasses O. Henry.* It is » not f<riraat7"-,ot: styea 
 secondary among literary merits; it is less a value 
 per se than the condition or foundation of values. 
 But its utility is manifest, and it is rare among men: 
 Chaucer and Shakespeare prove the possibility of its 
 absence in masters of that very branch of art in 
 which its presence would seem to be imperative. I 
 refer to the designing of stories — not to the primary 
 intuition or to skill in development, in both of which 
 finer phases of invention O. Henry has been largely 
 and frequently surpassed, but to the disposition of 
 
 ♦William Sidney Porter, 1862-1910, son of Algernon Sidney 
 Porter, physician, was born, bred, and meagerly educated in 
 Greensboro, North Carolina. In Greensboro he was drug clerk; 
 in Texas he was amateur ranchman, land-office clerk, editor, and 
 bank teller. Convicted of misuse of bank funds on insufficient 
 evidence (which he supplemented by the insanity of flight), he 
 passed three years and three months in the Ohio State Peniten- 
 tiary at Columbus. Release was the prelude to life in New 
 York, to story-writing, to rapid and wide-spread fame. Latterly, 
 his stories, published in New York journals and in book form, 
 were consumed by the public with an avidity which his prema- 
 ture death, in 1910, scarcely checked. The pen-name, O. Henry, 
 is almost certainly borrowed from a French chemist, Etienne- 
 Ossian Henry, whose abridged name he fell upon in his phar- 
 macal researches. See the interesting "O. Henry Biography" by 
 C. Alphonso Smith. 
 
I02 O. PV. Firkins 
 
 masses, to the blocking-out of plots. That a half' 
 educated American provincial should have been orig- 
 inal in a field in which original men have been copy- 
 ists is enough of itself to make his personality ob- 
 servable. 
 
 Illustration, even of conceded truths, is rarely super- 
 fiiJoiis; I 'Supply two instances. Two lads, parting in 
 New York, agree to meet "After Twenty Years" at 
 a specified hour, date, and corner. Both are faithful; 
 but the years in which their relation has slept in mutual 
 silence and ignorance have turned the one into a 
 dashing criminal, the other into a sober ofificer of the 
 law. Behind the picturesque and captivating rendez- 
 vous lurks a powerful dramatic situation and a moral 
 problem of arresting gravity. This is dealt with in 
 six pages of the "Four Million." The "Furnished 
 Room," two stories further on, occupies twelve pages. 
 Through the wilderness of apartments on the 'lower 
 West Side a man trails a woman. Chance leads him 
 to the very room in which the woman ended her life 
 the week before. Between him and the truth the 
 avarice of a sordid landlady interposes the curtain of 
 a lie. In the bed in which the girl slept and died, the 
 man sleeps and dies, and the entrance of the deadly 
 fumes into his nostrils shuts the sinister and mourn- 
 ful coincidence forever from the knowledge of man- 
 kind. O. Henry gave these tales neither extension nor 
 
O. Henry 103 
 
 prominence; so far as I know, they were received 
 without bravos or salvos. The distinction of a body 
 of work in which such specimens are undistinguished 
 hardly requires comment. 
 
 A few types among these stories may be specified. 
 There are the Sydney Cartonisms, defined in the name ; 
 love-stories in which divided hearts, or simply divided 
 persons, are brought together by the strategy of chance; 
 hoax stories — deft pictures of smiling roguery; "prince 
 and pauper" stories, in which wealth and poverty face 
 each other, sometimes enact each other; disguise 
 stories, in which the wrong clothes often draw the 
 wrong bullets; complemental stories, in which Jim 
 sacrifices his beloved watch to buy combs for Delia, 
 who, meanwhile, has sacrificed her beloved hair to 
 buy a chain for Jim. 
 
 This imperfect list is eloquent in its way; it smooths 
 our path to the assertion that O. Henry's specialty is 
 the enlistment of original method in the service of 
 traditional appeals. The ends are the ends of fifty 
 years ago; O. Henry transports us by aeroplane 
 the old homestead.* 
 
 * O Henry's stories have been known to coincide with earlier 
 work in a fashion which dims the novelty of the tale without 
 clouding the originality of the author. I thought the brilliant 
 "Harlem Tragedy" (in the "Trimmed Lamp") unique through 
 sheer audacity, but the other day I found its motive repeated 
 with singular exactness in Montesquieu's "Lettres Persanes" 
 (Letter LI). 
 
I04 O. W. Firkins 
 
 Criticism of O. Henry falls into those superlatives 
 and antitheses in which his own faculty delighted. 
 In mechanical invention he is almost the leader of his 
 race. In a related quality — ^a defect — his leadership 
 is even more conspicuous. I doubt if the sense of the 
 probable, or, more precisely, of the available in the 
 improbable, ever became equally weakened or dead- 
 ened in a man who made his living by its exercise. 
 The improbable, even the impossible, has its place 
 in art, though that place is relatively low; and it is 
 curious that works such as the "Arabian Nights" and 
 Grimm's fairy tales, whose stock-in-trade is the in- 
 credible, are the works which give almost no trouble 
 on the score of verisimilitude. The truth is that we 
 reject not what it is impossible to prove, or even what 
 it is possible to disprove, Kut what it is impossible to 
 imagine. O. Henry asks us to imagine the unimag- 
 inable — that is his crime. 
 
 The right and wrong improbabilities may be illus- 
 trated from two burglar stories. "Sixes and Sevens" 
 contains an excellent tale of a burglar and a citizen 
 who fraternize, in a comic midnight interview, on the 
 score of their common sufferings from rheumatism. 
 This feeling in practice would not triumph over fear 
 and greed; but the feeling is natural, and everybody 
 with a grain of nature in him can imagine its triumph. 
 Nature tends towards that impossibility, and art, lift- 
 
O. Henry 105 
 
 ing, so to speak, the lid which fact drops upon nature, 
 reveals nature in belying fact. In another story, in 
 "Whirligigs," a nocturnal interview takes place in 
 which a burglar and a small boy discuss the etiquette 
 of their mutual relation by formulas derived from 
 short stories with which both are amazingly conversant. 
 This is the wrong use of the improbable. Even an 
 imagination inured to the virtues of burglars and the 
 maturity of small boys will have naught to do with thi^ 
 insanity. 
 
 But O. Henry can go further yet. There are inven- 
 tions in his tales the very utterance of which — not the 
 mere substance but the utterance — on the part of a 
 man not writing from Bedlam or for Bedlam impresses 
 the reader as incredible. In a "Comedy in Rubber," 
 two persons become so used to spectatorship at trans- 
 actions in the street that they drift into the part of 
 spectators when the transaction is their own wedding. 
 Can human daring or human folly go further? O. 
 Henry is on the spot to prove that they can. In 
 the "Romance of a Busy Broker," a busy and forget- 
 ful man, in a freak of absent-mindedness, offers his 
 hand to the stenographer whom he had married the 
 night before. 
 
 The other day, in the journal of the Goncourts, I 
 came upon the following sentence: "Never will the 
 imagination approach the improbabilities and the an- 
 
I06 O. W. Firkins 
 
 titheses of truth'* (II, 9). This is dated February 21, 
 1862. Truth had still the advantage. O. Henry was 
 not born till September of the same year. 
 
 Passing on to style, we are still in the land of anti- 
 thesis. The style is gross — and fine. Of the plenitude 
 of its stimulus, there can be no question. In "Sixes 
 and Sevens," a young man sinking under accidental 
 morphia, is kept awake and alive by shouts, kicks, and 
 blows. O. Henry's public seems imaged in that young 
 man. But I draw a sharp distinction between the tone 
 of the style and its pattern. The tone is brazen, or, 
 better perhaps, brassy; its self-advertisement is incor^ 
 rigible; it reeks with that air of performance which i^ 
 opposed to real efficiency. But the pattern is another 
 matter. The South rounds its periods like its vowels; 
 O. Henry has read, not widely, but wisely, in his boy- 
 hood. His sentences are huilt — a rare thing in the best 
 writers of to-day. In conciseness, that Spartan virtue, 
 he was strong, though it must be confessed that the 
 tale-teller was now and then hustled from the rostrum 
 by his rival and enemy, the talker. He can introduce 
 a felicity with a noiselessness that numbers him for 
 a flying second among the sovereigns of English. "In 
 one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey 
 awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the 
 table. Its heat went into Mrs. McCaskey." 
 
 I regret the tomfoolery; I wince at the slang. Yet 
 
O. Henry 107 
 
 even for these levities with which his pages are so 
 liberally besprinkled or bedaubed, some half -apology 
 may be circumspectly urged. In nonsense his ease is 
 consummate. A horseman who should dismount to 
 pick up a bauble would be childish; O. Henry picks 
 it up without dismounting. Slang, again, is most 
 pardonable in the man with whom its use is least ex- 
 clusive and least necessary. There are men who, going 
 for a walk, take their dogs with them ; there are other 
 men who give a walk to their dogs. Substitute slang 
 for the dog, and the superiority of the first class to 
 the second will exactly illustrate the superiority of 
 O. Henry to the abject traffickers in slang. 
 
 In the "Pendulum" Katy has a new patch in her 
 crazy quilt which the ice man cut from the end of 
 his four-in-hand. In the "Day We Celebrate," thread- 
 ing the mazes of a banana grove is compared to "pag- 
 ing the palm room of a New York hotel for a man 
 named Smith." O. Henry's is the type of mind to 
 which images like this four-in-hand and this palm room 
 are presented in exhaustless abundance and unflagging 
 continuity. There was hardly an object in the merry- 
 go-round of civilized life that had not offered at least 
 an end or an edge to the avidity of his consuming 
 eyes. Nothing escapes from the besom of his allu- 
 siveness, and the style is streaked and pied, almost to 
 monotony, by the accumulation of livelv details. 
 
lo8 O. W. Firkins 
 
 If O. Henry's style was crude, it was also rare; but 
 it is part of the grimness of the bargain that destiny 
 drives with us that the mixture of the crude and the 
 rare should be a crude mixture, as the sons of whites 
 and negroes are numbered with the blacks. In the 
 kingdom of style O. Henry's estates were princely, 
 but, to pay his debts, he must have sold them all. 
 
 Thus far in our inquiry extraordinary merits have 
 been offset by extraordinary defects. To lift our 
 author out of the class of brilliant and skilful enter- 
 tainers, more is needed. Is more forthcoming? I 
 should answer, yes. In O. Henry, above the knowl- 
 edge of setting, which is clear and first-hand, but 
 subsidiary, above the order of events, which is, gen- 
 erally speaking, fantastic, above the emotions, which 
 are sound and warm, but almost purely derivative, 
 there is a rather small, but impressive body of first- 
 hand perspicacities and reactions. On these his en- 
 durance may hinge. 
 
 I name, first of all, O. Henry's feeling for New York. 
 With the exception of his New Orleans, I care little 
 for his South and West, which are a boyish South 
 and West, and as little, or even less, for his Spanish- 
 American communities. My objection to his opera- 
 bouffe republics is, not that they are inadequate as re- 
 publics (for that we were entirely prepared), but that 
 they are inadequate as opera. He lets us see his show 
 
O. Henry 109 
 
 from the coulisses. The pretense lacks standing even 
 among pretenses, and a faith must be induced before 
 its removal can enliven us. But his New York has 
 quality. It is of the family of Dickens's London and 
 Hugo's Paris, though it is plainly a cadet in the fam- 
 ily. Mr. Howells, in his profound and valuable study 
 of the metropolis in a "Hazard of New Fortunes," is 
 penetrating; O. Henry, on the other hand, is pene- 
 trated. His New York is intimate and clinging; it is 
 caught in the mesh of the imagination. 
 
 O. Henry had rare but precious insights into human 
 destiny and human nature. In these pictures he is not 
 formally accurate; he could never or seldom set his 
 truth before us in that moderation and proportion 
 which truths acquire in the stringencies of actuality. 
 He was apt to present his insight in a sort of parable 
 or allegory, to upraise it before the eyes of mankind 
 on the mast or flagpole of some vehement exaggera- 
 tion. Epigram shows us truth in the embrace of a /ie, 
 and tales which are dramatized epigrams are subject 
 to a like constraint. The force, however, is real. I 
 could scarcely name anywhere a more powerful expo- 
 sition of fatality than "Roads of Destiny," the initial 
 story in the volume which appropriates its title. It 
 wanted only the skilled romantic touch of a Gautier 
 or Stevenson to enroll this tale among the master- 
 pieces of its kind in contemporary letters. 
 
no O. W. Firkins 
 
 Now and then the ingredient of parable is hardly 
 perceptible ; we draw close to the bare fact. O. Henry, 
 fortunate in plots, is peculiarly fortunate in his re- 
 nunciation of plot. If contrivance is lucrative, it is 
 also costly. There is an admirable little story called 
 the "Pendulum" (in the "Trimmed Lamp"), the sim- 
 plicity of whose fable would have satisfied Coppee 
 or Hawthorne. A man in a flat, by force of custom, 
 has come to regard his wife as a piece of furniture. 
 She departs for a few hours, and, by the break in 
 usage, is restored, in his consciousness, to womanhood. 
 She comes back, and relapses into furniture. That 
 is all. O. Henry could not have given us less — or 
 more. Farcical, clownish, if you will, the story re- 
 sembles those clowns who carry daggers under their 
 motley. When John Perkins takes up that inauspicious 
 hat, the reader smiles, and quails. I will mention a 
 few other examples of insights with the proviso that 
 they are not specially commended to the man whose 
 quest in the short story is the electrifying or the cal- 
 orific. They include the "Social Triangle," the "Mak- 
 ing of a New Yorker," and the "Foreign Policy of 
 Company 99," all in the "Trimmed Lamp," the "Brief 
 Debut of Tildy" in the "Four Million," and the "Com- 
 plete Life of John Hopkins" in the "Voice of the 
 City." I cannot close this summary of good points 
 without a passing reference to the not unsuggestive 
 
O. Henry III 
 
 portrayal of humane and cheerful scoundrels in the 
 ^'Gentle Grafter." The picture, if false to species, is 
 faithful to genus. 
 
 O. Henry's egregiousness, on the superficial side, 
 both in merits and defects, reminds us of those park 
 benches so characteristic of his tales which are occu- 
 pied by a millionaire at one end and a mendicant at 
 the other. But, to complete the image, we must add 
 as a casual visitor to that bench a seer or a student, 
 who, sitting down between the previous comers and 
 suspending the flamboyancies of their dialogue, should 
 gaze with the pensive eye of Goldsmith or Addison 
 upon the passing crowd. 
 
 In O. Henry American journalism and the Victorian 
 tradition meet. His mind, quick to don the guise of 
 modernity, was impervious to its spirit. The specifi- 
 cally modern movements, the scientific awakening, the 
 religious upheaval and subsidence, the socialistic gospel, 
 the enfranchisement of women — these never interfered 
 with his artless and joyous pursuit of the old romantic 
 motives of love, hate, wealth, poverty, gentility, dis- 
 guise, and crime. On two points a moral record which, 
 in his literature, is everywhere sound and stainless, 
 rises almost to nobility. In an age when sexual excite- 
 ment had become available and permissible, this wor- 
 shiper of stimulus never touched with so much as a 
 fingertip that insidious and meretricious fruit. The 
 
112 O, W, Firkins 
 
 second point is his feeling for underpaid working-girls. 
 His passionate concern for this wrong derives a 
 peculiar emphasis from the general refusal of his books 
 to bestow countenance or notice on philanthropy in its 
 collective forms. When, in his dream of Heaven, he 
 is asked: "Are you one of the bunch?" (meaning one 
 of the bunch of grasping and grinding employers), 
 the response, through all its slang, is soul-stirring. 
 " *Not on your immortality,' said I. Tm only the 
 fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum and murdered 
 a bhnd man for his pennies.' " The author of that 
 retort may have some difficulty with the sentries that 
 watch the entrance of Parnassus; he will have none 
 with the gatekeeper of the New Jerusalem. 
 
: THE MOWING OF A FIELD 
 
 By HiLAiRE Belloc 
 
 We have not had in our time a more natural-born essayist, of 
 the scampering sort, than Hilaire Belloc. He is an infectious 
 fellow : if you read him much you will find yourself trying to 
 imitate him; there is no harm in doing so: he himself caught 
 the trick from Rabelais. I do not propose to rehash here the 
 essay I wrote about him in a book called Shandygaff. You can 
 refer to it there, which will be good business all round. I know 
 it is a worthy essay, for much of it was cribbed from an article 
 by Mr. Thomas Seccombe, which an American paper lifted from 
 the English journal which, presumably, paid Mr. Seccombe for 
 it. I wrote it for the Boston Transcript, where I knew the 
 theft would be undetected ; and in shoveling together some stuff 
 for a book (that was in 1917, the cost of living was rising at an 
 angle of forty-five degrees, as so many graphs have shown) I put 
 it in, forgetting (until too late) that some of it was absolute 
 plunder. 
 
 Mr. Chesterton once said something like this : "It is a mistake 
 to think that thieves do not respect property. They only wish 
 it to become their property, so that they may more perfectly re- 
 spect it." 
 
 And by the way, Max Beerbohm's parody of Belloc, in A 
 Christmas Garland, is something not to be missed. It is one 
 of the best proofs that Belloc is a really great artist. Beerbohm 
 does not waste his time mimicking the small fry. 
 
 Hilaire Belloc — son of a French father and an English mother; 
 his happy junction of both English and French genius in prose 
 is hereditary — was born in France in 1870. He lived in Sussex 
 as a child; served in the French field artillery; was at Balliol 
 College, Oxford, 1893-95, and sat four years (1906-10) in the 
 House of Commons. Certainly you must read (among his gath- 
 erings of essays) On Nothing, On Everything, On Something, 
 Hills and the Sea, First and Last; then you can read The Path 
 to Rome, and The Four Men, and Caliban's Guide to Letters 
 and The Pyrenees and Marie Antoinette. If you desire the 
 bouillon (or bullion) of his charm, there is A Picked Company, 
 a selection (by Mr. E. V. Lucas) of his most representative work. 
 It is published by Methuen and Company, .36 Essex Street W. C, 
 London. 
 
 Having done so, come again: we will go off in a comer and 
 talk about Mr. Belloc. 
 
 11.^ 
 
114 Hilaire Belloc 
 
 There is a valley in South England remote from 
 ambition and from fear, where the passage of 
 strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the scent 
 of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who 
 are native to that unvisited land. The roads to the 
 Channel do not traverse it; they choose upon either 
 side easier passes over the range. One track alont 
 leads up through it to the hills, and this is changeable ; 
 now green where men have little occasion to go, now 
 a good road where it nears the homesteads and the 
 barns. The woods grow steep above the slopes; they 
 reach sometimes the very summit of the heights, or, 
 when they cannot attain them, fill in and clothe the 
 coombes. And, in between, along the floor of the val- 
 ley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by 
 lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the 
 Downs. 
 
 The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond 
 the one great rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the 
 other, and sink beyond that other. But the plains 
 above which they have traveled and the Weald to 
 which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and 
 hardly recall. The wind, when it reaches such fields, 
 is no longer a gale from the salt, but fruitful and soft, 
 an inland breeze ; and those whose blood was nourished 
 here feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards 
 and all the life that all things draw from the air. 
 
 \ 
 
The Mowing of a Field 115 
 
 In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a 
 fringe of beeches that made a complete screen between 
 me and the world, and I came to a glade called No 
 Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised 
 and glad, because from the ridge of that glade, I saw 
 the sea. To this place very lately I rreturned. 
 
 The many things that I recovered as I came up the 
 countryside were not less charming than when a dis- 
 tant memory had enshrined them, but much more. 
 Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had 
 not intensified nor even made more mysterious the 
 beauty of that happy ground ; not in my very dreams 
 of morning had I, in exile, seen it more beloved or 
 more rare. Much also that I had forgotten now re- 
 turned to me as I approached — a group of elms, a little 
 turn of the parson's wall, a small paddock beyond the 
 graveyard close, cherished by one man, with a low 
 wall of very old stone guarding it all round. And all 
 these things fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even 
 the good vision of the place, which I had kept so many 
 years, left me and was replaced by its better reality. 
 "Here," I said to myself, "is a symbol of what some 
 say is reserved for the soul : pleasure of a kind which 
 cannot be imagined save in a moment when at last it is 
 attained." 
 
 When I came to my own gate and my own field, and 
 had before me the house I knew, I looked around a 
 
Il6 Hilaire Belloc 
 
 little (though it was already evening), and I saw that 
 the grass was standing as it should stand when it is 
 ready for the scythe. For in this, as in everything 
 that a man can do — of those things at least which are 
 very old — there is an exact moment when they are 
 done best. And it has been remarked of whatever rules 
 us that it works blunderingly, seeing that the good 
 things given to a man are not given at the precise mo- 
 nent when they would have filled him with delight. 
 But, whether this be true or false, we can choose the 
 just turn of the seasons in everything we do of our 
 own will, and especially in the making of hay. Many 
 think that hay is best made when the grass is thickest ; 
 and so they delay until it is rank and in flower, and 
 has already heavily pulled the ground. And there is 
 another false reason for delay, which is wet weather. 
 For very few will understand (though it comes year 
 after year) that we have rain always in South Eng- 
 land between the sickle and the scythe, or say just after 
 the weeks of east wind are over. First we have a 
 week of sudden warmth, as though the south had come 
 to see us all; then we have the weeks of east and south- 
 east wind ; and then we have more or less of that rain 
 of which I spoke, and which always astonishes the 
 world. Now it is just before, or during, or at the 
 very end of that rain — but not later — that grass should 
 be cut for hay. True, upland grass, which is always 
 
The Mowing of a Field 117 
 
 thin, should be cut earlier than the grass in the bot- 
 toms and along the water meadows; but not even the 
 latest, even in the wettest seasons, should be left (as 
 it is) to flower and even to seed. For what we get 
 when we store our grass is not a harvest of something 
 ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before ma- 
 turity: as witness that our corn and straw are best 
 yellow, but our hay is best green. So also Death 
 should be represented with a scythe and Time with a 
 sickle ; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death 
 comes always too soon. In a word, then, it is always 
 much easier to cut grass too late than too early; and 
 I, under that evening and come back to these pleasant 
 fields, looked at the grass and knew that it was time. 
 June was in full advance ; it was the beginning of that 
 season when the night has already lost her foothold of 
 the earth and hovers over it, never quite descending, 
 but mixing sunset with the dawn. 
 
 Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I awoke, 
 and thought of the mowing. The birds were already 
 chattering in the trees beside my window, all except 
 the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the 
 Weald, where he sings all summer by day as well as 
 by night in the oaks and the hazel spinneys, and espe- 
 cially along the little river Adur, one of the rivers of 
 the Weald. The birds and the thought of the mowing 
 had awakened me, and I went down the stairs and 
 
Il8 Hilaire Belloc 
 
 along the stone floors to where I could find a scythe; 
 and when I took it from its nail, I remembered how, 
 fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe, 
 just so, into the fields at morning. In between that 
 day and this were many things, cities and armies, and 
 a confusion of books, mountains and the desert, and 
 horrible great breadths of sea. 
 
 When I got out into the long grass the sun was not 
 yet risen, but there were already many colors in the 
 eastern sky, and I made haste to sharpen my scythe, 
 so that I might get to the cutting before the dew should 
 dry. Some say that it is best to wait till all the dew 
 has risen, so as to get the grass quite dry from the very 
 first. But, though it is an advantage to get the grass 
 quite dry, yet it is not worth while to wait till the dew 
 has risen. For, in the first place, you lose many hours 
 of work (and those the coolest), and next — which is 
 more important — you lose that great ease and thickness 
 in cutting which comes of the dew. So I at once began 
 to sharpen my scythe. 
 
 There is an art also in the sharpening of the scythe, 
 and it is worth describing carefully. Your blade must 
 be dry, and that is why you will see men rubbing the 
 scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then 
 also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account 
 it is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it 
 there during all your day's mowing. The scythe you 
 
The Mowing of a Field II9 
 
 stand upright, with the blade pointing away from you, 
 and put your left hand firmly on the back of the blade, 
 grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down one 
 side of the blade-edge and then down the other, begin- 
 ning near the handle and going on to the point and 
 working quickly and hard. When you first do this you 
 will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is only at first 
 that such an accident will happen to you. 
 
 To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the 
 rule. First the stone clangs and grinds against the 
 iron harshly ; then it rings musically to one note ; then, 
 at last, it purrs as though the iron and stone were ex- 
 actly suited. When you hear this, your scythe is 
 sharp enough ; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, 
 with everything quite silent except the birds, let down 
 the scythe and bent myself to mow. 
 
 When one does anything anew, after so many years, 
 one fears very much for one's trick or habit. But all 
 things once learnt are easily recoverable, and I very 
 soon recovered the swing and power of the mower. 
 Mowing A^ ell and mowing badly — or rather not mow- 
 ing at all — are separated by very little ; as is also true 
 of writing verse, of playing the fiddle, and of dozens 
 of other things, but of nothing more than of believing. 
 For the bad or young or untaught mower withouf 
 tradition, the mower Promethean, the mower original 
 and contemptuous of the past, does all these things: 
 
I20 Hi I aire Belloc 
 
 He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the 
 point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk. 
 He loosens the handles and even the fastening of the 
 blade. He twists the blade with his blunders, he blunts 
 the blade, he chips it, dulls it, or breaks it clean off at 
 the tip. If any one is standing by he cuts him in the 
 ankle. He sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing 
 to resist his stroke. He drags up earth with the grass, 
 which is like making the meadow bleed. But the 
 good mower who does things just as they should be 
 done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls 
 into none of these fooleries. He goes forward very 
 steadily, his scythe-blade just barely missing the 
 ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of 
 his mowing are always the same. 
 
 So great an art can only be learnt by continual prac- 
 tice; but this much is worth writing down, that, as in 
 all good work, to know the thing with which you work 
 is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on 
 good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal 
 on a whitewashed wall. The pen thinks for you; and 
 so does the scythe mow for you if you treat it honorably 
 and in a manner that makes it recognize its service. 
 The manner is this. You must regard the scythe as a 
 pendulum that swings, not as a knife that cuts. A 
 good mower puts no more strength into his stroke than 
 into his lifting. Again, stand up to your work. The 
 
The Mowing of a Field 121 
 
 bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and 
 tries to force the scythe through the grass. The good 
 mower, serene and able, stands as nearly straight as 
 the shape of the scythe will let him, and follows up 
 every stroke closely, moving his left foot forward. 
 Then also let every stroke get well away. Mowing is 
 a thing of ample gestures, like drawing a cartoon. 
 Then, again, get yourself into a mechanical and repeti- 
 tive mood : be thinking of anything at all but your 
 mowing, and be anxious only when there seems some 
 interruption to the monotony of the sound. In this 
 mowing should be like one's prayers — all of a sort and 
 always the same, and so made that you can establish 
 a monotony and work them, as it were, with half your 
 mind : that happier half, the half that does not bother. 
 In this way, when I had recovered the art after so 
 many years, I went forward over the field, cutting lane 
 after lane through the grass, and bringing out its most 
 secret essences with the sweep of the scythe until the 
 air was full of odors. At the end of every lane I 
 sharpened my scythe and looked back at the work done, 
 and then carried my scythe down again upon my 
 shoulder to begin another. So, long before the bell 
 rang in the chapel above me — that is, long before six 
 o'clock, which is the time for the Angelus — I had many 
 swathes already lying in order parallel like soldiery; 
 and the high grass yet standing, making a great con- 
 
122 Hilaire Be Hoc 
 
 trast with the shaven part, looked dense and high. As 
 it says in the Ballad of Val-es-Dunes, where — 
 The tall son of the Seven Winds 
 Came riding out of Hither-hythe, 
 and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled 
 into the press and made a gap in it, and his sword (as 
 you know) 
 
 was like a scythe 
 In Arcus when the grass is high 
 And all the swathes in order lie, 
 And there's the bailiff standing by 
 A-gathering of the tithe. 
 So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke 
 in the valley, and from some of them rose a little 
 fragrant smoke, and men began to be seen. 
 
 I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the 
 awakening of the village, when I saw coming up to 
 my field a man whom I had known in older times, 
 before I had left the Valley. 
 
 He was of that dark silent race upon which all the 
 learned quarrel, but which, by whatever meaningless 
 name it may be called — Iberian, or Celtic, or what you 
 will — is the permanent root of all England, and makes 
 England wealthy and preserves it everywhere, except 
 perhaps in the Fens and in a part of Yorkshire. Every- 
 where else you will find it active and strong. These 
 people are intensive; their thoughts and their labors 
 
The Mowing of a Field 123 
 
 turn inward. It is on account of their presence in 
 these islands that oup gardens are the richest in the 
 world. They also love low rooms and ample fires and 
 great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I be- 
 lieve, an older acquaintance with the English air than 
 any other of all the strains that make up England. 
 They hunted in the Weald with stones, and camped in 
 the pines of the green-sand. They lurked under the 
 oaks of the upper rivers, and saw the legionaries go up, 
 up the straight paved road from the sea. They helped 
 the few pirates to destroy the towns, and mixed with 
 those pirates and shared the spoils of the Roman villas, 
 and were glad to see the captains and the priests de- 
 stroyed. They remain; and no admixture of the 
 Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or the Angevin and 
 Norman conquerors, has very much affected their 
 cunning eyes. 
 
 To this race, I say, belonged the man who now ap- 
 proached me. And he said to me, "Mowing?'* And I 
 answered, "Ar." Then he also said "Ar," as in duty 
 bound; for so we speak to each other in the Stenes of 
 the Downs. 
 
 Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he 
 would lend me a hand ; and I thanked him warmly, or, 
 as we say, "kindly." For it is a good custom of ours 
 always to treat bargaining as though it were a cour- 
 teous pastime; and though what he was after was 
 
124 Hi I aire Belloc 
 
 money, and what I wanted was his labor at the least 
 pay, yet we both played the comedy that w^e were free 
 men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting 
 it. For the dry bones of commerce, avarice and method 
 and need, are odious to the Valley; and we cover them 
 up with a pretty body of fiction and observances. Thus, 
 when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not begin 
 to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the 
 custom with lesser men; but tradition makes them do 
 business in this fashion: — 
 
 First the buyer will go up to the seller when he sees 
 him in his own steading, and, looking at the pig with 
 admiration, the buyer will say that rain may or may 
 not fall, or that we shall have snow or thunder, accord- 
 ing to the time of the year. Then the seller, looking 
 critically at the pig, will agree that the weather is as 
 his friend maintains. There is no haste at all; great 
 leisure marks the dignity of their exchange. And the 
 next step is, that the buyer says: "That's a fine pig 
 
 you have there, Mr. " (giving the seller's name). 
 
 "Ar, powerful fine pig." Then the seller, saying also 
 "Mr." (for twin brothers rocked in one cradle give 
 each other ceremonious observance here), the seller, I 
 say, admits, as though with reluctance, the strength 
 and beauty of the pig, and falls into deep thought. 
 Then the buyer says, as though moved by a great 
 desire, that he is ready to give so much for the pig, 
 
The Mowing of a Field 125 
 
 naming half the proper price, or a little less. Then the 
 seller remains in silence for some moments; and at 
 last begins to shake his head slowly, till he says: "I 
 don't be thinking of selling the pig, anyways." He 
 will also add that a party only Wednesday offered him 
 so much for the pig — and he names about double the 
 proper price. Thus all ritual is duly accomplished; 
 and the solemn act is entered upon with reverence and 
 in a spirit of truth. For when the buyer uses this 
 phrase: "1*11 tell you what I will do," and offers 
 within half a crown of the pig's value, the seller replies 
 that he can refuse him nothing, and names half a 
 crown above its value; the difference is split, the pig 
 IS sold, and in the quiet soul of each runs the peace 
 of something accomplished. 
 
 Thus do we buy a pig or land or labor or malt or 
 lime, always with elaboration and set forms; and 
 many a London man has paid double and more for 
 his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous 
 higgling. As happened with the land at Underwal- 
 tham, which the mortgagees had begged and implored 
 the estate to take at twelve hundred and had privately 
 offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a 
 sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great for- 
 tunes, a man in a motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a 
 man of few words, bought for two thousand three 
 hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they 
 
126 Hilaire Belloc 
 
 might take his offer or leave it ; and all because he did 
 not begin by praising the land. 
 
 Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help me, 
 and he went to get his scythe. But I went into this 
 house and brought out a gallon jar of small ale for 
 him and for me ; for the sun was now very warm, and 
 small ale goes well with mowing. When we had drunk 
 some of this ale in mugs called "I see you,*' we took 
 each a swathe, he a little behind me because he was 
 the better mower; and so for many hours we swung, 
 one before the other, mowing and mowing at the tall 
 grass of the field. And the sun rose to noon and we 
 were still at our mowing; and we ate food, but only 
 for a little while, and we took again to our mowing. 
 And at last there was nothing left but a small square of 
 grass, standing like a square of linesmen who keep 
 their formation, tall and unbroken, with all the dead 
 lying around them when the battle is over and done. 
 
 Then for some little time I rested after all those 
 hours; and the man and I talked together, and a long 
 way off we heard in another field the musical sharpen- 
 ing of a scythe. 
 
 The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over the 
 breadth of the valley; for day was nearing its end. 
 I went to fetch rakes from the steading; and when I 
 had come back the last of the grass had fallen, and 
 all the field lay flat and smooth, with the very green 
 
The Mowing of a Field 127 
 
 short grass in lanes between the dead and yellow 
 swathes. 
 
 These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them 
 from the dew against our return at daybreak; and we 
 made the cocks as tall and steep as we could, for in 
 that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier 
 also to spread them after the sun has risen. Then we 
 raked up every straggling blade, till the whole field 
 was a clean floor for the tedding and the carrying of 
 the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was 
 but a little over two acres; for that is all the pasture 
 on my little tiny farm. 
 
 When we had done all this, there fell upon us the 
 beneficent and deliberate evening; so that as we sat a 
 little while together near the rakes, w^e saw the valley 
 more solemn and dim around us, and all the trees and 
 hedgerows quite still, and held by a complete silence. 
 Then I paid my companion his wage, and bade him a 
 good night, till we should meet in the same place 
 before sunrise. 
 
 He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all 
 our peasants do, making their w^alking a part of the 
 easy but continual labor of their lives. But I sat on, 
 watching the light creep around towards the north and 
 change, and the waning moon coming up as though by 
 stealth behind the woods of No Man's Land. 
 
THE STUDENT LIFE 
 By William Osler 
 
 Sir William Osier, one of the best-loved and most influential 
 teachers of his time, was born in Canada in 1849. He began 
 his education in Toronto and at McGill University, Montreal, 
 where he served as professor of medicine, 1874-84. Wherever 
 he worked his gifted and unique personality was a center of 
 inspiration — at the University of Pennsylvania, 1884-89; at Johns 
 Hopkins, 1889-1904. In 1904 he went to Oxford as Regius Pro- 
 fessor of Medicine; he died in England in 1919. 
 
 Only our medical friends have a right to speak of the great 
 doctor's place in their own world ; but one would like to see his 
 honorable place as a man of letters more generally understood. 
 His generous wisdom and infectious enthusiasm are delightfully 
 expressed in his collected writings. No lover of the essay can 
 afford to overlook ^quaniniitas and Other Addresses, An Ala- 
 bama Student and Other Biographical Essays, Science and Im- 
 mortality and Counsels and Ideals, this last an anthology col- 
 lected from his professional papers by one of his pupils. He 
 stands in the honorable line of those great masters who have 
 found their highest usefulness as kindly counselors of the young. 
 His lucid and exquisite prose, with its extraordinary wealth of 
 quotation from the literature of all ages, and his unfailing humor 
 and tenderness, put him in the first rank of didactic essayists. 
 One could get a liberal education in literature merely by follow- 
 ing up all his quotations and references. He was more deeply 
 versed in the classics than many professors of Greek and Latin ; 
 the whole music of English poetry seemed to be current in his 
 blood. His essay on Keats, taken with Kipling's wonderful 
 story Via Wireless, tells the student more about that poet than 
 many a volume of biography. When was biography more delight- 
 fully written than in his volume An Alabama Student? 
 
 Walt Whitman said, when Dr. Osier attended him years ago, 
 "Osier believes in the gospel of encouragement — of putting the 
 best construction on things — the best foot forward. He's a fine 
 fellow and a wise one, I guess." The great doctor's gospel 
 of encouragement is indeed a happy companion for the midnight 
 reader. Rich in every gentle quality that makes life endeared, 
 his books are the most sagacious and helpful of modern writings 
 for the young student. As one who h^ found them an unfail- 
 ing delight, I venture to hope that our medical confreres may 
 not be the only readers to enjoy their vivacity and charm. 
 
 128 
 
The Student Life 129 
 
 Except it be a lover, no one is more interesting as 
 an object of study than a student. Shakespeare might 
 have made him a fourth in his immortal group. The 
 lunatic with his fixed idea, the poet with his fine 
 frenzy, the lover with his frantic idolatry, and the 
 student aflame with the desire for knowledge are of 
 "imagination all compact." To an absorbing passion, 
 a whole-souled devotion, must be joined an enduring 
 energy, if the student is to become a devotee of the 
 gray-eyed goddess to whose law his services are bound. 
 Like the quest of the Holy Grail, the quest of Minerva 
 is not for all. For the one, the pure life ; for the other, 
 what Milton calls "a strong propensity of nature." 
 Here again the student often resembles the poet — he is 
 born, not made. While the resultant of two molding 
 forces, the accidental, external conditions, and the 
 hidden germinal energies, which produce in each one 
 of us national, family, and individual traits, the true 
 student possesses in some measure a divine spark which 
 sets at naught their laws. Like the Snark, he defies 
 definition, but there are three unmistakable signs by 
 which you may recognize the genuine article from a 
 Boojum — an absorbing desire to know the truth, an 
 unswerving steadfastness in its pursuit, and an open, 
 honest heart, free from suspicion, guile, and jealousy. 
 
 At the outset do not be worried about this big ques- 
 tion — Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of 
 
130 William Osier 
 
 you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. 
 No human being is constituted to know the truth, the 
 whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the 
 best of men must be content with fragments, with 
 partial glimpses, never the full fruition. In this un- 
 satisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the 
 thirst — a thirst that from the soul must rise! — the 
 fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all. What 
 is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who 
 ever eludes his grasp? In this very elusiveness is 
 brought out his second great characteristic — steadfast- 
 ness of purpose. Unless from the start the limitations 
 incident to our frail human faculties are frankly ac- 
 cepted, nothing but disappointment awaits you. The 
 truth is the best you can get with your best endeavor, 
 the best that the best men accept — with this you must 
 learn to be satisfied, retaining at the same time with 
 due humility an earnest desire for an ever larger por- 
 tion. Only by keeping the mind plastic and receptive 
 does the student escape perdition. It is not, as Charles 
 Lamb remarks, that some people do not know what to 
 do with truth when it is offered to them, but the tragic 
 fate is to reach, after years of patient search, a condi- 
 tion of mind-blindness in which the truth is not recog- 
 nized, though it stares you in the face. This can never 
 happen to a man who has followed step by step the 
 ffrowth of a truth, and who knows the painful phases 
 
The Student Life 131 
 
 of its evolution. It is one of the great tragedies of 
 life that every truth has to struggle to acceptance 
 against honest but mind-blind students. Harvey knew 
 his contemporaries well, and for twelve successive 
 years demonstrated the circulation of the blood before 
 daring to publish the facts on which the truth was 
 based.* 
 
 Only steadfastness of purpose and humility enable 
 the student to shift his position to meet the new condi- 
 tions in which new truths are born, or old ones modi- 
 fied beyond recognition. And, thirdly, the honest heart 
 will keep him in touch with his fellow students, and 
 furnish that sense of comradeship without which he 
 travels an arid waste alone. I say advisedly an honest 
 heart — the honest head is prone to be cold and stern, 
 given to judgment, not mercy, and not always able to 
 entertain that true charity which, while it thinketh no 
 evil, is anxious to put the best possible interpretation 
 upon the motives of a fellow worker. It will foster, 
 too, an attitude of generous, friendly rivalry untinged 
 by the green peril, jealousy, that is the best preventive 
 of the growth of a bastard scientific spirit, loving 
 seclusion and working in a lock-and-key laboratory, as 
 timorous of light as is a thief. 
 
 * "These views, as usual, pleased some more, others less ; some 
 chid and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had 
 dared to depart from the precepts and opinions of all Anato- 
 mists.'* — De Motu Cordis, chap. i. 
 
132 William Osier 
 
 You have all become brothers in a great society, not 
 apprentices, since that implies a master, and nothing 
 should be further from the attitude of the teacher than 
 much that is meant in that word, used though it be 
 in another sense, particularly by our French brethren 
 in a most delightful way, signifying a bond of intel- 
 lectual filiation. A fraternal attitude is not easy to 
 cultivate — the chasm between the chair and the bench 
 is difficult to bridge. Two things have helped to put 
 up a cantilever across the gulf. The successful teacher 
 is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high 
 pressure into passive receptacles. The new methods 
 have changed all this. He is no longer Sir Oracle, 
 perhaps unconsciously by his very manner antagoniz- 
 ing minds to whose level he cannot possibly descend, 
 but he is a senior student anxious to help his juniors. 
 When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there 
 is no appreciable interval between the teacher and the 
 taught — both are in the same class, the one a little 
 more advanced than the other. So animated, the 
 student feels that he has joined a family whose honor 
 IS his honor, whose welfare is his own, and whose 
 interests should be his first consideration. 
 
 The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a 
 beginner is that the education upon which he is en- 
 gaged is not a college course, not a medical course, 
 but a life course, for which the work of a few years 
 
The Student Life 133 
 
 under teachers is but a preparation. Whether you will 
 falter and fail in the race or whether you will be faith- 
 ful to the end depends on the training before the start, 
 and on your staying powers, points upon which I need 
 not enlarge. You can all become good students, a few 
 may become great students, and now and again one of 
 you will be found who does easily and well what others 
 cannot do at all, or very badly, which is John Ferriar*s 
 excellent definition of a genius. 
 
 In the hurry and bustle of a business world, which 
 is the life of this continent, it is not easy to train first- 
 class students. Under present conditions it is hard to 
 get the needful seclusion, on which account it is that 
 our educational market is so full of wayside fruit. I 
 have always been much impressed by the advice of 
 St. Chrysostom: "Depart from the highway and 
 transplant thyself in some enclosed ground, for it is 
 hard for a tree which stands by the wayside to keep 
 her fruit till it be ripe." The dilettante is abroad in 
 the land, the man who is always venturing on tasks for 
 which he is imperfectly equipped, a habit of mind 
 fostered by the multiplicity of subjects in the curricu- 
 lum: and while many things are studied, few are 
 studied thoroughly. Men will not take time to get to 
 the heart of a matter. After all, concentration is the 
 price the modern student pays for success. Thorough- 
 ness is the most difficult habit to acquire, but it is the 
 
134 William Osier 
 
 pearl of great price, worth all the worry and trouble 
 of the search. The dilettante lives an easy, butterfly 
 life, knowing nothing of the toil and labor with which 
 the treasures of knowledge are dug out of the past, or 
 wrung by patient research in the laboratories. Take, 
 for example, the early history of this country — how 
 easy for the student of the one type to get a smatter- 
 ing, even a fairly full acquaintance with the events of 
 the French and Spanish settlements. Put an original 
 document before him, and it might as well be Arabic. 
 What we need is the other type, the man who knows 
 the records, who, with a broad outlook and drilled in 
 what may be called the embryology of history, has yet 
 a powerful vision for the minutiae of life. It is these 
 kitchen and backstair men who are to be encouraged, 
 the men who know the subject in hand in all possible 
 relationships. Concentration has its drawbacks. It is 
 possible to become so absorbed in the problem of the 
 ^'enclitic (Jf," or the structure of the flagella of the 
 Trichomonas, or of the toes of the prehistoric horse, 
 that the student loses the sense of proportion in his 
 work, and even wastes a lifetime in researches which 
 are valueless because not in touch with current knowl- 
 edge. You remember poor Casaubon, in "Middle- 
 march," whose painful scholarship was lost on this ac- 
 count. The best preventive to this is to get denational- 
 ized early. The true student is a citizen of the world, 
 
The Student Life 135 
 
 the allegiance of whose soul, at any rate, is too pre- 
 cious to be restricted to a single country. The great 
 minds, the great works transcend all limitations of 
 time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can 
 never feel initiated into the company of the elect until 
 he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmo- 
 politan standpoint. I care not in what subject he may 
 work, the full knowledge cannot be reached without 
 drawing on supplies from lands other than his own — 
 French, English, German, American, Japanese, Rus- 
 sian, Italian — there must be no discrimination by the 
 loyal student who should willingly draw from any and 
 every source with an open mind and a stern resolve to 
 render unto all their dues. I care not on what stream of 
 knowledge he may embark, follow up its course, and 
 the rivulets that feed it flow from many lands. If the 
 work is to be effective he must keep in touch with 
 scholars in other countries. How often has it hap- 
 pened that years of precious time have been given to a 
 problem already solved or shown to be insoluble, be- 
 cause of the ignorance of w^hat had been done else- 
 where. And it is not only book knowledge and jour- 
 nal knowledge, but a knowledge of men that is needed^ 
 The student will, if possible, see the men in other lands. 
 Travel not only widens the vision and gives certainties 
 in place of vague surmises, but the personal contact 
 with foreign workers enables him to appreciate better 
 
136 William Osier 
 
 the failings or successes in his own Hne of work, per- 
 haps to look with more charitable eyes on the work of 
 some brother whose limitations and opportunities have 
 been more restricted than his own. Or, in contact with 
 a mastermind, he may take fire, and the glow of the 
 enthusiasm may be the inspiration of his life. Concen- 
 tration must then be associated with large views on the 
 relation of the problem, and a knowledge of its status 
 elsewhere; otherwise it may land him in the slough of 
 a specialism so narrow that it has depth and no breadth, 
 or he may be led to make what he believes to be impor- 
 tant discoveries, but which have long been current coin 
 in other lands. It is sad to think that the day of the 
 great polymathic student is at an end; that we may, 
 perhaps, never again see a Scaliger, a Haller, or a 
 Humboldt — men who took the whole field of knowl- 
 edge for their domain and viewed it as from a pinnacle. 
 And yet a great specializing generaHst may arise, who 
 can tell? Some twentieth-century Aristotle may be 
 now tugging at his bottle, as little dreaming as are his 
 parents or his friends of a conquest of the mind, beside 
 which the wonderful victories of the Stagirite will look 
 pale. The value of a really great student to the country 
 is equal to half a dozen grain elevators or a new trans- 
 continental railway. He is a commodity singularly 
 fickle and variable, and not to be grown to order. So 
 far as his advent is concerned there is no telling when 
 
The Student Life 137 
 
 or where he may arise. The conditions seem to be 
 present even under the most unHkely externals. Some 
 of the greatest students this country has produced have 
 come from small villages and country places. It is 
 impossible to predict from a study of the environ- 
 ment, v^hich a "strong propensity of nature," to 
 quote Milton's phrase again, will easily bend or 
 break. 
 
 The student must be allowed full freedom in his 
 work, undisturbed by the utilitarian spirit of the Philis- 
 tine, who cries, Cui bono? and distrusts pure science. 
 The present remarkable position in applied science and 
 in industrial trades of all sorts has been made possible 
 by men who did pioneer work in chemistry, in physics, 
 in biology, and in physiology, without a thought in their 
 researches of any practical application. The members 
 of this higher group of productive students are rarely 
 understood by the common spirits, who appreciate as 
 little their unselfish devotion as their unworldly neglect 
 of the practical side of the problems. 
 
 Everywhere now the medical student is welcomed as 
 an honored member of the guild. There was a time, 
 I confess, and it is within the memory of some of us, 
 when, like Falstaff, he was given to "taverns and sack 
 and wine and metheglins, and to drinkings and swear- 
 ings and starings, pribbles and prabbles" ; but all that 
 has changed with the curriculum, and the "Meds" now 
 
138 William Osier 
 
 roar you as gently as the "Theologs." On account of 
 the peculiar character of the subject-matter of your 
 studies, what I have said upon the general Hfe and 
 mental attitude of the student applies with tenfold 
 force to you. Man, with all his mental and bodily 
 anomalies and diseases — the machine in order, the ma- 
 chine in disorder, and the business yours to put it to 
 rights. Through all the phases of its career this most 
 complicated mechanism of this wonderful world will 
 be the subject of our study and of your care — the 
 naked, new-born infant, the artless child, the lad and 
 the lassie just aware of the tree of knowledge over- 
 head, the strong man in the pride of life, the woman 
 with the benediction of maternity on her brow, and the 
 aged, peaceful in the contemplation of the past. Almost 
 everything has been renewed in the science and in the 
 art of medicine, but all through the long centuries 
 there has been no variableness or shadow of change 
 in the essential features of the life which is our con-, 
 templation and our care. The sick love-child of Israel's 
 sweet singer, the plague-stricken hopes of the great 
 Athenian statesman, Elpenor, bereft of his beloved 
 Artemidora, and "Tully's daughter mourned so 
 tenderly," are not of any age or any race — they are 
 here with us to-day, with the Hamlets, the Ophelias, 
 and the Lears. Amid an eternal heritage of sorrow 
 and suffering our work is laid, and this eternal note 
 
The Student Life 139 
 
 of sadness would be insupportable if the daily tragedies 
 were not relieved by the spectacle of the heroism and 
 devotion displayed by the actors. Nothing will sustain 
 you more potently than the power to recognize in your 
 humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the 
 true poetry of life — the poetry of the commonplace, of 
 the ordinary man, of the plain, toilworn woman, with 
 their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their 
 griefs. The comedy, too, of life will be spread before 
 you, and nobody laughs more often than the doctor at 
 the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and the Bot- 
 toms among his patients. The humorous side is really 
 almost as frequently turned towards him as the tragic. 
 Lift up one hand to heaven and thank your stars if 
 they have given you the proper sense to enable you to 
 appreciate the inconceivably droll situations in which 
 we catch our fellow creatures. Unhappily, this is one 
 of the free gifts of the gods, unevenly distributed, not 
 bestowed on all, or on all in equal portions. In undue 
 measure it is not without risk, and in any case in the 
 doctor it is better appreciated by the eye than expressed 
 on the tongue. Hilarity and good humor, a breezy 
 cheerfulness, a nature "sloping toward the southern 
 side," as Lowell has it, help enormously both in the 
 study and in the practice of medicine. To many of a 
 somber and sour disposition it is hard to maintain good 
 spirits amid the trials and tribulations of the day, and 
 
140 William Osier 
 
 yet it is an unpardonable mistake to go about among 
 patients with a long face. 
 
 Divide your attentions equally between books and 
 men. The strength of the student of books is to sit 
 still — two or three hours at a stretch — eating the heart 
 out of a subject with pencil and notebook in hand, 
 determined to master the details and intricacies, 
 focussing all your energies on its difficulties. Get ac- 
 customed to test all sorts of book problems and state- 
 ments for yourself, and take as little as possible on 
 trust. The Hunterian "Do not think, but try" atti- 
 tude of mind is the important one to cultivate. The 
 question came up one day, when discussing the grooves 
 left on the nails after fever, how long it took for the 
 nail to grow out, from root to edge. A majority of 
 the class had no further interest; a few looked it up 
 in books ; two men marked their nails at the root with 
 nitrate of silver, and a few months later had positive 
 knowledge on the subject. They showed the proper 
 spirit. The little points that come up in your reading 
 try to test for yourselves. With one fundamental 
 difficulty many of you will have to contend from the 
 outset — a lack of proper preparation for really hard 
 study. No one can have watched successive groups 
 of young men pass through the special schools with- 
 out profoundly regretting the haphazard, fragmentary 
 character of their preliminary education. It does seem 
 
The Student Life 141 
 
 too bad that we cannot have a student in his eighteenth 
 year sufficiently grounded in the humanities and in the 
 sciences preliminary to medicine — but this is an edu- 
 cational problem upon which only a Milton or a Locke 
 could discourse with profit. With pertinacity you can 
 overcome the preliminary defects and once thoroughly 
 interested, the work in books becomes a pastime. A 
 serious drawback in the student life is the self -con- 
 sciousness, bred of too close devotion to books. A 
 man gets shy, "dysopic," as old Timothy Bright calls 
 it, and shuns the looks of men, and blushes like a girl. 
 The strength of a student of men is to travel — to 
 study men, their habits, character, mode of life, their 
 behavior under varied conditions, their vices, virtues, 
 and peculiarities. Begin with a careful observation 
 of your fellow students and of your teachers; then, 
 every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the 
 malady from which he suffers. Mix as much as you 
 possibly can with the outside world, and learn its ways. 
 Cultivated systematically, the student societies, the 
 students' union, the gymnasium, and the outside social 
 circle will enable you to conquer the diffidence so apt 
 to go with bookishness and which may prove a very 
 serious drawback in after-life. I cannot too strongly 
 impress upon the earnest and attentive men among 
 you the necessity of overcoming this unfortunate fail- 
 ing in your student days. , It is not easy for every one 
 
142 fVilliam Osier 
 
 to reach a happy medium, and the distinction between 
 a proper self-confidence and "cheek," particularly in 
 junior students, is not always to be made. The latter 
 is met with chiefly among the student pilgrims who, in 
 traveling down the Delectable Mountains, have gone 
 astray and have passed to the left hand, where lieth the 
 country of Conceit, the country in which you remember 
 the brisk lad Ignorance met Christian. 
 
 I wish we could encourage on this continent among 
 our best students the habit of wandering. I do not 
 know that we are quite prepared for it, as there is still 
 great diversity in the curricula, even among the lead- 
 ing schools, but it is undoubtedly a great advantage to 
 study under different teachers, as the mental horizon is 
 widened and the sympathies enlarged. The practice 
 would do much to lessen that narrow **I am of Paul 
 and I am of Apollos" spirit which is hostile to the best 
 interests of the profession. 
 
 There is much that I would like to say on the ques- 
 tion of work, but I can spare only a few moments for 
 a word or two. Who will venture to settle upon so 
 simple a matter as the best time for work? One will 
 tell us there is no best time ; all are equally good ; and 
 truly, all times are the same to a man whose soul is 
 absorbed in some great problem. The other day I 
 asked Edward Martin, the well-known story-writer, 
 what time he found best fcgr work. "Not in the eve- 
 
The. Student Life I43 
 
 ning, and never between meals !" was his answer, which 
 may appeal to some of my hearers. One works best 
 at night; another, in the morning; a majority of the 
 students of the past favor the latter. Erasmus, the 
 great exemplar, says, "Never work at night; it dulls 
 the brain and hurts the health." One day, going with 
 George Ross through Bedlam, Dr. Savage, at that time 
 the physician in charge, remarked upon two great 
 groups of patients — those who w^ere depressed in the 
 morning and those who were cheerful, and he suggested 
 that the spirits rose and fell with the bodily tempera- 
 ture — those with very low morning temperatures were 
 depressed, and vice versa. This, I believe, expresses a 
 truth which may explain the extraordinary difference 
 in the habits of students in this matter of the time at 
 which the best work can be done. Outside of the 
 asylum there are also the two great types, the student- 
 lark who loves to see the sun rise, who comes to break- 
 fast with a cheerful morning face, never so "fit'* as at 
 6 A. M. We all know the type. What a contrast to 
 the student-owl with his saturnine morning face, thor- 
 oughly unhappy, cheated by the wretched breakfast 
 bell of the two best hours of the day for sleep, no ap- 
 petite, and permeated with an unspeakable hostility to 
 his vis-a-vis, whose morning garrulity and good hu- 
 mor are equally offensive. Only gradually, as the day 
 wears on and his temperature riees, does he become 
 
144 William Osier 
 
 endurable to himself and to others. But see him really 
 awake at lo p. m. while our blithe lark is in hopeless 
 coma over his books, from which it is hard to rouse 
 him sufficiently to get his boots off for bed, our lean 
 owl-friend, Saturn no longer in the ascendant, with 
 bright eyes and cheery face, is ready for four hours of 
 anything you wish — deep study, or 
 
 Heart affluence in discoursive talk, 
 and by 2 a. m. he will undertake to unsphere the spirit 
 of Plato. In neither a virtue, in neither a fault we 
 must recognize these two types of students, differently 
 constituted, owing possibly — though I have but little 
 evidence for the belief — ^to thermal peculiarities. 
 
THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA 
 By Stephen Leacock 
 
 Nineteen hundred and ten was an important year. Halley's 
 comet came along, and some predicted the End of the World. 
 And Stephen Leacock's first humorous book — Literary Lapses — 
 was published. First humorous book, I said, for Mr. Leacock— 
 who is professor of political economy at McGill University, 
 Montreal — had published his Elements of Political Science in 
 1906. 
 
 It seems- to me that I have heard that Literary Lapses was 
 obscurely or privately pubHshed in Canada before 1910; that 
 Mr. John Lane, the famous London publisher, was given a copy 
 by some one as he got on a steamer to go home to England ; 
 that he read it on the voyage and cabled an offer for it as soon 
 as he landed. This is very vague in my mind, but it sounds 
 probable. At any rate, since that time Professor Leacock's hu- 
 morous volumes have appeared with gratifying regularity — Non- 
 :!ense Novels, Behind the Beyond, etc.: and some more serious 
 books too, such as Essays and Literary Studies and The Un~ 
 solved Riddle of Social Justice. One of the unsolved riddles 
 of social injustice is, why should Professor Leacock be so much 
 more amusing than most people? 
 
 We usually think of him as a Canadian, but he was born in 
 England in 1869. 
 
 Coming up home the other night in my car (the 
 Guy Street car), I heard a man who was hanging onto 
 a strap say: "The drama is just turning into a bunch 
 of talk." This set me thinking; and I was glad that it 
 did, because I am being paid by this paper to think once 
 a week, and it is wearing. Some days I never think 
 from morning till night. 
 
 This decline of the drama is a thing on which I 
 feel deeply and bitterly; for I am, or I have been, 
 
146 Stephen Leacock 
 
 something of an actor myself. I have only been in 
 amateur work, I admit, but still I have played some 
 mighty interesting parts. I have acted in Shakespeare 
 as a citizen, I have been a fairy in "A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream," and I was once one end (choice of 
 ends) of a camel in a pantomime. I have had other 
 parts too, such as "x\ Voice Speaks From Within," or 
 *'A Noise Is Heard Without," or a ''Bell Rings From 
 Behind," and a lot of things like that. I played as 
 A Noise for seven nights, before crowded houses 
 where people were being turned away from the door; 
 and I have been a Groan and a Sigh and a Tumult, and 
 once I was a "Vision Passes Before the Sleeper." 
 
 So when I talk of acting and of the spirit of the 
 Drama, I speak of what I know. 
 
 Naturally, too, I was brought into contact, very 
 often into quite intimate personal contact, with some of 
 the greatest actors of the day. I don't say it in any 
 way of boasting, but merely because to those of us who 
 love the stage all dramatic souvenirs are interesting. 
 I remember, for example, that when Wilson Barrett 
 played ''The Bat" and had to wear the queer suit with 
 the scales, it was I who put the glue on him. 
 
 And I recall a conversation with Sir Henry Irving 
 one night when he said to me, "Fetch me a glass of 
 water, will you?" and I said, "Sir Henry, it is not only 
 a pleasure to get it but it is to me, as a humble devotee 
 
The Decline of the Drama 147 
 
 of the art that you have ennobled, a high privilege. 
 I will go further — " "Do/' he said. Henry was like 
 that, quick, sympathetic, what we call in French 
 ^Vibrant." 
 
 Forbes Robertson I shall never forget : he owes me 
 50 cents. And as for Martin Harvey — I simply cannot 
 call him Sir John, we are such dear old friends — he 
 never comes to this town without at once calling in my 
 services to lend a hand in his production. No doubt 
 everybody knows that splendid play in which he ap- 
 pears, called "The Breed of the Treshams." 
 
 There is a torture scene in it, a most gruesome thing. 
 Harvey, as the hero, has to be tortured, not on the 
 stage itself, but off the stage in a little room at the 
 side. You can hear him howling as he is tortured. 
 Well, it was I who was torturing him. We are so used 
 to working together that Harvey didn't want to let any- 
 body do it but me. 
 
 So naturally I am a keen friend and student of the 
 Drama: and I hate to think of it going all to pieces. 
 
 The trouble with it is that it is becoming a mere mass 
 of conversation and reflection : nothing happens in it ; 
 the action is all going out of it and there is nothing 
 left but thought. When actors begin to think, it is 
 time for a change. They are not fitted for it. 
 
 Now in my day — I mean when I was at the apogee 
 of my reputation (I think that is the word — it may be 
 
148 Stephen Leacock 
 
 apologee — I forget) — things were very different. 
 What we wanted was action — striking, climatic, catas- 
 trophic action, in which things not only happened, but 
 happened suddenly and all in a lump. 
 
 And we always took care that the action happened 
 in some place that was worth while, not simply in an 
 ordinary room with ordinary furniture, the way it is 
 in the new drama. The scene was laid in a lighthouse 
 (top story), or in a mad house (at midnight), or in a 
 power house, or a dog house, or a bath house, in short, 
 in some place with a distinct local color and atmos- 
 phere. 
 
 I remember in the case of the first play I ever wrote 
 (I write plays, too) the manager to whom I submitted 
 it asked me at once, the moment he glanced at it. 
 "Where is the action of this laid?" ''It is laid," I an- 
 swered, "in the main sewer of a great city." "Good, 
 good," he said ; "keep it there." 
 
 In the case of another play the manager said to me, 
 "What are you doing for atmosphere?" "The opening 
 act," I said, "is in a steam laundry." "Very good," he 
 answered as he turned over the pages, "and have you 
 brought in a condemned cell?" I told him that I had 
 not. "That's rather unfortunate," he said, "because 
 we are especially anxious to bring in a condemned cell. 
 Three of the big theaters have got them this season, 
 and I think we ought to have it in. Can you do it?" 
 
The Decline of the Drama 149 
 
 "Yes," I said, "I can, if it's wanted. Fll look through 
 the cast, and no doubt I can find one at least of them 
 that ought to be put to death." "Yes, yes," said the 
 manager enthusiastically, "I am sure you can." 
 
 But I think of all the settings that we used, the light- 
 house plays were the best. There is something about a 
 lighthouse that you don't get in a modern drawing 
 room. What it is, I don't know; but there's a differ- 
 ence. I always have liked a lighthouse play, and never 
 have enjoyed acting so much, have never thrown my- 
 self into acting so deeply, as in a play of that sort. 
 
 There is something about a lighthouse — the way you 
 see it in the earlier scenes — with the lantern shining 
 out over the black waters that suggests security, fidelity, 
 faithfulness, to a trust. The stage used generally to 
 be dim in the first part of a lighthouse play, and you 
 could see the huddled figures of the fishermen and their 
 wives on the foreshore pointing out to the sea (the 
 back of the stage). 
 
 "See," one cried with his arm extended, "there is 
 lightning in yon sky." (I was the lightning and that 
 my cue for it) : "God help all the poor souls at sea 
 to-night !" Then a woman cried, "Look ! Look ! a boat 
 upon the reef !" And as she said it I had to rush round 
 and work the boat to make it go up and down properly. 
 Then there was more lightning, and some one screamed 
 out, "Look ! See ! there's a woman in the boat !'* 
 
150 Stephen Leacock 
 
 There wasn't really ; it was me ; but in the darkness 
 it was all the same, and of course the heroine herself 
 couldn't be there yet because she had to be downstairs 
 getting dressed to be drowned. Then they all cried 
 out, "Poor soul! she's doomed," and all the fishermen 
 ran up and down making a noise. 
 
 Fishermen in those plays used to get fearfully ex- 
 cited ; and what with the excitement and the darkness 
 and the bright beams of the lighthouse falling on the 
 wet oilskins, and the thundering of the sea upon the 
 reef — ah! me, those were plays! That was acting! 
 And to think that there isn't a single streak of lightning 
 in any play on the boards this year ! 
 
 And then the kind of climax that a play like this 
 used to have ! The scene shifted right at the moment 
 of the excitement, and lo ! we are in the tower, the top 
 story of the lighthouse, interior scene. All is still and 
 quiet within, with the bright light of the reflectors 
 flooding the little room, and the roar of the storm heard 
 like muffled thunder outside. 
 
 The lighthouse keeper trims his lamps. How firm 
 and quiet and rugged he looks. The snows of sixty 
 winters are on his head, but his eye is clear and his 
 grip strong. Hear the howl of the wind as he opens 
 the door and steps forth upon the iron balcony, eighty 
 feet above the water, and peers out upon the storm. 
 
 "God pity all the poor souls at sea !" he says. (They 
 
The Decline of the Drama 151 
 
 all say that. If you get used to it, and get to like it, 
 you want to hear it said, no matter how often they 
 say it.) The waves rage beneath him. (I threw it at 
 him, really, but the effect was wonderful.) 
 
 And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still 
 room, the climax breaks. A man staggers into the 
 room in oilskins, drenched, wet, breathless. (They 
 all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama 
 they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He 
 points to the sea. "A boat! A boat upon the reef! 
 With a woman in it." 
 
 And the lighthouse keeper knows that it is his only 
 daughter — the only one that he has — who is being cast 
 to death upon the reef. Then comes the dilemma. 
 They want him for the lifeboat; no one can take it 
 through the surf but him. You know that because the 
 other man says so himself. 
 
 But if he goes in the boat then the great light will 
 go out. Untended it cannot live in the storm. And 
 if it goes out — ah! if it goes out — ^ask of the angry 
 waves and the resounding rocks of what to-night's 
 long toll of death must be without the light! 
 
 I wish you could have seen it — ^you who only see the 
 drawing-room plays of to-day — the scene when the 
 Hghthouse man draws himself up, calm and resolute, 
 and says: "My place is here. God's will be done." 
 And you know that as he says it and turns quietly to 
 
152 Stephen Leacock 
 
 his lamps again, the boat is drifting, at that very mo- 
 ment, to the rocks. 
 
 "How did they save her?" My dear sir, if you can 
 ask that question you little understand the drama as 
 it was. Save her? No, of course they didn't save her. 
 What we wanted in the Old Drama was reality and 
 force, no matter how wild and tragic it might be. 
 They did not save her. They found her the next day, 
 in the concluding scene — all that was left of her when 
 she was dashed upon the rocks. Her ribs were broken. 
 Her bottom boards had been smashed in, her gunwale 
 was gone — in short, she was a wreck. 
 
 The girl? Oh, yes, certainly they saved the girl. 
 That kind of thing was always taken care of. You 
 see just a? the lighthouse man said "God's will be 
 done," his eye fell on a long coil of rope, hanging 
 there. Providential, wasn't it? But then we were not 
 ashamed to use Providence in the Old Drama. So he 
 made a noose in it and threw it over the balcony and 
 hauled the girl up on it. I used to hook her on to it 
 every night. 
 
 A rotten play? Oh, I am sure it must have been. 
 But, somehow, those of us who were brought up on 
 that sort of thing, still sigh for it. 
 
AMERICA AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 
 By Harry Morgan Ayres 
 
 This admirable summary of Anglo-American history first ap- 
 peared (February, 1920) as an editorial in the Weekly Rcviezv. 
 It seemed to me then, and still does, as a model in that form 
 of writing, perfect in lucidity, temperance and good sense. Mr. 
 Ayres is a member of the faculty of Columbia University (De- 
 partment of English) and also one of the editors of the Weekly 
 Review. Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Seneca seem to 
 be his favorite hobbies. 
 
 To sum up the gist of Anglo-American relations in half a 
 dozen pages, as Mr. Ayres does here, is surely a remarkable 
 achievement. 
 
 The recently established chair in the history, litera- 
 ture, and institutions of the United States which is to 
 be shared among the several universities of Great 
 Britain, is quite different from the exchange profes- 
 sorships of sometimes unhappy memory. It is not at 
 all the idea to carry over one of our professors each 
 year and indoctrinate him with the true culture at its 
 source. The occupant of the chair will be, if the an- 
 nounced intention is carried out, quite as often British 
 as American, and quite as likely a public man as a 
 professor. The chief object is to bring to England 
 a better knowledge of the United States, and a pur- 
 pose more laudable can scarcely be imagined. Peace 
 and prosperity will endure in the world in some very 
 
 153 
 
154 Harry Morgan Ay res 
 
 precise relation to the extent to which England suc- 
 ceeds in understanding us. 
 
 It is not an illusion to suppose that our understand- 
 ing of the British is on the whole better than theirs of 
 us. The British Empire is a large and comparatively 
 simple fact, now conspicuously before the world for a 
 long time. The United States was, in British eyes, 
 until recently, a comparatively insignificant fact, yet 
 vastly more complicated than they imagined. Each, of 
 course, perfectly knew the faults of the other, 
 assessed with an unerring cousinly eye. The 
 American bragged in a nasal whine, the Briton 
 patronized in a throaty burble. Whoever among 
 the struggling nations of the world might win, 
 England saw to it that she never lost; your Yankee 
 was content with the more ignoble triumphs of mer- 
 chandising, willing to cheapen life if he could only 
 add to his dollars. But the excellence of English 
 political institutions and methods, the charm of Eng- 
 lish life, the tremendous power of the Empire for pro- 
 moting freedom and civilization in the world, these 
 are things which Americans have long recognized and 
 in a way understood. Anything like an equivalent 
 British appreciation of America in the large seems 
 confined to a very few honorable exceptions among 
 them. Admiration for Niagara, which is half Brit- 
 ish anyway, or enthusiasm for the ''Wild West" — • 
 
America and the English Tradition 155 
 
 your better-class Englishman always thrills to the 
 frontier — is no step at all toward rightly appreciat- 
 ing America. 
 
 To no inconsiderable extent this is America's own 
 fault. She does not present to the world a record 
 that is easily read. It is obvious, for instance — and 
 so obvious that it is not often enough stated — that 
 America has and will continue to have a fundamen- 
 tally English civilization. English law is the basis of 
 her law. English speech is her speech, and if with a 
 difference, it is a difference that the philologist, all 
 things considered, finds amazingly small. English 
 literature is her literature — Chaucer and Shakespeare 
 hers because her blood then coursed indistinguishably 
 through the English heart they knew so well ; Milton, 
 Dryden, and the Queen Anne men hers, because she 
 was still a part of England; the later men hers by 
 virtue of affectionate acquaintanceship and a gen- 
 erous and not inconsiderable rivalry. English history, 
 in short, is her history. The struggles of the thir- 
 teenth century through which law and parliament camQ. 
 into being, the struggles of the seventeenth centurji 
 through which law and parliament came to rule, are 
 America's struggles upon which she can look back 
 with the satisfaction that some things that have been 
 done in the world need never be undone or done over 
 again, whatever the room for improvement may still 
 
156 Harry Morgan Ayres 
 
 be. Americans, no less than British, recognize that 
 independence was largely an accidental result of a 
 war which sprang out of a false theory of economics, 
 but whose conclusion carried with it a lesson in the 
 management of empire which subsequent history shows 
 the British to have learned thoroughly and for the 
 benefit of all concerned. American independence, 
 however, once established, pointed a way to demo- 
 cratic freedom which England hastened to follow. 
 This we know. And yet — 
 
 And yet we allow these obvious and fundamental 
 considerations to become marvelously obscured. We 
 allow England's failure to solve an insoluble Irish 
 problem to arouse in us an attitude of mind possibly 
 excusable in some Irishmen, but wholly inexcusable 
 in any American. We allow a sentimental regard for 
 some immigrant from Eastern Europe, who comes to 
 us with a philosophy bom of conditions that in Eng- 
 lish-speaking lands ceased to be centuries ago, to make 
 us pretend to see in him the true expression of Amer- 
 ica's traditional ideals. We allow ourselves to be far 
 too easy with the phrase, "He is not pro-German, he 
 is merely anti-British.'' Why are they anti-British? 
 Why should they be permitted to make it falsely ap- 
 pear that recognition of the English basis of Amer- 
 ica involves approval of everything that England in 
 
America and the English Tradition 157 
 
 her history may or may not have done? Why should 
 they be allowed to pretend that disapproval of some 
 particular act of England justifies repudiation of most 
 of the things by virtue of which we are what we are? 
 America from the first has been part of the great 
 English experiment — great because it is capable of 
 learning from experience. 
 
 The world has put a big investment in blood and 
 treasure, and all that they imply, into the education 
 of England. It is satisfied — the world's response to 
 Germany's insolent challenge is the proof of it — that 
 its pains have been well bestowed. England is more 
 nearly fit than any other nation to wield the power 
 that is hers. That is not to deny the peculiar virtues 
 of other nations; indeed, these virtues have largely 
 contributed to the result. Italy has educated her; 
 France has educated her; we have done something; 
 and Germany. In result, she is not perfect — the Eng- 
 lish would perhaps least of all assert that — ^but she 
 has learned a great deal and held herself steady while 
 she learned it. It is a bigger job than the world cares 
 to undertake to teach any other nation so much. Nor 
 would it be at all likely to succeed so well. For what 
 England has to offer the world in return is not simply 
 her institutions; it is not merely a formula for the 
 effective discharge of police duty throughout the world; 
 
,158 Harry Morgan Ayres 
 
 it is the English freeman, whether he hail from Can- 
 ada, Australia, Africa, or the uttermost isles of the 
 sea. 
 
 A most adaptable fellow, this freeman, doing all 
 sorts of work everywhere, and with tremendous 
 powers of assimilation. Consider him in his origins. 
 He began by assimilating fully his own weight in 
 Danes, while remaining an English freeman. He then 
 perforce accepted a Norman king, as he had accepted 
 a Danish one, hoping, as always, that the king would 
 not trouble him too much. But when Norman Wil- 
 liam, who was very ill-informed about the breed, killed 
 off most of his natural leaders and harried the rest 
 into villeiny, how did he manage in a small matter of 
 two hundred years or so to make an English gentle- 
 man not only of himself but of all the rag-tag of ad- 
 venturers who had come over with William and since ? 
 How did he contrive, out of a band of exiles fleeing 
 from an Egypt of ecclesiastical tyranny, broken 
 younger sons, artisans out of a job, speculators, bond- 
 men, Swedes, Dutchmen, and what not, to make Amer- 
 ica ? Is he one likely to lose his bearings when in his 
 America the age-old problem again heaves in view? 
 This is a job he has been working at pretty success- 
 fully for more than a thousand years. Grant him a 
 moment to realize himself afresh in the face of it. 
 Don't expect him to stop and give a coherent explana- 
 
America and the English Tradition 159 
 
 tion of what he is doing. He wouldn't be the true 
 son of the English tradition that he is if he could do 
 that. Perhaps the occupants of the new chair can 
 do something of the sort for him. 
 
THE FIFTY-FIRST DRAGON 
 By Heywood Broun 
 
 Heywood Broun, who has risen rapidly through tAe ranks of 
 newspaper honor from sporting reporter and war correspondent 
 to one of the most highly regarded dramatic and literary critics 
 in the country, graduated from Harvard in 1910; was several 
 years on the New York Tribune, and is now on the World. 
 
 There is no more substantially gifted newspaper man in his 
 field; his beautifully spontaneous humor and drollery are coun- 
 terbalanced by a fine imaginative sensitiveness and a remarkable 
 power in the fable or allegorical essay, such as the one here 
 reprinted. His book, Seeing Things at Night, is only the first- 
 fruit of truly splendid possibilities, li I may be allowed to 
 prophesy, thus hazarding all, I will say that Heywood Broun 
 is likely, in the next ten or fifteen years, to do as fine work, 
 both imaginative and critical, as any living American of his era. 
 
 Of all the pupils at the knight school Gawaine le 
 Coeur-Hardy was among the least promising. He was 
 tall and sturdy, but his instructors soon discovered that 
 he lacked spirit. He would hide in the woods when 
 the jousting class was called, although his companions 
 and members of the faculty sought to appeal to his 
 better nature by shouting to him to come out and break 
 his neck like a man. Even when they told him that the 
 lances were padded, the horses no more than ponies 
 and the field unusually soft for late autumn, Gawaine 
 refused to grow enthusiastic. The Headmaster and 
 the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce were discussing 
 the case one spring afternoon and the Assistant Pro- 
 fessor could see no remedy but expulsion. 
 
 160 
 
The Fifty -first Dragon i6i 
 
 "No," said the Headmaster, as he looked out at 
 the purple hills which ringed the school, *'I think I'll 
 train him to slay dragons." 
 
 ''He might be killed," objected the Assistant Pro- 
 fessor. 
 
 "So he might," replied the Headmaster brightly, but 
 he added, more soberly, '*we must consider the greater 
 good. We are responsible for the formation of this 
 lad's character." 
 
 "Are the dragons particularly bad this year?" inter- 
 rupted the Assistant Professor. This was characteris- 
 tic. He always seemed restive when the head of the 
 school began to talk ethics and the ideals of the institu- 
 tion. 
 
 "I've never known them worse," replied the Head- 
 master. "Up in the hills to the south last week they 
 killed a number of peasants, two cows and a prize pig. 
 And if this dry spell holds there's no telling when they 
 may start a forest fire simply by breathing around 
 indiscriminately." 
 
 "Would any refund on the tuition fee be 
 necessary in case of an accident to young Coeur- 
 Hardy?" 
 
 "No," the principal answered, judicially, "that's all 
 covered in the contract. But as a matter of fact he 
 won't be killed. Before I send him up in the hills Tm 
 going to give him a magic word." 
 
1 62 Hey wood Broun 
 
 'That's a good idea," said the Professor. "Some- 
 times they work wonders." 
 
 From that day on Gawaine specialized in dragons. 
 His course included both theory and practice. In the 
 morning there were long lectures on the history, 
 anatomy, manners and customs of dragons. Gawaine 
 did not distinguish himself in these studies. He had 
 a marvelously versatile gift for forgetting things. In 
 the afternoon he showed to better advantage, for then 
 he would go down to the South Meadow and practise 
 with a battle-ax. In this exercise he was truly impres- 
 sive, for he had enormous strength as well as speed 
 and grace. He even developed a deceptive display of 
 ferocity. Old alumni say that it was a thrilling sight 
 to see Gawaine charging across the field toward the 
 dummy paper dragon which had been set up for his 
 practice. As he ran he would brandish his ax and 
 shout "A murrain on thee T* or some other vivid bit 
 of campus slang. It never took him more than one 
 stroke to behead the dummy dragon. 
 
 Gradually his task was made more difficult. Paper 
 gave way to papier-mache and finally to wood, but 
 even the toughest of these dummy dragons had no 
 terrors for Gawaine. One sweep of the ax always did 
 the business. There were those who said that when 
 the practice was protracted until dusk and the dragons 
 threw long, fantastic shadows across the meadow 
 
The Fifty -first Dragon 165 
 
 Gawaine did not charge so impetuously nor shout so 
 loudly. It is possible there was mahce in this charge. 
 At any rate, the Headmaster decided by the end of 
 June that it was time for the test. Only the night be- 
 fore a dragon had come close to the school grounds 
 and had eaten some of the lettuce from the garden. 
 The faculty decided that Gawaine was ready. They 
 gave him a diploma and a new battle-ax and 
 the Headmaster summoned him to a private confer- 
 ence. 
 
 "Sit down," said the Headmaster. "Have a ciga- 
 rette.'' 
 
 Gawaine hesitated. 
 
 "Oh, I know it's against the rules," said the Head- 
 master. "But after all, you have received your pre- 
 liminary degree. You are no longer a boy. You are a 
 man. To-morrow you will go out into the world, the 
 great world of achievement." 
 
 Gawaine took a cigarette. The Headmaster offered 
 him a match, but he produced one of his own and 
 began to puff away with a dexterity which quite 
 amazed the principal, 
 
 "Here you have learned the theories of life," con- 
 tinued the Headmaster, resuming the thread of his- 
 discourse, "but after all, life is not a matter of theories. 
 Life is a matter of facts. It calls on the young and the 
 old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard 
 
164 Hey wood Broun 
 
 and sometimes unpleasant. Your problem, for exam- 
 ple, is to slay dragons." 
 
 "They say that those dragons down in the south 
 wood are five hundred feet long," ventured Gawaine, 
 timorously. 
 
 "Stuff and nonsense !" said the Headmaster. "The 
 curate saw one last week from the top of Arthur's Hill. 
 The dragon was sunning himself down in the valley. 
 The curate didn't have an opportunity to look at him 
 very long because he felt it was his duty to hurry back 
 to make a report to me. He said the monster, or shall 
 I say, the big lizard? — wasn't an inch over two hun- 
 dred feet. But the size has nothing at all to do with it. 
 You'll find the big ones even easier than the little 
 ones. They're far slower on their feet and less aggres- 
 sive, I'm told. .Besides, before you go I'm going to 
 equip you in such fashion that you need have no fear 
 of all the dragons in the world." 
 
 "I'd like an enchanted cap," said Gawaine. 
 
 "What's that?" answered the Headmaster, testily. 
 
 "A cap to make me disappear," explained Gawaine. 
 
 The Headmaster laughed indulgently. "You mustn't 
 believe all those old wives' stories," he said. "There 
 isn't any such thing. A cap to make you disappear, 
 indeed! What would you do with it? You haven't 
 even appeared yet. Why, my boy, you could walk 
 from here to London, and nobody would so much as 
 
The Fifty- first Dragon 165 
 
 look at you. You're nobody. You couldn't be more 
 invisible than that." 
 
 Gawaine seemed dangerously close to a relapse into 
 his old habit of whimpering. The Headmaster reas- 
 sured him : "Don't worry ; I'll give you something much 
 better than an enchanted cap. I'm going to give you 
 a magic word. All you have to do is to repeat this 
 magic charm once and no dragon can possibly harm a 
 hair of your head. You can cut off his head at your 
 leisure." 
 
 He took a heavy book from the shelf behind his desk 
 and began to run through it. "Sometimes," he said, 
 "the charm is a whole phrase or even a sentence. 
 I might, for instance, give you To make the' — No, 
 that might not do. I think a single word would be 
 best for dragons." 
 
 "A short word," suggested Gawaine. 
 
 "It can't be too short or it wouldn't be potent. 
 There isn't so much hurry as all that. Here's a splen- 
 did magic word : 'Rumplesnitz.' Do you think you 
 can learn that?" 
 
 Gawaine tried and in an hour or so he seemed to 
 have the word well in hand. Again and again he in- 
 terrupted the lesson to inquire, "And if I say 'Rumple- 
 snitz* the dragon can't possibly hurt me?" And al-' 
 ways the Headmaster replied, "If you only gay *Rum- 
 plesnitz,' you are perfectly safe." 
 
i66 Heywood Broun 
 
 Toward morning Gawaine seemed resigned to his 
 career. At daybreak the Headmaster saw him to the 
 edge of the forest and pointed him to the direction in 
 which he should proceed. About a mile away to the 
 southwest a cloud of steam hovered over an open 
 meadow in the woods and the Headmaster assured 
 Gawaine that under the steam he would find a dragon. 
 Gawaine went forward slowly. He wondered whether 
 it would be best to approach the dragon on the run 
 as he did in his practice in the South Meadow or to 
 walk slowly toward him, shouting "Rumplesnitz" all 
 the way. 
 
 The problem was decided for him. No sooner had 
 he come to the fringe of the meadow than the dragon 
 spied him and began to charge. It was a large dragon 
 and yet it seemed decidedly aggressive in spite of 
 the Headmaster's statement to the contrary. As the 
 dragon charged it released huge clouds of hissing steam 
 through its nostrils. It was almost as if a gigantic 
 teapot had gone mad. The dragon came forward so 
 fast and Gawaine was so frightened that he had time 
 to say "Rumplesnitz" only once. As he said it, he 
 swung his battle-ax and off popped the head of the 
 dragon. Gawaine had to admit that it was even easier 
 to kill a real dragon than a wooden one if only you 
 said "Rumplesnitz." 
 
 Gawaine brought the ears home and a small sectioii 
 
The Fifty-first Dragon 167 
 
 of the tail. His school mates and the faculty made 
 much of him, but the Headmaster wisely kept him from 
 being spoiled by insisting that he go on with his work. 
 Every clear day Gawaine rose at dawn and went out " 
 to kill dragons. The Headmaster kept him at home 
 when it rained, because he said the woods were damp 
 and unhealthy at such times and that he didn't want 
 the boy to run needless risks. Few good days passed 
 in which Gawaine failed to get a dragon. On one 
 particularly fortunate day he killed three, a husband 
 and wife and a visiting relative. Gradually he de- 
 veloped a technique. Pupils who sometimes watched 
 him from the hill-tops a long way off said that he often 
 allowed the dragon to come within a few feet before 
 he said '^Rumplesnitz.'* He came to say it with a 
 mocking sneer. Occasionally he did stunts. Once 
 when an excursion party from London was watching 
 him he went into action with his right hand tied behind 
 his back. The dragon's head came off just as easily. 
 
 As Gawaine's record of killings mounted higher the 
 Headmaster found it impossible to keep him com- 
 pletely in hand. He fell into the habit of stealing out 
 at night and engaging in long drinking bouts at the 
 village tavern. It was after such a debauch that he 
 rose a little before dawn one fine August morning and 
 started out after his fiftieth dragon. His head was 
 heavy and his mind sluggish. He was heavy in other 
 
l68 Heywood Broun 
 
 respects as well, for be had adopted the somewhat 
 vulgar practice of wearing his medals, ribbons and all, 
 when he went out dragon hunting. The decorations 
 began on his chest and ran all the way down to his 
 abdomen. They must have weighed at least eight 
 pounds. 
 
 Gawaine found a dragon in the same meadow where 
 he had killed the first one. It was a fair-sized dragon, 
 but evidently an old one. Its face was wrinkled and 
 Gawaine thought he had never seen so hideous a coun- 
 tenance. Much to the lad's disgust, the monster re- 
 fused to charge and Gawaine was obliged to walk to- 
 ward him. He whistled as he went. The dragon 
 regarded him hopelessly, but craftily. Of course it had 
 heard of Gawaine. Even when the lad raised his 
 battle-ax the dragon made no move. It knew that 
 there was no salvation in the quickest thrust of the 
 head, for it had been informed that this hunter was 
 protected by an enchantment. It merely waited, hop- 
 ing something would turn up. Gawaine raised the 
 battle-ax and suddenly lowered it again. He had 
 grown very pale and he trembled violently. The 
 dragon suspected a trick. "What's the matter?" it 
 asked, with false solicitude. 
 
 "I've forgotten the magic word," stammered 
 Gawaine. 
 
 "What a pity," said the dragon. "So that was the 
 
The Fifty-first Dragon 169 
 
 secret. It doesn't seem quite sporting to me, all this 
 magic stuff, you know. Not cricket, as we used to say 
 when I was a little dragon ; but after all, that's a mat- 
 ter of opinion." 
 
 Gawaine was so helpless with terror that the 
 dragon's confidence rose immeasurably and it could 
 not resist the temptation to show off a bit. 
 
 "Could I possibly be of any assistance?" it asked. 
 "What's the first letter of the magic word?" 
 
 "It begins with an V,' " said Gawaine weakly. 
 
 "Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us 
 much, does it ? What sort of a word is this? Is it an 
 epithet, do you think?" 
 
 Gawaine could do no more than nod. 
 
 "Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reaction- 
 ary Republican." 
 
 Gawaine shook his head. 
 
 "Well, then," said the dragon, "we'd better get down 
 to business. Will you surrender?" 
 
 With the suggestion of a compromise Gawaine mus- 
 tered up enough courage to speak. 
 
 "What will you do if I surrender?" he asked. 
 
 "Why, I'll eat you," said the dragon. 
 
 "And if I don't surrender?" 
 
 "ni eat you just the same." 
 
 "Then it doesn't mean any difference, does it?'^ 
 moaned Gawaine. 
 
170 Heywood Broun 
 
 *lt does to me," said the dragon with a smile. "I'd 
 rather you didn't surrender. You'd taste much better 
 if you didn't." 
 
 The dragon waited for a long time for Gawaine to 
 ask ''Why?" but the boy was too frightened to speak. 
 At last the dragon had to give the explanation without 
 his cue line. "You see," he said, ''if you don't surren- 
 der you'll taste better because you'll die game." 
 
 This was an old and ancient trick of the dragon's. 
 By means of some such quip he was accustomed to 
 paralyze his victims with laughter and then to destroy 
 them. Gawaine was sufficiently paralyzed as it was, 
 but laughter had no part in his helplessness. With 
 the last word of the joke the dragon drew back his head 
 and struck. In that second there flashed into the mind 
 of Gawaine the magic word "Rumplesnitz," but there 
 was no time to say it. There was time only to strike 
 and, without a word, Gawaine met the onrush of the 
 dragon with a full swing. He put all his back and 
 shoulders into it. The impact was terrific and the head 
 of the dragon flew away almost a hundred yards and 
 landed in a thicket. 
 
 Gawaine did not remain frightened very long after 
 the death of the dragon. His mood was one of won- 
 der. He was enormously puzzled. He cut off the ears 
 of the monster almost in a trance. Again and again he 
 thought to himself, "I didn't say 'Rumplesnitz*!" He 
 
The Fifty -first Dragon ^7^ 
 
 was sure of that and yet there was no question that he 
 had killed the dragon. In fact, he had never killed 
 one so utterly. Never before had he driven a head 
 for anything like the same distance. Twenty-five 
 yards was perhaps his best previous record. AH the 
 way back to the knight school he kept rumbling about 
 in his mind seeking an explanation for what had oc- 
 curred. He went to the Headmaster immediately and 
 after closing the door told him what had happened. **I 
 didn't say 'Rumplesnitz/ " he explained with great 
 earnestness. 
 
 The Headmaster laughed. "I'm glad you've found 
 out," he said. *Tt makes you ever so much more of a 
 hero. Don't you see that? Now you know that it 
 was you who killed all these dragons and not that 
 foolish little word 'Rumplesnitz.' " 
 
 Gawaine frowned. "Then it wasn't a magic word 
 after all?" he asked. 
 
 "Of course not," said the Headmaster, "you ought 
 to be too old for such foolishness. There isn't any 
 such thing as a magic word." 
 
 "But you told me it was magic," protested Gawaine. 
 '^ou said it was magic and now you say it isn't." 
 
 "It wasn't magic in a literal sense," answered the 
 Headmaster, "but it was much more wonderful than 
 that. The word gave you confidence. It took away 
 your fears. If I hadn't told you that you might have 
 
172 Heywood Broun 
 
 been killed the very first time. It was your battle-ax 
 did the trick." 
 
 Gawaine surprised the Headmaster by his attitude. 
 He was obviously distressed by the explanation. He 
 interrupted a long philosophic and ethical discourse by 
 the Headmaster with, "If I hadn't of hit 'em all mighty 
 hard and fast any one of 'em might have crushed me 
 like a, like a — " He fumbled for a word. 
 
 *'Egg shell," suggested the Headmaster. 
 
 "Like a tgg shell," assented Gawaine, and he said it 
 iiiany times. All through the evening meal people who 
 sat near him heard him muttering, "Like a tgg shell, 
 like a tgg shell." 
 
 The next day wal clear, but Gawaine did not get up 
 at dawn. Indeed, it was almost noon when the Head- 
 master found him cowering in bed, with the clothes 
 pulled over his head. The principal called the Assist- 
 ant Professor of Pleasaunce, and together they dragged 
 the boy toward the forest. 
 
 "He'll be all right as soon as he gets a couple more 
 dragons under his belt," explained the Headmaster. 
 
 "The Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce agreed. "It 
 would be a shame to stop such a fine run," he said. 
 "Why, counting that one yesterday, he's killed fifty 
 dragons." 
 
 They pushed the boy into a thicket above which 
 hung a meager cloud of steam. It was obviously quite 
 
The Fifty 'first Dragon 173 
 
 a small dragon. But Gawaine did not come back that 
 night or the next. In fact, he never came back. Some 
 weeks afterward brave spirits from the school explored 
 the thicket, but they could find nothing to remind them 
 of Gawaine except the metal parts of his medals. Even 
 the ribbons had been devoured. 
 
 The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of 
 Pleasaunce agreed that it would be just as well not to 
 tell the school how Gawaine had achieved his record 
 and still less how he came to die. They held that it 
 might have a bad effect on school spirit. Accordingly, 
 Gawaine has lived in the memory of the school as its 
 greatest hero. No visitor succeeds in leaving the build- 
 ing to-day without seeing a great shield which hangs 
 on the wall of the dining hall. Fifty pairs of dragons* 
 ears are mounted upon the shield and underneath in 
 gilt letters is "Gawaine le Coeur-Hardy," followed by 
 the simple inscription, "He killed fifty dragons." The 
 record has never been equaled. 
 
SOME HISTORIANS 
 By Philip Guedalla 
 
 Philip Guedalla, born 1889, is a London barrister and at the 
 present time an Independent Liberal candidate for the House 
 of Commons. He has written excellent light verse and parodies, 
 and a textbook on European history, 1715-1815. His most con- 
 spicuous achievement so far is the brilliant volume Supers and 
 Supermen, from which ray selection is taken. 
 
 Supers and Supermen is a collection of historical and political 
 portraits and skits. It is mercilessly^ and gloriously humorous. 
 Those who can always follow the wit and irony that Guedalla 
 knows how to conceal in a cunningly turned phrase, will find 
 the book a prodigious delight. He has an unerring eye for 
 the absurd; his paradoxes, when pondered, have a way of prov- 
 ing excellent truth. (Truth is sometimes like the furniture in 
 Through the Looking Glass, which could only be reached by 
 resolutely walking away from it.) ^ 
 
 Ten years ago Mr. Guedalla was considered the most continu- 
 ously and insolently brilliant undergraduate of the Oxford of 
 that day. The charm and vigor of his ironical wit have not 
 lessened since his fellow-undergraduates strove to convince them- 
 selves that no man could be as clever as "P. G." seemed to be. 
 When Mr. Guedalla "holds the mirror up to Nietzsche" or ''gives 
 thanks that Britons never never will be Slavs," or dynasticizes 
 Henry James into three reigns : "James I, James II, and the Old 
 Pretender;" or wlien he speaks of "the cheerful clatter of Sir 
 James Barrie's cans as he went round with the milk of human 
 kindness," there will be some who will sigh ; but there will also 
 (I hope) be many who will forgive the bravado for the quick- 
 silver wit. 
 
 It was Quintillian or Mr. Max Beerbohm who said, 
 ''History repeats itself: historians repeat each other.*' 
 The saying is full of the mellow wisdom of either 
 writer, and stamped with the peculiar veracity of the 
 Silver Age of Roman or British epigram. One might 
 have added, if the aphorist had stayed for an answer, 
 
 174 
 
Some Historians 17 5 
 
 that history is rather interesting when it repeats itself : 
 historians are not. In France, which is an enhghtened 
 country enjoying the benefits of the Revolution and a 
 public examination in rhetoric, historians are expected 
 to write in a single and classical style of French. The 
 result is sometimes a rather irritating uniformity; it 
 is one long Taine that has no turning, and any quota- 
 tion may be attributed with safety to Guizot, because 
 la nuit tous les chats sent gris. But in England, which 
 is a free country, the restrictions natural to ignorant 
 (and immoral) foreigners are put off by the rough 
 island race, and history is written in a dialect which 
 is not curable by education, and cannt)t (it would 
 seem) be prevented by injunction. 
 
 Historians' English is not a style; it is an indus- 
 trial disease. The thing is probably scheduled in the 
 Workmen's Compensation Act, and the publisher may 
 be required upon notice of the attack to make a suit- 
 able payment to the writer's dependants. The work- 
 ers in this dangerous trade are required to adopt (like 
 Mahomet's coffin) a detached standpoint — that is, to 
 write as if they took no interest in the subject. Since 
 it is not considered good form for a graduate of less 
 than sixty years' standing to write upon any period that 
 is either familiar or interesting, this feeling is easily 
 acquired, and the resulting narrations present the dreary 
 impartiality of the Recording Angel without that com- 
 
176 Philip Guedalla 
 
 pleteness which is the sole attraction of his style. 
 Wilde complained of Mr. Hall Caine that he wrote 
 at the top of his voice ; but a modern historian, when 
 he is really detached, writes like some one talking in 
 the next room, and few writers have equaled the legal 
 precision of Coxe's observation that the Turks "sawed 
 the Archbishop and the Commandant in half, and 
 committed other grave violations of international 
 law." 
 
 Having purged his mind of all unsteadying interest 
 in the subject, the young historian should adopt a 
 moral code of more than Malthusian severity, which 
 may be learned from any American writer of the last 
 century upon the Renaissance or the decadence of 
 Spain. This manner, which is especially necessary "in 
 passages dealing with character, will lend to his work 
 the grave dignity that is requisite for translation into 
 Latin prose, that supreme test of an historian's style. 
 It will be his misfortune to meet upon the byways 
 of history the oddest and most abnormal persons, and 
 he should keep by him (unless he wishes to forfeit his 
 Fellowship) some convenient formula by which he 
 may indicate at once the enormity of the subject and 
 the disapproval of the writer. The writings of Lord 
 Macaulay will furnish him at need with the necessar}' 
 facility in lightning characterization. It was the prac- 
 tice of Cicero to label his contemporaries without dis- 
 
Some Historians ^77 
 
 tinction as ''heavy men," and the characters of history 
 are easily divisible into ''far-seeing statesmen" and 
 "reckless libertines." It may be objected that al- 
 though it is sufficient for the purposes of contemporary 
 caricature to represent Mr. Gladstone as a collar or 
 Mr. Chamberlain as an eye-glass, it is an inadequate 
 record for posterity. But it is impossible for a busy 
 man to write history without formulae, and after all 
 sheep are sheep and goats are goats. Lord Macaulay 
 once wrote of some one, "In private life he was stern, 
 morose, and inexorable"; he was probably a Dutch- 
 man. It is a passage which has served as a lasting 
 model for the historian's treatment of character. I 
 had always imagined that Cliche was a suburb of Paris, 
 until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford. Thus, 
 if the working historian is faced with a period of "de- 
 plorable excesses," he handles it like a man, and writes 
 always as if he was illustrated with steel engravings: 
 
 The imbecile king now ripened rapidly towards 
 a crisis. Surrounded by a Court in which the 
 inanity of the day was rivaled only by the de- 
 bauchery of the night, he became incapable to- 
 wards the year 1472 of distinguishing good from 
 evil, a fact which contributed considerably to the 
 effectiveness of his foreign policy, but was hardly 
 calculated to conform with the monastic tradi- 
 
178 Philip Guedalla 
 
 tions of his House. Long nights of drink and 
 dicing weakened a constitution that was already 
 undermined, and the council-table, where once 
 Campo Santa had presided, was disfigured with 
 the despicable apparatus of Bagatelle. The 
 burghers of the capital were horrified by the wild 
 laughter of his madcap courtiers, and when it 
 was reported in London that Ladislas had played 
 at Halma the Court of St. James's received his 
 envoy in the deepest of ceremonial mourning. 
 
 That is precisely how it is done. The passage ex- 
 hibits the benign and contemporary influences of Lord 
 Macaulay and Mr. Bowdler, and it contains all the 
 necessary ingredients, except perhaps a "venal Chan- 
 cellor" and a "greedy mistress." Vice is a subject of 
 especial interest to historians, who are in most cases 
 residents in small county towns; and there is un- 
 bounded truth in the rococo footnote of a writer on 
 the Renaissance, who said a propos of a Pope : "The 
 disgusting details of his vices smack somewhat of the 
 morbid historian's lamp." The note itself is a fine 
 example of that concrete visualization of the subject 
 which led Macaulay to observe that in consequence of 
 Frederick's invasion of Silesia "black men fought on 
 the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each 
 pther by the Great Lakes of North America." 
 
Some Historians ^79 
 
 A less exciting branch of the historian's work is the 
 reproduction of contemporary sayings and speeches. 
 Thus, an obituary should always close on a note of 
 regretful quotation : 
 
 He lived in affluence and died in great pain. 
 "Thus," it was said by the most eloquent of his 
 contemporaries, "thus terminated a career as va- 
 ried as it was eventful, as strange as it was 
 unique." 
 
 But for the longer efforts of sustained eloquence 
 greater art is required. It is no longer usual, as in 
 Thucydides' day, to compose completely new speeches, 
 but it is permissible for the historian to heighten the 
 colors and even to insert those rhetorical questicwis 
 and complexes of personal pronouns which will render 
 the translation of the passage into Latin prose a work 
 of consuming interest and lasting profit: 
 
 The Duke assembled his companions for the 
 forlorn hope, and addressed them briefly in 
 oratio ohliqua. "His father," he said, "had al- 
 ways cherished in his heart the idea that he would 
 one day return to his own people. Had he fallen 
 in vain ? Was it for nothing that they had dyed 
 with their loyal blood the soil of a hundred bat- 
 tlefields? The past was dead, the future was yet 
 
i8o Philip Guedalla 
 
 to come. Let them remember that great sacrifices 
 were necessary for the attainment of great ends, 
 let them think of their homes and families, and 
 if they had any pity for ^n exile, an outcast, and 
 an orphan, let them die fighting." 
 
 That is the kind of passage that used to send the 
 blood of Dr. Bradley coursing more quickly through 
 his veins. The march of its eloquence, the solemnity 
 of its sentiment, and the rich balance of its pronouns 
 unite to make it a model for all historians : it can be 
 adapted for any period. 
 
 It is not possible in a short review to include the 
 special branches of the subject. Such are those effi- 
 cient modern text-books, in which events are referred 
 to either as "factors" (as if they were a sum) or as 
 "phases" (as if they were the moon). There is also 
 the solemn business of writing economic history, in 
 which the historian may lapse at will into algebra, 
 and anything not otherwise describable may be called 
 "social tissue." A special subject is constituted by th6 
 early conquests of Southern and Central America; in 
 these there is a uniform opening for all passages run- 
 ning: 
 
 It was now the middle of October, and the 
 season was drawing to an end. Soon the moun- 
 tains would be whitened with the snows of winter 
 
Some Historians i8l 
 
 and every rivulet swollen to a roaring torrent 
 Cortez, whose determination only increased with 
 misfortune, decided to delay his march until the 
 inclemency of the season abated. ... It was now 
 the middle of November, and the season was 
 drawing to an end. ... 
 
 There is, finally, the method of military history. 
 This may be patriotic, technical, or in the manner 
 prophetically indicated by Virgil as Belloc, horrida 
 Belloc. The finest exponent of the patriotic style is 
 undoubtedly the Rev. W. H. Fitchett, a distinguished 
 colonial clergyman and historian of the Napoleonic 
 wars. His night-attacks are more nocturnal, and his 
 scaling parties are more heroically scaligerous than 
 those of any other writer. His drummer-boys are the 
 most moving in my limited circle of drummer-boys. 
 One gathers that the Peninsular War was full of pleas- 
 ing incidents of this type : 
 
 The Night Attack 
 It was midnight when Staflf- Surgeon Pettigrew 
 showed the flare from the summit of Sombrero. 
 At once the whole plain was alive with the hum 
 of the great assault. The four columns speedily 
 got into position with fiares and bugles at the 
 head of each. One made straight for the Water- 
 
182 Philip Guedalla 
 
 gate, a second for the Bailey-guard, a third for 
 the Porter-house, and the last (led by the saintly 
 Smeathe) for the Tube station. Let us follow 
 the second column on its secret mission through 
 the night, lit by torches and cheered on by the 
 
 huzzas of a thousand English throats. ** the 
 
 s," cried Cocker in a voice hoarse with patri- 
 otism ; at that moment a red-hot shot hurtled over 
 the plain and, ricocheting treacherously from the 
 frozen river, dashed the heroic leader to the 
 ground. Captain Boffskin, of the Buffs, leapt up 
 with the dry coughing howl of the British in- 
 fantryman, " them," he roared, *' them 
 
 to "; and for the last fifty yards it was neck 
 
 and neck with the ladders. Our gallant drummer- 
 boys laid to again, but suddenly a shot rang out 
 from the silent ramparts. The 94th Leger were 
 awake. We were discovered ! 
 
 The war of 1870 requires more special treatment. 
 Its histories show no particular characteristic, but its 
 appearance in fiction deserves special attention. There 
 is a standard pattern. 
 
 How THE Prussians Came to Guitry-le-sec 
 It was a late afternoon in early September, or an 
 early afternoon in late September — I forget these 
 
Some Historians 183 
 
 things — when I missed the boat express from 
 Kerplouarnec to Pouzy-le-roi and was forced by 
 the time-table to spend three hours at the for- 
 gotten hamlet of Guitry-le-sec, in the heart of 
 Dauphine. It contained besides a quantity of un- 
 derfed poultry one white church, one white mairie, 
 and nine white houses. An old man with a white 
 beard came towards me up the long white road. 
 "It was on just such an afternoon as this forty 
 years ago," he began, "that . . ." 
 
 "Stop !'* I said sharply. "I have met you in a 
 previous existence. You are going to say that a 
 solitary Uhlan appeared sharply outlined against 
 the sky behind M. Jules' farm." He nodded 
 feebly. 
 
 "The red trousers had left the village half an 
 hour before to look for the hated Prussian in 
 the cafes of the neighboring town. You were 
 alone when the spiked helmets marched in. You 
 can hear their shrieking fifes to this day." He 
 wept quietly. 
 
 I went on. "There was an officer with them, a 
 proud, ugly man with a butter-colored mustache. 
 He saw the little Mimi and drove his coarse Sua- 
 bian hand upward through his Mecklenburger 
 mustache. You dropped on one knee. . . ." 
 But he had fled. 
 
l84 Philip Guedalla 
 
 In the first of the three cafes I saw a second 
 old man. "Come in, Monsieur," he said. I 
 waited on the doorstep. "It was on just such an 
 afternoon. . . .'* I went on. At the other two 
 cafes two further old men attempted me with 
 the story; I told the last that he was rescued by 
 Zouaves, and walked happily to the station, to 
 read about Vichy Celestins until the train came 
 in from the south. 
 
 The Russo-Japanese War is a more original subject 
 and derives its particular flavor from the airy grace 
 with which Sir Ian Hamilton has described it. Like 
 this : 
 
 Wag-wag, Jan. 31. — The rafale was purring 
 like a mistral as I shaved this morning. I wonder 
 
 where it is; must ask . is a charming 
 
 fellow with the face of a Baluchi Kashgai and a 
 voice like a circular saw. 
 
 1 1 .-40 — It was eleven-forty when I looked at 
 my watch. The shrapnel -bursts look like a plan- 
 tation of powder-puflfs suspended in the sky. 
 Victor says there is a battle going on : capital chap 
 Victor. 
 
 2 p. M. — Lunched with an American lady-doc- 
 tor. How feminine the Americans can be. 
 
Some Historians 185 
 
 7 p. M. — A great day. It was Donkelsdorp over 
 again. Substitute the Tenth Army for the Traf- 
 fordshire's baggage wagon, swell Honks Spruit 
 into the roaring Wang-ho, elevate Oom Kop into 
 the frowning scarp of Pyjiyama, and you have it. 
 The Staff were obviously gratified when I told 
 them about Donkelsdorp. 
 
 The Rooskis came over the crest-line in a huddle 
 of massed battalions, and Gazeka was after them 
 like a rat after a terrier. I knew that his horse- 
 guns had no horses (a rule of the Japanese service 
 to discourage unnecessary changing of ground), 
 but his men bit the trails and dragged them up by 
 their teeth. Slowly the Muscovites peeled off the 
 steaming mountain and took the funicular down 
 the other side. 
 
 I wonder what my friend Smuts would make 
 of the Yen-tai coal mine? Well, well. — "Some^ 
 thing accomplished, something done." 
 
 The technical manner is more difficult of acquisition 
 for the beginner, since it involves a knowledge of at 
 least two European languages. It is cardinal rule 
 that all places should be described as points d'appui, 
 the simple process of scouting looks far better as 
 Verschleierimg, and the adjective "strategicaF* may be 
 used without any meaning in front of any noun. 
 
1 86 Philip Guedalla 
 
 But the military manner was revolutionized by the 
 war. Mr. Belloc created a new Land and a new 
 Water. We know now why the Persian commanders 
 demanded "earth and water" on their entrance into a 
 Greek town; it was the weekly demand of the Great 
 General Staff, as it called for its favorite paper. Mr. 
 Belloc has woven Baedeker and geometry into a new 
 style : it is the last cry of historians' English, because 
 one was invented by a German and the other by a 
 Greek. 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER: DIOGENES OF THE 
 VICTORIANS 
 
 By Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 Professor Sherman's cold compress, applied to the Butler cult, 
 
 caused much suffering in some regions, where it was said to be 
 more than a cooling bandage — in fact, a wet blanket. In the 
 general rough-and-tumble among critical standards during recent 
 years, Mr. Sherman is one of those who have dealt some swing- 
 ing blows in favor of the Victorians and the literary Old Guard 
 — which was often square but rarely hollow. 
 
 Stuart Pratt Sherman, born in Iowa in 1881, graduated from 
 Williams in 1903, has been since 191 1 professor of English 
 at the University of Illinois. His own account of his adven- 
 tures, written without intended publication, is worth considera- 
 tion. He says : 
 
 "My life hasn't been quite as dryly 'academic,* nor as simply 
 'middle-Western,' as the record indicates. For example: I 
 lived in Los Angeles from my 5th to my 13th year, and 
 then went on a seven months' adventure in gold mining 
 in the Black Canon of Arizona, where I had some experi- 
 ence with drouth in the desert, etc. That is not 'literary.* 
 
 "Recently, I've been thinking I might write a little pa- 
 per about some college friends at Williams. I was in 
 college with Harry James Smith (author of Mrs. Bump- 
 stead Lee), Max Eastman, and 'Go-to-Hell' Whittlesey. 
 As editor of the Williams Monthly I have accepted and 
 rejected manuscripts of both the two latter, and have 
 reminiscences of their literary youth. 
 
 "Then I spent a summer in the Post and Nation in 1908, 
 which is a pleasant chapter to remember ; another summer 
 teaching at Columbia ; this past summer teaching at the 
 University of California. My favorite recreations are 
 climbing little mountains, chopping wood, and canoeing on 
 Lake Michigan. 
 
 "This summer I have been picking out a place to die 
 in — or rather looking over the sites offered in California. 
 I lean towards the high Sierras, up above the Yosemite 
 Valley. 
 
 "My ambition in life is to retire — perhaps at the age 
 of seventy — and write only for amusement. When I can 
 abandon the task of improving my contemporaries, I hope 
 to become a popular author." 
 
 187 
 
1 88 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 Professor Sherman, you will note, is almost an exact con- 
 temporary of H. L. Mencken, with whom he has crossed swords 
 in more than one spirited encounter ; and Sherman is likely to 
 give as good as he takes in such scuffles, or even rather better. 
 It is high time that his critical sagacity and powerful reasoning 
 were better known in the market-place. 
 
 Until I met the Butlerians I used to think that the 
 religious spirit in our times was very precious, there 
 was so little of it. I thought one should hold one's 
 breath before it as before the flicker of one's last 
 match on a cold night in the woods. "What if it 
 should go out?" I said; but my apprehension was 
 groundless. It can never go out. The religious spirit 
 is indestructible and constant in quantity like the sum 
 of universal energ}^ in which matches and suns are alike 
 but momentary sparkles and phases. This great truth 
 I learned of the Butlerians: Though the forms and 
 objects of religious belief wax old as a garment and 
 are changed, faith, which is, after all, the precious 
 thing, endures forever. Destroy a man's faith in God 
 and he will worship humanity; destroy his faith in 
 humanity and he will worship science; destroy his 
 faith in science and he will worship himself; destroy 
 his faith in himself and he will worship Samuel Butler. 
 
 What makes the Butlerian cult so impressive is, of 
 course, that Butler, poor dear, as the English say, was 
 the least worshipful of men. He was not even — till 
 his posthumous disciples made him so — ^a person of 
 any particular importance. One writing a private 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 189 
 
 memorandum of his death might have produced some- 
 thing Hke this: Samuel Butler was an unsociable, 
 burry, crotchety, obstinate old bachelor, a dilettante 
 in art and science, an unsuccessful author, a witty 
 cynic of inquisitive temper and, comprehensively speak- 
 ing, the unregarded Diogenes of the Victorians. Son 
 of a clergyman and grandson of a bishop, born in 1835, 
 educated at Cambridge, he began to prepare for ordina- 
 tion. But, as we are told, because of scruples regard- 
 ing infant baptism he abandoned the prospect of holy 
 orders and in 1859 sailed for New Zealand, where with 
 capital supplied by his father he engaged in sheep- 
 farming for five years. In 1864, returning to England 
 with £8,000, he established himself for life at Clifford's 
 Inn, London. He devoted some years to painting, 
 adored Handel and dabbled in music, made occasional 
 trips to Sicily and Italy, and wrote a dozen books, 
 which generally fell dead from the press, on religion, 
 literature, art and scientific theory. "Erewhon," how- 
 ever, a Utopian romance published in 1872, had by 
 1899 sold between three and four thousand copies. 
 Butler made few friends and apparently never mar- 
 ried. He died in 1902. His last words were : ''Have 
 you brought the cheque book, Alfred?" His body was 
 cremated and the ashes were buried in a garden by 
 his biographer and his man-servant, with nothing to 
 mark the spot. 
 
190 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 Butler's indifference to the disposal of his earthly 
 part betokens no contempt for fame. Denied contem- 
 porary renown, he had firmly set his heart on immor- 
 tality, and quietly, persistently, cannily provided for 
 it. If he could not go down to posterity by the suf- 
 frage of his countrymen, he would go down by the 
 shrewd use of his cheque book; he would buy his way 
 in. He bought the publication of most of the books 
 produced in his lifetime. He diligently prepared man- 
 uscripts for posthumous publication and accumulated 
 and arranged great masses of materials for a biog- 
 rapher. He insured an interest in his literary remains 
 by bequeathing them and all his copyrights to his liter- 
 ary executor, R. A. Streatfeild. He purchased an in- 
 terest in a biographer by persuading Henry Festing 
 Jones, a feckless lawyer of Butlerian proclivities, to 
 abandon the law and become his musical and literary 
 companion. In return for these services Mr. Jones 
 received between 1887 and 1900 an allowance of £200 
 a year, and at Butler's death a bequest of £500, the 
 musical copyrights and the manifest responsibility and 
 privilege of assisting Streatfeild with the propagation 
 of Butler's fame, together with their own, in the next 
 generation. 
 
 These good and faithful servants performed their 
 duties with exemplary zeal and astuteness. In 1903, 
 the year following the Master's death, Streatfeild pub- 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 191 
 
 lished "The Way of All Flesh," a book packed with 
 satirical wit, the first since "Erewhon" which was cap- 
 able of walking off on its own legs and exciting gen- 
 eral curiosity about its author — curiosity intensified by 
 the announcement that the novel had been written be- 
 tween 1872 and 1884. In the wake of this sensation 
 there began the systematic annual relaunching of old 
 works, with fresh introductions and memoirs and a 
 piecemeal feeding out of other literary remains, cul- 
 minating in 19 1 7 with the publication of "The Note- 
 Books," a skilful collection and condensation of the 
 whole of Butler's intellectual life. Meanwhile, in 1908, 
 the Erewhon dinner had been instituted. In spite of 
 mild deprecation, this feast, with its two toasts to his 
 Majesty and to the memory of Samuel Butler, assumed 
 from the outset the aspect of a solemn sacrament of 
 believers. Among these was conspicuous on the sec- 
 ond occasion Mr. George Bernard Shaw, not quite 
 certain, perhaps, whether he had come to give or to 
 receive honor, whether he was himself to be regarded 
 as the beloved disciple or rather as the one for whom 
 Butler, preaching in the Victorian wilderness, had 
 prepared the way with "free and future-piercing sug- 
 gestions." 
 
 By 19 14 Streatfeild was able to declare that no frag- 
 ment of Butler's was too insignificant to publish. In 
 191 5 and 1916 appeared extensive critical studies by 
 
192 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 Gilbert Cannan and John F. Harris. In 19 19 at last 
 arrives Henry Festing Jones with the authoritative 
 memoir in two enormous volumes with portraits, docu- 
 ments, sumptuous index, elaborate bibliography and a 
 pious accounting to the public for the original manu- 
 scripts, which have been deposited like sacred relics at 
 St. John's College, the Bodleian, the British Museum, 
 the Library of Congress and at various shrines in Italy 
 and Sicily. Here are materials for a fresh considera- 
 tion of the man in relation to his work. 
 
 The unconverted will say that such a monument to 
 such a man is absurdly disproportionate. But Butler 
 is now more than a man. He is a spiritual ancestor, 
 leader of a movement, moulder of young minds, 
 founder of a faith. His monument is designed not 
 merely to preserve his memory but to mark as well the 
 present importance of the Butlerian sect. The memoir 
 appears to have been written primarily for them. The 
 faithful will no doubt find it delicious; and I, though 
 an outsider, got through it without fatigue and with a 
 kind of perverse pleasure in its perversity. 
 
 It is very instructive, but it by no means simplifies 
 its puzzling and complex subject. Mr. Jones is not 
 of the biographers who look into the heart of a man, 
 reduce him to a formula and recreate him in accord- 
 ance with it. He works from the outside, inward, and 
 gradually achieves life and reality by an immense ac- 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 193 
 
 cumulation of objective detail, without ever plucking 
 out, or even plucking at, the heart of the mystery. 
 What was the man's "master passion" and his master 
 faculty? Butler himself did not know; consequently 
 he could not always distinguish his wisdom from his 
 folly. He was an ironist entangled in his own net and 
 an egotist bitten with self-distrust, concealing his 
 wounds in self-assertion and his hesitancies in an ex- 
 ternal aggressiveness. Mr. Jones pierces the shell here 
 and there, but never removes it. Considering his op- 
 portunities, he is sparing in composed studies of his 
 subject based on his own direct observation ; and, with 
 all his ingenuousness and his shocking but illuminating 
 indiscretions, he is frequently silent as a tomb where 
 he must certainly possess information for which every 
 reader will inquire, particularly those readers who do 
 not, like the Butlerians, accept Samuel Butler as the 
 happy reincarnation of moderation, common sense and 
 fearless honesty. 
 
 The whole case of the Georgians against the Vic- 
 torians might be fought out over his life and works; 
 and indeed there has already been many a skirmish in 
 that quarter. For, of course, neither Streatfeild nor 
 Mr. Jones is ultimately responsible for his revival. 
 Ultimately Butler's vogue is due to the fact that he is a 
 friend of the Georgian revolution against idealism in 
 the very citadel of the enemy; the extraordinary ac- 
 
194 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 claim with which he is now received is his reward 
 for having long ago prepared to betray the Victorians 
 into the hands of a ruthless posterity. He was a traitor 
 to his own times, and therefore it follows that he was 
 a man profoundly disillusioned. The question which 
 we may all reasonably raise with regard to a traitor 
 whom we have received within our lines is whether he 
 will make us a good citizen. We should like to know 
 pretty thoroughly how he fell out with his countrymen 
 — whether through defects in his own temper and 
 character or through a clear-eyed and righteous indig- 
 nation with the incorrigible viciousness of their man- 
 ners and institutions. We should like to know what 
 vision of reformation succeeded his disillusion. Hith- 
 erto the Georgians have been more eloquent in their 
 disillusions than in their visions, and have inclined 
 to welcome Butler as a dissolving agent without much 
 inspecting his solution. 
 
 The Butlerians admire Butler for his withering at- 
 tack on family life, notably in "The Way of All Flesh" ; 
 and many a studious literary man with a talkative wife 
 and eight romping children would, of course, admit 
 an occasional flash of romantic envy for Butler's bach- 
 elor apartments. Mr. Jones tells us that Theobald and 
 Christina Pontifex, whose nakedness Butler uncovers, 
 were drawn without exaggeration from his own father 
 and mother. His work on them is a masterpiece of 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 195 
 
 pitiless satire. Butler appears to have hated his father, 
 despised his mother and loathed his sisters in all truth 
 and sincerity. He nursed his vindictive and contemptu- 
 ous feeHngs towards them all through his life; he 
 studied these feelings, made notes on them, jested out 
 of them, lived in them, reduced them to a philosophy 
 of domestic antipathy. 
 
 He was far more learned than any other English 
 author in the psychology of impiety. When he heard 
 some one say, "Two are better than one," he ex- 
 claimed, "Yes, but the man who said that did not know 
 my sisters." When he was forty-eight years old he 
 wrote to a friend that his father was in poor health 
 and not likely to recover ; "but may hang on for months 
 or go off with the N. E. winds which w^e are sure to 
 have later on." In the same letter he writes that he 
 is going to strike out forty weak pages in "Erewhon" 
 and stick in forty stronger ones on the "trial of a 
 middle-aged man 'for not having lost his father at a 
 suitable age.' " His father's one unpardonable offense 
 was not dying early and so enlarging his son's income. 
 If this had been a jest, it would have been a little 
 coarse for a deathbed. But Mr. Jones, who appears 
 to think it very amusing, proves clearly enough that 
 it was not a jest, but an obsession, and a horrid obses- 
 sion it was. Now a man who attacks the family be- 
 cause his father does not die as promptly as could be 
 
196 Stuart P, Sherman 
 
 desired is not likely to propose a happy substitute: 
 his mood is not reconstructive, funny though it may be 
 in two old boys of fifty, like Butler and Jones, living 
 along like spoiled children on allowances, Butler from 
 his father, Jones from his mother. 
 
 The Butlerians admire Butler for his brilliant at- 
 tack on "romantic" relations between the sexes. Be- 
 fore the advent of Shaw he poured poison on the roots 
 of that imaginative love in which all normal men and 
 maidens walk at least once in a lifetime as in a rosy 
 cloud shot through with golden lights. 
 
 His portraits show a man of vigorous physique, cap- 
 able of passion, a face distinctly virile, rather harshly 
 bearded, with broad masculine eyebrows. Was he ever 
 in love? If not, why was he not? Elementary ques- 
 tions which his biographer after a thousand pages 
 leaves unanswered. Mr. Jones asserts that both Over- 
 ton and Ernest in "The Way of All Flesh" are in the 
 main accurately autobiographical, and he furnishes 
 much evidence for the point. He remarks a divergence 
 in this fact, that Butler, unlike his hero, was never in 
 prison. Did Butler, like his hero, have children and 
 farm them out? The point is of some interest in the 
 case of a man who is helping us to destroy the conven- 
 tional family. 
 
 Mr. Jones leaves quite in the dark his relations with 
 such women as the late Queen Victoria would not 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 197 
 
 have approved, relations which J. B. Yeats has, how- 
 ever, pubhcly discussed. Mr. Jones is ordinarily cyn- 
 ical enough, candid enough, as we shall see. He takes 
 pains to tell us that his own grandfather was never 
 married. He does not hesitate to acknowledge abun- 
 dance of moral ugliness in his subject. Why this access 
 of Victorian reticence at a point where plain-speaking 
 is the order of the day and the special pride of con- 
 temporary Erewhonians? Why did a young man of 
 Butler^s tastes leave the church and go into exile in 
 New Zealand for five years? Could a more resolute 
 biographer perhaps find a more "realistic" explana- 
 tion than difBculties over infant baptism? Mr. Shaw 
 told his publisher that Butler was "a shy old bird." 
 In so^e respects he was also a sly old bird. 
 
 Among the "future-piercing suggestions" extolled 
 by Mr. Shaw we may be sure that the author of "Man 
 and Superman" was pleased to acknowledge Butler's 
 prediscovery that woman is the pursuer. This idea 
 we may now trace quite definitely to his relations with 
 Miss Savage, a witty, sensible, presumably virtuous 
 woman of about his own age, living in a club in Lon- 
 don, who urged hm to write fiction, read all his manu- 
 scripts, knitted him socks, reviewed his books in 
 women's magazines and corresponded with him for 
 years till she died, without his knowledge, in hospital 
 from cancer. Her letters are Mr. Jones' mainstay in 
 
198 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 his first volume and she is, except Butler himself, altCN 
 gether his most interesting personality. Mr. Jones 
 says that being unable to find any one who could au- 
 thorize him to use her letters, he publishes them on 
 his own responsibility. But he adds, "I cannot imag- 
 ine that any relation of hers who may read her let- 
 ters will experience any feelings other than pride and 
 delight." This lady, he tells us, was the original of 
 Alethea Pontifex. But he marks a' difference. Alethea 
 was handsome. Miss Savage, he says, was short, fat, 
 had hip disease, and "that kind of dowdiness which I 
 used to associate with ladies who had been at school 
 with my mother." Butler became persuaded that Miss 
 Savage loved him ; this bored him ; and the correspond- 
 ence would lapse till he felt the need of her cheery 
 friendship again. On one occasion she wrote to him, 
 "I wish that you did not know wrong from right." 
 Mr. Jones believes that she was alluding to his scrupu- 
 lousness in matters of business. Butler himself con- 
 strued the words as an overture to which he was in- 
 disposed to respond. The debate on this point and 
 the pretty uncertainty in which it is left can surely 
 arouse in Miss Savage's relations no other feelings 
 than "pride and delight." 
 
 This brings us to the Butlerian substitute for the 
 chivalry which used to be practised by those who bore 
 what the Victorians called "the grand old name of 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 199 
 
 gentleman." In his later years, after the death of Miss 
 Savage, in periods of loneliness, depression and ill- 
 health, Butler made notes on his correspondence re- 
 proaching himself for his ill-treatment of her. "He 
 also," says his biographer, "tried to express his re- 
 morse" in two sonnets from which I extract some lines : 
 
 She was too kind, wooed too persistently, 
 Wrote moving letters to me day by day; 
 
 Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain, 
 For she was plain and lame and fat and short, 
 Forty and overkind. 
 
 Tis said that if a woman woo, no man 
 
 Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true, 
 A man will yield for pity if he can. 
 But if the flesh rebel what can he do? 
 
 I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long 
 The wrong I did in that I did no wrong. 
 
 In these Butlerian times one who should speak of 
 "good taste" would incur the risk of being called a prig. 
 Good taste is no longer "in." Yet even now, in the 
 face of these sonnets, may not one exclaim, Heaven 
 preserve us from the remorseful moments of a Butler- 
 ian Adonis of fifty! 
 
V 
 2CX) Stuart P, Sherman 
 
 The descendants of eminent Victorians may well be 
 thankful that their fathers had no intimate relations 
 with Butler. There is a familiar story of Whistler, 
 that when some one praised his latest portrait as equal 
 to Velasquez, he snapped back, "Yes, but why lug in 
 Velasquez?" Butler, with similar aversion for rivals, 
 but without Whistler's extempore wit, slowly excogi- 
 tated his killing sallies and entered them in his note- 
 books or sent them in a letter to Miss Savage, preserv- 
 ing a copy for the delectation of the next age : *T do 
 not see how I can well call Mr. Darwin the Pecksniff 
 of Science, though this is exactly what he is; but I 
 think I may call Lord Bacon the Pecksniff of his age 
 and then, a little later, say that Mr. Darwin is the 
 Bacon of the Victorian Era.'* To this he adds another 
 note reminding himself to call "Tennyson the Darwin 
 of Poetry, and Darwin the Tennyson of Science." I 
 can recall but one work of a contemporary mentioned 
 favorably in the biography; perhaps there are two. 
 The staple of his comment runs about as follows: 
 "Middlemarch" is a "longwinded piece of studied 
 brag"; of "John Inglesant," "I seldom was more dis- 
 pleased with any book" ; of "Aurora Leigh," "I dislike 
 it very much, but I liked it better than Mrs. Browning, 
 or Mr., either"; of Rossetti, "I dislike his face and his 
 manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his 
 friends"; of George Meredith, "No wonder if his work 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 201 
 
 repels me that mine should repel him" ; "all I remember 
 is that I disliked and distrusted Morley"; of Gladstone, 
 "Who was it said that he was 'a good man in the very- 
 worst sense of the words' ?" The homicidal spirit here 
 exhibited may be fairly related to his anxiety for the 
 death of his father. 
 
 It was on the whole characteristic of Victorian free- 
 thinkers to attack Christianity with reverence and dis- 
 crimination in an attempt to preserve its substance 
 w^hile removing obstacles to the acceptance of its sub- 
 stance. Butler was Voltairean. When he did not at- 
 tack mischievously like a gamin, he attacked vindic- 
 tively like an Italian laborer whose sweetheart has 
 been false to him. I have seen it stated that he was a 
 broad churchman and a communicant; and Mr. Jones 
 produces a letter from a clergyman testifying to his 
 "saintliness." But this must be some of Mr. Jones's 
 fun. From Gibbon, read on the voyage to New Zea- 
 land, Butler imbibed, he says, in a letter of 1861, "a 
 calm and philosophic spirit of impartial and critical 
 investigation." In 1862 he writes: "For the present 
 I renounce Christianity altogether. You say people 
 must have something to believe in. I can only say 
 that I have not found my digestion impeded since I 
 left off believing in what does not appear to be sup- 
 ported by sufficient evidence." When in 1865 he 
 printed his "Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus 
 
202 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 Christ," the manner of his attack was impish; and so 
 was the gleeful exchange of notes between him and 
 Miss Savage over the way the orthodox swallowed the 
 bait. In his notebook he wrote : "Mead is the lowest 
 of the intoxicants, just as Church is the lowest of the 
 dissipations, and carraway seed the lowest of the condi- 
 ments." He went to church once in 1883 to please a 
 friend and was asked whether it had not bored him 
 as inconsistent with his principles. "I said that, having 
 given up Christianity, I was not going to be hampered 
 by its principles. It was the substance of Christianity, 
 and not its accessories of external worship, that I had 
 objected to ... so I went to church out of pure 
 cussedness." Finally, in a note of 1889: 'There will 
 be no comfortable and safe development of our social 
 arrangements — I mean we shall not get infanticide, 
 and the permission of suicide, nor cheap and easy 
 divorce — till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid; and 
 the best way to lay it is to be a moderate church- 
 man." 
 
 Robert Burns was a free-thinker, but he wrote the 
 "Cotter's Saturday Night" ; Renan was a free-thinker, 
 but he buried his God in purple ; Matthew Arnold was 
 a free-thinker, but he gave new life to the religious 
 poetry of the Bible; Henry Adams believed only in 
 mathematical physics, but he wrote of Mont St. Michel 
 and Chartres with chivalrous and almost Catholic 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 203 
 
 tenderness for the Virgin : for in all these diverse men 
 there was reverence for what men have adored as their 
 highest. There was respect for a tomb, even for the 
 tomb of a God. Butler, having transferred his faith 
 to the Bank of England, diverted himself like a street 
 Arab with a slingshot by peppering the church win- 
 dows. He established manners for the contemporary 
 Butlerian who, coming down to breakfast on Christmas 
 morning, exclaims with a pleased smile, 'Well, this is 
 the birthday of the hook-nosed Nazarene !'* 
 
 Butler's moral note is rather attractive to young and 
 middle-aged persons: "We have all sinned and come 
 short of the glory of making ourselves as comfortable 
 as we easily might have done." His ethics is founded 
 realistically on physiology and economics; for "good- 
 ness is naught unless it tends towards old age and 
 sufficiency of means." Pleasure, dressed like a quiet 
 man of the world, is the best teacher : "The devil, when 
 he dresses himself in angels' clothes, can only be de- 
 tected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does 
 he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen 
 talking to an angel at all, and prudent people will fol- 
 low after pleasure as a more homely but more respect- 
 able and on the whole more trustworthy guide.'' There 
 we have something of the tone of our genial Franklin; 
 but Butler is a Franklin without a single impulse of 
 Franklin's wide benevolence and practical beneficence. 
 
204 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 a Franklin shorn of the spirit of his greatness, namely, 
 his immensely intelligent social consciousness. 
 
 Having disposed of Christianity, orthodox and 
 otherwise, and having reduced the morality of "en- 
 lightened selfishness'* to its lowest terms, Butler turned 
 in the same spirit to the destruction of orthodox Vic- 
 torian science. We are less concerned for the moment 
 with his substance than with his character and manner 
 as scientific controversialist. *lf I cannot," he wrote, 
 "and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific 
 bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, 
 heave bricks into the middle of them." Though such 
 professional training as he had was for the church and 
 for painting, he seems never to have doubted that his 
 mother wit was sufficient equipment, supplemented by 
 reading in the British Museum, for the overthrow of 
 men like Darwin, Wallace and Huxley, who from boy- 
 hood had given their lives to collecting, studying and 
 experimenting with scientific data. "I am quite ready 
 to admit," he records, "that I am in a conspiracy of 
 one against men of science in general." Having felt 
 himself covertly sHghted in a book for which Darwin 
 was responsible, he vindictively assailed, not merely 
 the work, but also the character of Darwin and his 
 friends, who, naturally inferring that he was an un- 
 scrupulous "bounder" seeking notoriety, generally 
 ignored him 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 205 
 
 His first "contribution'' to evolutionary theory had 
 been a humorous skit, written in New Zealand, on the 
 evolution of machines, suggested by "The Origin of 
 Species," and later included in "Erewhon." To sup- 
 port this whimsy he found it useful to revive the aban- 
 doned "argument from design"; and mother wit, still 
 working whimsically, leaped to the conception that the 
 organs of our bodies are machines. Thereupon he 
 commenced serious scientific speculator, and produced 
 "Life and Habit," 1878; "Evolution Old and New," 
 1879; "Unconscious Memory," 1880; and "Luck or 
 Cunning," 1886. The germ of all his speculations, 
 contained in his first volume, is the notion of "the one- 
 ness of personality existing between parents and off- 
 spring up to the time that the offspring leaves the 
 parent's body"; thence develops his theory that the 
 offspring "unconsciously" remembers what happened 
 to the parents ; and thence his theory that a vitalistic 
 purposeful cunning, as opposed to the Darwinian 
 chance, is the significant factor in evolution. His 
 theory has something in common with current philo- 
 sophical speculation, and it is in part, as I understand, 
 a kind of adumbration, a shrewd guess, at the present 
 attitude of cytologists. It has thus entitled Butler to 
 half a dozen footnotes in a centenary volume on Dar- 
 win; but it hardly justifies his transference of Darwin's 
 laurels to Buffon^ Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin and him- 
 
206 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 self; nor does it justify his reiterated contention that 
 Darwin was a plagiarist, a fraud, a Pecksniff and a 
 liar. He swelled the ephemeral body of scientific 
 speculation ; but his contribution to the verified body of 
 science was negligible, and the injuries that he in- 
 flicted upon the scientific spirit were considerable. 
 
 For their symptomatic value, we must glance at 
 Butler's sallies into some other fields. He held as an 
 educational principle that it is hardly worth while to 
 study any subject till one is ready to use it. When in 
 his fifties he wished to write music, he took up for the 
 first time the study of counterpoint. Mr. Garnett 
 having inquired what subject Butler and Jones would 
 take up when they had finished "Narcissus," Butler said 
 that they "might write an oratorio on some sacred 
 subject"; and when Garnett asked whether they had 
 anything in particular in mind, he replied that they 
 were thinking of "The Woman Taken in Adultery." 
 In the same decade he cheerfully applied for the Slade 
 professorship of art at Cambridge ; and he took credit 
 for the rediscovery of a lost school of sculpture. 
 
 At the age of fifty-five he brushed up his Greek, 
 which he "had not wholly forgotten," and read the 
 "Odyssey" for the purposes of his oratorio, "Ulysses." 
 When he got to Circe it suddenly flashed upon him 
 that he was reading the work of a young woman! 
 Thereupon he produced his book, "The Authoress of 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 207 
 
 the Odyssey," with portrait of the authoress, Nausicaa, 
 identification of her birthplace in Sicily, which pleased 
 the Sicilians, and an account of the way in which she 
 wrote her poem. It was the most startling literary dis- 
 covery since Delia Bacon burst into the silent sea on 
 which Colonel Fabyan of the biliteral cypher is the 
 latest navigator. That the classical scholars laughed 
 at or ignored him did not shake his belief that the work 
 was as important as anything he had done. "Perhaps 
 it was," he would have remarked, if any one else had 
 written it. "I am a prose man," he wrote to Robert 
 Bridges, "and, except Homer and Shakespeare" — he 
 should have added Nausicaa — "I have read absolutely 
 nothing of English poetry and very little of English 
 prose." His inacquaintance with English poetry, how- 
 ever, did not embarrass him, when, two years after 
 bringing out his Sicilian authoress, he cleared up the 
 mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets. Nor did it pre- 
 vent his dismissing the skeptical Dr. Furnivall, after a 
 discussion at an A. B. C. shop, as a poor old incompe- 
 tent. "Nothing," said Alethea Pontifex, speaking for 
 her creator, "is well done nor worth doing unless, take 
 it all round, it has come pretty easily." The poor old 
 doctor, like the Greek scholars and the professional 
 men of science, had blunted his wits by too much 
 research. 
 
 Butler maintained that every man's work is a por- 
 
2o8 Stuart P. Sherman 
 
 trait of himself, and in his own case the features stand 
 out ruggedly enough. Why should any one see in this 
 infatuated pursuer of paradox a reincarnation of the 
 pagan wisdom ? In his small personal affairs he shows 
 a certain old-maidish tidiness and the prudence of an 
 experienced old bachelor, who manages his little pleas- 
 ures without scandal. But in his intellectual life what 
 vestige do we find of the Greek or even of the Roman 
 sobriety, poise and decorum? In one respect Butler 
 was conservative : he respected the established political 
 and economic order. But he respected it only because 
 it enabled him, without bestirring himself about his 
 bread and butter, to sit quietly in his rooms at Clifford's 
 Inn and invent attacks on every other form of ortho- 
 doxy. With a desire to be conspicuous only surpassed 
 by his desire to be original he worked out the central 
 Butlerian principle ; videlicet : The fact that all the best 
 qualified judges agree that a thing is true and valuable 
 establishes an overwhelming presumption that it is 
 valueless and false. With his feet firmly planted on 
 this grand radical maxim he employed his lively wit 
 with lawyer-like ingenuity to make out a case ao^ainst 
 family life, of which he was incapable; against imagi- 
 native love, of which he was ignorant ; against chivalry, 
 otherwise the conventions of gentlemen, which he had 
 but imperfectly learned; against Victorian men of let- 
 ters, whom, by his own account, he had never read; 
 
Diogenes of the Victorians 209 
 
 against altruistic morality and the substance of Chris- 
 tianity, which were repugnant to his selfishness and 
 other vices; against Victorian men of science, w^hose 
 researches he had never imitated; and against Eliza- 
 bethan and classical scholarship, which he took up in 
 an odd moment as one plays a game of solitaire before 
 going to bed. To his disciples he could not bequeath 
 his cleverness; but he left them his recipe for origi- 
 nality, his manners and his assurance, which has been 
 gathering compound interest ever since. In the origi- 
 nal manuscript of "Alps and Sanctuaries" he consigned 
 "Raffaele, along with Socrates, Virgil [the last two 
 displaced later by Plato and Dante], Marcus Aurelius 
 Antoninus, Goethe, Beethoven, and another , to limbo 
 as the Seven Humbugs of Christiandom." Who was 
 the unnamed seventh ? 
 
BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS 
 By H. M. ToMLiNsoN 
 
 I shall not forget with what a thrill of delis^ht I came upon 
 H. M. Tomlinson's Old Junk, the volume of essays from which 
 this is borrowed. One feels, in stumbling upon such a book, much 
 as some happy and astounded readers must have felt in 1878 
 when An Inland Voyage came out. It makes one wonder, sub- 
 mitting one's self to the moving music and magic of that prose, 
 so simple and yet so subtle in its flavor, whether poetry is not, 
 after all, an inferior and more mechanic form. "The cool 
 element of prose," that perfect phrase of Milton's, comes back 
 to mind. How direct and satisfying a passage to the mind Mr. 
 Tomlinson's paragraphs have. How they build and cumulate, 
 how the sentences shift, turn and move in delicate loops and 
 ridges under the blowing wind of thought, like the sand of the 
 dunes that he describes in one essay. And through it all, as 
 intangible but as real and beautifying as moonlight, there is the 
 pervading brightness of a particular way of looking at the world, 
 something for which we have no catchword, the illumination 
 of a spirit at once humorous, melancholy, shrewd, lovely and 
 humane. Somehow, when one is caught in the web of that ex- 
 quisite, considered prose, the awkward symbols of speech seem 
 transparent; we come close to a man's mind. 
 
 In Mr. Tomlinson's three books — The Sea and the Jungle 
 (1912), Old Junk (1920) and London River (1921) is revealed 
 one of the most sincere and perfect workmen .in contemporary 
 prose. 
 
 H. M. Tomlinson was born in 1873 ; among his early memories 
 he records: 'T was an office boy and a clerk among London's 
 ships, in the last days of the clippers. And I am forced to recall 
 some of the things — such as bookkeeping in a jam factory and 
 stoking on a tramp steamer." He joined the staff of the London 
 Morning Leader in 1904; which was later merged with the Daily 
 News, and to this journal he was attached for several years. 
 During the War he was a correspondent in France; at the 
 danger of incurring his anger (should he see this) I quote Mr. 
 S. K. Ratcliffe on this phase of his work: — "One who was the 
 friend of all, a sweet and fine spirit moving untouched amid the 
 ruin and terror, expressing itself everywhere with perfect sim- 
 plicity, and at times with a shattering candor." 
 
 In 1917 he became associate editor of the London Nation, 
 where, if you are interested, you may find his initials almost 
 weekly. 
 
 210 
 
Bed-Books and Night-Lights 2il 
 
 The rain flashed across the midnight window with 
 a myriad feet. There was a groan in outer darkness, 
 the voice of all nameless dreads. The nervous candle- 
 flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose 
 to a shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and 
 nearly left its white column. Out of the corners of 
 the room swarmed the released shadows. Black spec- 
 ters danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh air, 
 but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate 
 body of my little friend the candle-flame, the comrade 
 who ventures with me into the solitudes beyond mid- 
 night. I shut the window. 
 
 They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb. 
 What do they mean ? It cannot have the faintest glim- 
 mer of the real power of my candle. It would be as 
 right to express, in the same inverted and foolish com- 
 parison, the worth of ''those delicate sisters, the 
 Pleiades." That pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, ex- 
 quisitely remote in deepest night, in the profound 
 where light all but fails, has not the power of a sul- 
 phur match ; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though 
 tremulous on the limit of vision, and sometimes even 
 vanishing, it brings into distinction those distant and 
 difficult hints — hidden far behind all our verified 
 thoughts — which we rarely properly view. I should 
 like to know of any great arc-lamp which could do 
 that. So the star-like candle for me. No other light 
 
212 H. M. Tomlinson 
 
 follows so intimately an author's most ghostly sug- 
 gestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the 
 shades we are conquering, and sometimes look up from 
 the lucent page to contemplate the dark hosts of the 
 enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us ; as they 
 will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will 
 burn out. 
 
 As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light, 
 to assist its illumination, coarse lamps are useless. 
 They would douse the book. The light for such a 
 book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a 
 limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; 
 the solitary taper beside the only worshiper in a sanc- 
 tuary. That is why nothing can compare with the 
 intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a living 
 heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for 
 us alone, holding the gaunt and towering shadows at 
 bay. There the monstrqus specters stand in our mid- 
 night room, the advance guard of the darkness of 
 the world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready 
 to flood instantly and founder us in original gloom. 
 
 The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large 
 and wandering in torment. The rain shrieks across 
 the window. For a moment, for just a moment, the 
 sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. 
 The shadows leap out instantly. The little flame 
 recovers, and merely looks at its foe the darkness, and 
 
Bed-Books and Night-Lights 213 
 
 back to its own place goes the old enemy of light and 
 man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and 
 brave, a golden lily on a silver stem ! 
 
 "Almost any book does for a bed-book," a woman 
 once said to me. I nearly replied in a hurry that 
 almost any woman would do for a wife; but that is 
 not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her 
 idea was that the bed-book is soporific, and for that 
 reason she even advocated the reading of political 
 speeches. That would be a dissolute act. Certainly 
 you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! 
 You would enter into sleep with your eyes shut. It 
 would be like dying, not only unshriven, but in the 
 act of guilt. 
 
 What book shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or 
 Dante, or Tolstoy, or a Blue Book for such an occa- 
 sion ! I cannot. They will not do — they are no good 
 to me. I am not writing about you. I know those 
 men I have named are transcendent, the greater lights. 
 But I am bound to confess at times they bore me. 
 Though their feet are clay and on earth, just as ours, 
 their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds. 
 For my part, they are too big for bed-fellows. I 
 cannot see myself, carrying my feeble and restricted 
 glim, following (in pajamas) the statuesque figure of 
 the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of 
 austere pity, the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades! 
 
214 ^- ^' Tomlinson 
 
 Not for me; not after midnight! Let those go who 
 
 like it. 
 
 As for the Russian, vast and disquieting, I refuse to 
 leave all, including the blankets and the pillow, to fol- 
 low him into the gelid tranquillity of the upper air, 
 where even the colors are prismatic spicules of ice, to 
 brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball below 
 called earth. I know it is my world also; but I can- 
 not help that. It is too late, after a busy day, and at 
 that hour, to begin overtime on fashioning a new and 
 better planet out of cosmic dust. By breakfast-time, 
 nothing useful would have been accomplished. We 
 should all be where we were the night before. The 
 job is far too long, once the pillow is nicely set. 
 
 For the truth is, there are times when we are too 
 weary to remain attentive and thankful under the im- 
 proving eye, kindly but severe, of the seers. There 
 are times when we do not wish to be any better than 
 we are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. 
 At midnight, away with such books! As for the 
 literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple of Let- 
 ters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an 
 acolyte to swinge them a good hard one with an in- 
 cense-burner, and cut and run, for a change, to some- 
 thing outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time when 
 one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the 
 Great Works which every gentleman ought to have 
 
Bed-Books and Night-Lights 215 
 
 read, but which some of us have not. For there is 
 almost as much clotted nonsense written about litera- 
 ture as there is about theology. 
 
 There are few books which go with midnight, soli- 
 tude, and a candle. It is much easier to say what 
 does not please us then than what is exactly right. 
 The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by 
 a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent 
 at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level 
 of mediocrity to-day; we are all too infernally clever. 
 The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the 
 candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a 
 morbid body turns to drink. The late candle throws 
 its beams a great distance; and its rays make trans- 
 parent much that seemed massy and important. The 
 mind at rest beside that light, when the house is asleep, 
 and the consequential affairs of the urgent world have 
 diminished to their right proportions because w^e see 
 them distantly from another and a more tranquil place 
 in the heavens where duty, honor, witty arguments, 
 controversial logic on great questions, appear such as 
 will leave hardly a trace of fossil in the indurated mud 
 which presently will cover them — the mind then cer- 
 tainly smiles at cleverness. 
 
 For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired, 
 the mind is white and lucid, like that of a man from 
 whom a fever has abated. It is bare of illusions. It 
 
21 6 H, M. To ml ins on 
 
 has a sharp focus, small and starlike, as a clear and 
 lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from 
 which all have gone but one. A book which ap- 
 proaches that light in the privacy of that place must 
 come, as it were, with honest and open pages. 
 
 I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave 
 and great, in those sentences which are as brave as 
 pennants in a breeze, is comfortable and sedative. 
 One's own secret and awkward convictions, never ex- 
 pressed because not lawful and because it is hard to get 
 words to bear them lightly, seem then to be heard aloud 
 in the mild, easy, and confident diction of an immortal 
 whose voice has the blitheness of one who has watched, 
 amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and 
 secret debate on the best way to keep the gilt and 
 trappings on the body of the evil they have created. 
 
 That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the 
 light of the intimate candle. Have you read lately 
 again his Voyage to the Houyhnhnms? Try it alone 
 again in quiet. Swift knew all about our contemporary 
 troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called 
 a misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver 
 in the select intimacy of midnight I am forced to 
 wonder, not at Swift's hatred of mankind, not at his 
 satire of his fellows, not at the strange and terrible 
 nature of this genius who thought that much of us, but 
 how it is that after such a wise and sorrowful reveal- 
 
Bed-Books and Night-Lights 217 
 
 ing of the things we insist on doing, and our reasons 
 for doing them, and what happens after we have done 
 them, men do not change. It does seem impossible 
 that society could remain unaltered, after the surprise 
 its appearance should have caused it as it saw its face 
 in that ruthless mirror. We point instead to the fact 
 that Swift lost his mind in the end. Well, that is not 
 a matter for surprise. 
 
 Such books, and France's "Isle of Penguins," are not 
 disturbing as bed-books. They resolve one's agitated 
 and outraged soul, relieving it with some free expres- 
 sion for the accusing and questioning thoughts en- 
 gendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest 
 immediately to hand in the book-shelf by the bed. 
 They depend on the kind of day one has had. Sterne is 
 closer. One would rather be transported as far as 
 possible from all the disturbances of earth's envelope 
 of clouds, and "Tristram Shandy" is sure to be found 
 in the sun. 
 
 But best of all books for midnight are travel books. 
 Once I was lost every night for months with Doughty 
 in the "Arabia Deserta." He is a craggy author. A long 
 course of the ordinary facile stuff, such as one gets in 
 the Press every day, thinking it is English, sends one 
 thoughtless and headlong among the bitter herbs and 
 stark boulders of Doughty's burning and spacious ex- 
 panse; only to get bewildered, and the shins broken, 
 
21 8 H, M. Tomlinson 
 
 and a great fatigue at first, in a strange land of fierce 
 sun, hunger, glittering spar, ancient plutonic rock, and 
 very Adam himself. But once you are acclimatized, 
 and know the language — it takes time — there is no 
 more London after dark, till, a wanderer returned from 
 a forgotten land, you emerge from the interior of 
 Arabia on the Red Sea coast again, feeling as though 
 you had lost touch with the world you used to know. 
 And if that doesn't mean good writing I know of no 
 other test. 
 
 Because once there was a father whose habit it was 
 to read with his boys nightly some chapters of the 
 Bible — and cordially they hated that habit of his — I 
 have that Book too; though I fear I have it for no 
 reason that he, the rigid old faithful, would be pleased 
 to hear about. He thought of the future when he 
 read the Bible; I read it for the past. The familiar 
 names, the familiar rhythm of its words, its wonder- 
 ful well-remembered stories of things long past — like 
 that of Esther, one of the best in English — the elo- 
 quent anger of the prophets for the people then who 
 looked as though they were alive, but were really dead 
 at heart, all is solace and home to me. And now I 
 think of it, it is our home and solace that we w^ant in 
 a bed-book. 
 
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE 
 By Louise Imogen Guiney 
 
 Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), one of the rarest poets 
 and most delicately poised essayists this country has reared, has 
 been hitherto scantily appreciated by the omnipotent General 
 Reader. Her dainty spoor is perhaps too lightly trodden upon 
 earth to be followed by the throng. And yet one has faith in 
 the imperishability of such a star-dust track. This lovely and 
 profound "Precept of Peace" is peculiarly characteristic of her, 
 and reminds one of the humorous tranquillity with which she 
 faced the complete failure (financially speaking) of almost all her 
 books. There was a certain sadness in learning, when the news 
 of her death came, that many of our present-day critical San- 
 hedrim had never even become aware of her name. 
 
 There is no space, in this brief note, to do justice to her. The 
 student will refer to the newly published memoir by her friend, 
 Alice Brown. 
 
 She was born in Boston in 1861, daughter of General Patrick 
 Guiney who fought in the Civil War. From 1894-97 she was 
 postmistress in Auburndale, Mass. Her later years were spent 
 in England, mostly at Oxford : the Bodleian Library was a candle 
 and she the ecstatic moth. 
 
 A CERTAIN sort of volutitary abstraction is the oldest 
 and choicest of social attitudes. In France, where all 
 esthetic discoveries are made, it was crowned long 
 ago: la sainte indifference is, or may be, a cult, and 
 le saint indifferent an articled practitioner. For the 
 Gallic mind, brought up at the knee of a consistent 
 paradox, has found that not to appear concerned about 
 a desired good is the only method to possess it; full 
 happiness is given, in other words, to the very man 
 who will never sue for it. This is a secret neat as that 
 
 219 
 
220 Louise Imogen Guiney 
 
 of the Sphinx : to "go softly" among events, yet domi- 
 neer them. Without fear : not because we are brave, 
 but because we are exempt; we bear so charmed a life 
 that not even Baldur's mistletoe can touch us to harm 
 us. Without solicitude: for the essential thing is 
 trained, falcon-like, to light from above upon our 
 wrists, and it has become with us an automatic motion 
 to open the hand, and drop what appertains to us no 
 longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the shorter stick 
 of celery, or 
 
 "The friends to whom we had no natural right. 
 The homes that were not destined to be ours," 
 
 it is all one: let it fall away! since only so, by deple- 
 tions, can we buy serenity and a blithe mien. It is 
 diverting to study, at the feet of Antisthenes and of 
 Socrates his master, how many indispensables man can 
 live without; or how many he can gather together, 
 make over into luxuries, and so abrogate them. 
 Thoreau somewhere expresses himself as fuU of divine 
 pity for the "mover," who on May-Day clouds city 
 streets with his melancholy household caravans: fatal 
 impedimenta for an immortal. No : furniture is clearly 
 a superstition. "I have little, I want nothing: all my 
 treasure is in Minerva's tower." Not that the novice 
 may not accumulate. Rather, let him collect beetles 
 
The Precept of Peace 221 
 
 and Venetian interrogation-marks ; if so be that he may 
 distinguish what is truly extrinsic to him, and bestow 
 these toys, eventually, on the children o£ Satan who 
 clamor at the monastery gate. Of all his store, uncon- 
 sciously increased, he can always part with sixteen- 
 seventeenths, by way of concession to his individuality, 
 and think the subtraction so much concealing marble 
 chipped from the heroic figure of himself. He would 
 be a donor from the beginning; before he can be 
 seen to own, he will disencumber, and divide. Strange 
 and fearful is his discovery, amid the bric-a-brac of 
 the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit, 
 is for him alone. He would fain beg oif from the 
 acquisition, and shake the touch of the tangible from 
 his imperious wings. It is not enough to cease to 
 strive for personal favor; your true indifferent is 
 Early Franciscan : caring not to have, he fears to hold. 
 Things useful need never become to him things desir- 
 able. Towards all commonly-accounted sinecures, he 
 bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walk- 
 ing a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered de- 
 tentions. "I enjoy life," says Seneca, "because I am 
 ready to leave it." Meanwhile, they who act with too 
 jealous respect for their morrow of civilized comfort, 
 reap only indigestion, and crow's-foot traceries for 
 their deluded eye-corners. 
 
 Now nothing is farther from le saint indifferent than 
 
222 Louise Imogen Guiney 
 
 cheap indifferentism, so-called : the sickness of sopho^ 
 mores. His business is to hide, not to display, his lack 
 of interest in fripperies. It is not he who looks languid, 
 and twiddles his thumbs for sick misplacedness, like 
 Achilles among girls. On the contrary, he is a smiling 
 industrious elf, monstrous attentive to the canons of 
 polite society. In relation to others, he shows what 
 passes for animation and enthusiasm; for at all times 
 his character is founded on control of these qualities, 
 not on the absence of them. It flatters his sense of 
 superiority that he may thus pull wool about the ears 
 of joint and several. He has so strong a will that it 
 can be crossed and counter-crossed, as by himself, so 
 by a dozen outsiders, without a break in his apparent 
 phlegm. He has gone through volition, and come out 
 at the other side of it; everything with him is a specific 
 act : he has no habits. Le saint indifferent is a dramatic 
 wight : he loves to refuse your proffered six per cent, 
 when, by a little haggling, he may obtain three-and-a- 
 half. For so he gets away with his own mental proc- 
 esses virgin : it is inconceivable to you that, being sane, 
 he should so comport himself. Amiable, perhaps, only 
 by painful propulsions and sore vigilance, let him ap- 
 pear the mere inheritor of eas^ good-nature. Unselfish 
 out of sheer pride, and ever eager to claim the slippery 
 side of the pavement, or the end cut of the roast (on 
 the secret ground, be it understood, that he is not as 
 
The Precept of Peace 223 
 
 Capuan men, who wince at trifles), let him have his 
 ironic reward in passing for one whose physical con- 
 noisseurship is yet in the raw. That sympathy which 
 his rule forbids his devoting to the usual objects, he 
 expends, with some bravado, upon their opposites; for 
 he would fain seem a decent partizan of some sort, 
 not what he is, a bivalve intelligence, Tros Tyriusque. 
 He is known here and there, for instance, as valorous 
 in talk ; yet he is by nature a solitary, and, for the 
 most part, somewhat less communicative than 
 
 ''The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride, 
 Lonely and terrible, on the Andean height." 
 
 Imagining nothing idler than words in the face of 
 grave events, he condoles and congratulates with the 
 genteelest air in the world. In short, while there is 
 anything expected of him, while there are spectators 
 to be fooled, the stratagems of the fellow prove inex- 
 haustible. It is only when he is quite alone that he 
 drops his jaw, and stretches his legs; then heigho! 
 arises like a smoke, and envelopes him becomingly, the 
 beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of 
 poetic boredom, of ''the Oxford manner." 
 
 "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!" sighed 
 Hamlet of this mortal outlook. As it came from him 
 in the beginning, that plaint, in its sincerity, can come 
 
224 Louise Imogen Guiney 
 
 only from the man of culture, who feels about him 
 vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face 
 of creation is but comparative and symbolic. Nor will 
 he breathe it in the common ear, where it may woo 
 misapprehensions, and breed ignorant rebellion. The 
 unlettered must ever love or hate what is nearest him, 
 and, for lack of perspective, think his own fist the size 
 of the sun. The social prizes, which, with mellowed 
 observers, rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order of 
 desirability, such as wealth and a foothold in affairs, 
 seem to him first and sole; and to them he clings like 
 a barnacle. But to our indifferent, nothing is so vulgar 
 as close suction. He will never tighten his fxUgers on 
 loaned opportunity ; he is a gentleman, the hero of the 
 habitually relaxed grasp. A light unprejudiced hold 
 on his profits strikes him as decent and comely, though 
 his true artistic pleasure is still in "fallings from us, 
 vanishings." It costs him little to loose and to forego, 
 to unlace his tentacles, and from the many who push 
 hard behind, to retire, as it were, on a never-guessed-at 
 competency, "richer than untempted kings." He would 
 not be a life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower. 
 While the tranquil Sabine Farm is his delight, well he 
 knows that on the dark trail ahead of him, even Sabine 
 Farms are not sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to 
 play the guest under his own cedars, and, with disci- 
 plinary intent, goes often from them ; and, hearing his 
 
The Precept of Peace 225 
 
 heart-strings snap the third night he is away, rejoices 
 that he is again a freedman. Where his foot is planted 
 (though it root not anywhere) , he calls that spot home. 
 No Unitarian in locality, it follows that he is the best 
 of travelers, tangential merely, and pleased with each 
 new vista of the human Past. He sometimes wishes 
 his understanding less, that he might itch deliciously 
 with a prejudice. With cosmic congruities, great and 
 general forces, he keeps, all along, a tacit understand- 
 ing, such as one has with beloved relatives at a dis- 
 tance ; and his finger, airily inserted in his outer pocket, 
 is really upon the pulse of eternity. His vocation, how- 
 ever, is to bury himself in the minor and immediate 
 task; and from his intent manner, he gets confounded, 
 promptly and permanently, with the victims of com- 
 mercial ambition. 
 
 The true use of the much-praised Lucius Gary, Vis- 
 count Falkland, has hardly been apprehended: he is 
 simply the patron saint of indifferents. From first to 
 last, almost alone in that discordant time, he seems to 
 have heard far-off resolving harmonies, and to have 
 been rapt away with foreknowledge. Battle, to which 
 all knights were bred, was penitential to him. It was 
 but a childish means: and to what end? He mean- 
 while — and no man carried his will in better abeyance 
 to the scheme of the universe — wanted no diligence in 
 camp or council. Cares sat handsomely on him who 
 
226 Louise Imogen Guiney 
 
 cared not at all, who won small comfort from the 
 cause which his conscience finally espoused. He 
 labored to be a doer, to stand well with observers ; and 
 none save his intimate friends read his agitation and 
 profound weariness. "I am so much taken notice of," 
 he writes, "for an impatient desire for peace, that it 
 is necessary I should hkewise make it appear how it is 
 not out of fear for the utmost hazard of war.'' And 
 so, driven from the ardor he had to the simulation of 
 the ardor he lacked, loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of 
 two transient opinions, and inly impartial as a star, 
 Lord Falkland fell: the young never-to-be-forgotten 
 martyr of Newburg field. The imminent deed he 
 made a work of art; and the station of the mo- 
 ment the only post of honor. Life and death may be 
 all one to such a man: but he will at least take the 
 noblest pains to discriminate between Tweedledum and 
 Tweedledee, if he has to write a book about the varia- 
 tions of their antennae. And like the Carolian ex- 
 emplar is the disciple. The indifferent is a good thinker, 
 or a good fighter. He is no "immartial minion," as 
 dear old Chapman suffers Hector to call Tydides. 
 Nevertheless, his sign-manual is content with humble 
 and stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the Hima- 
 layas of life affects him, very palpably, as "tall talk." 
 He deals not with things, but with the impressions and 
 analogies of things. The material counts for nothing 
 
The Precept of Peace 227 
 
 with him : he has moulted it away. Not so sure of the 
 identity of the higher course of action as he is of his 
 consecrating dispositions, he feels that he may make 
 heaven again, out of sundries, as he goes. Shall not a 
 beggarly duty, discharged with perfect temper, land 
 him in "the out-courts of Glory," quite as successfully 
 as a grand Sunday-school excursion to front the cruel 
 Paynim foe ? He thinks so. Experts have thought so 
 before him. Francis Drake, with the national alarum 
 instant in his ears, desired first to win at bowls, on 
 the Devon sward, "and afterwards to settle with the 
 Don.*' No one will claim a buccaneering hero for an 
 indifferent, however. The Jesuit novices were ball- 
 playing almost at that very time, three hundred years 
 ago, when some too speculative companion, figuring the 
 end of the world in a few moments (with just leisure 
 enough, between, to be shriven in chapel, according to 
 his own thrifty mind), asked Louis of Gonzaga how 
 he, on his part, should employ the precious interval. 
 "I should go on with the game," said the most inno- 
 cent and most ascetic youth among them. But to cite 
 the behavior of any of the saints is to step over the 
 playful line allotted. Indifference of the mundane 
 brand is not to be confounded with their detachment, 
 which is emancipation wrought in the soul, and the 
 ineffable efBorescence of the Christian spirit. Like 
 most supernatural virtues, it has a laic shadow; the 
 
228 Louise Imogen Guiney 
 
 counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, is one not 
 only of perfection, but also of polity. A very little 
 nonadhesion to common affairs, a little reserve of un- 
 concern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide the 
 moral immunity which is the only real estate. The 
 indifferent believes in storms : since tales of shipwreck 
 encompass him. But once among his own kind, he 
 wonders that folk should be circumvented by merely 
 extraneous powers! His favorite catch, woven in 
 among escaped dangers, rises through the roughest 
 weather, and daunts it : 
 
 "Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners, 
 For we be come into a quiet rode." 
 
 No slave to any vicissitude, his imagination is, on the 
 contrary, the cheerful obstinate tyrant of all that is. 
 He lives, as Keats once said of himself, "in a thousand 
 worlds," withdrawing at will from one to another, 
 often curtailing his circumference to enlarge his 
 liberty. His universe is a universe of balls, like those 
 which the cunning Oriental carvers make out of ivory; 
 each entire surface perforated with the same delicate 
 pattern, each moving prettily and inextricably within 
 the other, and all but the outer one impossible to 
 handle. In some such innermost asylum the right sort 
 of dare-devil sits smiling, while men rage or weep. 
 
WINTER MIST 
 By Robert Palfrey Utter 
 
 Robert Palfrey Utter was born in 1875, in Olympia, Wash- 
 ington. He graduated from Harvard (I am sorry there are so 
 many Harvard men in this book: I didn't know they were Har- 
 vard men until too late) in 1898 and took his Ph.D. there in 
 1906. After a varied experience, including editorial work on 
 the Youth's Companion, reporting on the New York Evening 
 Post, ranching in Mexico and graduate study at Harvard, he 
 went to Amherst, 1906-18, as associate professor of English. He 
 was on the faculty of the A. E. F. University at Beaune, France, 
 1919; and in 1920 became associate professor of English at the 
 University of California. 
 
 Mr. Utter has contributed largely to the magazines, and has 
 published Guide to Good English (1914), Every-Day Words and 
 Their Uses (1916), and Every-Day Pronunciation (1918). 
 
 Former students of his at Amherst have told me of the last- 
 ing stimulus his teaching has given them : that he can beautifully 
 practise what he preaches of the art of writing, this essay shows. 
 
 From a magazine with a rather cynical cover I 
 learned very recently that for pond skating the proper 
 costume is bro\vn homespun with a fur collar on the 
 jacket, whereas for private rinks one wears a gray 
 herringbone suit and taupe-colored alpine. Oh, bar- 
 ren years that I have been a skater, and no one told 
 me of this ! And here's another thing. I was patiently 
 trying to acquire a counter turn under the idle gaze 
 of a hockey player who had no better business till the 
 others arrived than to watch my efforts. "What I 
 don't see about that game,'* he said at last, *'is who 
 
 229 
 
230 Robert Palfrey Utter 
 
 j^ins ?" It had never occurred to me to ask. He looked 
 bored, and I remembered that the pictures in the mag- 
 azine showed the wearers of the careful costumes for 
 rink and pond skating as having rather blank eyes 
 that looked inimitably bored. I have hopes of the 
 "rocker" and the "mohawk" ; I might acquire a proper 
 costume for skating on a small river if I could learn 
 what it is; but aJjOTfidLlook — why, even hockey does 
 not borq me, unless I stop to watch it. I don't wonder 
 that those who play it look bored. Even Alexander, 
 who played a more imaginative game than hockey, 
 was bored — poor fellow, he should have taken U2 fancy 
 .skating in his youth; I never heard of a human being 
 who pretended to a complete conquest of it. 
 
 I like pond skating best by moonlight. The hollow 
 among the hills will always have a bit of mist about 
 it, let the sky be clear as it may. The moonlight, which 
 seems so lucid and brilliant when you look up, is all 
 pearl and smoke round the pond and the hills. The 
 shore that was like iron under your heel as you came 
 down to the ice is vague, when you look back at it from 
 the center of the pond, as the memory of a dream. 
 The motion is like flying in a dream; you float free 
 and the world floats under you ; your velocity is with- 
 out effort and without accomplishment, for, speed as 
 you may, you leave nothing behind and approach noth- 
 ing. You look upward. The mist is overhead now; 
 
Winter Mist 231 
 
 you see the moon in a * 'hollow halo" at the bottom of 
 an "icy crystal cup," and you yourself are in just such 
 another. The mist, palely opalescent, drives past her 
 out of nothing into nowhere. Like yourself, she is the 
 center of a circle of vague limit and vaguer content, 
 where passes a swift, ceaseless stream of impres- 
 sion through a faintly luminous halo of conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 If by moonlight the mist plays upon the emotions 
 like faint, bewitching music, m sunlight it is scarcely 
 less. More often than not when. I go for my skating 
 to our cosy little river, a winding mile from the mill- 
 dam to the railroad trestle, the hills are clothed in 
 silver mist which frames them in vignettes with blurred 
 edges. The tone is that of Japanese paintings on white 
 silk, their color showing soft and dull through the 
 frost-powder with which the air is filled. At the mill- 
 dam the hockey players furiously rage together, but 
 I heed them not, and in a moment am beyond the first ^T 
 bend, where their clamor comes softened on the air / 
 like that of a distant convention of politic crows. \ Thefr- 
 silver powder has fallen on the ice, just enough to 
 cover earlier tracings and leave me a fresh plate to 
 etch with grapevines and arabesques. The stream 
 winds ahead like an unbroken road, striped across 
 with soft-edged shadows of violet, indigo, and 
 lavender. On one side it is bordered with leaning 
 
232 Robert Palfrey Utter 
 
 birch, oak, maple, hickory, and occasional groups of 
 hemlocks under which the very air seems tinged with 
 green. On the other, rounded masses of scrub oak 
 and alder roll back from the edge of the ice like 
 clouds of reddish smoke. The river narrows and turns, 
 then spreads into a swamp, where I weave my curves 
 round the straw-colored tussocks. Here, new as the 
 snow is, there are earlier tracks than mine. A crow 
 has traced his parallel hieroglyph, alternate footprints 
 with long dashes where he trailed his middle toe as he 
 lifted his foot and his spur as he brought it down. 
 Under a low shrub that has hospitably scattered its 
 seed is a dainty, close-wrought embroidery of tiny bird 
 feet in irregular curves woven into a circular pattern. 
 A silent glide towards the bank, where among bare 
 twigs little forms flit and swing with low conversa- 
 tional notes, brings me in company with a working 
 crew of pine siskins, methodically rifling seed cones 
 of birch and alder, chattering sotto voce the while. 
 Under a leaning hemlock the writing on the snow 
 tells of a squirrel that dropped from the lowest branch, 
 hopped aimlessly about for a few yards, then went 
 up the bank. Farther on, where the river narrows 
 again, a flutter-headed rabbit crossing at top speed 
 has made a line seemingly as free from frivolous in- 
 direction as if it had been defined by all the ponder- 
 osities of mathematics. There is no pursuing track; 
 
Winter Mist 233 
 
 was it his own shadow he fled, or the shadow of a 
 hawk? 
 
 The mist now lies along the base of the hills, leav- 
 ing the upper ridges almost imperceptibly veiled and 
 the rounded tops faintly softened. The snowy slopes 
 are etched with brush and trees so fine and soft that 
 they remind me of Diirer's engravings, the fur of 
 Saint Jerome's lion, the cock's feathers in the coat of 
 arms with the skull. From behind the veil of the 
 southernmost hill comes a faint note as 
 
 From undiscoverable lips that blow 
 An immaterial horn. 
 
 It is the first far premonition of the noon train; I 
 pause and watch long for the next sign. At last I 
 hear its throbbing, which ceases as it pauses at the 
 flag station under the hill. There the invisible loco- 
 motive shoots a column of silver vapor above the sur- 
 face of the mist, breaking in rounded clouds at the 
 top, looking like nothing so much as the photograph 
 of the explosion of a submarine mine, a titanic out- 
 burst of force in static pose, a geyser of atomized 
 water standing like a frosted elm tree. Then quick 
 puffs of dusky smoke, the volley of which does not 
 reach my ear till the train has stuck its black head out 
 of fairyland and become a prosaic reminder of dinner. 
 
234 Robert Palfrey Utter 
 
 High on its narrow trestle it leaps across my little 
 river and disappears between the sandbanks. Far 
 behind it^ the mist is again spreading into its even 
 layers./ Silence is renewed, and I can hear the musical 
 creaking of four starlings in an apple tree as they 
 eviscerate a few rotten apples on the upper branches^ 
 I turn and spin down the curves and reaches of the 
 river without delaying for embroideries or arabesques. 
 At the mill-dam the hockey game still rages ; the players 
 take no heed of the noon train. 
 
 Let Zal and Rustum bluster as they will, 
 Or Hatim call to supper . . . 
 
 Their minds and eyes are intent on a battered disk of 
 hard rubber. I begin to think I have misjudged them 
 when I consider what effort of imagination must be 
 involved in the concentration of the faculties on such 
 an object, transcending the call of hunger and the lure 
 of beauty. Is it to them as is to the mystic "the great 
 syllable Om** whereby he attains Nirvana? I cannot 
 attain it; I can but wonder what the hockey players 
 win one-half so precious as the stuff they miss. 
 
TRIVIA 
 By Logan Pearsall Smith 
 
 It would be extravagant to claim that Pearsall Smith's Trivia, 
 the remarkable little book from which these miniature essays 
 are extracted, is well known : it is too daintily, fragile and absurd 
 and sophisticated to appeal to a very large public. But it has 
 a cohort of its own devotees and fanatics, and since its publi- 
 cation in 1917 it has become a sort of password in a secret 
 brotherhood or intellectual Suicide Club. I say suicide advisedly, 
 for Mr. Smith's irony is gUtteringly edged. Its incision is so 
 keen that the reader is often unaware the razor edge has turned 
 against himself until he perceives the wound to be fatal. 
 
 Pearsall Smith was, in a way, one of the Men of the Nineties. 
 But he had Repressions — (an excellent thing to have, brothers. 
 Most of the great literature is founded on judicious repres- 
 sions). He came of an excellent old intellectual Quaker family 
 down in the Philadelphia region. His father (if we remember 
 rightly) was one of Walt Whitman's staunchest friends in the 
 Camden days. But when the strong wine of the Nineties was 
 foaming in the vats and noggins, Mr. Smith (so we imagine 
 it, at least) was still too close to that "guarded education in 
 morals and manners" that he had had^ at Haver ford College, 
 Pennsylvania (and further tinctured with docility at Harvard 
 and Balliol) to give full rein to his inward gush of hilarious 
 satirics. Like a Strong Silent Man he held in that wellspring 
 of champagne and mercury until many many years later. When 
 it came out (in 1902 he first began to print his Trivia, privately; 
 the book was published by Doubleday in IQ17) it sparkled all 
 the more tenderly for its long cellarage. 
 
 But we must be statistical. Logan Pearsall Smith was born at 
 Melville, N. J., in 1865. As a boy he lived in Philadelphia and 
 Germantown (do you know Germantown? it is a foothill of 
 that mountain range whereof Parnassus and Olivet are twin 
 peaks) and was three years at Haverford in the class of '85. 
 He went to Harvard for a year, then to Balliol College, Oxford, 
 where he took his degree in 1893. Ever since then, eheu, he 
 has lived in England. 
 
 Stonehenge 
 They sit there for ever on the dim horizon of my 
 mind, that Stonehenge circle of elderly disapproving 
 
 23s 
 
236 Logan Pear sail Smith 
 
 Faces — Faces of the Uncles and Schoolmasters and 
 Tutors who frowned on my youth. 
 
 In the bright center and sunlight I leap, I caper, 
 I dance my dance ; but when I look up, I see they are 
 not deceived. For nothing ever placates them, noth- 
 ing ever moves to a look of approval that ring of bleak, 
 old, contemptuous Faces. 
 
 The Stars 
 
 Battling my way homeward one dark night against 
 the v/ind and rain, a sudden gust, stronger than the 
 others, drove me back into the shelter of a tree. But 
 soon the Western sky broke open ; the illumination of 
 the Stars poured down from behind the dispersing 
 clouds. 
 
 I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they 
 filled the night with their soft lustre. So I went my 
 way accompanied by them ; Arcturus followed me, and 
 becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses, 
 and then emerged triumphant, Lord of the Western 
 Sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own 
 footsteps, my thoughts were among the Constellations. 
 I was one of the Princes of the starry Universe; in 
 me also there was something that was not insignificant 
 and mean and of no account. 
 
Trivia 237 
 
 The Spider 
 
 What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I 
 call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve 
 choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating 
 froth and refuse? 
 
 No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, 
 insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in 
 every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrcps and dead 
 flies. And at its center, pondering for ever the Prob- 
 lem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and 
 uncanny Soul. 
 
 L'OiSEAU Bleu 
 
 What is it, I have more than once asked myself, 
 what is it that I am looking for in my walks about 
 London ? Sometimes it seems to me as if I were fol- 
 lowing a Bird, a bright Bird that sings sweetly as it 
 floats about from one place to another. 
 
 When I find myself, however, among persons of 
 middle age and settled principles, see them moving 
 regularly to their offices — ^what keeps them going? I 
 ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my 
 Bird. 
 
 There is though a Philosophic Doctrine — I studied 
 it at College, and I know that many serious people 
 
238 Logan Pearsall Smith 
 
 believe it — which maintains that all men, in spite of 
 appearances and pretensions, all live alike for Pleas- 
 ure. This theory certainly brings portly, respected 
 persons very near to me. Indeed, with a sense of low 
 complicity, I have sometimes watched a Bishop. Was 
 he, too, on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing 
 his Bird? 
 
 I See The World 
 
 "But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world,*' 
 my cousins said. 
 
 Now though I do go sometimes to the parties to 
 which I am now and then invited, I find, as a mattei^- 
 of fact, that I get really much more pleasure by look- 
 ing in at windows, and have a way of my own of 
 seeing the World. And of summer evenings, when 
 motors hurry through the late twilight, and the great 
 houses take on airs of inscrutable expectation, I go 
 owling out through the dusk; and wandering toward 
 the West, lose my way in unknown streets — an un- 
 known City of revels. And when a door opens and a 
 bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets un- 
 rolled by powdered footmen, I can easily think her 
 some great Courtezan, or some half -believed Duchess, 
 hurrying to card-tables and lit candles and strange 
 scenes of joy. I like to see that there are still splendid 
 people on this flat earth; and at dances, standing in 
 
Trivia 239 
 
 the street with the crowd, and stirred by the music, 
 the lights, the rushing sound of voices, I think the 
 Ladies as beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes 
 of light past our rows of vagabond faces; the young 
 men look like Lords in novels; and if (it has once or 
 twice happened) people I know go by me, they strike 
 me as changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when 
 on hot nights windows are left open, and I can look 
 in at Dinner Parties, as I peer through lace curtains 
 and window-flowers at the silver, the women's shoul- 
 ders, the shimmer of their jewels, and the divine atti- 
 tudes of their heads as they lean. and listen, I imagine 
 extraordinary intrigues and unheard-of wines and pas- 
 sions. 
 
 The Church of England 
 
 I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there 
 that Sunday afternoon, in the Palladian interior of the 
 London Church, and listened to the unexpressive voices 
 chanting the correct service, I felt a comfortable as- 
 surance that we were in no danger of being betrayed 
 into any unseemly manifestations of religious fervor. 
 We had not gathered together at that performance to 
 abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark 
 Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks 
 and miracles and sinister hocus-pocus ; but to pay our 
 duty to a highly respected Anglican First Cause — un- 
 
240 Logan Pear sail Smith 
 
 demonstrative, gentlemanly, and conscientious — whom, 
 >vithout loss of self-respect, we could decorously praise. 
 
 Consolation 
 
 The other day, depressed on the Underground, I 
 tried to cheer myself by thinking over the joys of our 
 human lot. But there wasn't one of them for which 
 I seemed to care a button — ^not Wine, nor Friendship, 
 nor Eating, nor Making Love, nor the Consciousness 
 of Virtue. Was it worth while then going up in a 
 lift into a world that had nothing less trite to offer? 
 
 Then I thought of reading — the nice and subtle 
 happiness of reading. This was enough, this joy not 
 dulled by Age, this polite and tmpunished vice, this 
 selfish, serene, life-long intoxication. 
 
 The Kaleidoscope 
 
 I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and 
 musings, a curious collection of little landscapes and 
 pictures, shining and fading for no reason. Sometimes 
 they are views in no way remarkable — the corner of 
 a road, a heap of stones, an old gate. But there are 
 many charming pictures too : as I read, between my 
 eyes and book, the Moon sheds down on harvest fields 
 her chill of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the 
 leaves falling, or swept in heaps; and storms blow 
 among my thoughts, with the rain beating for ever on 
 
Trivia 241 
 
 the fields. Then Winter's upward glare of snow ap- 
 pears ; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the 
 windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and 
 youths bathing in Summer's golden heats. 
 
 And as I walk about, certain places haunt me; a 
 cathedral rises above a dark blue foreign town, the 
 color of ivory in the sunset light; now I find myself 
 in a French garden, full of lilacs and bees, and shut-in 
 sunshine, with the Mediterranean lounging and wash- 
 ing outside its walls; now in a little college library, with 
 busts, and the green reflected light of Oxford lawns — 
 and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the familiar 
 Oxford hours. 
 
 The Poplar 
 
 There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin 
 foliage floats high in the summer air. The thrush 
 sings in it, and blackbirds, who fill the late, decorative 
 sunshine with a shimmer of golden sound. There the 
 nightingale finds her green cloister; and on those 
 branches sometimes, like a great fruit, hangs the lemon- 
 colored Moon. In the glare of August, when all the 
 world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze 
 in those cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of 
 water, among its lightly-hung leaves. 
 
 But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading 
 books. 
 
THE FISH REPORTER 
 By Robert Cortes Holliday 
 
 This informal commentary on the picturesque humors of trade 
 journalism is typical of Mr. Holliday's great skill in capturing 
 the actual vibration of urban life. He has something of George 
 Gissing's taste for the actuality of city scenes and characters, 
 with rather more pungent idiosyncrasy in his manner of self- 
 expression. Careful observers of the art of writing will see 
 how much shrewd skill there is in the apparently unstudied man- 
 ner. One of Mr. Holliday's favorite discussions on the art of 
 writing is a phrase of Booth Tarkington's— "How to get the 
 ink out of it." In other words, how to strip away mere literary 
 and conscious adornment, and to get down to a translucent 
 portraiture of life itself in its actual contour and profile. 
 
 We are told that Mr. Holliday. in his native Indianapolis 
 (where he was born in t88o), was a champion bicycle rider 
 at the age of sixteen. That triumph, however, was not per- 
 manently satisfying, for he came to New York in 1899 to study 
 art; lived for a while, precariously, as an illustrator; worked for 
 several years as a bookseller in Charles Scribner's retail store, 
 and passed through all sorts of curious jobs on Grub Street, 
 arnong others book reviewer on the Tribune and Times. He was 
 editor of The Bookman after that magazine was taken over by 
 the George H. Doran Company, and retired to the genteel dig- 
 nity of "contributing editor" in 1920, to obtain leisure for more 
 writing of his own. 
 
 Mr. Holliday has the genuine gift of the personal essay, mel- 
 low, fluent, and pleasantly eccentric. His Walking-Stick Papers, 
 Broome Street Straws, Turns about Tozvn and Peeps at People 
 have that charming rambling humor that descends to him from 
 his masters in this art, Hazlitt and Thackeray. When Mr. Hol- 
 liday was racking his wits for a title for Men and Books and 
 Cities (that odd Borrovian chronicle of his mind, body and 
 digestion on tour across the continent) I suggested The Odyssey 
 of an Oddity. He deprecated this; but I still think it would have 
 been a good title, because strictly true. 
 
 Men of genius, blown by the winds of chance, have 
 been, now and then, mariners, bar-keeps, schoolmasters, 
 
 242 
 
The Fish Reporter 243 
 
 soldiers, politicians, clergymen, and what not. And 
 from these pursuits have they sucked the essence of 
 yams and in the setting of these activities found a 
 flavor to stir and to charm hearts untold. Now, it is 
 a thousand pities that no man of genius has ever been 
 a fish reporter. Thus has the world lost great literary 
 treasure, as it is highly probable that there is not 
 under the sun any prospect so filled with the scents and 
 colors of story as that presented by the commerce in 
 fish. 
 
 Take whale oil. Take the funny old buildings on 
 Front Street, out of paintings, I declare, by Howard 
 Pyle, where the large merchants in whale oil are. 
 Take salt fish. Do you know the oldest salt-fish house 
 in America, down by Coenties Slip ? Ah ! you should. 
 The ghost of old Long John Silver, I suspect, smokes 
 an occasional pipe in that old place. And many are 
 the times I've seen the slim shade of young Jim 
 Hawkins come running out. Take Labrador cod for 
 export to the Mediterranean lands or to Porto Rico 
 via New York. Take herrings brought to this port 
 from Iceland, from Holland, and from Scotland; 
 mackerel from Ireland, from the Magdalen Islands, 
 and from Cape Breton; crabmeat from Japan; fish- 
 balls from Scandinavia; sardines from Norway and 
 from France ; caviar from Russia ; shrimp which comes 
 from Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia, or salmon 
 
244 Robert Cortes Holliday 
 
 from Alaska, and Puget Sound, and the Columbia 
 River. 
 
 Take the obituaries of fishermen. *lii his prime, it 
 is said, there was not a better skipper in the Gloucester 
 fishing fleet.'* Take disasters to schooners, smacks, 
 and trawlers. "The crew were landed, but lost all 
 their belongings.'* New vessels, sales, etc. *'The seal- 
 ing schooner Tillie B., whose career in the South Seas 
 is well known, is reported to have been sold to a mov- 
 ing-picture firm." Sponges from the Caribbean Sea 
 and the Gulf of Mexico. "To most people, familiar 
 only with the sponges of the shops, the animal as it 
 comes from the sea would be rather unrecognizable." 
 Why, take anything you please! It is such stuff as 
 stories are. And as you eat your fish from the store 
 how little do you reck of the glamor of what you are 
 doing ! 
 
 However, as it seems to me unlikely that a man of 
 genius will be a fish reporter shortly I will myself do 
 the best I can to paint the tapestry of the scenes of his 
 calling. The advertisement in the newspaper read : 
 "Wanted — Reporter for weekly trade paper." Many 
 called, but I was chosen. Though, doubtless, no man 
 living knew less about fish than I. 
 
 The news stands are each like a fair, so laden are 
 they with magazines in bright colors. It would seem 
 almost as if there were a different magazine for every 
 
The Fish Reporter 245 
 
 few hundred and seven-tenth person, as the statistics 
 put these ^natters. And yet, it seems, there is a vast, 
 a very vast, periodical literature of which we, that is, 
 magazine readers in general, know nothing whatever. 
 There is, for one, that fine, old, standard publication, 
 Barrel and Box, devoted to the subjects and the in- 
 terests of the coopering industry; there is too. The 
 Dried Fruit Packer and Western Canner, as alert a 
 magazine as one could wish — in its kind; and from 
 the home of classic American literature comes The 
 'New England Tradesman and Grocer. And so on. At 
 the place alone where we went to press twenty-seven 
 trade journals were printed every week, from one for 
 butchers to one for bankers. 
 
 The Fish Industries Gazette — Ah, yes! For some 
 reason not clear (though it is an engaging thing, I 
 think) the word "gazette" is the great word among 
 the titles of trade journals. There are The Jewellers' 
 Gazette and The Women's Wear Gazette and The 
 Poulterers' Gazette (of London), and The Maritime 
 Gazette (of Halifax), and other gazettes quite without 
 number. This word "gazette" makes its appeal, too, 
 curiously enough, to those who christen country 
 papers; and trade journals have much of the intimate 
 charm of country papers. The "trade" in each case is 
 a kind of neighborly community, separated in its parts 
 by space, but joined in unity of sympathy. "Per- 
 
246 Robert Cortes Hoi It Jay 
 
 sonals" are a vital feature of trade papers. "Walter 
 Conner, who for some time has conducted a bakery 
 and fish market at Hudson, N. Y., has removed to 
 Fort Edward, leaving his brother Ed in charge at the 
 Hudson place of business." 
 
 The Fish Industries Gazette, as I say, was one of 
 several in its field, in friendly rivalry with The Oyster 
 Trade and Fisherman and The Pacific Fisheries. It 
 comprised two departments : the fresh fish and oyster 
 department, and myself. I was, as an editorial an- 
 nouncement said at the beginning of my tenure of 
 office, a "reorganization of our salt, smoked, and 
 pickled fish department." The delectable, mellow spirit 
 of the country paper, so removed from the crash and 
 whirr of metropolitan journalism, rested in this, too, 
 that upon the Gazette I did practically everything on 
 the paper except the linotyping. Reporter, editorial 
 writer, exchange editor, make-up man, proof-reader, 
 correspondent, advertisement solicitor, was I. 
 
 As exchange editor, did I read all the papers in the 
 English language in eager search of fish news. And 
 while you are about the matter, just find me a finer bit 
 of literary style evoking the romance of the vast 
 wastes of the moving sea, in Stevenson, Defoe, any- 
 where you please, than such a news item as this: 
 "Capt. Ezra Pound, of the bark Elnora, of Salem, 
 Mass., spoke a lonely vessel in latitude this and longi- 
 
The Fish Reporter 247 
 
 tude that, September 8. She proved to be the whaler 
 Wanderer, and her captain said that she had been nine 
 months at sea, that all on board were well, and that 
 he had stocked so many barrels of whale oil.'* 
 
 As exchange editor was it my business to peruse re- 
 ports from Eastport, Maine, to the effect that one of 
 the worst storms in recent years had destroyed large 
 numbers of the sardine weirs there. To seek fish 
 recipes, of such savory sound as those for "broiled 
 redsnapper," "shrimps bordelaise," and "baked fish 
 croquettes.'* To follow fishing conditions in the North 
 Sea occasioned by the Great War. To hunt down jokes 
 of piscatory humor. "The man who drinks like a fish 
 does not take kindly to water. — Exchange.*' To find 
 other "fillers" in the consular reports and elsewhere: 
 "Fish culture in India," "1800 Miles in a Dory," 
 "Chinese Carp for the Philippines," "Americans as 
 Fish Eaters." And, to use a favorite term of trade 
 papers, "etc., etc." Then to "paste up" the winnowed 
 fruits of this beguiling research. 
 
 As editorial writer, to discuss the report of the 
 commission recently sent by congress to the Pribilof 
 Islands, Alaska, to report on the condition of our na- 
 tional herd of fur seals ; to discuss the official interpre- 
 tation here of the Government ruling on what consti- 
 tutes "boneless" codfish; to consider the campaign in 
 Canada to promote there a more popular consumption 
 
248 Robert Cortex Holliday 
 
 of fish, and to brightly remark h propos of this that 
 "a. fish a day keeps the doctor away" ; to review the 
 current issue of The Journal of the Fisheries Society 
 of Japan, containing leading articles on ''Are Fishing 
 Motor Boats Able to Encourage in Our Country" and 
 "Fisherman the Late Mr. H. Yamaguchi Well 
 Known"; to combat the prejudice against dogfish as 
 food, a prejudice like that against eels, in some quarters 
 eyed askance as "calling cousins with the great sea- 
 serpent," as Juvenal says ; to call attention to the doom 
 of one of the most picturesque monuments in the story 
 of fish, the passing of the pleasant and celebrated old 
 Trafalgar Hotel at Greenwich, near London, scene of 
 the famous Ministerial white-bait dinners of the days 
 of Pitt; to make a jest on an exciting idea suggested 
 by some medical man that some of the features of a 
 Ritz-Carlton Hotel, that is, baths, be introduced into 
 the fo'c's'les of Grand Banks fishing vessels; to keep 
 an eye on the activities of our Bureau of Fisheries ; to 
 hymn a praise to the monumental new Fish Pier at 
 Boston; to glance at conditions at the premier fish 
 market of the world. Billingsgate; to herald the fish 
 display at the Canadian National Exhibition at 
 Toronto, and, indeed, etc., and again etc. 
 
 As general editorial roustabout, to find each week a 
 "leader," a translation, say, from In Allgemeine Fish- 
 cherei'Zeitung, or Economic Circular No. 10, "Mus- 
 
The Fish Reporter 249 
 
 sels in the Tributaries of the Missouri," or the last 
 biennial report of the Superintendent of Fisheries of 
 Wisconsin, or a scientific paper on "The Porpoise in 
 Captivity'' reprinted by permission of Zoologica, of 
 the New York Zoological Society. To find each week 
 for reprint a poem appropriate in sentiment to the feel- 
 ing of the paper. One of the "Salt Water Ballads" 
 would do, or John Masefield singing of "the whale's 
 way," or "Down to the white dipping sails" ; or Rupert 
 Brooke : "And in that heaven of all their wish. There 
 shall be no more land, say fish" ; or a "weather rhyme" 
 about "mackerel skies," when "you're sure to get a 
 fishing day"; or something from the New York Sun 
 about "the lobster pots of Maine"; or Oliver Herford, 
 in the Century, "To a Goldfish"; or, best of all, an old 
 song of fishing ways of other days. 
 
 And to compile from the New York Journal of Contr 
 merce better poetry than any of this, tables, beautiful 
 tables of "imports into New York": "Oct. 15. — ' 
 From Bordeaux, 225 cs. cuttlefish bone; Copenhagen, 
 173 pkgs. fish; Liverpool, 969 bbls. herrings, 10 walrus 
 hides, 2,000 bags salt; La Guayra, 6 cs. fish sounds; 
 Belize, 9 bbls. sponges; Rotterdam, 7 pkgs. seaweed, 
 9,000 kegs herrings; Barcelona, 235 cs. sardines; 
 Bocas Del Toro, 5 cs. turtle shells; Genoa, 3 boxes 
 corals; Tampico, 2 pkgs. sponges; Halifax, i cs. seal 
 skins, 35 bbls. cod liver oil, 215 cs. lobsters, 490 bbls. 
 
250 Robert Cortes Holliday 
 
 codfish; Akureyri, 4,150 bbls. salted herrings," and 
 much more. Beautiful tables of "exports from New 
 York.'' *To Australia" (cleared Sep. i) ; "to Argen- 
 tina"; — Haiti, Jamaica, Guatemala, Scotland, Salva- 
 dor, Santo Domingo, England, and to places many 
 more. And many other gorgeous tables, too. "Fish- 
 ing vessels at New York," for one, listing the "trips" 
 brought into this port by the Stranger, the Sarah 
 O'Neal, the Nourmahal, a farrago of charming sounds, 
 and a valuable tale of facts. 
 
 As make-up man, of course, so to "dress" the paper 
 that the "markets," Oporto, Trinidad, Porto Rico, 
 Demerara, Havana, would be together; that "Nova 
 Scotia Notes" — "Weather conditions for curing have 
 been more favorable since October set in" — would fol- 
 low "Halifax Fish Market" — "Last week's arrivals 
 were: Oct. 13, schr. Hattie Loring, 960 quintals," 
 etc.— that "Pacific Coast Notes" — "The tug Tatoosh 
 will perform the service for the Seattle salmon packers 
 of towing a vessel from Seattle to this port via the 
 Panama Canal" — would follow "Canned Salmon"; 
 that shellfish matter would be in one place ; reports of 
 saltfish where such should be ; that the weekly tale of 
 the canned fish trade politically embraced the canned 
 fish advertising; and so on and so on. 
 
 Finest of all, as reporter, to go where the fish re- 
 porter goes. There the sight-seeing cars never find 
 
The Fish Reporter 251 
 
 their way ; the hurried commuter has not his path, nor 
 knows of these things at all ; and there that racy char- 
 acter who, voicing a multitude, declares that he would 
 rather be a lamp post on Broadway than Mayor of St. 
 Louis, goes not for to see. Up lower Greenwich Street 
 the fish reporter goes, along an eerie, dark, and nar- 
 row way, beneath a strange, thundering roof, the 
 "L" overhead. He threads his way amid seemingly 
 chaotic, architectural piles of boxes, of barrels, crates, 
 casks, kegs, and bulging bags ; roundabout many great 
 fetlocked draught horses, frequently standing or 
 plunging upon the sidewalk, and attached to many 
 huge trucks and wagons ; and much of the time in the 
 street he is compelled to go, finding the side walks too 
 congested with the traffic of commerce to admit of his 
 passing there. 
 
 You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese. Then 
 you would delight in Greenwich Street. You could 
 feast your highly creditable appetite for these excel- 
 lent things for very nearly a solid mile upon the signs 
 of "wholesale dealers and commission merchants" in 
 ^hem. The letter press, as you might say, of the fish 
 reporter's walk is a noble paean to the earth's glorious 
 yield for the joyous sustenance of man. For these 
 princely merchants' signs sing of opulent stores of 
 olive oil, of sausages, beans, soups, extracts, and spices, 
 sugar, Spanish, Bermuda, and Havana onions, "fine" 
 
252 Robert Cortes Holliday 
 
 apples, teas, coffee, rice, chocolates, dried fruits and 
 raisins, and of loaves and of fishes, and of '*fish pro- 
 ducts." Lo ! dark and dirty and thundering Greenwich 
 Street is to-day's translation of the Garden of Eden. 
 
 Here is a great house whose sole vocation is the im- 
 portation of caviar for barter here. Caviar from 
 over-seas now comes, when it comes at all, mainly by 
 the way of Archangel, recently put on the map, for 
 most of us, by the war. The fish reporter is told, how- 
 ever, if it be summer, that there cannot be much doing 
 in the way of caviar until fall, "when the spoonbill 
 start coming in." And on he goes to a great saltfish 
 house, where many men in salt-stained garments are 
 running about, their arms laden with large fiat objects, 
 of sharp and jagged edge, which resemble dried and 
 crackling hides of some animal curiously like a huge 
 fish; and numerous others of ''the same" are trundling 
 round wheelbarrow-like trucks likewise so laden. 
 Where stacks of these hides stand on their tails against 
 the walls, and goodness knows how many big boxes 
 are, containing, as those open show, beautifully soft, 
 thick, cream-colored slabs, which is fish. And where 
 still other men, in overalls stained like a painter's 
 palette, are knocking off the heads of casks and dipping 
 out of brine still other kinds of fish for inspection. 
 
 Here it is said by the head of the house, by the 
 
 stove (it is chill weather} in his ofBce like a ship- 
 
 ( 
 
The Fish Reporter 253 
 
 master's cabin : "Strong market on foreign mackerel. 
 Mines hinder Norway catch. Advices from abroad re- 
 port that German resources continue to purchase all 
 available supplies from the Norwegian fishermen. No 
 Irish of any account. Recent shipment sold on the 
 deck at high prices. Fair demand from the Middle 
 West." 
 
 So, by stages, on up to turn into North Moore 
 Street, looking down a narrow lane between two long 
 bristling rows of wagons pointed out from the curbs, 
 to the facades of the North River docks at the bottom, 
 vrith the tops of the buff funnels of ocean liners, and 
 Whistleranean silhouettes of derricks, rising beyond. 
 Hereabout are more importers, exporters, and "pro- 
 ducers" of fish, famous in their calling beyond the 
 celebrities of popular publicity. And he that has official 
 entree may learn, by mounting dusky stairs, half- 
 ladder and half-stair, and by passing through low- 
 ceilinged chambers freighted with many barrels, to the 
 sanctums of the fish lords, what's doing in the foreign 
 herring way, and get the current market quotations, at 
 present sky-high, and hear that the American shore 
 mackerel catch is very fine stock. 
 
 Then roundabout, with a step into the broad vista of 
 homely Washington Street, and a turn through Frank- 
 lin Street, where is the man decorated by the Imperial 
 Japanese Government with a gold medal, if he should 
 
254 Robert Cortes Holliday 
 
 care to wear it, for having distinguished himself in 
 the development of commerce in the marine products 
 of Japan, back to Hudson Street. An authentic rail- 
 road is one of the spectacular features of Hudson 
 Street. 
 
 Here down the middle of the way are endless trains, 
 stopping, starting, crashing, laden to their ears with 
 freight, doubtless all to eat. Tourists should come 
 from very far to view Hudson Street. Here is a spec- 
 tacle as fascinating, as awe-inspiring, as extraordinary 
 as any in the world. From dawn until darkness falls, 
 hour after hour, along Hudson Street slowly, steadily 
 moves a mighty procession of great trucks. One 
 would not suppose there were so many trucks on the 
 face of the earth. It is a glorious sight, and any man 
 whose soul is not dead should jump with joy to see it. 
 And the thunder of them altogether as they bang over 
 the stones is like the music of the spheres. 
 
 There is on Hudson Street a tall handsome building 
 where the fish reporter goes, which should be enjoyed 
 in this way : Up in the lift you go to the top, and then 
 you walk down, smacking your lips. For all the doors 
 in that building are brimming with poetry. And the 
 tune of it goes like this: "Toasted Com-FIake Co.," 
 "Seaboard Rice," "Chili Products," "Red Bloom 
 Grape Juice Sales Office," "Porto Rico and Singapore 
 Pineapple Co.," "Sunnyland* Foodstuffs," "Importers 
 
The Fish Reporter ^55 
 
 of Fruit Pulps, Pimentos/' "Sole Agents U. S. A. 
 Italian Salad Oil," "Raisin Growers," "Log Cabin 
 Syrups," "Jobbers in Beans, Peas," "Chocolate and 
 Cocoa Preparations," "Ohio Evaporated Milk Co.," 
 "Bernese Alps and Holland Condensed Milk Co.," 
 "Brazilian Nuts Co.," "Brokers Pacific Coast Salmon," 
 "California Tuna Co.," and thus on and on. 
 
 The fish reporter crosses the street to see the head of 
 the Sardine Trust, who has just thrown the market 
 into excitement by a heavy cut in prices of last year's 
 pack. Thence, pausing to refresh himself by the way 
 at a sign "Agency for Reims Champagne and Moselle 
 Wines — Bordeaux Clarets and Sauternes," over tQ 
 Broadway to interview the most august persons of all, 
 dealers in fertilizer, "fish scrap." These mighty 
 gentlemen live, when at business, in palatial suites of 
 offices constructed of marble and fi«e woods and laid 
 with rich rugs. The reporter is relayed into the inner- 
 most sanctum by a succession of richly clothed at- 
 tendants. And he learns, it may be, that fishing in 
 Chesapeake Bay is so poor that some of the "fish fac- 
 tories" may decide to shut down. Acid phosphate, it 
 is said, is ruling at $13 f.o.b. Baltimore. 
 
 And so the fish reporter enters upon the last lap of 
 his rounds. Through, perhaps, the narrow, crooked 
 lane of Pine Street he passes, to come out at length 
 upon a scene set for a sea tale. Here would a lad, heir 
 
256 Robert Cortes Holliday 
 
 to vast estates in Virginia, be kidnapped and smuggled 
 aboard to be sold a slave in Africa. This is Front 
 Street. A white ship lies at the foot of it. Cranes 
 rise at her side. Tugs, belching smoke, bob beyond. 
 All about are ancient warehouses, redolent of the 
 Thames, with steep roofs and sometimes stairs outside, 
 and with tall shutters, a crescent-shaped hole in each. 
 There is a dealer in weather-vanes. Other things dealt 
 in hereabout are these : chronometers, ''nautical instru- 
 ments," wax gums, cordage and twine, marine paints, 
 cotton wool and waste, turpentine, oils, greases, and 
 rosin. Queer old taverns, public houses, are here, too. 
 Why do not their windows rattle with a *'Yo, ho, ho" ? 
 There is an old, old house whose business has been 
 fish oil within the memory of men. And here is an- 
 other. Next, through Water Street, one comes in 
 search of the last word on salt fish. Now the air is 
 filled with gorgeous smell of roasting coffee. Tea, 
 coffee, sugar, rice, spices, bags and bagging here have 
 their home. And there are haughty bonded ware- 
 houses filled with fine liquors. From his white cabin 
 at the top of a venerable structure comes the dean of 
 the saltfish business. "Export trade fair," he says; 
 "good demand from South America." 
 
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