too forbidding, ominous, a sound to be under the broad and open sky.
There where the neighbours gather, all those who knew and loved the
departed from a boy, the "last sad rites are read," and the "mortuary
services are performed." Then from the fruitful valley where he dwelt
after his fathers, and their fathers, he mounts again the old red hill,
bird enchanted.
He is not buried, though he rests in the warm clasp of the caressing
earth. Buried has an inhuman sound, as though a man were a bone. The
deceased is always "interred," or he may be "laid to rest," or his
"interment takes place."
Now, it is in these biographical annals of small places that one finds
the justest estimates of life. There folks are valued for what they
are as well as for what they do. Inner worth is held in regard equally
with the flash and glitter of what the great world calls success. I
was reading just the other day of a late gentleman, "aged 61," whose
principal concern appeared to be devotion to his family. His filial
feeling was indeed remarkable. It was told that "after the death of
his parents, three years ago, he had resided with his sister." After
his attachment to his own people, his chief interest, apparently, was
in the things of the mind, in literature. He had "never engaged in
business," it was said, but he "was a great reader," he could "talk
intelligently on many topics which interested him," and in the circles
which he frequented he was admired, that is it was thought that he was
"quite a bright man." Who would not feel in this sympathetic record of
his goodly span something of the charm of the modest nature of this
man? Again, there was the recent intelligence concerning William
Jackson, "a coloured gentleman employed as a deck hand on a pleasure
craft in this harbour," who "met his demise" in an untimely manner.
Clothes do not make the man, nor doth occupation decree the bearing.
This is a great and fundamental truth very clearly grasped by the
country obituary, and much obscured elsewhere.
On the other hand, positively nowhere else does the heart to dare and
the power to do find such generous recognition as in the obituaries of
country papers. The "prominence" of blacksmiths, general store
keepers, undertakers, notaries public, and other townspeople bright in
local fame has been made a jest by urban persons of a humorous
inclination, who take scorn of merit because it is not vast merit.
Pleasing to contemplate in contrast to this waspish spirit is the noble
nature of the country obituary, inspiration to humanism. Here was a
man, to the seeing eye, of sterling stamp: "He attended public grammar
school where he profited by his opportunities in obtaining as good an
education as possible, etc." Later in life, be became "well and
favourably known for his conservative and sane business methods," and
was esteemed by his associates, it is said, "fraternally and
otherwise." He was "mourned," by those who "survived" him, as people
are not mourned in cities, that is, frankly, in a manner undisguised.
Country obituaries are not afraid to be themselves. In this is their
appeal to the human heart.
They are the same in spirit, identical in turn of phrase, from Maine to
California, from the Gulf to the Upper Provinces. That is one of the
remarkable things about them. You might expect to come across, here or
there, a writer of country paper obituaries out of step, as it were,
with his fellow mutes, so to put it, one raising his voice in a
slightly off, or different key, a trace, in short, of the hand of some
student of the modes of thought of the world beyond his bosky dell or
rolling plain. But it is not so in any paper truly of the countryside.
And, perhaps, that is well.
A type of obituary which very likely is read rather generally in cities
is that of slow growth and released from the newspaper-office "morgue"
as occasion calls. One such timely and capable biographical account is
waiting for each of us that is a Vice-President, King, lord of great
dominions, high commander of armed forces, intellectual immortal of any
kind, recognised superman in this or that. Big Chief anywhere, or
beloved popular idol, nicely proportioned according to our space value.
Of course, if we are a very great Mogul indeed we get a display head on
the first page upon the dramatic occasion of our exit. But, generally
speaking, this type of matter would run somewhere between the seventh
and the thirteenth or fifteenth page, according to the number of pages
of the issue of the paper coinciding with the date of the ending of our
day's work. There, if we are pretty important, we should lead the
column, and take a two-line head, with a pendant "comb." This,
altogether, would announce to the passing eye that we went out (as the
poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, puts it) in such or such a year of our
age, that pneumonia, or what not, "took" us, that we were a member of
one of the city's oldest families, that a family breach was healed at
the death of our sister, or the general points of whatever it is that
makes us interesting to the paper's circulation. We are likely to have
a date line and a brief despatch from Rome, or Savannah, or wherever we
happen to be when we shuffle off, stating that we have done so. This
to be followed by a "shirt-tail dash." Then begins a beautifully
dispassionate and highly dignified recital of the salient facts
connected with our career, which may run to a couple of sticks, or,
even, did our activities command it, turn the column.
Or, suppose for the sake of our discussion that your achievements have
not been quite of the first rank. You get a one-line head, a sub-head,
and a couple of paragraphs. Somebody has exclaimed concerning how much
life it takes to make a little art. Just so. How much life it takes
to make a very little obituary in the great city! Early and late, day
in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, in the
sun's hot eye of summer, through the winter's blizzard, year after year
for thirty-six years you have been a busy practising physician. You
have lived in the thick of births and life and death for thousands of
hours. What you know, and have lived and have seen would fill rows of
volumes. You are a distinguished member of many learned societies,
widely known as an educator. You are good for about a hundred and
fifty words.
Perhaps not. Perhaps you were a person of rather minor importance.
You are, that is, you were, we will say, an astronomer, or you were a
mineralogist, or a former Alderman, or something like that. So you
call for a paragraph, with a head. Your virtues (and your vices) have
been many. You were three times married. As Mr. Bennett says of
another of like momentous history, the love of life was in you, three
times you rose triumphant over death. Goodness! what a novel you would
make. You call for a paragraph, with a head. All your clubs are given.
You are doing pretty well. Many of us, just somebodies but nobodies in
especial particular, do not have a separate head at all but go in a
group into the feature "Obituary Notes." Our names are set in "caps,"
and we have a brisk paragraph apiece, admirable pieces of composition,
pellucid, compact, nervous. Our stories are contained in these
dry-point-like portraits stript of all that was occasional, accidental,
ephemeral, leaving alone the essential facts, such as, for instance,
that we were, say, a civil engineer. I think it would be well for each
of us occasionally to visualise his obituary "note." This should have
the effect of clarifying our outlook. Amid the welter of existence
what is it that we are above all to do? To thine own self be true.
You are a husband, a father, and a civil engineer. That is all that
matters in the end.
But after all, all obituaries in a great city are for the elect. The
great majority of us have none at all, in print. What we were is,
indeed, graven on the hearts that knew us, and told in the places where
we have been. But in the written word we go into the feature headed
"Died," a department similar in design to that on the literary page
headed "Books Received." We are arranged alphabetically according to
the first letter of our surnames. We are set in small type with lines
following the name line indented. It is difficult for me to tell with
certainty from the printed page but I think we are set without leads.
Here again, frequently, the reader comes upon the breath of affection,
the hand of some one near to the one that is gone: "Beloved husband of
------." And he is touched by the realisation that even in the rushing
city, somewhere unseen amid the hard glitter and the gay scene, to-day
warm hearts are torn, and that simple grief throbs in and makes
perennially poignant a bromidian phrase.
As this column lengthens the paragraphs shorten, until is reached what
seems to me the most moving obituary of all, that most eloquent of the
destiny of men. "ROE. ------ Richard. 1272 West 96th St., Dec. 30,
aged 54." It is like to the most moving line, perhaps, in modern
literature. For nowhere else, I think, is there one of such simplicity
and grandeur as this from "The Old Wives' Tale": "He had once been
young, and he had grown old, and was now dead."
XXI
A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL
There is certainly no more grotesque fallacy than that humorously
bigoted notion so generally entertained, particularly by our friends of
other nations (at any rate, before the war), that the only thing in the
world for which we as a people care is success as measured by money. A
walk about any day will give this ridiculous idea a black eye. Any one
with ears to his head will perceive that we scorn things which are to
be had for money. Money! What is that? Phew! Everybody has it. It
is mine, it is yours, it is nothing--trash. Any one with a brain-pan
under his hat will recognise inside of half an hour that we are
anything but a nation of shopkeepers spiritually. It is as plain as a
pike-staff that we are a nation of perfectly rabid idealists. It is
sounded on every side that the things which we most fervently prize,
inordinately covet, envy possession of, and hold most proudly, are
precisely those things which the wealth of the Indies would not
procure. To wit:
Jimmy was a waiter, humble, but celebrated--as a waiter--among a
circle. An admirer of Jimmy's, a journalist continually on the lookout
for copy, wrote him up for the paper at space rates. Thence till the
day Broadway suffered his loss by untimely death did Jimmy fold and
unfold his worn clipping to exhibit with a full heart this tribute to
him which was of a kind (as he never failed to say) which "money could
not buy." It is reported upon reasonably reliable authority that
Jimmy's last words, in a faint whisper, were: "Money could not have
bought------" And then he went on his way.
So it was, too, with a tobacconist whom I knew--who had an article
framed which referred to his shop. "In such a paper, too!" he
exclaimed a hundred times a day, "money could not have bought it."
Your aunt has a lot of old spavined furniture which would bring about
tu'pence at public sale. Some of it was your great-aunt's. All of it
has been in the family from time immemorial; and its peculiar and
considerable value, your aunt and her neighbours are agreed, resides in
the esoteric fact that it is the kind of thing which "money couldn't
buy."
Health is a great blessing, and, we are repeatedly told, we should
prize it beyond measure,--as it is a thing that money will not buy.
His money, it is commonly said of a rich man in bereavement, will not
bring his son back to life. The impotency of money in the life of the
spirit is notorious among us. Of a deceased miser we declare with
satisfaction: "Well, he can't take his money with him." And money--the
righteous well know--will get none into heaven.
What is the moving theme that holds the multitude at the movie theatre
bound in a spell? What is it that answers deep unto deep between the
literature vended at drug stores and the people?--Concern for money
overthrown by idealism! The triumph of ethereal love over the base
temptation of lucre! Is it not so: the rich wooer in the top hat and
the elegant Easter-parade coat is turned away, and the poor lover with
his flannel shirt open at the collar and a dinner-pail hung upon his
arm is chosen for bluebird happiness--and the heart of the maligned
masses is satisfied.
Money (the conviction has passed into an industrious bromideum) will
not buy happiness.
I knew a man who had a wife; and he was told by sage counsellors that
if he would treat her right she would give him "what money could not
buy."
But what need is there to multiply examples? Take a turn around the
block and return with the wisdom that money can not buy. Come; get
your stick and let us go.
A beneficent Providence, sir, has caused it to be that the finest shows
in this world are free of all men. Nature charges no admission fee.
The dawn and the evening are gratis. In the matter of art, the
performances of the little men of the passing hour are to be seen in
Bond Street, on the Avenue, and at the academies and societies, for a
price; but those treasure houses of the enduring masterpieces, the
great museums of the world, demand naught from him that hath nothing.
A collector of customs sitteth at the golden door of the movies; but
the far more delightful and far more human shows shown in the show
windows are quite free for all to see. And to those blessed ones whose
eyes have not lost their innocence and whose hearts remain sweet and
simple the costly spectacles of the world are but tawdry vanity as
compared with the feasts of entertainment enacted daily in show windows.
One of the very best theatres in this country for entertainments of
this nature is lower Sixth Avenue, though the Bowery is not to be
overlooked, and the passionate lover of pleasure should not neglect any
business thoroughfare which presents a particularly shabby appearance.
The actors and actresses in these fascinating histrionic presentations
are not called comedians and tragedians, comediennes and
tragediennes--but "demonstrators." The effect of their performances
thus is twofold: they gratify the spectator's sense of the humorous or
the curious, and they demonstrate to his intelligence the value of
something with whose merits possibly he is not acquainted.
There are not many things in life, I think, which you find pleasanter
than this: You are slightly obstructed in your perambulations on a fine
afternoon by a small knot of loiterers pausing before a shop window in
which an active young man of admirably mobile countenance is holding
forth in dumb show. Your progress is slackened as you edge about the
throng with the intention of proceeding on your way. As it were, you
poise on the wing. Then, like a warming liquor stealing through the
veins, the awakening of your interest in the artful antics of this
young man makes fainter and fainter your will to proceed on your
course, until it dies softly away. What is this ridiculous thing he is
doing? By its magnetism it has, at any rate, become for you the
supreme interest, for the moment, of the universe.
With a horrible grimace the young man yanks fiercely at his cravat. It
does not budge, or at least only very slightly. With still further
display of energetic effort, accompanied by a ferocious expression of
pained and enraged exasperation, he yanks again. No, the cravat is
stuck fast behind within the collar. With a gesture of hopeless
despair and a face of pitiful woe the young man abandons his struggle
with the ordinary kind of cravat which loops around the neck, and
which, foolishly enough, is so universally worn. You see, so his
eloquent flinging out of the hands saith, it is of no use. He shakes
his fist. Then, registering the extremity of disgust, he rips the
loathesome, cravat-clogged collar from his neck and flings it from him.
What will he do now? is the thought that holds his audience bound in a
spell. Ah! His face breaks into light. He snatches up his collar and
industriously adjusts it without a cravat. He picks up a small object
which he holds aloft between thumb and forefinger, turning it this way
and that. It is the ready-made bow of a bow tie, the bow and nothing
more. Yes, there are patent prongs to it, which he deftly slips
beneath the wings of his collar. So! No trouble whatever.
Instantaneous. A smile of luxurious blandness spreads over the face of
the young man. Thus he stands for a moment. Then stoops and places in
a corner of the window a large card inscribed "Ten Cents." With a
pleasing sense of curiosity satisfied, the current of your own life as
distinct from show-window shows flows back again into your
consciousness. You turn, and the great movement of the city takes you,
although some souls of spacious leisure and of apparently insatiable
curiosity linger on to drink in the happiness of witnessing a
repetition of the fascinating exhibition.
Of such shows is the freedom of the kingdom of heaven. There is the
other young man in a show window a bit further on who all day long
gashes blocks of wood with a magic razor, only to sharpen it to greater
keenness, so that before you he continually cuts with it the finest
hairs. There is the young woman garbed as a nurse who treats the corns
on a gigantic plaster foot. In show windows cooks are cooking
appetising dishes; damsels are combing magnificent, patent-medicine
grown tresses; and in show windows are spectacles of infinite variety
and without number. All for the delight without cost of a penny of
those whose hearts are as a little child. There is the trim maid who
folds and unfolds a Davenport couch. I had a friend one time of a
roving disposition (alas! he is now in jail) who once got the amazingly
enviable job of doing nothing but smoke an endless succession of cigars
in a show window.
Brother (as Lavengro used to say), there is nothing high about the cost
of pleasure. But hold! would you, without a thought, pass by here?
Though this, yon show, is without its rapt throng to do it reverence,
it is, to an ardent mind, the most enticing, and the most instructive,
of all the classic exhibitions to be seen from the pavement, the one
fullest of all of (in the words of one Quinney) "meat and gravy."
Always tarry, fellow man, before the cheap photographer's.
Any one who has ever been enough interested in human matters to examine
the sidewalk exhibitions of the cheap photographer does not need to be
told that the fine old star character there, a character somewhat
analogous in popular appeal and his permanency as an institution to the
heavy villain of melodrama, a character old as the hills, yet fresh as
the morning, is the naked baby. Nobody ever saw a cheap photographer's
display without its naked baby. Just why he should be naked is not
clear. However, there is undoubtedly inherent in the mind of the race
this instinct,--that you should begin your photographic life naked.
Perhaps this is in response to a sentiment for symbol: naked came ye
into the world. Perhaps it is because your face at the time of your
initial photograph is as yet so uncarved by time that it is deemed more
interesting to display the whole of you, clothed, as it were, in
innocence. The art of painting, of course, from the earliest rendering
of the Child of the Virgin down to Mary Cassatt, has been fond of
portraying infants nude,--the photographer may be said only to continue
a very old tradition. But painting has always observed the baby with
ceremonious respect; painting stripped him to admire him and softly
caress him. The broad humanity of the cheap photographer "jokes" him,
as you may say.
The most popular way of presenting the baby at the cheap
photographer's,--seated, standing, on his back, or on his belly; stark
naked, or (as sometimes he is found) girded about the loins, or (as,
again, he is seen) less naked and wearing an abbreviated shirt, and in
various other stages of habilimentation,--is on a whitish hairy rug.
No background but the hairy rug. It is background (very largely), one
suspects, that gives one the sense of a baby's value. The idea occurs
to a thoughtful observer of his photograph that it is to a considerable
degree from background, surrounding atmosphere, local colour, that the
baby derives personal identity. Twenty cabinet-sized naked babies,
each on a hairy rug:--one conceives how an unscrupulous photographer
(as may very likely commonly be the case) might save money on
negatives, after he had a stock of a little variety, by snapping babies
with an unloaded camera and printing from old plates, without anybody's
being the wiser. (Here, indeed, would be a utilitarian motive behind
the baby's being naked of articles of identification.) It is, alas!
undermining to the pride of race to reflect that that photograph of
one's cousin's fine new baby Edward, which reminded every one so much
of the infant's mother, may not impossibly have been the original
likeness of some baby now long extinct.
History, so called, deals exclusively with persons of distinction;
fiction, though more catholic, sees man in a glamour, with the various
prejudices this way and that of a mortal eye. The development of the
discovery announced by Daguerre in 1839, and first applied to portraits
by one Draper,--this is the great historian. The photograph business,
sir, alone sees life steadily and sees it whole. Photography is the
supreme sociologist, master psychologist. In the sidewalk display of
the cheap photographer is the poor, naked, human story,--poignantly
touching, chastening of pride, opening the heart of the responsive
beholder to deeper knowledge of the inherent kinship of all humankind.
How does the consummate realism of the cheap photographer show its
babies of yester-year, clothed now in the raiment of mature years and
simple honours?
That appealing spectacle, the girl who has performed somewhere in
curiously home-made-looking "tights," and, laughing roguishly at the
camera, been photographed afterward (from this sight what roue would
not turn away his sinful eyes in shame and pity?). The highly
satisfied young man in the very rented-appearing evening clothes
(photographed, it is apparent, in the day time). The blank-looking
person who for some cryptic reason is enamoured of the studious,
literary pose, and appears, in effect like a frontispiece portrait,
glancing up from a writing table (an obviously artificial cigar between
the fingers of one hand, apparently made of carbon, and, presumably,
the property of the photographer). The aspiring amateur boxer, in
position, with his sparing trunks on and an American flag around his
waist (or sometimes, in default of trunks, he is seen in his nether
undergarment). The jolly girl in boy's clothes (who has not seen
her?). The little child in costume performing a cute dance. The
coloured beau, a heavy swell, in spats and a van Bibber overcoat. The
gay banqueters of the So-and-So Association, around their festive board
(one man, devilish fellow! holding aloft a beer bottle). The young
girl in confirmation attire, standing awkwardly by a table (her slip of
a mind, as she stands there, very probably less upon her God than upon
her common, foolish dress). The team of amateur comedians (sad
spectacle!). The bride and groom (perennial as the naked baby)
standing, curiously enough, upon our old friend, the hairy rug. The
family group (all the figures of which have a curious wax-work effect,
reminiscent of the late Eden Musee). The policeman, in uniform
(sitting in a chair of cathedral architecture). The fireman (a hero,
perhaps,--though no man is a hero, merely amazingly human, to the cheap
photographer's camera). The youthful swains posed beside that
indestructible stage property of the popular photographer, the
artificial tree stump. The immortal woman vain of that part of her
which Mr. Mantalini referred to as "outline," and careful to keep her
near arm from obstructing the spectator's view (sometimes she is
clothed; sometimes simply wound in a sheet; sometimes, in either case,
she is like the Dowager whose outline Mr. Mantalini described as
"dem'd"). All these--and many others--are the traditions of the cheap
photography.