time to loaf in my office and talk politics--an ardent patriotism
burned in him. He was proud of his ancestors who had not withheld their
hand all the way from Lexington to Yorktown, and he used to speak
with emotion of that dark winter at Valley Forge. He would look out
of the window upon Washington Street and declare, with a fine sweep
of the hand, that “We’ve got to keep all this; we’ve got to keep it
for these people and for our children.” He had not been above sitting
as delegate in city and state conventions, and he had once narrowly
escaped a nomination for the legislature. The industry he owned and
managed was a small affair and he knew all the employees by name. His
lucky purchase of a patent that had been kicked all over the United
States before the desperate inventor offered it to him had sent his
fortunes spinning into millions within ten years. Our cautious banker
who had vouchsafed Smith a reasonable guarded credit in the old days
had watched, with the mild cynical smile peculiar to conservative
bank presidents, the rapid enrollment of Smith’s name in the lists of
directors of some of the solidest corporations known to Wall Street.
It is a long way from Washington Street to Wall Street, and men who
began life with more capital than Smith never cease marveling at the
ease with which he effected the transition. Some who continue where
he left them in the hot furrows stare gloomily after him and exclaim
upon the good luck that some men have. Smith’s abrupt taking-off would
cause at least a momentary chill in a thousand safety-vault boxes.
Smith’s patriotism, which in the old days, when he liked to speak of
America as the republic of the poor, and when he knew most of the
“Commemoration Ode” and all of the “Gettysburg Address” by heart, is
far more concrete than it used to be. When Smith visits Washington
during the sessions of Congress the country is informed of it. It is
he who scrutinizes new senators and passes upon their trustworthiness.
And it was Smith who, after one of these inspections, said of a member
of our upper chamber that, “He’s all right; he speaks our language,”
meaning not the language of the “Commemoration Ode” or the “Gettysburg
Address,” but a recondite dialect understood only at the inner gate of
the money-changers.
IV
No place was ever pleasanter in the old days than the sitting-room
of Smith’s house. It was the coziest of rooms and gave the lie to
those who have maintained that civilization is impossible around a
register. A happy, contented family life existed around that square
of perforated iron in the floor of the Smiths’ sitting-room. In the
midst of arguments on life, letters, the arts, politics, and what-not,
Smith would, as the air grew chill toward midnight, and when Mrs.
Smith went to forage for refreshments in the pantry, descend to the
cellar to renew the flagging fires of the furnace with his own hands.
The purchase of a new engraving, the capture of a rare print, was
an event to be celebrated by the neighbors. We went to the theatre
sometimes, and kept track of the affairs of the stage; and lectures
and concerts were not beneath us. Mrs. Smith played Chopin charmingly
on a piano Smith had given her for a Christmas present when Fanny
was three. They were not above belonging to our neighborhood book
and magazine club, and when they bought a book it was a good one. I
remember our discussions of George Meredith and Hardy and Howells,
and how we saved Stockton’s stories to enjoy reading them in company
around the register. A trip to New York was an event for the Smiths
in those days as well as for the rest of us, to be delayed until just
the right moment for seeing the best plays, and an opera, with an
afternoon carefully set apart for the Metropolitan Museum. We were glad
the Smiths could go, even if the rest of us couldn’t; for they told us
all so generously of their adventures when they came back! They kept a
“horse and buggy,” and Mrs. Smith used to drive to the factory with
Fanny perched beside her to bring Smith home at the end of his day’s
work.
In those days the Smiths presented a picture before which one might be
pardoned for lingering in admiration. I shall resent any suggestions
that I am unconsciously writing them down as American _bourgeois_ with
the contemptuous insinuations that are conveyed by that term. Nor were
they Philistines, but sound, wholesome, cheerful Americans, who bought
their eggs direct from “the butterman” and kept a jug of buttermilk in
the ice-box. I assert that Smiths of their type were and are, wherever
they still exist, an encouragement and a hope to all who love their
America. They are the Americans to whom Lincoln became as one of
Plutarch’s men, and for whom Longfellow wrote “The Children’s Hour,”
and on whom Howells smiles quizzically and with complete understanding.
Thousands of us knew thousands of these Smiths only a few years ago,
all the way from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. I linger upon
them affectionately as I have known and loved them in the Ohio
Valley, but I have enjoyed glimpses of them in Kansas City and Omaha,
Minneapolis and Detroit, and know perfectly well that I should find
them realizing to the full life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
in many other regions,--for example, with only slight differences of
background, in Richmond, Virginia, and Burlington, Vermont. And in
all these places some particular Smith is always moving to Chicago or
Boston or New York on his way to a sanatorium or Bad Neuheim and a
German specialist! Innumerable Smiths, not yet so prosperous as the old
friend I encountered in Berlin, are abandoning their flower-gardens
and the cozy verandas (sacred to neighborhood confidences on the long
summer evenings) and their gusty registers for compact and steam-heated
apartments with only the roof-garden overhead as a breathing-place.
There seems to be no field in which the weary Smith is not exercising
a baneful influence. We have fallen into the habit of laying many of
our national sins at his door, and usually with reason. His hand is
hardly concealed as he thrusts it nervously through the curtains of
legislative chambers, state and national. He invades city halls and
corrupts municipal councils. Even the fine arts are degraded for his
pleasure. Smith, it seems, is too weary from his day’s work to care for
dramas
“That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe.”
He is one of the loyalest patrons of that type of beguilement known
as the “musical comedy,” which in its most engaging form is a naughty
situation sprinkled with cologne water and set to waltz time. Still,
if he dines at the proper hour at a Fifth Avenue restaurant and eats
more and drinks more than he should (to further the hardening of his
arteries for the German specialist), he may arrive late and still
hear the tune every one on Broadway is whistling. The girl behind the
book-counter knows Smith a mile off, and hands him at once a novel that
has a lot of “go” to it, or one wherein “smart” people assembled in
house-parties for week-ends, amuse themselves by pinning pink ribbons
on the Seventh Commandment. If the illustrations are tinted and the
first page opens upon machine-gun dialogue, the sale is effected all
the more readily. Or, reluctant to tackle a book of any sort, he may
gather up a few of those magazines whose fiction jubilantly emphasizes
the least noble passions of man. And yet my Smith delighted, in those
old days around the register, in Howells’s clean, firm stroke; and we
were always quoting dear Stockton--“black stockings for sharks”--“put
your board money in the ginger jar.” What a lot of silly, happy,
comfortable geese we were!
It seems only yesterday that the first trayful of cocktails jingled
into a parlor in my town as a prelude to dinner; and I recall the
scandalous reports of that innovation which passed up and down the
maple-arched thoroughfares that give so sober and cloistral an air to
our residential area. When that first tray appeared at our elbows,
just before that difficult moment when we gentlemen of the provinces,
rather conscious at all times of our dress-coats, are wondering whether
it is the right or left arm we should offer the lady we are about
to take in, we were startled, as though the Devil had invaded the
domestic sanctuary and perched himself on the upright piano. Nothing is
more depressing than the thought that all these Smiths, many of whose
fathers slept in the rain and munched hard-tack for a principle in
the sixties, are unable to muster an honest appetite, but must pucker
their stomachs with a tonic before they can swallow their daily bread.
Perhaps our era’s great historian will be a stomach specialist whose
pages, bristling with statistics and the philosophy thereof, will
illustrate the undermining and honeycombing of our institutions by gin
and bitters.
V
The most appalling thing about us Americans is our complete
sophistication. The English are children. An Englishman is at no
moment so delightful as when he lifts his brows and says “Really!” The
Frenchman at his sidewalk table watches the world go by with unwearied
delight. At any moment Napoleon may appear; or he may hear great news
of a new drama, or the latest lion of the salon may stroll by. Awe and
wonder are still possible in the German, bred as he is upon sentiment
and fairy-lore: the Italian is beautifully credulous. On my first visit
to Paris, having arrived at midnight and been established in a hotel
room that hung above a courtyard which I felt confident had witnessed
the quick thrusts of Porthos, Athos, and Aramis, I wakened at an early
hour to the voice of a child singing in the area below. It has always
seemed to me that that artless song flung out upon the bright charmed
morning came from the very heart of France! France, after hundreds of
years of achievement, prodigious labor, and staggering defeat, is still
a child among the nations.
Only the other day I attended a prize-fight in Paris. It was a gay
affair held in a huge amphitheatre and before a great throng of
spectators of whom a third were women. The match was for twenty rounds
between a Frenchman and an Australian negro. After ten rounds it was
pretty clear that the negro was the better man; and my lay opinion was
supported by the judgment of two American journalists, sounder critics
than I profess to be of the merits of such contests. The decision was,
of course, in favor of the Frenchman and the cheering was vociferous
and prolonged. And it struck me as a fine thing that that crowd could
cheer so lustily the wrong decision! It was that same spirit that
led France forth jauntily against Bismarck’s bayonets. I respect the
emotion with which a Frenchman assures me that one day French soldiers
will plant the tri-color on the Brandenburg Gate. He dreams of it as a
child dreams of to-morrow’s games.
But we are at once the youngest and the oldest of the nations. We are
drawn to none but the “biggest” shows, and hardly cease yawning long
enough to be thrilled by the consummating leap of death across the
four rings where folly has already disproved all natural laws. The
old prayer, “Make me a child again just for to-night,” has vanished
with the belief in Santa Claus. No American really wants to be a child
again. It was with a distinct shock that I heard recently a child of
five telephoning for an automobile in a town that had been threatened
by hostile Indians not more than thirty years ago. Our children avail
themselves with the coolest condescension of all the apparatus of our
complex modern life: they are a thousand years old the day they are
born.
The farmer who once welcomed the lightning-rod salesman as a friend of
mankind is moving to town now and languidly supervising the tilling
of his acres from an automobile. One of these vicarious husbandmen,
established in an Indiana county seat, found it difficult to employ
his newly acquired leisure. The automobile had not proved itself a toy
of unalloyed delight, and the feet that had followed unwearied the hay
rake and plow faltered upon the treads of the mechanical piano. He
began to alternate motor flights with more deliberate drives behind a
handsome team of blacks. The eyes of the town undertaker fell in mortal
envy upon that team and he sought to buy it. The tired husbandman
felt that here, indeed, was an opportunity to find light gentlemanly
occupation, while at the same time enjoying the felicities of urban
life, so he consented to the use of his horses, but with the distinct
understanding that he should be permitted to drive the hearse!
VI
If we are not, after all, a happy people, in the full enjoyment of
life and liberty, what is this sickness that troubleth our Israel?
Why huddle so many captains within the walls of the city, impotently
whining beside their spears? Why seek so many for rest while this our
Israel is young among the nations? “Thou hast multiplied the nation and
not increased the joy; they joy before thee according to the joy in
harvest and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.” Weariness fell
upon Judah, and despite the warnings of noble and eloquent prophets she
perished. It is now a good many years since Mr. Arnold cited Isaiah
and Plato for our benefit to illustrate his belief that with us, as
with Judah and Athens, the majority are unsound. And yet from his essay
on Numbers--an essay for which Lowell’s “Democracy” is an excellent
antidote--we may turn with a feeling of confidence and security to that
untired and unwearying majority which Arnold believed to be unsound.
Many instances of the soundness of our majority have been afforded
since Mr. Arnold’s death, and it is a reasonable expectation that, in
spite of the apparent ease with which the majority may be stampeded, it
nevertheless pauses with a safe margin between it and the precipice.
Illustrations of failure abound in history, but the very rise and
development of our nation has discredited History as a prophet. In
the multiplication of big and little Smiths lies our only serious
danger. The disposition of the sick Smiths to deplore as unhealthy and
unsound such a radical movement as began in 1896, and still sweeps
merrily on in 1912, never seriously arrests the onward march of
those who sincerely believe that we were meant to be a great refuge
for mankind. If I must choose, I prefer to take my chances with the
earnest, healthy, patriotic millions rather than with an oligarchy of
tired Smiths. Our impatience of the bounds of law set by men who died
before the Republic was born does not justify the whimpering of those
Smiths who wrap themselves in the grave-clothes of old precedents,
and who love the Constitution only when they fly to it for shelter.
Tired business men, weary professional men, bored farmers, timorous
statesmen are not of the vigorous stuff of those
“Who founded us and spread from sea to sea
A thousand leagues the zone of liberty,
And gave to man this refuge from his past,
Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.”
Our country’s only enemies are the sick men, the tired men, who have
exhausted themselves in the vain pursuit of vain things; who forget
that democracy like Christianity is essentially social, and who
constitute a sick remnant from whom it is devoutly to be hoped the
benign powers may forever protect us.
VII
It was a year ago that I met my old friend Smith, irritable, depressed,
anxious, in the German capital. This morning we tramped five miles,
here among the Vermont hills where he has established himself. Sound
in wind and limb is my old neighbor, and his outlook on life is sane
and reasonable. I have even heard him referring, with something of
his old emotion, to that dark winter at Valley Forge, but with a new
hopefulness, a wider vision. He does not think the American Republic
will perish, even as Nineveh and Tyre, any more than I do. He has
come to a realization of his own errors and he is interested in the
contemplation of his own responsibilities. And it is not the German
specialist he has to thank for curing his weariness half so much as
Fanny.
Fanny! Fanny is the wisest, the most capable, the healthiest-minded
girl in the world. Fanny is adorable! As we trudged along the road,
Smith suddenly paused and lifted his eyes to a rough pasture slightly
above and beyond us. I knew from the sudden light in his face that
Fanny was in the landscape. She leaped upon a wall and waved to us. A
cool breeze rose from the valley and swept round her. As she poised
for a moment before running down to join us in the road, there was
about her something of the grace and vigor of the Winged Victory as
it challenges the eye at the head of the staircase in the Louvre. She
lifted her hand to brush back her hair,--that golden crown so loved by
light! And as she ran we knew she would neither stumble nor fall on
that rock-strewn pasture. When she reached the brook she took it at a
bound, and burst upon us radiant.
It had been Fanny’s idea to come here, and poor, tired, broken,
disconsolate Smith, driven desperate by the restrictions imposed upon
him by the German doctors, and only harassed by his wife’s fears,
had yielded to Fanny’s importunities. I had been so drawn into their
affairs that I knew all the steps by which Fanny had effected his
redemption. She had broken through the lines of the Philistines and
brought him a cup of water from that unquenchable well by the gate for
which David pined and for which we all long when the evil days come.
The youth of a world that never grows old is in Fanny’s heart. She is
to Smith as a Goddess of Liberty in short skirt and sweater, come down
from her pedestal to lead the way to green pastures beside waters of
comfort. She has become to him not merely the spirit of youth but of
life, and his dependence upon her is complete. It was she who saved him
from himself when to his tired eyes it seemed that
“All one’s work is vain,
And life goes stretching on, a waste gray plain,
With even the short mirage of morning gone,
No cool breath anywhere, no shadow nigh
Where a weary man might lay him down and die.”
Later, as we sat on Smith’s veranda watching the silver trumpet of the
young moon beyond the pine-crowned crest, with the herd a dark blur
in the intervening meadows, and sweet clean airs blowing out of the
valley, it somehow occurred to me that Fanny of the adorable head,
Fanny gentle of heart, quick of wit, and ready of hand, is the fine
essence of all that is worthiest and noblest in this America of ours.
In such as she there is both inspiration to do and the wisdom of peace
and rest. As she sits brooding with calm brows, a quiet hand against
her tanned cheek, I see in her the likeness of a goddess sprung of
loftier lineage than Olympus knew, for in her abides the spirit of that
old and new America that labors in the sun and whose faith is in the
stars.
The Spirit of Mischief:
A Dialogue
The Spirit of Mischief: A Dialogue
If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships.
To where the roads on either hand
Lead onward into fairyland,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.
R. L. S.
JESSAMINE and I had been out sailing. We came back to find the house
deserted, and after foraging in the pantry, we made ourselves at home
in the long unceiled living-room, which is one of the pleasantest
lounging-places in the world. A few pine-knots were smouldering in the
fireplace, and, as I have reached an age when it is pleasant to watch
the flames, I poked a little life into the embers and sat down to
contemplate them from the easiest chair the camp afforded. Jessamine
wearily cast herself upon the couch near by without taking off her coat.
Jessamine is five and does as she likes, and does it perversely,
arbitrarily, and gracefully, in the way of maids of five. In the pantry
she had found her way to marmalade with an ease and certainty that
amazed me; and she had, with malice aforethought, made me _particeps
criminis_ by teaching me how to coax reluctant, tight-fitting olives
from an impossible bottle with an oyster-fork.
Jessamine is difficult. I thought of it now with a pang, as her brown
curls lay soft against a red cushion and she crunched a biscuit,
heavily stuccoed with marmalade, with her little popcorn teeth.
I have wooed her with bonbons; I have bribed her with pennies;
but indifference and disdain are still my portion. To-day was my
opportunity. The rest of the household had gone to explore the village
bazaars, and we were left alone. It was not that she loved me more,
but the new nurse less; and, as sailing had usually been denied her,
she derived from our few hours in my catboat the joy of a clandestine
adventure. We had never been so much together before. I wondered how
long the spell of our sail would last. Probably, I reflected, until the
wanderers came back from town to afford a new diversion; or until her
nurse came to carry her away to tea. For the moment, however, I felt
secure. The fire snapped; the clock ticked insistently; my face burned
from its recent contact with a sharp west wind, which had brought white
caps to the surface of the lake and a pleasant splash to the beach at
our front door. Jessamine folded her arms, rested her head upon them,
and regarded me lazily. She was slim and lean of limb, and the lines
she made on the couch were long. I tried to remember whether I had ever
seen her still before.
“You may read, if you like,” she said.
“Thank you; but I’d rather have you tell me things,” I answered.
I wished to be conciliatory. At any moment, I knew she might rise and
vanish. My tricks of detention had proved futile a thousand times;
I was always losing her. She was a master opportunist. She had, I
calculated, a mood a minute, and the mood of inaction was not often one
of them.
“There are many, many things I’d like to have you tell me, Mischief,” I
said. “What do you think of when you’re all alone; what do you think of
me?”
“Oh! I never think of you when I’m all alone.”
“Thank you, Mischief. But I wonder whether you are quite frank. You
must think of me sometimes. For example,--where were you when you
thought of knotting my neckties all together, no longer ago than
yesterday?”
“Oh!” (It is thus she begins many sentences. Her “Ohs” are delightfully
equivocal.)
“Perhaps you’d rather not tell. Of course, I don’t mind about the ties.”
“It was nice of you--not to mind.”
Suddenly her blue eyes ceased to be. They are little pools of blue,
like mountain lakes. I was aware that the dark lashes had stolen down
upon her brown cheek. She opened her eyes again instantly.
“I wish I hadn’t found your ties. Finding them made a lot of trouble
for me. I was looking for your funny little scissors to open the door
of my doll-house that was stuck, and I saw the ties. Then I remembered
that I needed a rope to tie Adolphus--that’s the woolly dog you bought
for my birthday--to my bed at night; and neckties make very good ropes.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Mischief.”
“There’s a prayer they say in church about mischief--” she began
sleepily.
“‘From all evil and mischief; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of
the Devil?’” I quoted.
“That is it! and there’s something in it, too, about everlasting
damnation, that always sends shivers down my back.”
She frowned in a puzzled way. I remembered that once, when Jessamine
and I went to church together, she had, during the reading of the
litany, so moved a silk hat on the next seat that its owner crushed it
hideously when he rose from his knees.
The black lashes hid the blue eyes once more, and she settled her head
snugly into her folded arms.
“Why,” she murmured, “do you call me Mischief? I’m not Mischief; I’m
Jessamine.”
“You are the Spirit of Mischief,” I answered; and she made no reply.
The water of the lake beat the shore stormily.
“The Spirit of Mischief.”
Jessamine repeated the words sleepily. I had never thought of them
seriously before, and had applied them to her thoughtlessly. Is there,
I asked myself, a whimsical spirit that possesses the heart of a
child,--something that is too swift for the slow pace of adult minds;
and if there be such, where is its abiding-place?
“I’m the Spirit of Mischief!”
There, with her back to the fire, stood Jessamine, but with a
difference. Her fists were thrust deep down into the pockets of her
coat. There was a smile on her face that I did not remember to have
seen before. The wind had blown her hair into a sorry tangle, and
it was my fault--I should have made her wear her tam-o’-shanter in
the catboat! An uncle may mean well, but, after all, he is no fit
substitute for a parent.
“So you admit it, do you? It is unlike you to make concessions.”
“You use long words. Uncles _always_ use long words. It is one of the
most foolish things they do.”
“I’m sorry. I wish very much not to be foolish or naughty.”
“I have wished that many times,” she returned gravely. “But naughtiness
and mischief are not the same thing.”
“I believe that is so,” I answered. “But if you are really the Spirit
of Mischief,--and far be it from me to doubt your word,--where is your
abiding-place? Spirits must have abiding-places.”
“There are many of them, and they are a long way off. One is where the
four winds meet.”
“But that--that isn’t telling. Nobody knows where that is.”
“Everybody doesn’t,” said the Spirit of Mischief gently, as one who
would deal forbearingly with dullness.
“Tell me something easier,” I begged.
“Well, I’ll try again,” she said. “Sometimes when I’m not where four
winds meet, I’m at the end of all the rainbows. Do you know that place?”
“I never heard of it. Is it very far away?”