which the majority chafe, for which some magic pill or potion is
offered as a substitute. Temperance, cleanliness, activity, are the
three cardinal virtues of the body, as faith, hope, and charity are
of the soul. As tithes of mint, anise, and cumin are easier to render
than the observance of law, justice, and judgment, so burnt-offerings
of drugs are offered to the Goddess Hygeia in place of obedience to
her regimen. After the excesses of the carnival came the brief rigours
of the Lenten retreat, and after the Fat Tuesday of gluttony comes the
short atonement of the "Cure" at some mineral spring, where the priests
of health are yielded a complete but passing submission. It is easier
to repeat incessant formulæ of prayer than persistently to keep one's
self unspotted from the world, and it is easier for fat old sinners to
paddle about barefoot in the dew at a Kneippe cure than to abandon at
once and forever their little darling sins of greediness or indolence.
One hears a constant cry of "Lo, Here!" and "Lo, There!" and all the
world rushes to sit hopefully under blue glass or swathe itself in
pure wool in the ever-renewed belief that some substitute may be found
for the fatiguing necessity of obedience to the three rules.
Even yet ill health is considered as a sort of supernatural visitation
rather than a certain result of the infringement of plain laws. I
remember reading once a clever book, less popular than it deserved to
be, which told of a country in the heart of the Andes in which the
intelligent inhabitants looked upon crime as the unfortunate result of
congenital temperament; a disease demanding sympathy and treatment;
but ill health aroused only condemnation as a wilful infringement of
wise and well understood laws. A bronchial case caused arrest and
imprisonment, and friends of the family considered it rude to cough in
the presence of the criminal's unfortunate family; but a severe attack
of embezzlement was cause of polite condolence, and cards were left
upon the invalid with kind inquiries as to whether he was receiving the
best moral attention. An idea less whimsical than it may seem.
Paracelsus--who was accused of magic because his cures were effected
by such simple means--always asserted that if he were allowed to
absolutely direct a child's diet from its birth he could build up a
constitution which might without difficulty be made to last out a
century in undiminished vigour; and there are those who are prepared to
accept literally the age of the antediluvian patriarchs, on the ground
that as at that time bread had not been discovered, digestions never
called upon to struggle with starch found no difficulty in sustaining
life to Methuselah's term.
It is certain that the subtle but supremely important chemistry of
nutrition has been shamefully neglected in favour of matters far less
germane to happiness, and that the same skill which has developed
the science of bacteriology and pursued the most elusive microbe
to his most secret lair might have been more profitably applied.
After the microbe has been found and named his dangerousness remains
unattenuated. How much more valuable would be a knowledge--equally
attainable--of exactly the amount and nature of the food for the best
results of growth and health.
There is a farmer ant in the West Indies, who, in a carefully prepared
soil, compounded of flowers and leaves, grows a tiny fungus on which he
feeds. The eggs of this ant seem, when hatched, to produce creatures
all alike, but through different feeding they develop into warriors,
farmers, or queens, as may be needed. If through an accident the supply
of warriors is dangerously lowered, larvæ being fed with the meat which
nourishes farmers are transferred to the soldiers' nursery, and change
of diet produces change of nature.
Ah! could we too know upon what meat to feed our Cæsars, or Roosevelts,
that they might grow so great. What a much more important achievement
that would be than the naming of microbes which would be impotent to
injure a perfectly nourished body.
To know the law, to practise it daily--there is the secret of the
fountain of youth, the elixir of life. These Christian Scientists, who
practise the latest abracadabra to conjure away the effects of fixed
causes, who dream that pain arises from sin, and can be abolished by
faith, childishly overlook the fact that pain in itself is no evil,
but rather a good. It is simply a telegraphic message sent over the
nerve-wires to the brain to inform it that some member of the physical
commonwealth is in danger and requires help.
Not by magic is health to be obtained. Flying carpets will not reach
it. Fasts and prayers will not call it down from heaven. Fixed,
immortal, the laws continue. Always unchanged; always inexorable. The
wages of the sin of disobedience are disease.
July 24.
"Dead, Dead, Dead."
I wonder if there is still anyone in all the world to whom this date
is important? And after all why should it be? In twenty-three years a
whole generation has come into life; has wept and laughed, and loved
and married, and produced another generation to do the same thing--and
who remembers the roses that withered even yesterday?
* * * * *
Oh, wild, loud wind,
Who, moaning, as in pain,
Beats with wet fingers at my door in vain,
Dost thou come from the graves with that sad cry
Which pleads for entrance, and denied, goes by
To faint in tears amidst the freezing rain?
In here the live red fire glows again.
Of life and living we are full and fain.
Here is no thought of death, or men that die--
Oh, wild, loud wind!
Why shouldst thou come then to my window pane
To wring thy hands and weep, and sore complain
That they alone all sad and cold must lie
In wet, dark graves, and we breathe not a sigh?
We have forgot. The quick and dead are twain,
Oh, wild, loud wind!
September 6.
Verbal Magic.
J---- was reading me parts of his new book in manuscript to-day, and I
objected that it lacked style. "Why, all the successful writers tell
me that style is unnecessary," he said in an injured tone. "D---- says
he just writes ahead and pays no attention to it. He says that the
laboriousness of Stevenson and Flaubert has 'gone out' and the public
are bored by it. And just see how successful D---- is!"
What was one to say? I merely tried to look convinced and begged him to
continue. And yet Emerson said that when the distraught Hamlet cried
to the mailed spirit of his father,
"What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
he was so possessed by the verbal magic of the phrase that he could
attend no more to the rest of the play.
Perhaps it is some penetrating assonance in that "complete steel"--in
those sibilant repetitions of "revisit'st thus the glimpses"--that
makes its witchery. Poe carefully analyzed the science of it--which is
no science at all, but the inscrutable magic of inspiration. Such lines
as
"Came up through the lair of the lion
With love in her luminous eyes"
are built upon that theory of liquid consonants and open vowels, and
it has no magic at all, while "To Annie"--which was written without
conscious plan--is full of it.
"Her grand family funerals" is instinct with that prickling delight of
the magic of words, as is "the wizard rout" of the bodiless airs that
blew through her "casement open to the night."
Tennyson's famous alliteration,
"The moaning of doves in immemorial elms
And the murmur of innumerable bees"
lacks glamour. One scents the intention.
"Ay! Ay! oh ay!
The wind that blows the brier"
recaptures the elusive charm, because of its wild, unconscious lyrism.
Fancy these absurd, ignorant young writers talking of style having
"gone out"! Apparently they suppose it means "fine writing," in which
nothing is more lacking than style. The essence of style, I suppose,
is in the inspired, instinctive choice of words which present suddenly
to the mind a _picture_ of what the writer is talking about. The whole
_clou_ of Hamlet's phrase is that "glimpses of the moon." It makes one
see the vague, intangible momentariness of the apparition. Sir Thomas
Browne's famous "drums and tramplings of three conquests" gives just
that flashing picture of the banners and rolling sounds of those long
vanished invasions. And Keats's
"Casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn"
presents the indescribable to the eye.
There is, of course, that other element of musical quality, and
Hamlet's phrase is delicious for its strange, broken sibilations, but
without the _picture_ the alliterations and vowel sounds are but dead
things. All the fine, rolling, organ-like sonority of Swinburne's Hymn
to Proserpine would be tedious without the impressions of light and
colour that palpitate through the lines. For style I can think of no
better modern example than the concluding paragraph in Lafcadio Hearn's
paper on the dragon-fly in the volume called Kotto:
"... then let me hope that the state to which I am destined will not
be worse than that of a cicade or of a dragon-fly;--climbing the
cryptomerias to clash my tiny cymbals in the sun,--or haunting, _with
soundless flicker of amethyst and gold_, some holy silence of lotus
pools."
October 8.
Hamlet.
Old Mr. A---- was most interesting to-night at dinner on the subject
of the various Hamlets he has seen--apparently every actor of any
importance who has attempted the part in the last sixty years; not
only the English-speaking ones, but German and French as well. After
dwelling upon all manner of details of the varied dress, business,
scenery, and so forth, of the different men who have attempted the
role, I asked him which of them all he considered to have been the
best, and he decided after some hesitation that not one of them
satisfied him completely. "Not one of them all," he concluded, "seemed
to me to have a clear, comprehensive grasp of the essentials of the
part. Each appeared to try to express some one phase of it, but you
felt the thing as a whole escaped them." Which is, perhaps, not to
be wondered at, since, so far, it appears, as a complete conception,
to have escaped every one. No one of the Shakespearian scholars has
expressed what definite meaning the play in its entirety conveyed to
his mind.
Mr. A----'s talk interested me immensely, much more than any of those
long-winded mystical triumphs of verbiage the Germans perpetrate. I
have seen but two eminent actors in the part. Booth's Hamlet was, of
course, only a noble piece of elocution, not an interpretation, and
without vitality. Mounet Sully--but then all Frenchmen believe Hamlet
mad, despite his express warning to Horatio--
"How strange or odd so'er I bear myself,
As I, perchance, hereafter _shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on_ ..."
And of his confidence to Guildenstern that he is but
"Mad nor'-nor'-west. When the wind is southerly
I know a hawk from a hernshaw."
Of course, I've a theory of my own about Hamlet. It seems to me that
the difficulty most persons experience in endeavouring to penetrate
what they call "the mystery" of the Prince's character arises from
the fact that they read the play either carelessly or with some
prepossession, to fit which they bend all that he says or does. The
German critics blunder through forgetting how essentially sane and
unmystical was Shakespeare in every fibre of his mind. To him the
cloudy symbolism of the second part of Faust would have sounded very
like nonsense. His interest was in man--the normal, typical man and his
passions of hate, love, ambition, revenge, envy, humour....
To me the key to Hamlet seems to be a proper regard for the attitude of
the mind of the seventeenth century toward the belief in ghosts. The
Englishman of Shakespeare's day hardly doubted their existence, but was
unsettled as to the nature and origin of spectres. Whether they were
truly shades of the departed ones which they resembled, or were merely
horrid delusions of the mind, projected upon it by some malign and
hellish influence, they were not clear.
Hamlet says:
"The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and melancholy,
(as he is very potent with such spirits)
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this...."
Personally, my method of endeavouring to clear vexed questions is to
make an effort to conceive of my own emotions and actions in a like
difficulty. To understand Hamlet I try to imagine what my frame of
mind would be if P---- had died, suddenly and tragically, during
my absence. Hastening home in all the turmoil of grief and shock I
find H---- has grasped all P----'s fortune and has promptly married
M----, whom I had expected to find as afflicted as I. Naturally I
would be deeply horrified and offended and greatly puzzled over such a
situation. When one injects the warmth and power of one's own emotions
into a situation by personifying it with one's own kinspeople one
begins to realize Hamlet's condition of mind prior to the appearance
of the Ghost. A ghostly visitation not being imaginable nowadays,
one may suppose one's self having a vivid and circumstantial dream,
making all these curious conditions clear by an explanation of hideous
criminality. The hysterical distraction of Hamlet's interview with
the Ghost seems natural enough when one pictures one's own horror and
incredulity on awaking from such a vision.
Of course, a reaction would follow the first red lust for denunciation
and for revenge of the deep damnation of the taking off of the
helpless victim. One would be continually paralyzed in the very act of
vengeance by the remembrance that one had no better authority than a
dream for proof of crime in those one had always loved and trusted.
The thing would seem so incredible, and yet the dream would explain
all the puzzling facts so clearly. To a young and noble mind, evil in
those one loves appears impossible. One would be always fighting the
thought--which pulled the very ground of confidence from under one's
feet--and yet always laying traps to prove one's suspicions true, as
the jealous notoriously do; wishing yet fearing to know the truth.
Hamlet's varying fits of violence and indecision seem natural enough
under the circumstances, and not a sign of madness nor of eccentricity
of character. He is called the "Melancholy Dane," but to a young
confiding heart the first revelation of the possibility of filth and
criminality in those near in blood and love causes distrust of all
the world; arouses a mad desire for escape out of a cruel existence
where such spiritual squalour is possible. If one will bring the
situation home to one's self in this way--vivifying it with one's own
heart--Hamlet no longer seems a strange and alien soul, but one's
very own self caught in a web of horrid circumstance, and doing and
being just what one's self would do and be in like case. Temptation to
suicide, murder, "unpacking one's heart with words," bitterness to, and
distrust of, the innocent Ophelia, treachery, doubt, indecision,--all
are inevitable temptations. Looked at in this way, there is no mystery
at all in the play if one reads it straight and simply, and from the
human point of view--which view was always Shakespeare's, I think.
December 13.
Ghosts.
The R----s are home this week from California, and full of a
surprising tale of their experience in renting and trying to live in
a haunted house. They had no idea of its unpleasant character when
they took it. Indeed they decided upon it principally because of the
sunniness of the rooms and its generally cheerful character. The only
suspicious feature was the very moderate price; but that appears to
have aroused only gratitude instead of suspicion in their minds.
The sounds they heard, which finally drove them out of the house, were
such commonplace ones--the clinking of medicine bottles, the mixing of
stuff in saucers--that one hardly believes they could have invented
them. Invention would certainly have conceived a more dramatic excuse
for abandoning a house. Also, they solemnly aver that it was only upon
their giving up the lease that they heard the story of the almost
incredible tragedy of the former owner's death.
There certainly must be some manifestations such as are commonly
known as "ghostly." I never have come across any personally, but the
testimony is too frequent and persistent for doubt. Some phenomena have
undoubtedly been observed of which the laws are not yet understood.
The psychologists profess to be working in this direction, but the
psychology of our day is still in about the condition of astronomy
and chemistry in the days of the thirteenth-century astrologers and
alchemists--mere blind flounderings. We need a psychological Copernicus
badly. I am convinced that what are commonly called "superstitions"
are really observed results of unknown causes. When I was a child
the negroes always warned one that it brought bad luck to go near a
stable when one had a cut finger. Nothing could seem more blindly
uncorrelated, and yet it is now known that the germ of tetanus breeds
only in manure, which shows that their observation was correct,
though they had no conception of germs, or microbes. It was an old
superstition, derided by the medical profession, that there was some
merit in hanging red curtains at the windows of a smallpox patient; yet
recently some interesting discoveries have been made as to the effect
of red light upon sufferers from this disease.
Again there is the old-wife's belief that the howling of a dog presages
death. I saw no sense in that until I was brought in contact with death
for the first time, and then discovered that a person near the end, and
immediately afterwards, emitted a powerful odour, very like the smell
of tuberoses. In two cases within my experience this odour remained in
the death-chamber, despite persistent airing and cleaning, for fully a
year. My sense of smell is extremely acute, and no one seemed to remark
this odour but myself, nor have I ever heard or seen any mention of the
phenomenon being noticed by others; but naturally a dog, whose sense of
smell must be a thousand times more acute than mine, is aware of this
strange, half repulsive perfume, which has the effect upon his nerves
produced also, apparently, by moonlight and by music.
If fresh rose leaves are shut closely into a drawer until they have
thoroughly dried and crumbled, they will be found, when removed,
entirely scentless, but the drawer will retain for years some
intangible emanation which they have given off, and this will permeate
any object left in the drawer. Recent delicate experiments have shown
how the violence of emotion will affect the weight of human beings, and
no doubt, in supreme crises of feeling, living bodies may lose this
weight by the throwing off of some emanation which may linger for a
long time in the immediate surroundings. It has been discovered that
many objects retain luminosity, after being long exposed to powerful
rays; a luminosity invisible to our sight, but sufficient to make
dim photographs upon highly sensitized plates. The "ghosts" are very
probably explicable on some such theory as this. Some individuals
are like these extremely sensitive plates. The emanations thrown out
in the condition of intense emotion affect them, and give them an
impression of sounds or sights which appear, in our present state of
ignorance, to be supernatural. Of course, any psychologist or scientist
would pooh-pooh this hypothesis of mine, if it were made public, but
equally they would have sniffed fifty years ago at a guess at wireless
telegraphy, or the Roëntgen ray, or the radioactivity of radium. After
all, however, they are right in thinking that guesses are not very
valuable unless one has the industry to demonstrate their accuracy.
December 20.
Amateur Saints.
If there is any one thing more particularly repulsive to me than
another it is the way the average clerical person speaks of religious
things. One would suppose that such matters, if one really believed
them, would be the profoundest sentiments of one's nature, and be
mentioned with the reserve and reverence with which the lay person
treats the deeper sentiments, such as love, honour, or patriotism.
A little pamphlet came by mail to-day, which proved to be a sort of
begging letter from a community of Protestant clergymen, who are
undertaking to imitate monasticism in America. Under a heading of a
cross is this text, "If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a
great matter if we shall reap your worldly things?" And there follows
an appeal for assistance in building a monastery on the Hudson. The
language of this pamphlet is the usual language of begging letters,
only with that flavour of smug religiosity and bland business-like
dealing with matters of the soul which amazes the lay mind.
This community of, presumably, able-bodied men who desire to reap of
our worldly things naively sets forth in the following programme the
manner in which they intend to occupy their time:
5 A.M. Rise.
5.30 to 6. Meditation in Chapel.
6. Morning Prayer and Prime.
6.50 to 8. Celebrations of the Holy Eucharist.
8. Breakfast.
9.30. Terce and Intercessions.
12 M. Sext and None.
12.30 P.M. Dinner.
1 to 1.20. Recreation (in common).
4.45. Evensong.
5.15 to 5.45. Meditation.
6. Supper.
6.30 to 7.15. Recreation (in common).
8.30. Compline.
10. Lights extinguished.
And it is to permit them to spend their days in such fruitful fashion
that one is called upon to contribute the money earned by men who toil!
That many have already contributed is to be inferred from the fact that
this community has become possessed of seventy-five acres of valuable
land, and has spent some forty thousand dollars on the erection of a
monastery.
Of course, there are worthless idlers everywhere, but very few of them
in our practical day assume their indolence as a merit, or call upon
their neighbours to support them, in the name of the deeper sentiments
of life.
Hare, in "A Pair of Spectacles" remarks cynically, when asked to
help an indigent widow, "Oh, I know that indigent widow; she comes
from Sheffield." One knows these sturdy beggars. They come from out
the Middle Ages, when it was still felt that there was some special
virtue in abandoning the obvious duties of life to take up others more
appealing to the Saint; more appealing precisely because they were
anything but obvious.
The very name of Saint is a stench in my heretical nostrils. I never
knew or read of one who was not a vain egoist, with all the cruelty,
obstinacy, and selfishness of the egoist. Read the Lives of the Saints.
Not one of these absurd chronicles but is a repulsive tale of an insane
vanity trampling on the rights and feelings of others to achieve
notoriety. St. Louis is a sample of the type: renouncing his duties
to his unlucky wife, squabbling with every other monarch unfortunate
enough to be associated with him, and wrecking the expeditions in which
he joined because of some petty qualm about his meagre, unimportant
little soul.
The person who extorts my reverence is not Saint Elizabeth, but
that poor boy, her husband, bearing the torments of her hysterical
squeamishness with such noble patience and chivalry. One can picture
that tired, sleepy young fellow, busy with his duties of government all
day, dragged out of his proper slumber to behold his ridiculous wife
climbing out of bed to lie on the cold floor in her nightgown, while
the attendants stood about and crossed themselves in admiration.
St. Theresa seems to have been a sort of Moyen-Age Hedda Gabler; no
better than an ecclesiastic flirt. Go through the whole list and the
story is always the same. One never hears of a person with a sense of
humour--which implies a sense of proportion--setting up as a saint. The
breath in the nostrils of these gentry is the stare of the unthinking
multitude, who are awed by anything out of the ordinary. And yet it
takes so much finer patience, so much greater self-abnegation, to do
the plain duties of life. I feel far more like crossing myself when
I look at the humble commuter, who has sat on a stool all day, and
travels with his arms full of parcels to that cheap, draughty cottage
in the cold dusk of Lonelyville, to listen patiently to Emily's
recitals of Johnny's cut finger and Mary Ann's impudence. It is upon
such as he that civilization and the world's happiness and sunshine
depend. He has done a man's duties; upon him depends a helpless
woman, and innocent children. His tedious, petty drudgeries rise to
nobility compared with the lives of these fat and lazy grubs with their
complines and sexts and primes.
St. Theresa seems vulgar to me contrasted with the anxious Emily
cheapening chops at the butcher's, and fighting around the bargain
counter to make her laborious commuter's meagre salary stretch over the
needs of her family. It requires a finer and sweeter, a more saintly
nature to walk the floor patiently with a teething baby than to pose as
a saint on the floor to no one's benefit but one's own.