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, lifting, 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 this insanity.
But O. Henry can go further yet. There are inventions 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 transactions 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 forgetful
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 antitheses 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 antithesis. 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 incorrigible; it
reeks with that air of _performance_ which is 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 boyhood. His sentences are _built_--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 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 exclusive 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,"
threading the mazes of a banana grove is compared to "paging 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 allusiveness, and the style is
streaked and pied, almost to monotony, by the accumulation of lively
details.
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 entertainers, more is needed. Is more forthcoming? I should
answer, yes. In O. Henry, above the knowledge of setting, which is clear
and first-hand, but subsidiary, above the order of events, which is,
generally 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
endurance 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 republics (for that we were entirely
prepared), but that they are inadequate as opera. He lets us see his
show 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 family. 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 _penetrated_. 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 exaggeration.
Epigram shows us truth in the embrace of a lie, 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
exposition 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
masterpieces of its kind in contemporary letters.
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 renunciation of plot. If contrivance is lucrative, it
is also costly. There is an admirable little story called the "Pendulum"
(in the "Trimmed Lamp"), the simplicity of whose fable would have
satisfied Coppée 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 resembles 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 calorific. They include
the "Social Triangle," the "Making of a New Yorker," and the "Foreign
Policy of Company 99," all in the "Trimmed Lamp," the "Brief Début of
Tildy" in the "Four Million," and the "Complete 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 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 occupied 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 specifically 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, disguise, 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 excitement had become
available and permissible, this worshiper of stimulus never touched with
so much as a fingertip that insidious and meretricious fruit. The
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. 'I'm only the fellow
that set fire to an orphan asylum and murdered a blind 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 respect
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 gatherings 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 corner and talk
about Mr. 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 alone
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 valley, 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.
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 returned.
The many things that I recovered as I came up the countryside were not
less charming than when a distant 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 returned 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 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 moment 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 England 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 thin, should be cut earlier than
the grass in the bottoms 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
maturity: 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 especially 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 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 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, beginning 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 exactly 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 well and mowing badly--or rather not mowing 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 without tradition, the mower
Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does all
these things: 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 practice; 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 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 repetitive
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 contrast
with the shaven part, looked dense and high. As it says in the Ballad of
Val-ès-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)