coursing more quickly through his veins. The march of its eloquence, the
solemnity of its sentiment, and the rich balance of its pronouns unite
to make it a model for all historians: it can be adapted for any period.
It is not possible in a short review to include the special branches of
the subject. Such are those efficient modern text-books, in which events
are referred to either as "factors" (as if they were a sum) or as
"phases" (as if they were the moon). There is also the solemn business
of writing economic history, in which the historian may lapse at will
into algebra, and anything not otherwise describable may be called
"social tissue." A special subject is constituted by the early conquests
of Southern and Central America; in these there is a uniform opening for
all passages running:
It was now the middle of October, and the season was drawing to an
end. Soon the mountains would be whitened with the snows of winter
and every rivulet swollen to a roaring torrent. Cortez, whose
determination only increased with misfortune, decided to delay his
march until the inclemency of the season abated.... It was now the
middle of November, and the season was drawing to an end....
There is, finally, the method of military history. This may be
patriotic, technical, or in the manner prophetically indicated by Virgil
as _Belloc_, _horrida Belloc_. The finest exponent of the patriotic
style is undoubtedly the Rev. W. H. Fitchett, a distinguished colonial
clergyman and historian of the Napoleonic wars. His night-attacks are
more nocturnal, and his scaling parties are more heroically scaligerous
than those of any other writer. His drummer-boys are the most moving in
my limited circle of drummer-boys. One gathers that the Peninsular War
was full of pleasing incidents of this type:
THE NIGHT ATTACK
It was midnight when Staff-Surgeon Pettigrew showed the flare from
the summit of Sombrero. At once the whole plain was alive with the
hum of the great assault. The four columns speedily got into
position with flares and bugles at the head of each. One made
straight for the Watergate, a second for the Bailey-guard, a third
for the Porter-house, and the last (led by the saintly Smeathe) for
the Tube station. Let us follow the second column on its secret
mission through the night, lit by torches and cheered on by the
huzzas of a thousand English throats. "---- the ----s," cried
Cocker in a voice hoarse with patriotism; at that moment a red-hot
shot hurtled over the plain and, ricocheting treacherously from the
frozen river, dashed the heroic leader to the ground. Captain
Boffskin, of the Buffs, leapt up with the dry coughing howl of the
British infantryman. "---- them," he roared, "---- them to ----";
and for the last fifty yards it was neck and neck with the ladders.
Our gallant drummer-boys laid to again, but suddenly a shot rang
out from the silent ramparts. The 94th Léger were awake. _We were
discovered!_
The war of 1870 requires more special treatment. Its histories show no
particular characteristic, but its appearance in fiction deserves
special attention. There is a standard pattern.
HOW THE PRUSSIANS CAME TO GUITRY-LE-SEC
It was a late afternoon in early September, or an early afternoon
in late September--I forget these things--when I missed the boat
express from Kerplouarnec to Pouzy-le-roi and was forced by the
time-table to spend three hours at the forgotten hamlet of
Guitry-le-sec, in the heart of Dauphiné. It contained besides a
quantity of underfed poultry one white church, one white mairie,
and nine white houses. An old man with a white beard came towards
me up the long white road. "It was on just such an afternoon as
this forty years ago," he began, "that...."
"Stop!" I said sharply. "I have met you in a previous existence.
You are going to say that a solitary Uhlan appeared sharply
outlined against the sky behind M. Jules' farm." He nodded feebly.
"The red trousers had left the village half an hour before to look
for the hated Prussian in the cafés of the neighboring town. You
were alone when the spiked helmets marched in. You can hear their
shrieking fifes to this day." He wept quietly.
I went on. "There was an officer with them, a proud, ugly man with
a butter-colored mustache. He saw the little Mimi and drove his
coarse Suabian hand upward through his Mecklenburger mustache. You
dropped on one knee...." But he had fled.
In the first of the three cafés I saw a second old man. "Come in,
Monsieur," he said. I waited on the doorstep. "It was on just such
an afternoon...." I went on. At the other two cafés two further old
men attempted me with the story; I told the last that he was
rescued by Zouaves, and walked happily to the station, to read
about Vichy Célestins until the train came in from the south.
The Russo-Japanese War is a more original subject and derives its
particular flavor from the airy grace with which Sir Ian Hamilton has
described it. Like this:
WAO-WAO, _Jan._ 31.--The _rafale_ was purring like a _mistral_ as I
shaved this morning. I wonder where it is; must ask ----. ---- is a
charming fellow with the face of a Baluchi Kashgai and a voice like
a circular saw.
11:40--It was eleven-forty when I looked at my watch. The
shrapnel-bursts look like a plantation of powder-puffs suspended in
the sky. Victor says there is a battle going on: capital chap
Victor.
2 P. M.--Lunched with an American lady-doctor. How feminine the
Americans can be.
7 P. M.--A great day. It was Donkelsdorp over again. Substitute the
Tenth Army for the Traffordshire's baggage wagon, swell Honks
Spruit into the roaring Wang-ho, elevate Oom Kop into the frowning
scarp of Pyjiyama, and you have it. The Staff were obviously
gratified when I told them about Donkelsdorp.
The Rooskis came over the crest-line in a huddle of massed
battalions, and Gazeka was after them like a rat after a terrier. I
knew that his horse-guns had no horses (a rule of the Japanese
service to discourage unnecessary changing of ground), but his men
bit the trails and dragged them up by their teeth. Slowly the
Muscovites peeled off the steaming mountain and took the funicular
down the other side.
I wonder what my friend Smuts would make of the Yen-tai coal mine?
Well, well.--_"Something accomplished, something done."_
The technical manner is more difficult of acquisition for the beginner,
since it involves a knowledge of at least two European languages. It is
(a) cardinal rule that all places should be described as _points
d'appui_, the simple process of scouting looks far better as
_Verschleierung_, and the adjective "strategical" may be used without
any meaning in front of any noun.
But the military manner was revolutionized by the war. Mr. Belloc
created a new Land and a new Water. We know now why the Persian
commanders demanded "earth and water" on their entrance into a Greek
town; it was the weekly demand of the Great General Staff, as it called
for its favorite paper. Mr. Belloc has woven Baedeker and geometry into
a new style: it is the last cry of historians' English, because one was
invented by a German and the other by a Greek.
WINTER MIST
_By_ ROBERT PALFREY UTTER
Robert Palfrey Utter was born in 1875, in Olympia, Washington. He
graduated from Harvard (I am sorry there are so many Harvard men in
this book: I didn't know they were Harvard men until too late) in
1898 and took his Ph.D. there in 1906. After a varied experience,
including editorial work on the _Youth's Companion_, reporting on
the New York _Evening Post_, ranching in Mexico and graduate study
at Harvard, he went to Amherst, 1906-18, as associate professor of
English. He was on the faculty of the A. E. F. University at
Beaune, France, 1919; and in 1920 became associate professor of
English at the University of California.
Mr. Utter has contributed largely to the magazines, and has
published _Guide to Good English_ (1914), _Every-Day Words and
Their Uses_ (1916), and _Every-Day Pronunciation_ (1918).
Former students of his at Amherst have told me of the lasting
stimulus his teaching has given them: that he can beautifully
practise what he preaches of the art of writing, this essay shows.
From a magazine with a rather cynical cover I learned very recently that
for pond skating the proper costume is brown homespun with a fur collar
on the jacket, whereas for private rinks one wears a gray herringbone
suit and taupe-colored alpine. Oh, barren years that I have been a
skater, and no one told me of this! And here's another thing. I was
patiently trying to acquire a counter turn under the idle gaze of a
hockey player who had no better business till the others arrived than to
watch my efforts. "What I don't see about that game," he said at last,
"is who wins?" It had never occurred to me to ask. He looked bored, and
I remembered that the pictures in the magazine showed the wearers of the
careful costumes for rink and pond skating as having rather blank eyes
that looked illimitably bored. I have hopes of the "rocker" and the
"mohawk"; I might acquire a proper costume for skating on a small river
if I could learn what it is; but a bored look--why, even hockey does not
bore me, unless I stop to watch it. I don't wonder that those who play
it look bored. Even Alexander, who played a more imaginative game than
hockey, was bored--poor fellow, he should have taken up fancy skating in
his youth; I never heard of a human being who pretended to a complete
conquest of it.
I like pond skating best by moonlight. The hollow among the hills will
always have a bit of mist about it, let the sky be clear as it may. The
moonlight, which seems so lucid and brilliant when you look up, is all
pearl and smoke round the pond and the hills. The shore that was like
iron under your heel as you came down to the ice is vague, when you look
back at it from the center of the pond, as the memory of a dream. The
motion is like flying in a dream; you float free and the world floats
under you; your velocity is without effort and without accomplishment,
for, speed as you may, you leave nothing behind and approach nothing.
You look upward. The mist is overhead now; you see the moon in a
"hollow halo" at the bottom of an "icy crystal cup," and you yourself
are in just such another. The mist, palely opalescent, drives past her
out of nothing into nowhere. Like yourself, she is the center of a
circle of vague limit and vaguer content, where passes a swift,
ceaseless stream of impression through a faintly luminous halo of
consciousness.
If by moonlight the mist plays upon the emotions like faint, bewitching
music, in sunlight it is scarcely less. More often than not when I go
for my skating to our cosy little river, a winding mile from the
mill-dam to the railroad trestle, the hills are clothed in silver mist
which frames them in vignettes with blurred edges. The tone is that of
Japanese paintings on white silk, their color showing soft and dull
through the frost-powder with which the air is filled. At the mill-dam
the hockey players furiously rage together, but I heed them not, and in
a moment am beyond the first bend, where their clamor comes softened on
the air like that of a distant convention of politic crows. The silver
powder has fallen on the ice, just enough to cover earlier tracings and
leave me a fresh plate to etch with grapevines and arabesques. The
stream winds ahead like an unbroken road, striped across with soft-edged
shadows of violet, indigo, and lavender. On one side it is bordered with
leaning birch, oak, maple, hickory, and occasional groups of hemlocks
under which the very air seems tinged with green. On the other, rounded
masses of scrub oak and alder roll back from the edge of the ice like
clouds of reddish smoke. The river narrows and turns, then spreads into
a swamp, where I weave my curves round the straw-colored tussocks. Here,
new as the snow is, there are earlier tracks than mine. A crow has
traced his parallel hieroglyph, alternate footprints with long dashes
where he trailed his middle toe as he lifted his foot and his spur as he
brought it down. Under a low shrub that has hospitably scattered its
seed is a dainty, close-wrought embroidery of tiny bird feet in
irregular curves woven into a circular pattern. A silent glide towards
the bank, where among bare twigs little forms flit and swing with low
conversational notes, brings me in company with a working crew of pine
siskins, methodically rifling seed cones of birch and alder, chattering
sotto voce the while. Under a leaning hemlock the writing on the snow
tells of a squirrel that dropped from the lowest branch, hopped
aimlessly about for a few yards, then went up the bank. Farther on,
where the river narrows again, a flutter-headed rabbit crossing at top
speed has made a line seemingly as free from frivolous indirection as if
it had been defined by all the ponderosities of mathematics. There is no
pursuing track; was it his own shadow he fled, or the shadow of hawk?
The mist now lies along the base of the hills, leaving the upper ridges
almost imperceptibly veiled and the rounded tops faintly softened. The
snowy slopes are etched with brush and trees so fine and soft that they
remind me of Dürer's engravings, the fur of Saint Jerome's lion, the
cock's feathers in the coat of arms with the skull. From behind the veil
of the southernmost hill comes a faint note as
From undiscoverable lips that blow
An immaterial horn.
It is the first far premonition of the noon train; I pause and watch
long for the next sign. At last I hear its throbbing, which ceases as it
pauses at the flag station under the hill. There the invisible
locomotive shoots a column of silver vapor above the surface of the
mist, breaking in rounded clouds at the top, looking like nothing so
much as the photograph of the explosion of a submarine mine, a titanic
outburst of force in static pose, a geyser of atomized water standing
like a frosted elm tree. Then quick puffs of dusky smoke, the volley of
which does not reach my ear till the train has stuck its black head out
of fairyland and become a prosaic reminder of dinner. High on its
narrow trestle it leaps across my little river and disappears between
the sandbanks. Far behind it the mist is again spreading into its even
layers. Silence is renewed, and I can hear the musical creaking of four
starlings in an apple tree as they eviscerate a few rotten apples on the
upper branches. I turn and spin down the curves and reaches of the river
without delaying for embroideries or arabesques. At the mill-dam the
hockey game still rages; the players take no heed of the noon train.
Let Zal and Rustum bluster as they will,
Or Hatim call to supper....
Their minds and eyes are intent on a battered disk of hard rubber. I
begin to think I have misjudged them when I consider what effort of
imagination must be involved in the concentration of the faculties on
such an object, transcending the call of hunger and the lure of beauty.
Is it to them as is to the mystic "the great syllable Om" whereby he
attains Nirvana? I cannot attain it; I can but wonder what the hockey
players win one-half so precious as the stuff they miss.
TRIVIA
_By_ LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
It would be extravagant to claim that Pearsall Smith's _Trivia_,
the remarkable little book from which these miniature essays are
extracted, is well known: it is too daintily, fragile and absurd
and sophisticated to appeal to a very large public. But it has a
cohort of its own devotees and fanatics, and since its publication
in 1917 it has become a sort of password in a secret brotherhood or
intellectual Suicide Club. I say suicide advisedly, for Mr. Smith's
irony is glitteringly edged. Its incision is so keen that the
reader is often unaware the razor edge has turned against himself
until he perceives the wound to be fatal.
Pearsall Smith was, in a way, one of the Men of the Nineties. But
he had Repressions--(an excellent thing to have, brothers. Most of
the great literature is founded on judicious repressions). He came
of an excellent old intellectual Quaker family down in the
Philadelphia region. His father (if we remember rightly) was one of
Walt Whitman's staunchest friends in the Camden days. But when the
strong wine of the Nineties was foaming in the vats and noggins,
Mr. Smith (so we imagine it, at least) was still too close to that
"guarded education in morals and manners" that he had had at
Haverford College, Pennsylvania (and further tinctured with
docility at Harvard and Balliol) to give full rein to his inward
gush of hilarious satirics. Like a Strong Silent Man he held in
that wellspring of champagne and mercury until many many years
later. When it came out (in 1902 he first began to print his
_Trivia_, privately; the book was published by Doubleday in 1917)
it sparkled all the more tenderly for its long cellarage.
But we must be statistical. Logan Pearsall Smith was born at
Melville, N. J., in 1865. As a boy he lived in Philadelphia and
Germantown (do you know Germantown? it is a foothill of that
mountain range whereof Parnassus and Olivet are twin peaks) and was
three years at Haverford in the class of '85. He went to Harvard
for a year, then to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his
degree in 1893. Ever since then, eheu, he has lived in England.
STONEHENGE
They sit there for ever on the dim horizon of my mind, that Stonehenge
circle of elderly disapproving Faces--Faces of the Uncles and
Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth.
In the bright center and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my dance; but
when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For nothing ever placates
them, nothing ever moves to a look of approval that ring of bleak, old,
contemptuous Faces.
THE STARS
Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and rain, a
sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back into the shelter of
a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open; the illumination of the
Stars poured down from behind the dispersing clouds.
I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the night
with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by them; Arcturus
followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses,
and then emerged triumphant, Lord of the Western Sky. Moving along the
road in the silence of my own footsteps, my thoughts were among the
Constellations. I was one of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me
also there was something that was not insignificant and mean and of no
account.
THE SPIDER
What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a
waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full
of floating froth and refuse?
No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on
leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops
and dead flies. And at its center, pondering for ever the Problem of
Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.
L'OISEAU BLEU
What is it, I have more than once asked myself, what is it that I am
looking for in my walks about London? Sometimes it seems to me as if I
were following a Bird, a bright Bird that sings sweetly as it floats
about from one place to another.
When I find myself, however, among persons of middle age and settled
principles, see them moving regularly to their offices--what keeps them
going? I ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my Bird.
There is though a Philosophic Doctrine--I studied it at College, and I
know that many serious people believe it--which maintains that all men,
in spite of appearances and pretensions, all live alike for Pleasure.
This theory certainly brings portly, respected persons very near to me.
Indeed, with a sense of low complicity, I have sometimes watched a
Bishop. Was he, too, on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing his
Bird?
I SEE THE WORLD
"But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world," my cousins said.
Now though I do go sometimes to the parties to which I am now and then
invited, I find, as a matter of fact, that I get really much more
pleasure by looking in at windows, and have a way of my own of seeing
the World. And of summer evenings, when motors hurry through the late
twilight, and the great houses take on airs of inscrutable expectation,
I go owling out through the dusk; and wandering toward the West, lose my
way in unknown streets--an unknown City of revels. And when a door opens
and a bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets unrolled by
powdered footmen, I can easily think her some great Courtezan, or some
half-believed Duchess, hurrying to card-tables and lit candles and
strange scenes of joy. I like to see that there are still splendid
people on this flat earth; and at dances, standing in the street with
the crowd, and stirred by the music, the lights, the rushing sound of
voices, I think the Ladies as beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes
of light past our rows of vagabond faces; the young men look like Lords
in novels; and if (it has once or twice happened) people I know go by
me, they strike me as changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when on hot
nights windows are left open, and I can look in at Dinner Parties, as I
peer through lace curtains and window-flowers at the silver, the women's
shoulders, the shimmer of their jewels, and the divine attitudes of
their heads as they lean and listen, I imagine extraordinary intrigues
and unheard-of wines and passions.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there that Sunday afternoon, in
the Palladian interior of the London Church, and listened to the
unexpressive voices chanting the correct service, I felt a comfortable
assurance that we were in no danger of being betrayed into any unseemly
manifestations of religious fervor. We had not gathered together at that
performance to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark
Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles and
sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly respected Anglican
First Cause--undemonstrative, gentlemanly, and conscientious--whom,
without loss of self-respect, we could decorously praise.
CONSOLATION
The other day, depressed on the Underground, I tried to cheer myself by
thinking over the joys of our human lot. But there wasn't one of them
for which I seemed to care a button--not Wine, nor Friendship, nor
Eating, nor Making Love, nor the Consciousness of Virtue. Was it worth
while then going up in a lift into a world that had nothing less trite
to offer?
Then I thought of reading--the nice and subtle happiness of reading.
This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished
vice, this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication.
THE KALEIDOSCOPE
I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a curious
collection of little landscapes and pictures, shining and fading for no
reason. Sometimes they are views in no way remarkable--the corner of a
road, a heap of stones, an old gate. But there are many charming
pictures too: as I read, between my eyes and book, the Moon sheds down
on harvest fields her chill of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the
leaves falling, or swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts,
with the rain beating for ever on the fields. Then Winter's upward
glare of snow appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the
windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and youths bathing in
Summer's golden heats.
And as I walk about, certain places haunt me; a cathedral rises above a
dark blue foreign town, the color of ivory in the sunset light; now I
find myself in a French garden, full of lilacs and bees, and shut-in
sunshine, with the Mediterranean lounging and washing outside its walls;
now in a little college library, with busts, and the green reflected
light of Oxford lawns--and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the
familiar Oxford hours.
THE POPLAR
There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage floats high
in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and blackbirds, who fill the
late, decorative sunshine with a shimmer of golden sound. There the
nightingale finds her green cloister; and on those branches sometimes,
like a great fruit, hangs the lemon-colored Moon. In the glare of
August, when all the world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze
in those cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of water, among
its lightly-hung leaves.
But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading books.