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THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN
Books by
Ralph Bergengren
THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN
THE COMFORTS OF HOME
_Each $1.00_
For
Younger Readers
JANE, JOSEPH AND JOHN
_Boxed, $3.00_
_The_
SEVEN AGES _of_ MAN
BY
RALPH BERGENGREN
[Illustration: colophon]
The Atlantic Monthly Press
Boston
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
RALPH BERGENGREN
CONTENTS
I. Baby, Baby 1
II. To be a Boy 17
III. On Meeting the Beloved 33
IV. This is a Father 47
V. On Being a Landlord 64
VI. Old Flies and Old Men 78
VII. The Olde, Olde, Very Olde Man 94
I
BABY, BABY
_In meeting a baby, one should behave as much as possible like a
baby one's self. We cannot, of course, diminish our size, or
exchange our customary garments for baby-clothes; neither can we
arrive in a perambulator, and be conveyed in the arms, either of a
parent or a nursemaid, into the presence of the baby whom we are to
meet. The best we can do is to hang, as it were on the hatrack, our
preconceived ideas of what manner of behavior entertains a baby, as
cooing, grimacing, tickling, and the like, and model our deportment
on the dignified but friendly reticence that one baby evinces in
meeting another._--BABY: HIS FRIENDS AND FOES.
Of the many questions that Mr. Boswell, at one time and another, asked
his friend, Dr. Johnson, I can hardly recall another more searching
than one that he himself describes as whimsical.
"I know not how so whimsical a thought came into my head," says Boswell,
"but I asked, 'If, sir, you were shut up in a castle, and a new-born
child with you, what would you do?'
"JOHNSON: Why, sir, I should not much like my company.
"BOSWELL: But would you take the trouble of rearing it?
"He seemed, as may be supposed, unwilling to pursue the subject: but,
upon my persevering in my question, replied, 'Why, yes, sir, I would;
but I must have all conveniences. If I had no garden, I would make a
shed on the roof, and take it there for fresh air. I should feed it, and
wash it much, and with warm water, to please it, not with cold water, to
give it pain.'
"BOSWELL: But, sir, does not heat relax?
"JOHNSON: Sir, you are not to imagine the water is to be very hot. I
would not _coddle_ the child."
It appears, too, that the Doctor had given some thought to the subject,
although never expecting to be a mother himself: his immediate
insistence upon fresh air promises well for the infant, and the
frequency with which he proposes to wash his little companion indicates
that, so long as the water-supply of the castle lasted, he would have
done his part. A cow in the castle seems to have been taken for granted;
but, in 1769, even Dr. Johnson would have known little or nothing about
formulas, nor would it have occurred to him to make a pasteurizing
apparatus, as so many parents do nowadays, out of a large tin pail and a
pie-plate. Here the baby would have had to take his eighteenth-century
chance. And I wish, too, that he might have had a copy of "The Baby's
Physical Culture Guide," that modern compendium of twenty-four
exercises, by which a reasonably strongarmed mother may strengthen and
develop the infant's tiny muscles; for I like to think of Dr. Johnson
exercising his innocent companion in his shed on the roof. "Sir," he
says, "I do not much like my employment; but here we are, and we'll have
to make the best of it."
Such an experience, no doubt, would have been good for Dr. Johnson, and
good for the baby (if it survived). "That into which his little mind is
to develop," says "The Baby's Physical Culture Guide," "is plastic--like
a wax record, ready to retain such impressions as are made upon it"; and
on this wax some, at least, of the impressions left by Dr. Johnson must
have been valuable. But on the real mystery of babyhood--the insoluble
enigma that the "Guide" can only in small measure dispose of by
comparing the rearing of an infant with the home-manufacture of a record
for the gramaphone--the experience would have thrown no light.
The Doctor, I dare say, would have written a paper on the feeding and
washing of infants, and later dictionaries of familiar quotation might
perhaps have been enriched by the phrase,"'The baby is grandfather to
the man.'--JOHNSON." But of this grandfather the man has no memory. His
babyhood is a past concerning which he is perforce silent, a time when
it is only by the report of others that he knows he was living. His
little mind seems to have been more than a little blank; and although
gifted novelists have set themselves the imaginative task of thinking
and writing like babies, none, in my reading, has ever plausibly
succeeded. The best they can do is to think and write like little
adults. I recall, for example, the honest effort of Miss May Sinclair,
whom I greatly respect as an adult, to see Mr. Olivier through the eyes
of his baby daughter Mary. "Papa sat up, broad and tall above the table,
all by himself. He was dressed in black. One long brown beard hung down
in front of him and one short beard covered his mouth. You knew he was
smiling because his cheeks swelled high up in his face, so that his eyes
were squeezed into narrow, shining slits. When they came out again, you
saw scarlet specks and smears in their corners." A fearsome Papa!--and,
although I have no way of knowing that fathers do not present
themselves in this futurist aspect to their helpless offspring, I am
glad to think otherwise. At all events a baby is, and must be, well used
to living in Brobdingnag.
It would be a surprising thing, if it were not so common, that a man
shows so little curiosity about this forgotten period of his life. But
such curiosity would be impossible to satisfy. Existing photographs of
him at that time are a disappointment: he seldom admits seeing any
resemblance, and, if he does, the likeness rarely, if ever, gives him
any visible satisfaction. Nor can anything of real and personal interest
be found out by interviewing those who then knew him. Of a hundred, nay,
of a thousand or a million babies,--and though I cannot speak as a
woman, it seems to me (except, perhaps, for a livelier interest and
pleasure among them in their infant appearance) that everything I am
saying applies equally to babies of that fascinating sex,--the trivial
details observed by those who are nearest them are practically
identical. They thump their heads. They chew their fingers. They try to
feed their toes; and, sillier yet, they try to feed them with things
that are obviously inedible. And so forth. And so forth. If Dr. Johnson,
actually shut up in a castle, and a new-born child with him, had kept a
record, the result would have been very much like the records that
mothers now keep in what, unless I am mistaken, are called "Baby Books."
If you've seen one Baby Book, as the cynical old man said about
circuses, you've seen all of 'em.
Nor does any man take pleasure in preserving and reading over his own
Baby Book. Hercules, to be sure, might have been interested to read in
his mother's handwriting,--"_Tuesday._ An eventful day. Two big, horrid
Snakes came in from the garden, and got in Darling's cradle, frightening
Nurse into hysterics; but Darling only cooed and strangled them both
with his dear, strong little hands. He gets stronger and cunninger every
day. When the horrid Snakes were taken away from him, he cried and said,
'Atta! Atta!'"
But Hercules was an exceptionally interesting baby; and the average Baby
Book records nothing that a grown man can regard with pride, and much,
if he has any sensitiveness at all, that must make him blush. Nothing
but respect for his mother, it is almost safe to say, would withhold him
from hurrying the incriminating document to the cellar, and cremating it
in the furnace.
For in the beginning Captain William Kidd, George Washington, Dr.
Johnson, the writer of this essay, and even the editor of the "Atlantic
Monthly," looked and behaved very much alike. And so, for that matter,
did little Moll Cutpurse and little Susan B. Anthony. So far as anybody
could then have said, Captain Kidd might have become a thoughtful,
law-abiding essayist, and I a pirate, handicapped, indeed, by changed
conditions of maritime traffic, but unconscientiously doing my wicked
best.
As the twig is bent, says the proverb, so is the tree inclined; but
these little twigs are bent already, and I humbly submit, with all
respect to my scientific friends, and their white mice and their guinea
pigs, that where and how it happened remains an insoluble mystery.
Little as I know about myself, I know that I am neither a white mouse
nor a guinea pig. And this, mark you, is no mere conceit. Scientists
themselves have decided that when babies, in that remote past when they
first began really to interest their parents, and the human mother, the
most pathetic figure of that primitive world, first began the personal
and affectionate observation that was to develop slowly, over millions
of years, until it found expression in the first Baby Book--scientists,
themselves, I say, have decided that, then and there, you and I,
intelligent reader, began to differ essentially from every other known
kind of mammal. There appeared--oh, wonder!--something psychical as well
as physical about us; but _where it came from_, they cannot tell us.
"Natural selection," so John Fiske once summed up this opinion, "began
to follow a new path and make psychical changes instead of physical
changes." Little enough there seems to have been to start with; little
enough, indeed, there seems to be now--yet enough more to encourage us
to believe that Baby is a lot further along in the right direction than
he was a good many million years ago. And with this helpful conviction,
Baby himself, whether he will grow up to write essays or commit
picturesque murder, seems reasonably well satisfied. We solemn adults,
standing around the crib, may well admire, not so much the pinkness and
chubbiness of his toes, as the pinkness and chubbiness (if I may so
express it) of his simple satisfaction with the mere fact of existence,
his simple faith in the Universe. And when we think how impossible it is
to think of its beginning, we, too, may capture something of this
infantile optimism.
It is by no means impossible (though not susceptible of scientific
proof) that Baby may have a life of his own; and, if we may assume
Hercules weeping and saying, "Atta! Atta!"--because shrewd observers of
babyhood declare it to be characteristic of babies to say, "Atta! Atta!"
when something desirable, in this case two dead snakes, is removed from
their range of vision,--may we not assume also a universal language of
babies, and a place, such as it may be, from which they have emigrated?
Here, indeed, one follows M. Maeterlinck, except that, in his judgment,
unborn babies speak French. Such a theory is no help to the novelist,
for in that case baby Mary Olivier's impressions of Mr. Olivier must be
rendered in baby--a language equally unknown to Miss Sinclair and to her
readers. Babies have been heard to say, for example, "Nja njan dada atta
mama papaï attaï na-na-na hatta meen[)e]-meen[)e]-meen[)e] m[)o]mm
m[)o]mma ao-u"--and who but another baby knows whether this may not be
speech? The assumption that this is an effort to speak the language of
the baby's elders is academic, as, for that matter, is the assumption
that they are his elders. There may even be no baby at all; for, as
Schopenhauer has almost brusquely put it, "The uneasiness that keeps the
never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that
the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence."
But this, I confess, is far too deep for me.
Baby, baby in your cot,
Are you there?--or are you not?
If you're not, then what of me!
Baby, _what_ and _where_ are we?
For all practical purposes, however, Baby is sufficiently
real--substantial enough, indeed, as "The Baby's Physical Culture Guide"
shows in Exercise 24, to be lifted by his little feet and stood on his
little head; but, mercifully adds the "Guide," "do not hold Baby on his
head very long." For all practical purposes we must, and do, assume our
own existence. "Here we are," as I have imagined Dr. Johnson saying to
his innocent new-born comrade, "and we'll have to make the best of it."
Nobody has thought of a better way, or any other way at all, for us to
get here; and the familiar Biblical phrase, 'born again,' may perhaps be
more literal than we are wont to imagine, and apply to this world as
well as the next. Baby himself may just have been born again. That
innocent-seeming and rather silly-sounding monologue, which we flatter
ourselves is an earnest attempt to imitate our own speech,--"Nja njan
dada atta mama papaï attaï na-na-na hatta meen[)e]-meen[)e]-meene[)e]
m[)o]mm m[)o]mma ao-u,"--may it not be the soliloquy of a gentle
philosopher, or, again, the confession of an out-and-out rascal,
talking to himself of his misdeeds, chuckling and cooing over them,
indeed, before he forgets them in this new state of being? May not Papa,
waggishly shaking his forefinger and saying, "You little rascal, you,"
be speaking with a truthfulness which, if known, would make him sick?
Meanwhile, as says "The Baby's Physical Culture Guide," "Don't jerk Baby
round. Never rush through his exercises, but talk to him in a happy,
encouraging way. When he is able to talk he will be glad to tell you
what great, good fun he has been having."
So speaks, I think, a mother's imagination; in sober reality, even the
great good fun of Exercise 24 will be forgotten. Which is perhaps why,
although I have heard men wish they could again be children, I have
never heard any man say he would like to be a baby.
II
TO BE A BOY
_I love dearly to watch the boys at their play. How gayly they pitch and
catch their baseball with their strong little hands! How blithely they
run from base to base! How merrily their voices come to me across the
green; for, although I cannot hear what they say, I know it expresses a
young, innocent joy in this big, good world. Yet even in this Garden
there is a Serpent, and one day two of the little innocents quarreled
and came to blows. A real fight! I soon hurried out and stopped that,
but the sight of their little faces distorted with rage, and one poor
boy bleeding at the nose, upset me for quite a time._--AN OLD MAID'S
WINDOW.
* * * * *
In "The Boyhood of Great Men," published by Harper and Brothers, in
1853, but now, I fear, very little read, it is told of Sir Isaac Newton
that "An accident first fired him to strive for distinction in the
school-room. The boy who was immediately above him in the class, after
treating him with a tyranny hard to bear, was cruel enough to kick him
in the stomach, with a severity that caused great pain. Newton resolved
to have his revenge, but of such a kind as was natural to his reasoning
mind, even at that immature age. He determined to excel his oppressor in
their studies and lessons; and, setting himself to the task with zeal
and diligence, he never halted in his course till he had found his way
to the top of the class; thus exhibiting and leaving a noble example to
others of his years similarly situated. Doubtless, after this, he would
heartily forgive his crestfallen persecutor, who could not but
henceforth feel ashamed of his unmanly conduct, while Newton would feel
the proud consciousness of having done his duty after the bravest and
noblest fashion which it is in the power of man to adopt."
We cannot all be Sir Isaac Newtons, and, although I may wish for a
passing moment that some sturdy little school-fellow had kicked me too
in the stomach, the resulting sequence of events would probably have
been different, and the world would have gained little or nothing by my
natural indignation. Having an impartial mind, I should like to know
also _why_ Sir Isaac was kicked in the stomach, and what became
afterward of the boy who kicked him. As his fame grew in the world, the
reflected glory of having thus kicked Sir Isaac Newton in the stomach
would presumably have brightened in proportion, but, lacking other
distinction, the kicker served his evolutionary purpose and has now
vanished.
But this much remains of him--that his little foot kicks also in the
stomach the widely accepted fallacy that boyhood is an age of unalloyed
gold, to which every man now and then looks back and vainly yearns to be
a boy again. "Oh! happy years!"--so sighed the poet Byron,--"once more,
who would not be a boy?" And so to-day, as one may at least deduce from
his general newspaper reading, sigh all the editors of all the
newspapers in the United States. Not, indeed, for a boyhood like Sir
Isaac Newton's, but for the standard American boyhood, to which, in
theory, every ageing American looks back with tender reminiscence--that
happy time when he went barefooted, played "hookey" from school, fished
in the running brook with a bent pin for a hook, and swam, with other
future bankers, merchants, clerks, clergymen, physicians and surgeons,
confidence-men, pickpockets, authors, actors, burglars, etc., etc., in
an old swimming-hole. The democracy of the old swimming-hole is, in
fact, the democracy of the United States, naked and unashamed; and even
in the midst of a wave of crime (one might almost imagine), if the
victim should say suddenly to the hold-up man,--
"Oh, do you remember the ole swimmin' hole,
And the hours we spent there together;
Where the oak and the chestnut o'ershadowed the bowl,
And tempered the hot summer weather?
Ah, sweet were those hours together we spent
In innocent laughter and joy!
How little we knew at the time what it meant
To be just a boy--just a boy!"
--the hold-up man would drop his automatic gun, and the two would
dissolve on each other's necks in a flood of sympathetic tears.
It is a pleasant and harmless fallacy, and I for one would not destroy
it; I am no such stickler for exactitude that I would take away from any
man whatever pleasure he may derive from thinking that he was once a
barefoot boy, even if circumstances were against him and his mother as
adamant in her refusal to let him go barefooted. But the fallacy is
indestructible: the symbols may not have been universal, but it is true
enough of boyhood that time then seems to be without limit; and this
comfortable, unthinking sense of immortality is what men have lost and
would fain recover. One forgets how cruelly slow moved the hands of the
school-room clock through the last, long, lingering, eternal fifteen
minutes of the daily life-sentence. One forgets how feverishly the
seconds chased each other, faster than human feet could follow, when
one's little self was late for school, and the clamor of the distant
bell ended in a solemn, ominous silence. Then was the opportunity for
stout heart to play "hookey," and to lure the finny tribe with a poor
worm impaled on a bent pin; and that, in the opinion of all the editors
of all the newspapers in the United States, is what all of us always
did. But in the painful reality most of us, I think, tried to overtake
those feverish seconds, seeking indeed to outrun time, and somehow or
other, though the bell had stopped ringing, get unostentatiously into
our little seats before it stopped. And so we ran, and ran, and ran,
lifting one leaden foot after the other with hopeless determination, in
a silent, nightmare world where the road was made of glue and the very
trees along the way turned their leaves to watch us drag slowly by.
Little respect we would have had then for the poet Byron and his "Ah!
happy years! once more, who would not be a boy?"
But even when time seemed to stand still, or go too fast, we had no
consciousness that the complicated clock of our individual existence
could ever run down and stop; and so happily careless were we of this
treasure, that we often wished to be men! "When I was young," says the
author of "The Boy's Week-Day Book,"--another volume that is not read
nowadays as much as it used to be,--
I doubted not the time would come,
When grown to man's estate,
That I would be a noble 'squire,
And live among the great.
It was a proud, aspiring thought,
That should have been exiled:--
I wish I was more humble now
Than when I was a child.
I wonder what proud, aspiring thought Uncle Jones, as he called himself,
just then had in mind; but it was evidently no wish to be a boy again:
perhaps he meditated matrimony.
For my own part I cannot successfully wish to be a boy; I remain
impervious to all the efforts of all the editors of all the newspapers
in the United States to dim my eye; and there must be many another eye
like mine, or else it is unbelievably unique. I lean back in my chair,
close my undimmed eye, and do my best; but, contrary to all editorial
expectation, I can summon no desire to go barefooted, fish with a bent
pin, or revisit the old swimming-hole
Where the elm and the chestnut o'ershadowed the bowl,
And tempered the hot summer weather.
I prefer a beach and a bathing-suit and somebody my own age. Yet do not
think, shocked reader, that I am unsympathetic with youth. I am more
sympathetic--that is all--with my contemporaries; and the thought
forces itself upon me that boyhood is a narrow and conventional period,
in which my own desire to go without shoes was exactly similar to my
mother's determination to wear a bustle. Equally anxious to follow the
fashion of our respective sets, neither understood the other; and I
would no more have worn a bustle than my mother would have gone
barefooted. My father, similarly thwarted in a single desire, would have
cared less: his wider interests--politics, business, family, the local
and world gossip that immersed him in his newspaper, art, literature,
music, and the drama, to say nothing of professional baseball and
pugilism (in which, however, many fathers and sons have a common
interest)--would have absorbed his disappointment.
But my narrower world, so to speak, was all feet. An unconventional
boy, as I think the most erudite student of boy-life and boy-psychology
will admit, is much more rare than an unconventional man; and even then
his unconventionality is likely to be imposed upon him "for his own
good" by well-meaning but tyrannical parents. "I have known boys," wrote
Uncle Jones, observing but not comprehending this characteristic fact,
"when playing at 'Hare and hounds' and 'Follow my leader,' to scramble
over hedges, leap over brooks, and mount up precipices, in a manner
which they would not have dared to attempt, had it not been for the
examples set them by their school-fellows; but," he adds, "I do not
remember any instance of a boy imitating another on account of his good
temper, patience, forbearance, principle, or piety."
Naturally not. You and I, Uncle Jones, might be expected to imitate
each other's good temper, patience, forbearance, principle, or
piety,--though I do not say that we would,--but from the point of view
of a boy these virtues are unconventional. Their practice shocks and
disconcerts the observer. The behavior of Sir Isaac Newton, when kicked
in the stomach, was perfectly scandalous.
And what is there, after all, in the life of a boy, that a man would
find interesting? Or that he may not do, if such is sufficiently his
desire to "make" the time for it, as he makes time for his adult
pleasures, and if he is not too old or too fat? He can spend his
vacation at the old swimming-hole--but he never does it. He can go
barefooted whenever he wishes: his mother can no longer prevent him. He
can fish with a bent pin in the porcelain bathtub,--adding a goldfish
to make the pursuit more exciting,--every morning before he takes his
bath. He can chase butterflies; here and there, indeed, a man makes a
profession of it, and institutions of learning call him an entomologist,
and pay him much honor and a small salary. Nobody forbids him to enlarge
his mental horizon by reading the lives of criminals and detectives; and
I can myself direct him to many an entertaining book, which is at once
far worse and far better, morally and artistically, than the sober
narratives that Old Sleuth used to write by the yard for boys to read by
stealth. He can roll a hoop; in many cases it would do him a world of
good to roll it down to the office in the morning and back home at
night. If he can persuade other ageing men, wishful of renewed boyhood,
to join with him, he can play at marbles, tick, puss-in-the-corner,
hop-scotch, ring-taw, and "Hot beans ready buttered." (Uncle Jones
mentions these games. I do not remember all of them myself, but "Hot
beans ready buttered" sounds especially interesting.) And where better
than in some green, quiet corner at the Country Club? And why, if you
_will_ raise the question of conventionality, why more foolish than
golf, or folk-dancing?
But what he cannot do is to assume the boy's unconsciousness of his own
mortality. What he cannot unload is his own consciousness of
responsibility to and for others. Life, in short, has provided the man
with a worrying company of creditors of whom the boy knows
nothing--Creditor Cost-of-Living, Creditor Ambition, Creditor
Conscience, and Creditor Death. And the boy is unmarried! It is even
claimed by one philosopher of my acquaintance that this is why men wish
they were once more boys. I grant the plausibility of this opinion; for
the more a man is is devoted to his wife and family, the more he is
beset and worried by these troublesome creditors, the more, one may
reasonably argue, he feels the need of time to meet his obligations, and
is likely now and then to envy the boy his narrow, conventional, but
immortal-feeling life.
Uncle Jones misses, I think, this fundamental fact. He is always trying
to destroy the boy's sense of immortality in this world by trying to
persuade him to read the Bible and prepare for immortality in the next.
"When a boy first begins his A B C," says Uncle Jones, "it is terrible
work for him for a short time; yet how soon he gets over it, and begins
to read! And, then, what a pleasure to be able to read a good and
pleasant book! Oh, it is worthwhile to go through the trouble of
learning to read fifty times over, to obtain the advantage of reading
the Bible."
III
ON MEETING THE BELOVED
_Now it is a quainte Oddity of thys State and Mysterie of Loue that
youre trew Louer combines the opposyte qualities of a deepe
Humilitie and a loftie Conceit of Hymselfe. For with respect to
this, hys Mistresse, he believes himself a most inferior Person,
and as it were a mere Worme; yet if he doth suspect her to regard
any Man els as his Equal, he is consumed with great Astonishment
and raging Indignation, for this same Loue is a great Destroyer of
Common Sense in its Victimes. For he thinketh Hymselfe inferior to
her because he is her Louer, and superior to all Men els for the
same silly Reason._--ANATOMIE OF LOUE.
To any sensitive man, not yet armored by the indifference that comes of
being married himself, there is cause for apprehension in the prospect
of meeting for the first time that person, male or female, whom somebody
he knows and loves has recently agreed to marry. The event, when it
comes, is unavoidable, nor is there any period in adult life when it may
not happen, or anybody we know so old that he or she may not occasion
it. Fact is more romantic, or at any rate remains romantic much later in
life, than fiction. Only the other day I read in the newspaper of a man
of one hundred and thirty-five years who had just subjected his little
circle to this formality. Very likely the newspaper exaggerated, but the
case undermines the security that one ordinarily feels in his
relationship with the ageing.
Now it needs no argument that to be happy in the happiness of others is
an inexpensive pleasure and well worth cultivating. Other things being
equal, one should go dancing and singing to his first meeting with
another's beloved. Bright-colored flowers, be she sixteen or sixty,
should blossom, to his imagination, from the granite curb along his way;
and, though a foolish convention may repress the song and dance, yet
should he walk as if shod with the most levitating heels ever made from
the liveliest of live rubber, and sing merrily in his heart.
But, thus to enter into the happiness of another, one must see and feel,
as if for himself, some good and sufficient reason for that happiness;
and the deep, insoluble mystery essential to all proper betrothals is
that this good and sufficient reason is not necessarily visible: these
two are happy-mad, and how shall anybody who is sane enter into their
lunacy?
Mr. Harvey Todd, 2d,--to take the first name that comes to mind,--has
become engaged to Miss Margaret Lemon; Miss Lemon to Mr. Todd. Well and
good. Nature, which, for some reason that mankind has long curiously and
vainly sought to penetrate, wishes to continue the human race, is, one
may believe, reasonably well satisfied. It is one job among many. But
the satisfaction of Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon, if it could be put to such
haberdashery use, would girdle the Equator, and the ends, tied in a true
lover's knot, would flutter beyond the farthest visible star. Men and
women have become engaged in the past; men and women will become engaged
in the future; but this engagement of Harvey Todd and Margaret Lemon is
and will ever remain unique--and so whoever is now called upon to
appraise one party to this wonder and congratulate the other, may well
be troubled. He is not so much afraid of what he may do and say,--for
any man may hope to achieve a hard, quick, almost sobbing pressure of
the hand and a few muttered words,--as of the way, in spite of himself,
that he will look when he does and says it; there, indeed, the amateur
actor profits by his hobby. There is, to be sure, the saving chance that
Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd) may so pleasurably affect him that the ordeal
will be less difficult than he anticipates: there is even the rare
chance that he may _instantly and completely agree with Mr. Todd's
estimate of Miss Lemon_; but this is the happy-madness itself, and
certainly not desirable under the circumstances. There is the
possibility, even more rare and less desirable, that Miss Lemon, seeing
him for the first time, _will instantly and completely prefer him to
Mr. Todd_. There is the possibility that he may recoil with horror from
Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd), or be recoiled from, or that both may recoil
simultaneously, falling over, figuratively, on their backs, and being
picked up and carried away unconscious, and in opposite directions, by
surprised onlookers. His whole nature may, in short, instinctively run
toward, or away from, the beloved; and between these extremes lies a
gamut of intermediary emotions, which at the moment he would hardly wish
to uncover. This stiff and geometrical smile, he asks himself at the
worst, can it deceive anybody? this hypocritical mutter of
congratulation, does it proceed from his own or an ice chest? Nor is he
much relieved when Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon, as the case may be, proves
how genuine appeared his smile, how sincere his mutter, by asking him
in affectionate detail what he thinks of the other--a procedure which
should be legally forbidden the newly engaged, under penalty of being
refused a marriage license for at least ten years.
This state of mind in lovers, so important to those who are called upon
to meet the beloved for the first time, has engaged the attention of
essayists, conversationalists, and philosophers. "They fall at once,"
wrote Stevenson, "into that state in which another person becomes to us
the very gist and centre point of God's creation, and demolishes our
laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with
the one master-thought, that even the trivial cares of our own person
become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is
translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and
desirable a fellow creature. And all the while their acquaintances look
on in stupor."
"No, sir," said Dr. Johnson, promptly improving Mr. Boswell's milder
assertion that love is like being enlivened with champagne, "No, sir.
Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne"--an
opinion, one hopes, that will not some day be made the basis of a
nation-wide campaign to prohibit falling in love.
"His friends," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, "find in her a likeness to her
mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees
no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to
rainbows and the song of birds."
Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon (so like a rainbow) are impervious to any lack
of enthusiasm that you or I, dear, unselfish, sensitive reader, may fear
to exhibit when either leads us the other by the hand and says, "This
is IT." Ours, if any, will be the suffering. It may even happen that
Miss Lemon or Mr. Todd--Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon beaming consent and
approval--will suggest that _we call her_ (_or him_) _Margaret_ (_or
Harvey_).
Yet from another point of view, but this is a selfish one, apprehension
is justified in proportion to the sensitive man's previous intimacy with
the individual whose beloved he is about to meet. For until that meeting
is over, "previous" is the word for it: whatever opinion the beloved may
form of him will determine the degree and manner of its continuance. If
Miss Lemon disapproves of him, though Mr. Todd has hitherto loved him as
Damon did Pythias, all is over; if Mr. Todd disapproves of him, though
he has known Miss Lemon from her perambulator, all is over. A pale
ghost, he may, in either case, sometimes hang his spectral hat in the
Todd hallway, and even extend his phantom legs under the Todd mahogany;
but ALL IS OVER. Divinely harmonious as they seem, these two will never
agree to let him try, however humbly and conscientiously, to cultivate
the inexpensive pleasure of being happy in their happiness. He becomes
what no self-respecting man can wish to be--a fly in the ointment. Most
cases, fortunately, are not so serious: he will be given a reasonable
chance to make a place for himself on this new plane to which Mr. Todd
and Miss Lemon have been translated; but it is always a question whether
he can enter that plane himself, or must hereafter be content with
hearing from his former friend through a medium. For he has not, as is
so often gracefully but emptily said on these trying occasions, been
enriched by the acquisition of a new friend: he has simply exchanged
Miss Lemon or Mr. Todd (as the case may be) for a composite, a Toddlemon
or a Lemontodd--a few years will show which. He must make the best he
can of that composite. He who was formerly described as (let us say) "my
friend, Mr. Popp," becomes, if he becomes at all, "our friend, Mr.
Popp"; and if ever he hears himself being introduced as "Mr. Todd's
friend, Mr. Popp," or as "Mrs. Todd's friend, Mr. Popp," he had better
go away as soon as politeness permits, and never come back. Never.
I speak, of course, in generalities; for there are no rules immutably
governing all cases, and life is mellowed and beautified by shining,
sensible examples, in which Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon become one, yet
realize that in many respects, being human, they must still remain two;
then, indeed, the congratulator may actually be enriched by the
acquisition of a new friend--but not instantly, as one is enriched by
the acquisition of a new hat. Yet it is always the wiser part, in
preparing to meet a beloved, to prepare for the worst.
These are evidently the apprehensions of a bachelor, sensitive but not
unselfish; the mental attitude is different with a student, philosopher,
and idealist who, thinking not of himself, contemplates another's
marriage in the calm, intelligent way, having as yet no beloved in which
he can contemplate his own. Such a one weighs. Such a one is conscious
that, little as _he_ knows the beloved of Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon, there
is grave danger that Mr. Todd knows Miss Lemon, or Miss Lemon Mr. Todd,
hardly better. This happy-madness may not only be a delusion, as a calm
outside intelligence contemplates it, but it may be a snare. Mistakes do
happen. There are known cases in which the happy lunatic has been
mistaken in a beloved not once but often; and the persistent effort of
these poor madmen and madwomen to correct one mistake by making another
is one of the most discussed and pitiable phases of our civilization.
The calm intelligence must balance also the practical aspects of the
business, its risks and liabilities as well as its profits; and so
serious is the enterprise when thus examined that he can hardly fail to
be terrified for anybody he knows and loves who is undertaking it.
O Harvey! Harvey! (or Margaret! Margaret!)
Tact is what he will pray for. And if his prayer is granted, when Mr.
Todd (or Miss Lemon) asks him, "Now, honestly, what do you think of her
(or him)?" he will say, "Of course I do not know Miss Lemon (or Mr.
Todd) very well _yet_, but I have never met anybody whom I _hoped_ to
know and like better." Which will be quite true, and please the
twittering questioner much more than if he said, "Oh, I don't know. I
_don't_ know."
IV
THIS IS A FATHER
_Proud Parent, in this little life
Yourself reflected see,
And think how Baby will progress
A man like you to be!
So stout, so strong, so wise, and when
Sufficient years have flown,
Like you the happy parent of
A baby of his own!
And when that unborn baby grows
To be a man like you,
Oh, think how proud that man will be
To be a parent too.
So think, when life oppresses you
And you are feeling sad,
A million, million, million times
You'll be a happy dad._
--THE FATHER'S ANTHEM.
In the life of man fatherhood is so likely to happen, that I wonder
Shakespeare did not select father as a natural, and indeed inevitable,
successor to lover in his well-known seven ages. He chose the soldier,
"full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard," presumably because
such soldiers were common in Elizabethan London. But fathers must have
been more so: they must have gone in droves past the tavern window where
Shakespeare (as what we now call the "wets" so like to think) sat at his
ale-stained table, dipping now his quill in an inkwell, and again his
nose in a tankard; but they seem to have made no impression. Indeed this
unromantic, necessary figure, composite as it is of all sorts and
conditions of men, has never appealed strongly to the poets; perhaps it
is their revenge because fathers so seldom read poetry.
Whatever else a man does, whether he lives by banking or burglary,
ascends to the presidency or descends to the gutter, he is likely to be
a father: they are as countless as the pebbles on a beach or the leaves
in Vallombrosa, and the few who evade paternity evade also the purpose
for which nature evidently created them, and go through life thumbing
their noses, so to speak, at Divine Providence. So taken for granted is
this vocation of fatherhood, and so little considered in comparison with
other masculine employments, that no correspondence school offers a
course, and many a young man undertakes to raise children with less
hesitation than he would start in to raise chickens. Some accept
fatherhood with joy, others with resignation, like a recently wedded
young Italian who cobbles my shoes, and spoke the other day of his own
new little one. "Zee fadder and zee modder," he said, "zey work and zey
slave for zee leetle one. But what-a good? When he is grow up, he say,
'To hell wiz zee fadder and zee modder!'" And so, as Shakespeare may
have decided, there is no universal type of fatherhood, nor has the
imagination of mankind created one, as in the case of mothers, for
convenient literary and conversational use. The lines of the
balladist,--
With his baby on his knee
He's as happy as can be,--
were, to be sure, something in this direction; but they have become so
wholly associated with humor, that even the late Mr. Rogers, had he
known the ballad, could hardly have found inspiration therein for a
group; nor Shakespeare adapted the lines to describe seriously one of
his seven ages. He might have scribbled experimentally,--
Then the father,
Infant on knee, and happy like the clam,--
but that would have been the end of it. He would have crossed out the
experiment, and taken another drink.
Father, in fact, follows Mother, in the mind of the general, so far
behind that he is almost invisible, a tiny object on red wheels at the
end of a string. But the little fellow carries a pocketbook: when Mother
needs money she pulls in the string, and he comes up in a hurry. And, as
is usually the case with popular conceptions, this odd, erroneous
notion, which most fathers seem cheerfully enough to accept, has no
doubt its historic foundation, and derives from the unquestionable
supremacy of Mother in the beginning. At that period, indeed, it is
hardly to be expected that any father should feel immediately _en
rapport_ with his new-born child, or become intimately associated with
its helpless, flower-like life. Ever since the idea, which has now so
long lost its original element of bewildering surprise, yet remains
always somewhat surprising, first dawned upon a human father and mother
that _this baby_ belonged to _them_, conditions have inexorably
consigned the infant to the care of its mother, while its father pursued
elsewhere the equally necessary business of providing sustenance for the
family. A division of labor was imperative: somebody must stay at home
in the cave and tend the baby, somebody must go out in the woods and
hustle for provisions. Maternity was, as it must have been, already a
feminine habit, but paternity was something new and unexpected; and
although I suspect, in many cases, this astonishing discovery was
followed by speedy flight. Trueheart the First took up his
responsibilities and his stone axe together.
The horror is recorded with which Dr. Johnson regarded the idea of being
left alone in a castle with a new-born child; and this feeling in so
civilized a man was no doubt an echo of the emotion with which poor,
bewildered, primitive, but faithful Trueheart would have envisaged being
left alone in the cave with his new-born baby: the sense of relief, of
gayety, of something definite and within his capabilities to do, with
which the young father nowadays takes his hat and starts for the office,
must be much the same as that with which Trueheart took his stone axe
and started for the woods.
Thus, in the very inception of the human family, fatherhood became
subordinate to motherhood; and so, because conditions after all have not
fundamentally changed, it has ever since continued. "Mothers' Day," for
example, is celebrated with enthusiasm; "Fathers' Day" remains a mere
humorous suggestion, a kind of clown in the editorial circus. Then as
now, moreover, in the earlier life of the child, Father, although not
quite as useless as a vermiform appendix, was and is of very little
importance.
I am not forgetting--for I do them an honor I can hardly express--those
fathers who walk, all through the night, back and forth, back and forth,
back and forth, across an otherwise silent room, that the motion
incidental to their perambulation may soothe a mysteriously afflicted
babe to sleep; nor am I unaware that Father sometimes pushes baby's
wicker chariot, pausing ever and anon to pick up and restore some
article of infant use or pleasure that the little rascal has
mischievously thrown overboard, and in many other touching ways
patiently tries to make himself useful. These offices are almost
impersonal. Any father could perform them for any baby: a mechanical
father, ingeniously contrived to walk back and forth, push, or pick up
and restore, according as the operator wound him up and pressed the
proper button, would do as well. Only in proportion as the child begins
to sit up and take intelligent notice does Father's position become
responsible, important, and precarious. From that time on, his behavior
has consequences.
Fatherhood, in fact, is a mighty serious business--yet even to-day many
a father seems to have made no more conscious preparation for it than
had our astonished ancestor, Trueheart. My friend Mr. Todd, for example,
meets Miss Margaret Lemon at an afternoon tea. A blind attachment (I am
putting the case with unimpassioned simplicity, for this is no novel)
springs up (God knows why) between them. If Harvey Todd had been Faust,
Mephistopheles would have wasted time trying to tempt him with any
Margaret but a Lemon; and if Miss Lemon had been that other Margaret,
Mephistopheles would have had to produce Harvey Todd, who, I am glad to
believe, would have promptly told him to go to the Devil.
And so Mr. Todd becomes engaged; and after a decent interval, he becomes
a husband; and after another decent interval he becomes a father--and
who more surprised than he! Even as we congratulate him, clinking
together the long-handled spoons that come in the ice-cream sodas with
which all good fellows now celebrate such an occasion, it is perfectly
evident that Harvey Todd has given hardly more thought to the
tremendously important and interesting relation of father and son than
might reasonably have been expected of little Harvey, Jr. Mind you, I do
not attempt to say how he shall conduct himself: that is his business;
but as he begins, so is he likely to go on to the end of the chapter,
when little Harvey is no longer a roly-poly human plaything but a great
big man like himself. And according as he _has_ conducted himself, that
great big man will bless him or curse him or regard him with varying
degrees of affection or contumely. If he has never thought of it before,
it is something for him to think about now, seriously, in the brief
respite while his duties are perambulatory, and a mechanical father,
cleaned, oiled, and wound up once a day, would do just as well. Fill the
glasses again, O white-coated Dispenser, and make mine chocolate. For
this man is a father! He has created new life, or clothed in mortality
an immortal spirit (though he doesn't know which), and here he
stands,--I said chocolate,--and Solomon, with all his wisdom and all his
experience, could not tell him what to do about it.
So we clink our long-handled spoons.
For in sober truth, as one reads the reputed wisdom of Solomon on this
topic, fatherhood seems to be in a state of evolution and to have
advanced materially since he was a father. "He that spareth his rod,"
said Solomon in the complacent, dogmatic way that seems to have charmed
the Queen of Sheba more than it would charm me, "hateth his son: But he
that loveth him, chasteneth him betimes." And again, "The rod and the
reproof giveth wisdom." We know better nowadays: the rod has become a
figure of speech, the occasions that even appear to excuse its use are
fewer and fewer, and when they happen, the modern practice may be
described quite simply as a laying-on of the hand. Here, however, is
something objective for a father to do--an occasion when Mother pulls in
the string, and Father, mercifully hanging back on his red wheels, comes
up in a hurry, and what has to be done is done. But the procedure, over
the centuries, has compelled thought; the idea has ripened slowly in the
paternal mind that it is an unwise waste of strength and emotion to
attempt at one end what may be better accomplished at the other; and in
this revolutionary discovery there must have been pioneers whose success
as fathers was measured by the affection and respect of worthy sons.
Hamlet's father, I believe, rarely, if ever, spanked young Hamlet, and
never in such mood and manner as to make the little Prince of Denmark
smart at the injustice of the high-handed proceeding. Mr. Todd can do no
better than follow the elder Hamlet's example; and in so doing he will
show himself wiser than Solomon, with his old-fashioned insistence on
proverbs and a stout stick. "He that, being often reproved, hardeneth
his neck," said Solomon (and here perhaps is the origin of the phrase to
"get it in the neck"), "shall suddenly be broken, and that beyond
remedy"; which is an attitude of mind that the best thought certainly no
longer considers conducive to the best fatherly results. The book for
Mr. Todd to read is not Solomon's Book of Proverbs but Theodore
Roosevelt's Letters to his Children.