that even you or I, gentle Reader, being often reproved, will harden
our necks, reveals the widespread tendency to ossification that has
gradually discredited the didactic and strong-arm system. If I may
compose a proverb myself--
The wise man maketh no enemy of his neighbor;
And the wise father maketh a friend of his son.
But it is easier to compose a proverb than to apply it, and friendship,
which can be built only on a good foundation of common understanding and
truthful speech, is here especially difficult. "To speak truth," says
Stevenson, "there must be a moral equality or else no respect; and hence
between parent and child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal
fencing bout, and misapprehensions to become ingrained. And there is
another side to this; for the parent begins with an imperfect notion of
the child's character, formed in early years or during the equinoctial
gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only the facts that suit with
his preconceptions; and wherever a person fancies himself unjustly
judged, he at once and finally gives up the effort to speak truth."
Somehow or other our Mr. Todd, if he wishes to make the best of his
paternity, must overcome the handicap imposed by his wider mental
experience and his acquired moral distinctions between rightness and
wrongness; somehow or other he must create in Harvey, Jr., an
affectionate regard for his jolly old father that shall make it a line
of least resistance for the little fellow to follow and imitate his
jolly old father's opinions and wishes. Often, indeed, if he is wise,
Mr. Todd will dare to seem foolish. "Foolishness," said Solomon, "is
bound up in the heart of the child"--and there he stopped, after adding
his usual suggestion about the rod as a remedy. But it is bound up also,
O Solomon, in every heart that beats, and is one thing at least that Mr.
Todd and little Harvey have in common to start with.
And so the father plays his unapplauded part--"tragedy, comedy, history,
pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem
unlimited," as Polonius might enumerate. He wants no applause. He wants
no "Father's Day." He wants no statue. He wants no advice. Yet it seems
to me that a figure and character has lately been perpetuated in
statuary of various kinds that answers all practical purposes, though
most of us think of the original as a Great American rather than as a
Great Father.
V
ON BEING A LANDLORD
_In an informal, but practical way, a landlord is, and must be, a
Justice of the Domestic Peace. If one tenant murders another
tenant, the case passes beyond his jurisdiction: he has no power of
the black cap. But if one tenant annoys another (which may
eventually lead to homicide more or less justifiable), the case
comes to his court: he is both jury and judge, and can in extremity
pronounce sentence of eviction. But so many and subtile are the
ways in which tenants annoy each other that to be a perfectly just
landlord would demand a wisdom greater than Solomon's._--APARTMENTS
TO LET.
On my consciousness are impressed the names of fourteen married women
and one (so far as I know) unmarried man: Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Smith, Mrs.
Brown, Mrs. Cawkins, Mrs. Trolley, Mrs. Karsen, Mrs. Le Maire, Mrs.
Barber, Mrs. Sibley, Mrs. Carrot, Mrs. Mahoney, Mrs. Hopp, Mrs. Ranee,
Mrs. Button, and Charlie Wah Loo. Their husbands I hardly know at all;
indeed, if Mrs. Carrot should introduce Mr. Hopp to me by that dear
title,--as, for example, 'my husband, Mr. Hopp,'--I should hastily
readjust my ideas and decide that Mrs. Carrot was really Mrs. Hopp, and
Mrs. Hopp really Mrs. Carrot. Charlie Wah Loo _may_ be married; he
devotes his days to the washtub and ironing-board, and his nights (I
like to think) to what Mr. Sax Rohmer, author of "The Yellow Claw,"
mysteriously mentions as "ancient, unnamable evils." In feudal times,
however, I should have known them all better. Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! that
brave little company--
BUTTON
HOPP
CARROT
BARBER
KARSEN
CAWKINS
SMITH
RANEE
MAHONEY
SIBLEY
LE MAIRE
TROLLEY
BROWN
MURPHY
--would have marched sturdily under my banner, each in his stout
leathern jerkin, manfully carrying his trusty pike, halberd, long bow,
short bow, or arbalest; and with them Charlie Wah Loo would have trotted
along by himself as an interesting human curiosity--or, perhaps, in a
cage. Each in his time would have done me fealty, saying, "Know ye this,
my lord, that I will be faithful and true unto you, and faith to you
will bear for the tenements which I claim to hold of you; and that I
will lawfully do to you the customs and services which I ought to do at
the terms assigned. So help me God and his saints."
Those, in retrospect, were pleasant days for the landlord, when rent was
paid in loyal service and a few dozen eggs, or what not. But all that
now remains of the ancient custom is that they continue, vicariously,
through the agency of their beloved helpmates, to pay me rent. In this
sense, Charlie Wah Loo, with his washtub and irons, is his own beloved
helpmate.
Briefly, I am a landlord. But do not hate me, gentle reader, for I am of
that mild, reticent, and reluctant kind to whom even collecting the
rent, to say nothing of raising it, is more a pain than a pleasure.
There are such landlords, products of evolution, inheritance, and a
civilization necessarily based on barter. Our anxious desire is to exact
no more than a "fair rent"; at our weakest, when a tenant gets in
arrears and, evidently enough, cannot catch up, our line of least
resistance would be to go quietly away and leave that tenement to the
tenant, his heirs and assigns forever. It is unpleasant, and becomes
more so every time, to remind him that he owes us money. Only the
inexorable harshness of our own overlords compels us, hating ourselves
the while, to be strict.
I have seen it stated as a scientific deduction that "in the beginning
man probably dwelt in trees after the fashion of his ape-like ancestors.
He lived on nuts, fruits, roots, wild honey, and perhaps even bird's
eggs, grubs from rotten wood, and insects." And my own experience leads
me to feel that there was much to be said for this way of life, though I
draw the line at birds' eggs, grubs from rotten wood, and insects, at
which items of an earlier menu even the scientific mind seems to baulk.
But it may well have happened that some strong fellow presently got
possession of an especially desirable tree, and allowed others to share
its branches only if they kept him supplied with provisions. Thus may
landlordry have been established.
Millions of years have passed since then,--a mere flicker in the great
movie of eternity,--and we are still, many of us, living in trees; but
the trees have been cut down and made into houses, of which at present
there are not enough to go round. We have outgrown our simple arboreal
diet, developed and perfected the hen (no small achievement in itself),
invented underwear, and in countless other cunning ways have created a
complex civilization. Century by century, generation by generation, we
have acquired tastes and conventions that prevent us from returning to
the simple, happy, uncomplicated life of our ape-like ancestors. And in
this civilization that we have made, the figure of the landlord bulks
large and overshadowing, and might, indeed, be likened to Rodin's
Thinker, thinking, in this instance, about how much more he shall raise
the rent. One must assume, of course, that he is thinking about it just
before taking his morning bath.
It is not my purpose to dwell upon those disgraceful landlords who
profiteer. I am concerned rather with the character of the Perfect
Landlord, a just man, respected, if not loved (within reason), by
fourteen married women and a Charlie Wah Loo. But this admirable ideal
seems impracticable. I know a landlord who speaks with pleasure of the
social aspect of collecting his rents; but his is a selected tenantry,
for he lets apartments only to what he calls "nice people," whose
society he feels reasonably certain he will enjoy on rent-day, and whose
financial status, he also feels reasonably certain, is and will remain
such that no painful embarrassment on this sordid but necessary side of
their relations will ever cast a gloom over his visit. Yet even so, I
gather that there are sometimes breaks in the golden chain, when the
nice tenant chats with a too feverish interest about life and things in
general, and the sordid aspect cannot be glossed over by a casual "Ah,
yes, the rent." Such breaks in the golden chain are the test of
landlordry.
I am reminded of a little one-act play which I have just written
entitled
THE RENT
CHARACTERS: MRS. BUTTON, a tenant.
I, a landlord.
SCENE: _A tenement, owned by_ I, _but referred to as_ MRS.
BUTTON'S, _which is perhaps more correct._ MRS. BUTTON _is washing
dishes. The room steams. Slow creaks outside as of a reluctant man
coming upstairs._ MRS. BUTTON _smiles enigmatically. A knocking at
the door, as in "Macbeth."_
MRS. BUTTON. Come in. (I _enters._)
I _(laughing with affected lightness)._ Ah, _good-_morning, Mrs.
Button. I've come for the rent.
MRS. BUTTON _(weeping)._ It's not me, as ye know, sir, that likes
to be behind with th' rint. I'm proud.
I _(touched in spite of himself by the sight of a strong woman in
tears)._ I know _that._ But you've been here seven months, Mrs.
Button, without--
MRS. BUTTON _(wiping her eyes)._ Yis, I'm an old tenant, and 't
would break me heart to go. An' me goin' to begin payin' reg'lar
only nixt week, sir. It's th' only home I've got, an' it's cruel
harrd to leave it.
I (_sternly_). Very well. Very well. I shall _expect_ the money
next week. Good-day, Mrs. Button.
MRS. BUTTON. Good-day, sir.
I _exits_. MRS. BUTTON _resumes washing dishes, smiling
enigmatically. The room steams, and steps are heard going hastily
downstairs, fainter and fainter_.
(CURTAIN)
It is a grave responsibility--this power to dispossess other human
beings of their little home--to say nothing of the recurrent task of
making them behave themselves in it. Perhaps, on some other and happier
plane of being, all landlords will be just and all tenants reasonable of
disposition and stable of income. Then, indeed, the landlord need have
nothing in common with a well-known walrus, of whom it is told that, in
dealing with certain oysters, "with sobs and tears he sorted out those
of the largest size." But something might even now be done by compulsory
psychopathic--I had nearly said psychopathetic--treatment; for thus the
effort to solve the rent problem would go to the soil in which it is
rooted, and no complicated laws would be needed. Landlords and tenants,
in fact everybody, would have to take the treatment,--including, of
course, the psychopathic practitioners, who would treat each other,--but
it would be a fine thing for the world if it worked.
One sees in imagination the profiteering landlord, after looking long
and intently at a bright object, say a five-dollar gold-piece, dropping
peacefully asleep; one hears the voice of the scientist repeating,
firmly and monotonously, "When you wake up you will never want anything
more than a just rent--a just rent--a just rent--a just rent."
One sees this profiteering landlord, once more wide awake, busy at his
desk with pencil and paper, scowling conscientiously as he endeavors to
figure out exactly what a just rent will be. Investment, so much; taxes;
insurance; repairs; laths and plaster here, wall-paper there; water,
light, putty, paint, janitor, Policeman's Annual Ball, postman at
Christmas, wear and tear on landlord's shoes, etc., etc., etc.,
etc.--now, if ever, there is a tired business man.
Or,--to take another aspect of this great reform,--there is the sad case
of Mrs. Murphy, who can no longer endure the children of Mrs. Trolley,
who lives in the flat above her. They run and play, run and play; they
produce in Mrs. Murphy a conviction that presently the floor will give
way, and the children, still running and playing, will come right
through on her poor head. Yet it is the nature of children to run and
play, run and play: the landlord cannot, try as he may, persuade Mrs.
Trolley to chain her offspring. So away, away to the Public Psychopathic
Ward with poor Mrs. Murphy. "Madam, when you awake, the sound of running
feet over your poor head will suggest the joys of innocent childhood,
and you will be very happy when they run and play, run and play--happy
all day--run and play--run and play--happy all day--run and play."
But alas, so far even psychopathic treatment cannot promise to stabilize
incomes. There must still be times when the just landlord must say to
his tenant, "All is over between us; we must part forever--and at once."
To which, judging by the tenor of some of the laws that have lately
been suggested, the tenant may presently answer, "All right, you Old
Devil. This is the tenth of the month, and I'll shake the dust of your
disgraceful premises off my feet two years and six months from
to-morrow."
It's a puzzling time for us landlords. Not long ago I felt compelled to
raise the rent of fourteen married women and one (so far as I know)
unmarried Chinaman. And then, overcome by conscience, I sat down and
figured out a just rent. And when I had finished I came upon a
distressing discovery. I had raised the rent of neither Mrs. Murphy,
Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Cawkins, Mrs. Trolley, Mrs. Karsen, Mrs. Le
Maire, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Sibley, Mrs. Carrot, Mrs. Mahoney, Mrs. Hopp,
Mrs. Ranee, Mrs. Button, nor Charlie Wah Loo, anything like enough.
VI
OLD FLIES AND OLD MEN
_To-day, my dear, I greatly astonished my grandson by standing on my
head, and by entering the kitchen by turning a back-somersault through
the door--exercises which I frequently practise for the benefit of my
digestion, but not often in public. His bewilderment at seeing a man of
my years perform such acrobatics was most comical. But there, there, one
must amuse one's self with the young sometimes. I have thought more or
less seriously of advising these exercises for general use; but few men
have had the advantage of being brought up in a circus, and what seems
easy to me would no doubt present insuperable obstacles to most. The
main thing, after all, is not to grow old before your time, because the
silly younger generation likes to flatter itself by thinking you
antediluvian._--LETTERS OF FATHER WILLIAM.
Few men read Shakespeare, and so, fortunately enough, few think of
themselves as being some day a pantaloon--lean and slippered (as
Shakespeare described this sixth age of man), with spectacles on nose,
his youthful hose, well-saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank,
and his big, manly voice, turning again to childish treble, operating
like a penny whistle when he tries to converse. But the Bard made a
bogey: at any rate, there are fewer pantaloons visible than there
probably were in Elizabethan England; and the sixth age of man appears
more logically to offer a kind of Indian summer that is well worth
living for. Shakespeare, it seems to me, slipped a cog in his sequence;
and I prefer to think of Cornaro, the Italian centenarian, who began at
forty to restrict his diet (though this I care less for), and wrote of
himself at eighty-three: "I enjoy a happy state of body and mind. I can
mount my horse without assistance; I climb steep hills; and I have
lately written a play abounding in innocent wit and humor. And I am a
stranger to those peevish and morose humors which fall so often to the
lot of old age."
Granting some other choice of mental employment,--for writing that kind
of a play seems nowadays too useless an occupation even for an old man's
leisure,--this is the kind of an old man I should like to be.
In the light of recent scientific research with flies, Cornaro probably
inherited his longevity from long-lived ancestors, and would have done
about as well on a less restricted diet: he might reasonably have
lasted as long if not as comfortably. Ideas have changed since Pope
asked himself,--
Why has not man a microscopic eye?--
and promptly answered,--
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n,
T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n?
Man since then has provided himself with a remarkably good microscopic
eye. He has inspected the mite, and discovered resemblances between this
innocently disgusting little insect and himself, which make it
desirable, in some cases, to suspend the swatter, and study instead of
assassinate. Granting that the proper study of mankind is Man, the
proper study of mankind is Flies; for the days of a fly present an
entertaining and instructive parallel to the years of a man: a
seventy-year-old man and a seventy-day-old fly are contemporaries;
other things being equal, they might almost be called twins. Confined in
glass bottles and observed impartially from birth to burial, each baby
fly, it appears, inherits a maximum number of days on this perplexing
planet, and lives fewer according to the activity with which he expends
his inheritance. If flies had copybooks one might compose a maxim for
little flies to copy,--
Do not fly too much or fast,
And you will much longer last.
Thus one scientific gentleman has watched, godlike, the lives of 5836
flies--3216 fair flies (if I may so call them), and 2620 of their
natural, and only, admirers--from their separate birth-minutes till each
in turn paid his or her little debt to nature, and passed away. It is an
odd thing to contemplate--this self-election of a man to the positions
of guardian, health officer, divine providence, nursemaid, matchmaker,
clergyman, physician, undertaker, and sexton to 5836 flies. Yet it
redounds to his credit, and is another proof of the poet's contention
that we men are superior: for what fly would ever think of studying us
to find out anything about himself? And, by deduction, I, like the
little fly, inherit my span of life, although either accident or a germ
may get me if I don't watch out.
But even if man, like the fly, inherits his individual length of life,
he will, again like the fly, go on living it with little concern as to
whatever invisible string may be fastened to his inheritance. He will
think hopefully that any ancestor he has had who died by violence or a
germ might otherwise have lived to be as hale and hearty as Father
William, that lively sage whose habit was to stand on his head at
intervals, and to enter a door by turning a back-somersault. Heredity
is still a mystery; the ancestry of free men is much more complicated
than that of flies in bottles; and any of us, if he anxiously carried
his genealogical research far enough back, would find a goodly number of
forbears, prematurely carried off, from whom he might reasonably have
inherited quite a lot of what the scientific mind calls the
"hypothetical substance or substances which normally prevent old age and
natural death." Flies growing gracefully old in glass bottles therefore
need not worry us, and every ancestor who has been hanged is a reason
for optimism.
And there is another reason even more valuable than a pendent ancestor.
You and I, gentle Reader, have souls (though there may be times of
discouragement when we wish we hadn't), and old age is a mere trivial
incident in our jolly eternal lives. Willy-nilly, we begin growing
older, by the conventional measurement of time, with our first breath;
but who can prove that we are not in reality very much older than we
look in the beginning, and very much younger than we look in the end? I
get these sober thoughts from the laboratory rather than the pulpit,
from evolution rather than dogma. O aged fly, to whom your seventy days
are a long life and your glass bottle a perfectly natural and normal
world in which to have lived it! O aged man, to whom your seventy years
are a long life, and who may also have lived it, for all you know, in a
kind of glass bottle, big enough to contain comfortably this little
planet and all the visible stars! Whoever respects age for its own sake
must impartially salute you both.
"It is a man's own fault," said Dr. Johnson, then seventy years old,
but no pantaloon, "it is from want of use, if the mind grows torpid in
old age." And so plausible is this observation, that any reasonably
intelligent man might make it to his wife at breakfast without at all
astonishing her. Here, to be sure, one gets no help from flies in glass
bottles who depart this world according as they fly more or fly less,
for theirs apparently is a democracy in which no outside observer can
yet say that any one fly thinks more or thinks less than another. A
scientific study of 5836 old men (in biographies instead of bottles)
would very likely do no more than verify the generalization that any
thinker may make at breakfast. And this being the case, civilization
tends naturally enough to reduce the number of pantaloons. Universal
education, books, newspapers, magazines, politics, movies, anything and
everything that to any degree employs and exercises the mind, postpones
its torpidity; and statistics indicate that an increasing proportion of
babies live to be middle-aged people--but a decreasing proportion of
middle-aged people live to be old enough to become pantaloons. For many
a not-so-very-promising baby survives nowadays who would have perished
under earlier conditions; and many a man gets to middle life who would
otherwise be dead already, and lacks the "pep," as a popular magazine
editor might say, to get very much further. What a survival of the
fittest, for example, was that of the beautiful Galeria Copiola, who, I
have read, made her first dazzling appearance in the theatre of ancient
Rome at the age of ninety! She acted and danced; and Roman playgoers of
seventy, sitting in the front rows, had opportunity to become madly
infatuated with a charmer twenty years their senior, such as now falls
only to the lot of the college undergraduate or the tired business man.
And if anybody doubts this surprising youthfulness of Galeria, I offer
the corroborative evidence of the seventeenth-century pamphlet, "The
Olde, Olde, very Olde Man; or the Age and Long Life of Thomas Parr," in
which John Taylor, the Water Poet, describes the pre-Adamite who was
brought up to London at the age of 152, met the King, and had such a
great good time in general, that his death nine months later was
attributed to over-excitement.
He was of old Pythagoras' opinion
That green cheese was most wholesome with an onion;
Coarse meslin bread, and for his daily swig,
Milk, butter-milk, and water, whey and whig:
Sometimes metheglin, and by fortune happy,
He sometimes sipped a cup of ale most nappy.
(I have looked up "metheglin," and I find it to have been a "strong
liquor made by mixing honey with water and flavoring it, yeast or some
similar ferment being added, and the whole allowed to ferment." "Ale"
was also a liquor, but made from malt. "Nappy" means heady and strong:
"Nappie ale," says an old writer, was "so called because, if you taste
it thoroughly, it will either catch you by the nape of the neck or cause
you to take a nappe of sleepe." The use of these drinks, it may still be
argued, shortened Parr's life; but the fly-research that I have
mentioned seems to indicate that their tendency to decrease physical
activity by inducing "nappes" may have materially helped him to conserve
his inheritance of longevity.)