Produced by Al Haines.
*THE ROMANCE OF
THE COMMONPLACE*
*Gelett Burgess*
_Now things there are that, upon him who sees,_
_A strong vocation lay; and strains there are_
_That whoso hears shall hear for evermore._
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Paul Elder and Morgan Shepard : : : San Francisco
_Copyright_, 1902
by GELETT BURGESS
_Entered at_ Stationer's Hall
_London_
PRINTED BY THE STANLEY-TAYLOR COMPANY, SAN FRANCISCO
To
My Sisters, Ella and Ann:
with whom
This Philosophy was Proven
*THE ROMANCE OF
THE COMMONPLACE*
*Contents*
Introduction
April Essays
Getting Acquainted
Dining Out
The Uncharted Sea
The Art of Playing
The Use of Fools
Absolute Age
The Manual Blessing
The Deserted Island
The Sense of Humour
The Game of Correspondence
The Caste of the Articulate
The Tyranny of the Lares
Costume and Custom
Old Friends and New
A Defense of Slang
The Charms of Imperfection
"The Play's the Thing"
Living Alone
Cartomania
The Science of Flattery
Romance *en Route*
At the Edge of the World
The Diary Habit
The Perfect Go-between
Growing Up
A Pauper's Monologue
A Young Man's Fancy
Where is Bohemia?
The Bachelor's Advantage
The Confessions of an Ignoramus
A Music-Box Recital
A Plea for the Precious
Sub Rosa
*Introduction*
To let this book go from my hands without some one more personal note
than the didactic paragraphs of these essays contained, has been, I must
confess, a temptation too strong for me to resist. The observing reader
will note that I have so re-written my theses that none of them begins
with an "I" in big type, and though this preliminary chapter conforms to
the rule also, it is for typographic rather than for any more modest
reasons. Frankly, this page is by way of a flourish to my signature,
and is the very impertinence of vanity.
But this little course of philosophy lays my character and temperament,
not to speak of my intellect, so bare that, finished and summed up for
the printer, I am all of a shiver with shame. My nonsense gave, I
conceit myself, no clue by which my real self might be discovered. My
fiction I have been held somewhat responsible for, but escape for the
story-teller is always easy. Even in poetry a man may so cloak himself
in metaphor that he may hope to be well enough disguised. But the essay
is the most compromising form of literature possible, and even such
filmy confidences and trivial gaieties as these write me down for what I
am. Were they even critical in character, I would have that best of
excuses, a difference of taste, but here I have had the audacity to
attempt a discussion of life itself, upon which every reader will
believe himself to be a competent critic.
By a queer sequence of circumstances, the essays, begun in the _Lark_,
were continued in the _Queen_, and, if you have read these two papers,
you will know that one magazine is as remote in character from the other
as San Francisco is from London. But each has happened to fare far
afield in search of readers, and between them I may have converted some
few to my optimistic view of every-day incident. To educate the British
Matron and Young Person was, perhaps, no more difficult an undertaking
than to open the eyes of the California Native Son. The fogs that fall
over the Thames are not very different to the mists that drive in
through the Golden Gate, after all!
Still, I would not have you think that these lessons were written with
my tongue in my cheek. I have made believe so long that now I am quite
sincere in my conviction that we can see pretty much whatever we look
for; which should prove the desirability of searching for amusement and
profit rather than for boredom and disillusion.
We are in the day of homespun philosophy and hand-made dogma. A kind of
mental atavism has made science preposterous; modern astrologers and
palmists put old wine into new bottles, and the discussion of
Psychomachy bids fair to revolutionize the Eternal Feminine. And so I,
too, strike my attitude and apostrophize the Universe. As being, in
part, a wholesome reaction from the prevailing cult, I might call my
doctrine Pagan Science, for the type of my proselyte is the Bornese war
chief peripatetic on Broadway--the amused wonderer. But I shall not
begin all my nouns with capitals, for it is my aim to write of romance
with a small "r." Also my philosophy must not be thought a mere
_laissez faire_; it is an active, not a passive creed. We are here not
to be entertained, but to entertain ourselves.
I might have called this book _A Guide Through Middle Age_, for it is
then that one needs enthusiasm the most. We stagger gaily through
Youth, and by the time Old Age has come we have usually found a
practicable working philosophy, but at forty one is likely to have a
bitter hour at times, especially if one is still single. Or, so they
tell me; I shall never confess to that status, and shall leap boldly
into a white beard. A kindly euphemism calls this horrid, half-way
stage one's Prime. I have here endeavoured to justify the usage, though
I am opposed by a thousand poets.
If some of these essays seem but vaguely correlated to my major theme,
you must think of them as being mere illustrations or practical
solutions of the commonplace, solved by means of the theory I have
developed and iterated. It was hard, indeed, to know when to stop, but,
ragged as are my hints, I hope that in all essentials I have covered the
ground and formulated the main rules of the Game of Living. One does
not even have to be an expert to be able to do that!
*THE ROMANCE OF
THE COMMONPLACE*
*April Essays*
They were begun in the April of my life, and though it is now well into
mid-June, some of the glamour of the Spring yet inspires me, and I am
still a-wondering. I have tried every charm to preserve my youth, and a
drop of wine and a girl or two into the bargain, but the game is near
played out.
But what boots marbles and tops when one is initiated into the mysteries
of billiards and chess? It has taken me all these years to find that
there is sport for every season, and the rules vary. To make a bold
play at life, then, without cheating (which is due only to a false
conception of the reward), and with the progress, rather than the
particular stage reached, in mind, is my aim. So I have tossed
overboard all my fears and regrets, and gone in for the higher problems
of maturity.
Still, a few of the maxims I drew from my joys and sorrows in the few
calmer moments of reverie persist; and these all strengthen me in the
romantic view of life. A man must take his work or his art seriously,
and pursue it with a single intent; he must fix upon the realities first
of all, but there is room for imagination as well, and with this I have
savoured my duties, as one puts sauce to pudding. Enough has been
written upon the earnestness of motive, of sobriety and all the
catalogue of virtues usually dignified with capital initials. I own
allegiance to an empire beside all that--another Forest of Arden--the
tinkle of whose laughter is a permanent sustained accompaniment to the
more significant notes of man's sober industries.
Must I be dubbed trifler then, because I make a game of life? Every man
of spirit and imagination must, I think, be a true sportsman. It is in
the blood of genius to love play for its own sake, and whether one uses
one's skill on thrones or women, swords or pens, gold or fame, the
game's the thing! Surely, it is not only the reward that makes it worth
while, it is the problem--the study of each step on the way, the
disentangling of the knotted cord of fate, the sequence and climax of
move after move, the logical grasp of what is to come upon the
chess-board. As it is in the great, then, may it not be in the small?
To one of fancy and poetic vision, mere size is an accident, a personal
element, a relative, not an absolute quality of things. The microscope
reveals wonders to the scientist, as great and as important as does the
telescope. To the poet, "a primrose by the river's brim" has the beauty
of the Infinite. And so nothing is commonplace, or to be taken for
granted. One needs only the fresh eye, the eagerness of interest, and
this Universe of workaday things which, with the animals, we get "for a
penny, plain," may be coloured with the twopence worth of mind by which
we are richer than they.
We have all passed through that phase of art-appreciation in which
familiar objects are endowed with an extrinsic aesthetic value. The
realist discovers a new sensation in a heap of refuse, the impressionist
in the purple shadows of the hills. In weaker intellects the craving
for this dignifying of the obvious leads to the gilding of the
rolling-pin or the decalcomanie decoration of the bean-pot. With
something of each of these methods, I would practice upon every-day
affairs, and make them picturesque.
This is, perhaps, a characteristically Oriental point of view of life.
Undoubtedly it is the Japanese pose, and it is well illustrated in their
art. What by Korin would be thought too insignificant for portrayal?
He had but to separate an object, or a group of objects, from its
environment and he beheld a design, with line, mass, colour and _notan_.
Art was to him not a question of subject, but of composition. He held
his frame before a tiny fragment of the visible world, any fragment,
indeed, and, placing that in its true position, not in regard to its
surroundings, but in regard to the frame, it became a pattern. May we
not, for our diversion, do thus with Life? If we hold up our frame,
disregarding the accidental shadows of tradition and establishment, we
may see bits of a new world.
It is thus that the man from Mars would view our life and manners.
Unsophisticated, he would hold his frame in front of a man, and, cutting
him off from his family, his neighbours, his position in Society, he
would see a personage as real and as individual as "the Man with the
Glove," or "the Unknown Woman" is to us. He would bring an uncorrupted
eye and see strange pictures in the facts of our jaded routine. He
would see in accustomed meetings and actions hidden possibilities and
secret charms. He would witness this drab life of ours as a
bewilderingly endless romance. Nothing would be presupposed, nothing
foreseen, and each turn of the kaleidoscope would exhibit another of the
infinitely various permutations of human relationship.
Such is the philosophy of youth. It denies the conventional postulates
of the Philistine. It will not accept the axioms of the unimaginative;
two and two may prove to make five, upon due investigation, seemingly
parallel cases may widely diverge, and the greater may not always
include the less, in this non-Euclidean Geometry of Life. It transmutes
the prose of living into the poetry of idealization, as love transmutes
the physical fact of osculation into the beatitude of a kiss. It makes
mysteries of well-known occurrences, and it turns accepted marvels into
simple truths, comprehensible and self-evident.
Civilization refines and analyzes. It seeks the invisible rays of the
spectrum and delights in overtones, subtle vibrations and delicate
nuances of thought. So this neglected philosophy of enthusiasm also
gleans the neglected and forgotten mysteries of humanity. Its virtue is
in its economy; it wrings the last drop of sensation from experience.
Like modern processes of manufacture it produces good from what was
considered but waste and tailings. By a positive contribution to
happiness it refutes the charge of trifling, for in the practice of this
art one does but pick up what has been thrown away. All's fish that
comes to its net.
But it is more than a science; it has more than an economic value for
happiness--it is a religion. The creed of hope bids one wonder and hope
and rejoice, it teaches us to listen for the whispered voice, to see the
spirit instead of the body of the facts of life. But it does more; it
is illuminating, and reveals a new conception of beauty. There is an
apocryphal legend of the Christ that tells how He with His disciples
were passing along a road, when they came upon the body of a dead dog.
Those with Him shrank from the pitiful sight with loathing, and drew
away. But Jesus went calmly up to the decaying flesh and leaning over
it, said gently, "How beautifully white are his teeth!" The customary
moral drawn from the story is one of gentleness and pity, the kindness
and charity of looking at the good, rather than the evil that is
present. But it has a more literal meaning, and teaches clearly the
lesson of beauty.
For it has come to this: that even in our pleasures we are influenced by
prejudice and tradition. Some things are as empirically branded
beautiful or ugly, as others are declared right or wrong, and to this
dogma we conform. Korin, when he held his frame before a clothes-line
fluttering with damp garments, saw not only an interesting design, but a
beautiful one; yet the Monday's wash might be taken as something
typically vulgar and ugly to the common mind.
We Anglo-Saxons have debased many facts of life, once rightly thought of
as exquisitely beautiful, into the category of the beast. Sexual passion
is the great example, but there are myriads of lesser things which,
viewed calmly, purely, as some strange god able to see clearly without
passion or prejudice, might view them, would take on lovely aspects.
When such situations approach the pathetic, as the sight of some forlorn
half-naked mother nursing her child on a doorstep, or the housemaid,
denied of the chance of seclusion, embracing her lover in the publicity
of the park, this diviner phase of common human nature is patent to the
casual observer. When they approach the comic, also, it is easier to
believe that every scene may have its complimentary phase, and the most
careless may read the joke between the lines. But much of the more
subtle delight of life escapes us, like the tree-toad in the oak,
because it is so much a part of its surroundings; its charm is of so
intrinsic a value that we do not notice it. We are used to finding our
beauty within gilt rectangles, set off from other things not so
denominated as especially worthy of regard; we expect it to be labelled
and highly coloured.
Two things alone remain safe from this bias of custom--Love and Youth.
To the lover, the tying of a shoe-lace on his mistress's foot may be as
sacred a rite and may contain as much sentiment as the most impassioned
caress. To the child, the mud-pile has possibilities of infinite bliss.
To the one comes eternal beauty, to the other eternal mystery. And so,
to touch these forever, and to lose no intermediary sensation of charm,
whether it be humour, romance, pathos or inspiration, to be bound by
every link that connects Youth to Love, that was my April essay!
*Getting Acquainted*
Two lives moving in mysterious orbits are drawn together, and for an
instant, or maybe for ever after, whirl side by side. We call the
encounter an introduction, and we usually proceed to stifle the wonder
of it by impersonal talk of art, books or the drama. It is an every-day
affair and does not commonly stir the imagination. And yet to the
connoisseur in living the meeting may be an event as well as an episode.
He is a discoverer come to an unknown shore--it may be the margent of a
boundless sea or not, but of a certain it is swung by new tides and
currents to be adventured and plumbed.
How can we, supercivilized out of almost all real emotion, develop the
potential charm of this first glimpse of a new personality? It is
guarded by conventionality; the shutters are down, the door is
barricaded; you may knock in vain with polite interrogations, and no one
appears at the window. Must we perforce set the house afire, smite or
shriek aloud to bring this stranger's soul to his eyes for one searching
gaze, face to face? The time is so short--we must greet, and pass on to
the next; we exchange easy commonplaces, and so the chance vanishes.
Why not defy custom and boldly snatch in that magic moment some
satisfactory taste of warm human intercourse?
Curiously enough, this strangeness--this lack of background in new
acquaintances--is one of the freshest charms of meeting. Who would not
throw off all restraint and talk frankly with a man from the planet Mars
or Venus? Could we resurrect an inhabitant of Atlantis we could give
him our whole confidence--and even a South Sea Islander, were he
intelligent, might be our confessor. Where then shall we draw the line
of convention? Mars is some 140,000,000 miles away--San Francisco is
but 9,000--the ratio is inadequate but there is a guarantee of candour
in mere distance. May we not apply the same rule to nearer neighbours
and look upon them in this interesting light?
There is no such stimulating instant possible for old friends for they
are bound by preconceived ideals of personality--they are pigeon-holed
as this or that--circumscribed by mutual duty and sacrifice; they must
reconcile present whims to past vagaries; they are held to strict
account of consistency with previous moods; but on our first meeting
with another we are free of all this constraint, and if we have courage
may meet soul to soul without reserves. We may confess unreliable
things in that moment, for there is no perspective of formulated opinion
into which the confidence must be fitted--the little secret is safe
alone in the new mind, and will not be held to intolerable account. We
may even for this once state a brutal truth, for we are unpledged to
distressing considerations. We may be in some few sacred thoughts more
intimate with a stranger than with an old friend. Such is the divine
franchise of this first sudden opportunity. No compact is yet sealed;
you must take me as you find me, like me or not, it matters little,
since it is for us to say whether or not we shall meet again.
This play is, as Dickens says of melancholy, "one of the cheapest and
most accessible of luxuries," for the scene is always ready, set in the
nearest drawing-room. Every stranger has a possible fascination and
comes like a prince incognito. It is probably your own fault, not his,
if the disguise is not dropped during the first impetuous flurry of
talk. Children do these things better, making friends not inch by inch,
but by bold advances of genuine confidence, yet approaching each new
mystery with respect. So we, too, like the child, must dress these our
dolls, and put them into their first mental attitudes with sincerity and
trust before they will come to life. We must put much feeling into the
relation--giving and taking--so much that we cannot only confide our
tenderest spiritual aspirations, but invest trifles with unaccustomed
worth and significance. These are not impossible sensations even for
such accidental fellowship, for nothing is too unimportant to reveal
personality and orient one's point of view. But we must proceed from
the inside, outward--beginning with truths and thence to fancy. It is
the _apriori_ method; not deducing the character of your neighbour from
his visible idiosyncracies of taste and habit, but boldly inducing a new
conception, making him what you will, and varying the picture by
successive approximations as his words and actions modify your theory.
No one is too dull for the experiment, as no mummy is too common to be
unwrapped. Granted only that he is newly found, so that you have
imagination, romance and sentiment on your palette, you may paint him as
you will. The colours may wash, but for the while he is your puppet and
must dance to your piping, if, indeed, you do not become his.
There are those, of course, who will but cry "Oh!" and "Ah!" to your
essays--dolts with neither wits nor words nor worth, who take all and
give nothing; no one can set such damp stuff afire. Well, after all,
though you have unmasked, retreat is still possible. With how many
duller friends have you given your parole and cannot escape with honour!
Indeed, it is not so desirable that we should always win, as that the
game itself be worth the playing. One must not expect to make a friend
at each introduction. To make the most of the minute in this way, then,
to strike while the iron is hot (and, better, to heat it yourself)--this
is the art of getting acquainted. It is the higher flirtation, not
dependent upon sex or temperament, but of many subtler dimensions, and
though it soon turns into the old familiar ruts, the first steps, made
picturesque by a common fancy, shall never lose their glamour, and one
shall remember to the very last how the first shots went home.
But do not confound playing with playing a part. One may do all this
sincerely, honestly giving good coin, and that is the only game worth
while; for of a sudden it may wake into new beauty like a dream come
true, and you will find yourself in Arcady. No more fooling then, for
the real you is walking by my side, hand in hand. We shall not be sorry
either, shall we, that we hurried round the first corner into the
open--that we jumped a few hedges? Surely we have an infinite
friendship for our inaccessible goal, and though the first rush was
exhilarating, there are more inspiring heights beyond!
*Dining Out*
Why human beings are so fond of eating together and making a ceremonial
of the business it is hard to say. Man is almost the only animal who
prefers to consume his food in company with his kind, for even sheep and
cattle wander apart as they graze, seeking private delicacies. Early in
the morning, it is true, most cultivated persons are savages, preferring
to breakfast in seclusion and _dishabille_; lunch time finds them in a
slightly barbarous state, and they tolerate company; but by evening we
all become gregarious and social, and we resent the absence of an
expected companion at the table as of a course omitted.
And so, whether we dine at home or abroad we call it a poor dinner where
we have good things only to eat. The dullest, most provincial hostess
has come to understand this, and each does what she can, in inviting
guests, to form partnerships or combinations sympathetic and enlivening.
There are, of course, always those impossibles, poor relations or
what-not, whom policy or politeness imperatively demands, and every
dinner-table is, in attempt at least, a conversational constellation of
stars of the first magnitude separated by lesser lights.
From these fixed stars radiate flashes of talk, and supplementing this,
the laughter of the connecting circle should follow as punctually as
thunder upon lightning. The hostess, like a beneficent sun, kindles and
warms and sways her little system, while the servants revolve about the
table in their courses, like orderly planets.
But we might push the allegory a step farther. Though the round of a
score of dinners may exhibit no more unusual a cosmogony than this, yet
at every thirty-third event, perhaps, we may encounter a comet! There
is no prognosticating his eccentric course; he comes and goes according
to a mysterious law, but wherever he appears, blazing with a new light,
foreign to all our conventions, he is a compelling attraction, drawing
the regular and steady orbs of fashion this way and that out of their
orbits, shifting their axes, and upsetting social tides and seasons.
To such an innovator a dinner is given not for food but for pastime, and
it is a game of which he may change the rules as soon and as often as
they hamper his enjoyment. It matters little to him that he is dressed
for a feast of propriety. To him alone it is not a livery; he is not
the servant of custom. If it pleases him to settle a dispute out of
hand, he will send the butler for the dictionary while the discussion is
hot, or more likely go himself forthright. If he wishes to see a red
rose in the hair of his host's daughter over against him, he will whip
round two corners to her place, and adjust the decoration. And if it is
necessary to his thesis that you, his shocked or amused partner, help
him illustrate a Spanish _jerabe_, you too must up and help him in the
pantomime if you would not have such fine enthusiasm wasted for a
scruple.
I knew one such once who retrieved an almost hopelessly misarranged
dinner by his generalship, usurping the power of the hostess herself.
The guests were distributed in a way to give the greatest possible
discomfort to the greatest number, though from stupidity rather than
from malice. Mr. Comet solved the problem at a glance. He rose before
the fish was served, with a wine-glass in one hand and his serviette in
the other. "The gentlemen," he announced, "will all kindly move to the
left four places." It was before the day of "progressive dinner
parties," and the scheme was new. The ladies gasped at his audacity,
but after this change of partners the function began to succeed.
Your comet, then, must not only be a social anarchist but he must
convert the whole company, or he presents merely the sorry spectacle of
a man making a fool of himself, never a sight conducive to appetite or
to refined amusement, except perhaps to the cynic. He must be able to
swing the situation. He must believe, and convince others, that the
true object of a dinner is to amuse, and if it should take all of the
time devoted to the _entree_ for him to show the pretty sculptress at
his right how to model an angel out of bread, his observing hostess
should feel no pang that he has neglected his brochette. After all, the
elaborate supervision of the _menu_ was undertaken, any modern hostess
will acknowledge, only that, in the dire case her guests did not succeed
in amusing each other, they might at least have good things to eat.
Every dish untasted in the excitement of conversation, then, should be a
tribute to her higher skill in experiments with human chemistry.
If she can catch no comet, however, she must be contented with lesser
meteoric wits who make up for real brilliancy by saying what they do say
quickly and spontaneously; with the punsters, in short, and such
hair-trigger intellects. Failing these, the last class above the
bores-positive are those well-meaning diners-out who load themselves
with stories for a dinner as a soldier goes into an engagement with a
belt full of cartridges. They may not get a chance for a shot very
often, but, given an opening, their fire is accurate and deadly till the
last round is gone, when they are at the mercy of a more inventive wit.
Yet even these welter-weights have their place at the table, for we must
have bread as well as wine.
It was one of Lewis Carroll's pet fancies to have a dinner-table in the
shape of a ring, and half the guests seated inside upon a platform which
revolved slowly round the circle till each one had circumnavigated the
orbit and passed opposite every guest seated on the outside of the
table. But this would break up many of the little secret schemes for
which the modern dinner is planned, and many a young man would suddenly
find himself flirting with the wrong lady across the board.
And this last hint carries me from the exoteric to the esoteric charms
of the dinner. Here, however, you must guess your own way; I dare not
tell you precisely what it means when Celestine shifts her glass from
left to right of her plate, nor what I answer when I raise my serviette
by one corner, for Celestine and I may dine with you some day, and you
may remember our little code. You would better not invite me anyway,
for, though I am no comet, yet I admit I would be mad enough to upset
the claret purposely rather than have nothing exciting happen!
*The Uncharted Sea*
Ay, there's the rub! If we could but forecast our dreams, who would
care to keep awake? In that, we are no further advanced than in the
times of Pythagoras; still clumsy, ignorant amateurs in this most
fascinating and mysterious game, played by every race and condition of
men under the moon. There are some, maybe, who do not dream, poor
half-made men and women, to whom a waking, literal prosaic life is the
whole of existence. They stay idly at home, while you and I take ship
upon the Unknown Sea and navigate uncharted waters every night. Then we
are poets, dunces, philosophers, clowns or madcaps of sorts in a secret
carnival, changing not only our costumes, but often our very selves,
doffing conscience, habit and taste, to play a new part at each
performance.
If we could but manage this raree-show, and not be mere marionettes,
wired to the finger of the Magician, what tremendous adventures might we
not undertake! We have rare glimpses of the Lesser Mysteries, but the
inner secrets of that inconsequential empire are still undiscovered.
The revels confound us; we are whirled, intoxicated or drugged, into a
realm of confusion, and, out of touch with senses, reason and will, we
cannot quite keep our heads clear. How many of us have tried to "dream
true," like Peter Ibbetson, even to obeying the foolish formula he
described, lying, hands under head, foot upon foot, murmuring his magic
words?
Try as we may, those of us who are true dreamers can never quite accept
the psychologist's explanation of dreams. Some cases may be easily
understood, perhaps, such as the pathological influence of a Welsh
rarebit, a superabundance of bed covers, or suggestive noises. We may
account, too, for those absurd visions that appear so often on
awakening, when one sense after another comes breaking into our
consciousness, and when the mind, summoned suddenly to construct some
reasonable relation between incongruous floating pictures, seizes upon
any explanation, however ridiculous. But of deeper dreams, dreams
logical or meaningful, dreams that recur or are shared by others, modern
science does not give any satisfactory theory, and we are forced,
willingly enough no doubt, to apply the hypotheses of mysticism.
There are dreams, too, so progressive and educational that they seem to
involve a new science unknown in this workaday world. So many of us have
had experiences with levitation in our dream life that we are, so to
speak, a cult. I myself began by jumping, timing each spring with the
precise moment of alighting from a previous leap, profiting by the
rebound, and, after many experiments I am now able to float freely, even
accomplishing that most difficult of all feats, rising in the air by a
deliberate concentrated effort of will, even while lying on my back.
Yet all of us, jumpers, flyers or floaters, must wait till that
wonderful dream comes to us, after months maybe, to indulge in that most
exhilarating pastime.
Children's dreams are (until they are cruelly undeceived) quite as real
as their waking moments, and it may be that we shall, in time, learn the
forgotten art from them. It is dependent, no doubt, upon their power of
visualizing imagined objects while their eyes are shut, but while still
awake; but this ability to call up the images of anything at will is as
soon lost as their belief in dreams. Though this habit fades and is
forgotten in the growing reality of our outward life, it may not be
impossible with practice to regain the proficiency, for at times of
great physical fatigue and mental exaltation the power comes back, often
intensified almost to the point of hallucination. If we could train our
imagination then, and learn to see pictures when our eyes are shut,
these might become more accurate and real, so that at the moment of
sinking into unconsciousness, as we lose hold on tangible things, the
vision would become one with the reality, and, still imagining and
creating, we might pass over the footlights and dream true. To most of
us there comes a recognizable moment when we know we are just at the
border of sleep; if we could then with our last effort of will keep
control of the moving pictures we might go wherever we wished.
We might learn, too, to remember more of what happens in the night. We
usually give what has passed in dream no more than an indulgent smile,
and forget the strangeness of it all as soon as we are well awake. It
is as if we had hurriedly turned the pages of an illustrated book. We
recall, here and there, a few striking pictures, beautiful or comic, and
the volume is replaced upon the shelves not to be taken down till the
next evening. It is a book from which we learn little; its contents are
not even amusing to anyone else, who has as fanciful tales in his own
dreamland library. If we could, upon first awakening, impress our minds
with the reality of our dreams, we might be able to recall more and
more, and find that in spite of their incongruity there was some law
which governed their visitation and some meaning in their grotesque
patterns.
To one who dreams frequently, bedtime cannot fail to be something to
look forward to, to hope and to prepare for with efforts to capture in
the net of sleep some beautiful dream. May we not, sometime, find the
proper bait, and lie down confident that we shall be duly enchanted in
some delightful way, according to our desires? Till then we must each
buy our nightly ticket in Sleep's lottery, and draw a blank or a prize,
as Morpheus wills. Some say that the most refreshing sleep is absolute
unconsciousness of time--that one should shut one's eyes, only to open
them in the morning, with the night all unaccounted for. But no true
dreamer will assent to this; he knows it is not so. I was told in my
youth, that if I turned the toes of my boots toward the bed, I should
have a nightmare. I confess I have never dared try it. But, rather
than not dream at all, I believe I should be tempted to hazard the
experiment.
*The Art of Playing*
Time was when we made our own toys; when a piece of twine, a spool, a
few nails and a bit of imagination could keep us busy and happy all day
long. There were no new-fangled iron toys "made in Germany," so
tiresome in their inevitable little routine of performance, so easily
got out of order, and so hard, metallic and realistic as to be hardly
worth the purchase. A penny would, indeed, buy some funny carved wooden
thing that aroused a half-hour's excitement, but it was never quite so
alluring as when in the front window of the toy-shop. Such queer
animals never became thoroughly acclimated to the nursery, and they lost
their lustre in a half-holiday. The things that gave permanent
satisfaction were home-made, crude and capable of transformation. A
railway train might, with a small effort of the fancy, become a ship or
a dragon. Are there such amateur toy-builders now, in this age when
everything is perfect and literal, when even a box of building-blocks
contains a book of plans to supply imaginative design to the modern
child? Indeed, many children are nowayears too lazy even to do their
own playing. I have heard of one who was used to sit on a chair and
order his nurse to align his ninepins and bowl them down for him!
Perhaps one notices the lack of creative ability in children more in the
city where ready-made toys are cheap and accessible, than in the country
where the whole world is full of wonderful possibilities for entrancing
pastime. Nature is the universal playmate, perpetually parodying
herself in miniature for the benefit of those who love to amuse
themselves with her toys. Every brook is a little river, every pond an
unfathomable sea. She plants tiny forests of fern and raises
microscopic mountains in every sand-bank. Flowers and plants furnish
provender for Lilliputian groceries, the oak showers acorn cups; what
wonder we believe, as long as we can, in fairies?
And yet, strange to say, it is the city more often than the country
child who feels the charm of these marvels. The freshness and the
strangeness breed a fascinated wonder; it is, after flagged pavements
and brick walls, almost too good to be true. The juvenile rustic is
more familiar with Nature. It is his business to know when the flowers
come, where berries ripen and birds nest. It is scarcely play to him,
it is a science to be applied to his personal profit. The woods and
rivulets are his familiar domain, to be forayed and hunted specifically
for gain. And this, though it is delightful, is not play. For him,
there is no glamour over the fields until long after, when his native
countryside has become inaccessible.
Perhaps the art of playing is, after all, a matter more of temperament
than environment, for one sees, at times, good sport even in the city
streets, though it is rare nowadays. I had my own full share of it, for
my youth was an age of pure romance. My clan had its own code and its
own traditions. Every man of us had his suit of wooden armour, his
well-wrought weapons and his fiery steed. We were all for Scott. We had
our Order, small, but well up in the technique of feudal ways, facile in
sword-play, both with the thin, sinewy hard-pine rapier, and the huge,
two-handed, double-hiked battle-sword that should stand just as high as
one's head. On the brick sidewalks we tilted on velocipedes, full in
the view of the anxious passers-by. _Cap-a-pie_ in pine sheathed with
tin, with a shield blazoned with a tiger couchant, and inscribed with a
Latin motto out of the back of the dictionary, many a long red lance I
shivered, and many a wheel I broke. On Warren Avenue I did it, opposite
the church. What would I not give, now, to see such sights in
town!--instead, I watch little boys smoking cigarettes upon the street
corners, waiting for their girls.
I knew a youngster, too, who organized in his town a postoffice
department, established letter-boxes and a regular service of boy
carriers. He drew and coloured the stamps himself--you will find them
in few collections, though they should have enormous value from their
rarity. Such games are consummate play, even though the sport goes awry
all too soon; it is too great to last!
It is the older brother who should give finesse to such sport. Without
him, complications arise which accomplish at last the ruin of the game.
Many of us do not truly learn to play until it is too late to do so with
dignity, and to these, the appreciation of the young gives a fine excuse
for prolonging the diversion. We fancy we cannot, when grown up, play
imaginative games for the pure joy of it, as does the child; we think we
must have an ulterior motive. Yet the father, who whittles out a boat
for his son, often gets more delight than the child, who would far
rather do it himself, no matter how much more crudely accomplished.
The theater is the typical play for grown-ups; the name itself, "play,"
is significant of the unquenchable tendency of youth. And this reminds
me of a most amusing case where two grown-ups dared to be absolutely
ingenuous. It was upon a honeymoon, when if ever, adults have the right
to yield to juvenile impulses. As the groom was titled and the bride
fair, society took it ill that the two should retire to their country
house and deny access to all neighbours. One at last called, too
important to be denied admittance by the servants, and the astonished
visitor discovered the happy pair stretched over the dining-room table,
training flies whose wings had been clipped, to pull, in a harness of
threads, little paper wagons! This had been their absorbing occupation
for ten blissful days!
An important element of play seems to be the doing of things in
miniature. See Stevenson, for instance, prone upon the floor, involved
in romantic campaigns, massing his troops of tin soldiers, occupying
strategic positions in hall and passage, skirmishing over the upstairs
"roads of the Third Class, impassable for artillery," intercepting
commissary trains labouring up from the Base of Operations in the
kitchen, deploying cavalry-screens upon the rug, and out-manoeuvering
the wily foe that defends the verandah, both being bound by the strict
treaties of the play. There is your ideal big brother, and the game of
toy soldiers is glorified into weeks of excitement!
The Japanese, immortal children, carry the game of diminution to its
extreme. The dwarfed trees and the excruciating carved ivories are not
the only symptoms of this delightful disease; for the perfection of the
spirit of play one must see their miniature gardens, often the
life-employment of the owners. No matter how small the patch of ground
employed, every inch is perfect. Pebble by pebble, almost grain by
grain, the area is arranged, the tiny rivulet is guided between
carefully curved banks, wee bridges span the shores, little lanterns and
pagodas are artfully placed, plants and flowers are sown, trees planted,
fishes are domiciled, till the garden is a replica of Nature at her
best. Each view is a toy landscape, and without a scale, as seen in a
photograph, for instance, one might think it a garden of the gods. And
yet, there is a sort of play where one may use infinite distances,
macrocosms for microcosms, if one has the courage and the power of
visualization. These games are purely mental, feats of the imagination,
though not nearly so difficult as might be thought. I know a sober,
workaday lawyer, for instance, who combines the two methods with
extraordinary cleverness. His income is not derived solely from his
practice, I need hardly say. You will not catch him at his fascinating
diversion, for his table is strewn with books and papers, and his
playthings are not noticeable amongst the professional litter.
I have known him to sit for hours gazing at the table, and, once in his
confidence--for there is a fraternity of players, and one must give the
grip and prove fellowship--he will tell you that he has shrunk to but an
inch in height, so that, to him, his desk seems to be some three hundred
feet long by a hundred feet wide, and its plateau is elevated some two
hundred feet above the floor; as high, that is, as a church. Assuming
that he has, by some miraculous means shrunk to one-fiftieth of his
stature, the size of everything visible is, of course, increased in a
like proportion. His diverting occupation, under this queer state of
things, is to explore his little domain, and exist as well as is
possible. What adventures has he not had! There was the terrific combat
with a cockroach as big as a dragon, which he finally slew with a broken
needle! There was the dust storm, when the care-taker swept, and the
huge snow crystals like white pie-plates, that came in when the window
was opened. He had an enormous difficulty in getting water from a glass
tumbler, and he broke his teeth upon the crystals of sugar that, as a
lawyer, he had been thoughtful enough to strew upon the table for the
benefit of himself as an Inchling. I believe he is now attempting to
escape to the floor by means of a spool of thread, if he cannot make up
his mind to risk a descent by means of a paper parachute. It is a world
of his own, as real to him as the child's toy paradise, a retreat immune
from the cares of his daily life, a never-tiring playground, with
perpetual discoveries possible. He, if any one, has discovered not only
the art of playing, but has applied the science as well!
*The Use of Fools*
What a dull world it would be if everyone were modest, discreet and
loyal to that conformity which is called good taste! if, in short, there
were no fools to keep us amused. What would divert us from the deadly
routine of seriousness? What toy scandal would we have to discuss at
dinner? What would leaven this workaday world of common-places, if
everyone were gifted with common sense? Is it not, when you stop to
think of it, a bit inconsiderate to discountenance buffoonery and to
resent innocently interesting impropriety? Should we not rather
encourage eccentricity with what flattering hypocrisies we may, so that
we shall never be at a loss for things to smile at and talk about?
A fair sprinkling of fools in the world is as enlivening as a pinch of
salt in a loaf of bread. They give a relish to life, and flavour with a
brisk spicery of nonsense what would otherwise be oppressively flat.
Civilized existence, if it were always cooked up and served to us by
Mrs. Grundy herself, would be unpalatable enough; but luckily her
infallible recipes are not always carried out, and a few plums and
cloves get into her pudding.
We may not care to play the part of public jesters ourselves, but the
least we can do is to be grateful to those who are willing to become
absurd for our benefit. Patronize them daintily, therefore, lest they
backslide into propriety; remember that there is such a thing as
enjoyment without ridicule. To make fun of a person to his face is a
brutal way of amusing one's self; be delicate and cunning, and keep your
laugh in your sleeve, lest you frighten away your game.
But there will doubtless always be enough who are willing to play the
guy, whether we encourage or condemn. The fool is a persistent factor
in society, and yet the common misconception of his status and economic
function is silly and unfair. With the prig and the crank, the fool has
been reviled from time immemorial, and persecuted out of all reason. He
is protected by no legislation; your fool is always in season, and is
the target for universal contempt. Instead of this perpetual fusillade
of wits, there should be a "close season" for fools to allow them to
propagate and grow fearless, after which we could make game of them in
safety of a full supply. Since he is, in a way, the lubricator of the
wheels of life, a coiner of smiles, he should be carefully bred to give
the greatest possible amount of diversion. He should be trained like an
actor that his best points may be brought out; he should be paid a
salary or kept in livery to amuse the public, with no need or excuse for
sobriety.
But, until the fool is properly appreciated and his place assured, we
must put up with the amateurs that haunt the street and drawing-room. It
is too much to hope for the sight of a zany every time we go out doors,
but, when we do encounter one, what a ray of sunshine gleams athwart our
strict fashions--poor sober dun slaves to style and custom! If we
chance upon a woman who dares perpetrate her own radical theories of
dress, who combines pink with red, or commits a gay indiscretion in
millinery, how superbly she is distinguished, for the moment, from the
ruck and swarm of victims to good taste! She is at once an event and a
portent. The afternoon is quaintly illuminated with a phenomenon, and
we scan with new interest and expectation the dull and sombre throng.
How small a deviation from the mode, indeed, is necessary to provoke a
revivifying smile! Every such unconscious laughing-stock is a true
benefactor, ministering to our sense of superiority. Were we never to
see the freaks, we would not know how glorious is our own uncompromising
regularity. Truly, if we have sufficient conceit, every one in the
world, in a way of thinking, may be considered foolish relatively to our
own criterion. "All the world is queer except thee and me," said the
Quaker, "and even thee is a little queer!"
Such praise of fools may seem extravagant or illogical, but if it is so,
it must be not because the fool is not helpful and stimulating in
society, but because, after all, he is not so easily identified as one
might suppose. Celestine tells me she never calls a man a fool, but
instead asks him why he does so,--and in this way she often learns
something. That is the most disagreeable trait of fools; often, upon
investigation, what appears to be genuine nonsense is but the consistent
carrying out of a clever and original idea, whose novelty alone excites
amusement. The fool thus cheats us of our due enjoyment by being in the
right. It seems dishonest of a fool to instruct; it is beside the mark,
and outside his proper sphere, and yet even Confucius is said to have
learned politeness from the impolite. To see one's own faults and
weaknesses caricatured spoils the laugh that should testify to the
folly.
We cannot be sure, either, that the ass who amuses us by his eccentric
absurdities may not eventually cheat us of the final victory by proving
to be but the vanguard of a new custom to which we or our children must,
perforce, in time succumb, and fall into line with him far behind, only
then to count our present attitude foolish and old-fashioned. Let us
therefore laugh while we may, for your fool is but a chameleon who
refuses to change colour. What today is arrant silliness may tomorrow
be good horse-sense, wherefore it is wise to watch fools carefully when
you find them, lest the sport spoil overnight, and you yourself become
ridiculous, while the fool takes your place as the amused philosopher.