Utopia, Atlantis, Alice's Wonderland, or the countries of the Faerie
Queene? Who has reconstructed the plans of Troy? And there are other
allegorical lands, too, that should be mapped. I have had a try myself
at the modern "Bohemia," and have taken the liberty of shewing within
its much-maligned borders Arcady and the Forest of Arden. I have even
planned Millamours, the city of a thousand loves, and I am now
attempting to draw a map of the State of Literature in the year 1902.
There are many celebrated edifices, too, that might be trifled with. I
have a friend, an architect, who has completed the Castle of Zenda, and
he is now occupied with Circe's palace, with a fine eye to the
decorative effect of the pig-pens. Think of laying out the gardens,
grottoes, and palaces of the Arabian Nights! Why has the Castle of
Otranto been neglected--and Udolpho, and Castle Dangerous, and the
Moated Grange?
Many novelists, and, I think, most writers of pure romance, have played
this game. Stevenson, dreaming in his father's office, drew the map of
Treasure Island, and from that chart came forth, hint by hint, the
suggestions for his masterpiece. Maurice Hewlett drew a plat of the
ancient marches and forests where the Forest Lovers wandered, and it is
a pity he did not publish it in more detail. This is one of the
graphical solutions of story writing, a queer, anomalous method whereby
the symbol suggests the concept. The cheaper magazines often use old
cuts, and request some hack to write a story to fit the illustration.
But the map is an abstraction; its revelations are cabalistic, not
definite. A good map is a stage set for romantic fiction, ready for
anybody who can write or dream the play.
*The Science of Flattery*
Time was when people were less sophisticated and almost everybody could
be flattered. A compliment was the pinch of salt that could be placed
upon any bird's tail. But such game is scarcer now, and to capture one's
quarry one has to practice all the arts of modern social warfare. We
have, for instance, been taught to believe, time out of mind, that women
are especially susceptible to this saccharine process; that one had but
to make a pretty speech, and her conquest was assured. But what lady
nowadays can take a compliment without bridling? It is as much as a
man's reputation is worth to make a plain, straightforward statement of
approbation. He must veil his meaning so that it can be discovered only
by a roundabout reflection. Whether it be true or not, he is held
offensively responsible for the blush with which it is received.
So, to be successful, one must be politic and tactful; one must adopt
the indirect method, and, above all, one must escape the obvious. To
say what has been said many times before defeats the very purpose,
whether it be good or evil, for which we flatter. The artist discards
the hackneyed compliment, and endeavours to place his arrow in a spot
that has never been hit before. He will compliment a poet upon his
drawings and a painter upon his verses. If a woman ordinarily plainly
dressed, has a single effective garment, does he compliment her upon
that particular costume? By no means. Subtilty demands that he flatter
her by pointing out some interesting feature in one of her common
frocks, without hinting that it is surprising to see her particularly
well clad. Such compliments have the flavour of novelty, and are
treasured up by the recipient, to be quoted long after the donor has
forgotten them.
The tribute of unexpected praise is more grateful to a person than the
reward for which he works hardest and is most confident. It discovers to
him new and pleasing attributes. It has all the zest and relish that
the particular always has more than the general. And, besides, for the
person who happens to light upon some little favourite trick of
individuality, and to notice and to comment upon it, the reward is
great. Such a flatterer is, in the heart of the flattered one, throned
with the authority of discernment; he is considered forever after as a
critic of the first importance. Everyone has a hobby, an idiosyncrasy,
visible or invisible; it is the art of the flatterer to discover it, and
his science to use it to his own ends.
Flattery is, however, an edged tool, and must be used with care. It is
not everyone who has the tact to decide at a glance just how much his
victim will stand. He may know enough, perhaps, to praise the author of
a successful book for some other one of his works which has not attained
a popular vogue; he may have the discretion to banter men about their
success with the opposite sex, and to accuse women of cleverness; but
for all that he may often misjudge his object, and give embarrassment if
not actual affront. For all such the safest weapon is the written word.
This is the ambush from which your prey cannot escape. If a letter of
praise, of compliment, or even of deliberate flattery, is made decently
interesting, if it is not too grossly cloying even for private perusal,
it cannot fail to count. It has to be paid for by no blush, no awkward
moment, no painful conspicuous self-consciousness, no hypocritical
denial. It strikes an undefending victim, and brings him down without a
struggle. Such tributes of praise can be read and reread without
mortification. It is a sweet-smelling incense that burns perpetually
before the shrine of vanity. One compliment written down in black and
white is worth any number of spoken words, and the trouble that has been
taken to commit such praise to paper gives the offering an added
interest and importance. Anything that can be said can be written, from
the eulogy of a lady's slipper to the appreciation of a solo on the
harp. You may be sure that any unconventionality of manner will be
atoned for by the seduction of a honeyed manner. Stevenson, in his
playful "Decalogue for Gentlemen," set down as his first canon, "Thou
shalt not write an anonymous letter," but it cannot be doubted that he
would have excepted an unsigned note of admiration.
The element of time, in flattery, too, is often disregarded. Few
would-be flatterers understand the increased influence of a compliment
deferred. It is again the same case of the misuse of the obvious. When
your friend's book appears, or his picture is displayed, there are
enough to compliment him on the spot, but your own sympathetic
endorsement, delayed a few months, or even iterated, comes to him when
he is least expecting the compliment. He is off his guard, and the shot
goes home. When I give Celestine a present she thanks me immediately,
of course, but that is not the last of it. In every third letter or so
I am reminded of her gratitude and my kindness.
There is, however, a flattery of manner as well as one of matter.
Celestine, to whose wise counsels I am indebted for many a short cut in
the making of friends, once laid down for me the following rules for
dealing with women:
First, be intellectual with pretty women.
Second, be frivolous with intellectual women.
Third, be serious and _empresse_ with young girls.
Fourth, be saucy and impudent with old ladies. Call them by their first
names, if necessary.
It goes without saying that such audacious methods require boldness and
sureness of touch, especially in the application of the fourth rule.
But even that, when attempted with spirit and assurance, has given
miraculous results. In a case where a woman's age is in question,
action speaks far louder than words.
Perhaps the most successful method of flattery is that of the person who
makes the fewest compliments. To gain a name for brusqueness and
frankness is, in a way, to attain a reputation for sincerity. Whether
this is just or not, it is undoubtedly true that the occasional unlooked
for praise of such a person acquires an exaggerated importance and
worth. This system is similar to that of the billiard-player who goes
through the first half of his game wretchedly in order to surprise his
opponent with the dexterity of his shots later on. But it is an
amateurish ruse, and is soon discovered and discounted at its true
value. Yet in a way, too, it is justifiable, since unpleasant comments
are usually accepted as candid, while pleasant ones alone are suspected.
There is a kind of conscious vanity to which flattery comes welcomely,
however patent the hyperboles may appear. To such persons, and there
are many, a certain amount of adulation oils the mental machine. They
do not believe all that is said, but prefer, on the whole, to be
surrounded by pleasant fictions rather than by unpleasant facts. They
prefer harmony to honesty, and, though the oil on the troubled waters of
life does not dispel the storm, it makes easier sailing. To others,
especially if they be creators in any art, compliments stimulate and
impel to their best endeavour. Many a man has achieved a masterpiece
chiefly because a woman declared him capable of it.
The question of the object for which flattery is employed is here beside
the mark. It may be used or misused; it may be true or false of itself,
although, to be sure, the word flattery has attained an evil
significance and has come to stand for counterfeit approval. All that
has been said, however, applies to one as well as to the other. Even
when praise has the least foundation in fact, it may prove beneficial to
the person flattered, arousing a pride which creates the admired quality
that was wholly lacking. Thus I have known a man notorious for his
vulgarity stimulated to a very creditable politeness by the most
undeserved and insincere compliment upon his table manners.
I have used the three testimonials of admiration as synonymous, but
Celestine says that praise is a rightful fee, a compliment is a tip, and
that flattery is bribery.
*Romance En Route*
How tired I am of the question, "How do you like London?" and "How do
you like New York?" "Would you rather live in San Francisco or Paris?"
Why, indeed, should I not like London, Kalamazoo, Patagonia, Bombay, or
any other place where live men and women walk the streets, eat, drink,
and are merry? How can I say whether El Dorado is better than Arcady,
or a square room more convenient than an oblong one? Every living place
has its own fascination, its mysteries, its characteristic delights.
Ask me, rather, if I can understand London, if I can catch the point of
view of the French _concierge_, if I comprehend the slang and bustle of
Chicago? Like them? Show me the town I cannot like! Know them? Ah,
that is different!
This is the charm of travel--to keep up the feeling of strangeness to
the end, never to take things for granted or let them grow stale, to see
them always as though one had never seen them before. Then, and only
then, can we see things as they really are. When I become cosmopolitan,
world-old, _blase_, when I think and speak in all languages, I shall fly
to some deserted island to study the last, most impenetrable
enigma--myself.
But meanwhile, I can purchase romance retail, at the mere cost of a
railway ticket. I can close my eyes in one city, and wake next morning
in its mental antipode. Romance requires only a new point of view; it
is the art of getting fresh glimpses of the commonplace. One need not be
transported to the days of chivalry, one need not even travel; one need
only begin life anew every morning, and look out upon the world
unfamiliarly as the child does. One must be born a discoverer. Thus one
may keep youth, for the sport never loses colour. One game won or lost,
the next has an equal interest, though we use the same counters and the
same board. The combinations are always fresh.
Still, though one may find this fountain of perpetual youth in one's
breakfast glass, the obvious conventional method is to go forth for the
adventure, and get this famed elixir at some foreign and well-advertised
spring. For this purpose tourists travel, taking part in a pilgrimage
of whose meaning and proper method they are wholly ignorant. In their
boxes and portmanteaus they pack, not hopes of mystery, faith in the
compelling marvels of the world, nor the wonder of strange sights; but
instead, fault-finding comparisons, and prejudice against all manners
not their own. They do not see, in the omnibus of London, the
automobile of Paris, the electric trolley of New York and the cable car
of San Francisco, the pregnant evidence of several points of view on
life, art and commerce, but they perceive only grotesque contrasts with
their own particular means of locomotion. They do not delight in the
incomprehensible hurly-burly of civilization that has produced the City
Man, the Bounder, the Coster, the Hoodlum, Hooligan and Sundowner, nor
do they attempt to solve the mystery or get the meat from such strange
shells. Instead, they see only the clerk at the lunch-counter bolting
his chops and half-pint, the incredible waistcoat of the pretentious
_blagueur_, or the buttons and "moke" of the ruffling D'Artagnan of the
Old Kent-road.
So the tourist travels with his eyes shut, while the true traveller has
a lookout on life, keen for new sensations. To do things in Rome as the
Romans do, that is his motto. He must eat spaghetti with his fingers,
his rice and chopped suey with chop-sticks, or he fails of their subtle
relish. He calls no Western town crude or uncivilized, but he tries to
cultivate a taste for cocktails, that he may imbibe the native fire of
occidental enthusiasm. In the East he is an Oriental; he changes his
mind, his costume and his spectacles wherever he goes, and underneath
the little peculiarities of custom and environment, he finds the
essential realities of life.
To taste all this fine, crisp flavour of living--not to write about it
or fit it to sociological theories, but to live it, understand it, be
it--this is the art of travel, the art of romance, the art of youth.
But there is no Baedeker to guide such a sentimental tourist through
such experiences as these. It takes a lively glance to recognize a man
disguised in a frock coat, and to find him blood brother to the
Esquimau!
Well, there is a place in Utah on the Central Pacific Railroad called
Monotony. The settlement consists of a station, a water-tank, and a
corrugated iron bunk-house. The level horizon swings round a full
circle, enclosing a flat, arid waste, bisected by an unfenced line of
rails, straight as a stretched string. The population consists of a
telegraph operator, a foreman, and six section hands. Yet I dare say I
would like to stay there awhile, on the way, and perhaps I would taste
some charm that London never gave. I am not so sure that but that
before I took wing again I might not like it, in some respects, better
even than Paris.
*The Edge of the World*
To find the colonial or the provincial more cultured, better educated in
life and keenlier cognizant of the world's progress than the ordinary
metropolitan, is a common enough paradox. Class for class, the
outlander has more energy, greater sapience and a truer zest of
intellect than the citizen at the capital. By the outlander is not
meant, however, the mere suburban or rural inhabitant, but the dweller
at the outpost of civilization, the picket on the edge of the world.
Let us grant that, in the gross, every new community must be crude--it
takes time to grow ivy over the walls, to soften the primary colours
into harmonious tones, to smooth off the rough edges,--but let us also
grant that, at all the back doorways of empire, in far-away corners of
the earth, are assembled little coteries of men and women who, by reason
of their very isolation, rather than despite it, have made themselves
cosmopolitan, catholic, eclectic, and stand ever ready to welcome, each
in his own polite dialect and idiom, the astonished traveller who thinks
he has left all that is great and good behind.
This compensation is, indeed, a natural law. If we cut back half the
shoots of a shrub, the surviving sprouts will be more vigorous. The
deprivation of one sense renders the others more acute. Make it hard
for an ambitious lad to obtain an education, and, working alone by
candle-light, he will outstrip the student with greater advantages. So
it is with the colonial who realizes his poverty of artistic and
intellectual resources. He must, in self-defense and to compensate for
his isolation, make friends with the world at large, and his mental
vision, accustomed to long ranges of sight, becomes sharp and subtile.
To avoid the reproach of provincialism he studies the great centers of
thought and watches eagerly for the first signs of new growths in fads,
fashions, art and politics. It is for this reason that the British
colonial is more British than the Englishman at home.
Plunged in the midst of the turmoil of every-day excitements, the
dwellers in great cities lose much of the true and fine significance of
things. A thousand enterprises are beginning, and amidst a myriad
essays the headway of yesterday's novelty is lost in the struggle of
today's agonists. The little, temporary, local success seems big with
import, and the slower development of more serious and permanent virtues
is ignored. Things are seen so closely that they are out of true
proportion, and they are seen through media of personality that diffract
and magnify.
But the provincial, far from this complicated aspect of intellectual
life, gains greatly in perspective. Separated by great space, he is, in
a way, separated by time also, and he sees what another generation will
perhaps see in the history of today. For he watches not only literary
London, that tiniest and most garrulous of gossiping villages, but a
dozen other hives of thought as well, and from his very distance can the
more easily discern the first signs of pre-eminence. His ears are not
ringing with a myriad petty clamours, but he can hear, rising above the
multitudinous hum, the voice of those who sing clearest. The
connoisseur in art views a painting from across the hall--the lover of
music does not sit too close to the orchestra--and so the intelligent
looker-on at life does not come too often in familiar touch with the
aspirants for fame. Living, as one might say, upon a hill, the stranger
thus gets the range, volume and trend of human activities, and sees
their movements, like those of armies marching below him, though they
seem as ants, so far away. He can trace the direction of waves of
emotion that follow round the earth like tides of the sea.
In every community, however small or remote, there are a few who delight
in this comprehensive view of things, who keep up with the times, and,
so far as their immediate neighbours are concerned, are ahead of the
prevailing mode. As the meteorologist, studying the reports from North,
South, East and West, can trace the progress of storm and wind, so these
intelligent observers can predict what will be talked about next, and
how soon the first murmurs will reach their shores. Their cosmic
laboratory is the club library table, with its journals and periodicals
from all over the world.
The first hint of a new success in literature comes from the London
weeklies, and then, if the British opinion is corroborated by American
favour, the New York papers take up the note of praise, and one may
follow the progress of a novel's triumph across three thousand five
hundred miles of continent, or see the word pass from colony to colony,
over the whole empire. The Londoner sees but the bubbles at the
spring--the pioneer by the Pacific watches the course of a mighty stream
increasing in depth and width. Tomorrow, or in three months, the vogue
will reach his own town, and he will smile to see all tongues wag of the
latest literary success.
So it is with art, so it is with fashions, with the drama and with every
fad and foible, from golf and Babism to the last song and catchword of
the music halls. The colonial is behind the times? What does it
matter! Are we not all behind the times of tomorrow? So long as we
cannot travel faster than the news, it makes little difference; and it
is wise, when we are in San Francisco, to do as the Franciscans do. It
is as bad to be ahead of the times as to be behind, and it is best to
follow the style of one's own locality, with a shrewd eye to one's
purchases for the future, buying what we can see must come into popular
favour.
But does your metropolitan enjoy this complexity, this living in the
future? Not he! He cares nothing for the _vieux jeu_. For him,
ping-pong is dead or dying--he neither knows nor cares that it still
lives in the Occident, marching in glory ever towards the West, along
the old trail to fame. Of the last six successful books discussed over
his muffins, does he know which have been virile enough to survive
transplanting to other shores--which have emigrated and become
naturalized in the colonies? No! He is for the next little victory at
the tea tables of the elect!
And yet, this afterglow, this subsequent invasion of new territory is
what brings enduring fame. Before the city election is substantiated,
the country must be heard from. The urban hears the solo voices of
adulation, the worship of those near and dear to celebrity, but the
great chorus that sweeps the hero up to Parnassus comes from a wider
stage. The army of invasion never comes home again to be hailed as
victor until it has encircled the globe. But it is the greater conquest
that the dweller at the outpost sees, at first like a cloud no bigger
than a man's hand, and it is his game to watch and await it. It is
better so. Waste no pity upon him at the edge of the world. For the
big game needs big men, and it is the boldest and most strenuous spirits
who push to Ultima Thule. The anaemic and neurotic do not emigrate; the
reddest blood has flowed in the veins of the pioneer ever since the
first migration. He does things, rather than talks of things others
have done--he knows life, even if he knows not Ibsen. Meet him in his
far-away home, and he holds your interest with an unlooked-for charm;
take him to the Elgin marbles and he will have and hold his own idea of
art unborrowed from text-books. He knows more of your city's history
than you do yourself; panic or the furor of a fashion cannot hypnotize
him. The importance of a celebrated name cannot embarrass him, for he
has met men unknown to fame who have lived as uncrowned kings. He has
seen cities rise from the plain. He has made the wilderness to blossom
like the rose; he has lived, not written epics.
And in addition to gaining all this experience that trained the pioneers
of old, he has, while living at the confines of civilization, kept in
touch with the world, and has tasted the exhilarating flavour of the old
and new in one mouthful. For, in this century, distance is swept away
and no land is really isolate. The pioneer lives like a god above
distinctions of time, at once in the past, the present and the future.
*The Diary Habit*
For seven years I have kept my diary scrupulously, without missing a
day, and now, at the beginning of a new twelvemonth, I am wondering
whether I should maintain or renounce it. There are certain good
habits, it would seem, as hard to break as bad ones, and if the practice
of keeping a daily journal is a praiseworthy one, it derives no little
of its virtue from sheer inertia. The half-filled book tempts one on;
there is a pleasure in seeing the progress of the volume, leaf by leaf;
like sentimental misers, we hoard our store of memories. We end each
day with a definite statement of fact or fancy, and it grows harder and
harder to abstain from the self-enforced duty. Yet it is seldom a
pleasure, when one is fatigued with excitement or work, to transmit our
affairs to writing. Some, it is true, love it for its own sake, or as a
relief for pent-up emotions, but, in one way or another, most
autobiographical journalists consider the occupation as a prudent
depositor regards his frugal savings in the bank. Some time, somehow,
they think, these coined memories will prove useful.