Will not some Christian gentleman of leisure have the benevolence to
organize The Society for the Protection of Writers? Its work will be
mainly educational; not much permanent good can be done, I fear, by
assassination, though as an auxiliary means, that may be worthy of
consideration. The public must be led to understand, each individual in
his own way, that some part of a writer’s time belongs to himself and
has a certain value to him. If the experience of other writers equally
ill known is the same as mine the sum of our wrongs is something
solemn. Everybody, it would seem, feels at liberty to request a writer
to do whatever the wild and wanton requester may wish to have done—to
criticise (commend) a manuscript; send his photograph, or a copy of his
latest book; write poetry in an album forwarded for the purpose and
already well filled with unearthly sentiments by demons of the pit;
set down a few rules for writing well, and so forth. It is God’s truth
that compliance with one-half of the “requests” made of me would leave
me no time for my meals, and no meals for my time.
Of course I speak of strangers—persons without the shadow of a claim
to my time and attention, and with very little to those of their
heavenly Father. Indeed, they belong, as a rule, to a class that is
more profited by escaping divine attention than by courting it: nothing
should so fill them with consternation as a glance from the All-seeing
Eye—though some of the finer and freer spirits of their bright band
would think nothing of inviting the Recording Angel to forsake his
accounts and scratch an appropriate sentiment on “the enclosed
headstone.”
When Mr. Rudyard Kipling once visited Montreal he gave orders at his
hotel that he was not to be disturbed—whereby many worthy persons who
called to “pay their respects” were sadly disappointed. One “prominent
merchant,” a “great admirer,” took the trouble to introduce himself,
and had the infelicitous fate to be informed by Mr. Kipling that he
did not wish any new acquaintances—and sorrow perched upon that
man’s prominent soul. To a club of “literary” folk and “artists” who
“tendered him a reception” he did not deign a reply; and those whose
hope construed his silence as assent were made acquainted with the
taste of their own teeth. In short, Mr. Kipling seems to have acted in
Montreal very much like a modest gentleman desiring to be let alone and
having a gentleman’s fine scorn of vulgarity and intrusion.
When, I wonder, will Americans—Canadian Americans and United States
Americans—learn that their admiration of a man’s work in letters or
art gives them no right to occupy his time and lengthen the always
intolerably long muster-roll of his acquaintance? One would think that
so wholesome a lesson in manners as Dickens gave us during his first
visit, and later in the _American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_, would
suffice, and that for lack of students he would have no successor in
the Chair of Deportment. But sycophancy, like hope, springs eternal in
the human breast, and, crushed to earth, impudence like truth, will
rise again, inviting a fresh humiliation. Well, as the homely proverb
hath it, there is no great loss without some small gain—albeit the
same usually accrues to the author of the loss. Montreal’s Pen and
Pencil Club having passed through the fire and been purified of its own
respect, is now, by that privation and the affining stress of a common
sorrow, fitted to affiliate with the Bohemian Club of San Francisco,
which also knows the lift of the Kipling superior lip, and how he
kipples.
Mr. Kipling’s explanation that he did not desire any new acquaintances
goes pretty nearly to the root of the matter. What man of sense
does?—unless he is so ghastly unfortunate as to need them in his
business. A man of brains has commonly a better use for his head than
to make it serve as a rogues’ gallery for an interminable succession
of mental portraits, each of which he must be prepared to outfit with
its appropriate name on demand. One can not, of course, and none but
a fool would wish to, go through life without now and again making
an acquaintance, even a friendship, as circumstances, civility and
character may determine. Even chance may without absolutely uniform
disaster play a part in such matters, though, as a rule, persons in
whose lives accidental meetings entail lasting social relations are
not particularly agreeable to meet. Your man of sense cares to know
those whom he daily meets under such circumstances as would make it
awkward if he did not know them; and he is accessible to all good
souls whose wish to know him is supplemented by the frankness to ask
an introduction and the civility to obtain his assent. It is thus that
he will himself approach those whom he wishes to know, and in some
cases those whom he merely suspects of the wish to know him. As to
that invention of the devil, the purposeless and meaningless “chance
introduction,” it is the hatefulest thing in all the wild welter of
social irritants. As a claim to acquaintance it has about the same
validity as had, in the case of Kipling, the fact that Montreal’s
“prominent merchant” was a “great admirer.”
If a man, like a red worm, could be multiplied by section he might
perhaps undertake to know all whom the irritating freedom of American
manners permits to be introduced to him, and, if he is a distinguished
writer, all who “greatly admire” him. At least if they were properly
brigaded he might undertake to commit to his multiplied memory the
names or numerals of the several brigades. Even then it should be
understood that failure through preoccupation with his own affairs
should not be counted against him as proof of pride and an evil
disposition. Some allowance should be made, too, for the probability
that a man of letters may be unfitted for prodigious feats of
recollection by the necessity of preserving some part of his time for
use in—well, for example, in letters. As to “receptions,” “banquets,”
and so forth, “tendered” him, and “calls” “paid” him by strangers
not of his profession, unless he is a literary impostor he will not
accept the hospitality, nor, unless he is a social coward, submit to
the intrusion. He knows that beneath these dreary and dispiriting
“attentions” are motives transcending in ugliness a tangle of snakes
under a warm rock.
There are other reasons why men of letters are not usually hot to make
acquaintances. A good writer is a man of thought, for good writing,
whatever else it may be, is, first of all, clear thinking. However
much or little of his actual opinions he may choose to put into his
work, he necessarily, as a man of thought, has convictions not commonly
entertained by “persons whom one meets”—when one must. He is likely to
be a dissenter from the established order of things—to hold in scant
esteem the institutions, faiths, laws, customs, habits, morals and
manners that are the natural outgrowth and expression of our barbarous
race; the enactments of God’s governing majority, the rogues and fools.
To utter his views in conversation with Philistines and Prudes is to
smite them sick with dismay and fill them topful of resentment and
antagonism; to incite a contention in which the appurtenant stalled ox
itself is imperiled in the bones of it. Yet in making the acquaintance
of even a fairly educated person not a vulgarian and having no outward
and visible signs of an inner disgrace the chances are ten to one that
you are meeting a Philistine and prude by whom natural conduct and
rational convictions are accounted immoral, and with whom conversation
outside the worn ways of commonplace and platitude is impossible. If
it is a woman she will probably insult you, all unconsciously, in a
thousand and fifty ways by savage scruples inherited from a long line
of pithecan ancestresses eared to hear in the rustle of every leaf the
tonguefall of the arboreal Mrs. Grundy. If it is a man there should be
no needless delay in insulting _him_.
Another imminent peril to him who travels the hard road of letters lies
in the mad desire and iron resolution of his new acquaintances to talk
about his work, with, of course, imperfect knowledge, understanding
and discretion. This if he will not permit he is accounted proud; if
he will, vain. Poor Hawthorne’s experience with the worthy person
who thought it the proper thing to make a graceful reference to his
book, “The Red Letter A,” is typical and the record of that dreadful
encounter comes home to every author’s bosom and business with a
peculiar personal interest.