elaboration of stage effect. "To the King's playhouse--" says Pepys, "a
good scene of a town on fire." Women take parts. An avalanche of new plays
descends on it. Even the old plays that have survived are garbled to suit a
change of taste.
But if you would really know what kind of theatre it was that sprang up
with the Stuarts and what the audiences looked like and how they behaved,
you must read Pepys. With but a moderate use of fancy, you can set out with
him in his yellow coach for the King's house in Drury Lane. Perhaps hunger
nips you at the start. If so, you stop, as Pepys pleasantly puts it, for a
"barrel of oysters." Then, having dusted yourself of crumbs, you take the
road again. Presently you come to Drury Lane. Other yellow coaches are
before you. There is a show of foppery on the curb and an odor of smoking
links. A powdered beauty minces to the door. Once past the doorkeeper, you
hear the cries of the orange women going up and down the aisles. There is a
shuffling of apprentices in the gallery. A dandy who lolls in a box with a
silken leg across the rail, scrawls a message to an actress and sends it
off by Orange Moll. Presently Castlemaine enters the royal box with the
King. There is a craning of necks, for with her the King openly "do
discover a great deal of familiarity." In other boxes are other fine ladies
wearing vizards to hold their modesty if the comedy is free. A board breaks
in the ceiling of the gallery and dust falls in the men's hair and the
ladies' necks, which, writes Pepys, "made good sport." Or again, "A
gentleman of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of some fruit in
the midst of the play, did drop down as dead; being choked, but with much
ado Orange Moll did thrust her finger down his throat and brought him to
life again." Or perhaps, "I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spit
backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a
very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all."
At a change of scenes, Mrs. Knipp spies Pepys and comes to the pit door. He
goes with her to the tiring-room. "To the women's shift," he writes,
"where Nell was dressing herself, and was all unready, and is very pretty,
prettier than I thought.... But to see how Nell cursed for having so few
people in the pit, was pretty."--"But Lord! their confidence! and how
many men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and how
confident they are in their talk!" Or he is whispered a bit of gossip, how
Castlemaine is much in love with Hart, an actor of the house. Then Pepys
goes back into the pit and lays out a sixpence for an orange. As the play
nears its end, footmen crowd forward at the doors. The epilogue is spoken.
The fiddles squeak their last. There is a bawling outside for coaches.
"Would it fit your humor," asks Mr. Pepys, when we have been handed to our
seats, "would it fit your humor, if we go around to the Rose Tavern for
some burnt wine and a breast of mutton off the spit? It's sure that some
brave company will fall in, and we can have a tune. We'll not heed the
bellman. We'll sit late, for it will be a fine light moonshine morning."
To an Unknown Reader
Once in a while I dream that I come upon a person who is reading a book
that I have written. In my pleasant dreams these persons do not nod
sleepily upon my pages, and sometimes I fall in talk with them. Although
they do not know who I am, they praise the book and name me warmly among
my betters. In such circumstance my happy nightmare mounts until I ride
foremost with the giants. If I could think that this disturbance of my
sleep came from my diet and that these agreeable persons arose from a
lobster or a pie, nightly at supper I would ply my fork recklessly among
the platters.
But in a waking state these meetings never come. If an article of mine is
ever read at all, it is read in secret like the Bible. Once, indeed, in a
friend's house I saw my book upon the table, but I suspect that it had been
dusted and laid out for my coming. I request my hostess that next time, for
my vanity, she lay the book face down upon a chair, as though the grocer's
knock intruded. Or perhaps a huckster's cart broke upon her enjoyment.
Let it be thought that a rare bargain--tender asparagus or the first
strawberries of the summer--tempted her off my pages! Or maybe there was
red rhubarb in the cart and the jolly farmer, as he journeyed up the
street, pitched it to a pleasing melody. Dear lady, I forgive you. But let
us hope no laundryman led you off! Such discord would have marred my book.
I saw once in a public library, as I went along the shelves, a volume of
mine which gave evidence to have been really read. The record in front
showed that it had been withdrawn one time only. The card was blank
below--but once certainly it had been read. I hope that the book went out
on a Saturday noon when the spirits rise for the holiday to come, and that
a rainy Sunday followed, so that my single reader was kept before his fire.
A dull patter on the window--if one sits unbuttoned on the hearth--gives
a zest to a languid chapter. The rattle of a storm--if only the room be
snug--fixes the attention fast. Therefore, let the rain descend as though
the heavens rehearsed for a flood! Let a tempest come out of the west! Let
the chimney roar as it were a lion! And if there must be a clearing, let
it hold off until the late afternoon, lest it sow too early a distaste for
indoors and reading! There is scarcely a bookworm who will not slip his
glasses off his nose, if the clouds break at the hour of sunset when the
earth and sky are filled with a green and golden light. I took the book off
the library shelf and timidly glancing across my shoulder for fear that
some one might catch me, I looked along the pages. There was a thumb mark
in a margin, and presently appeared a kindly stickiness on the paper as
though an orange had squirted on it. Surely there had been a human being
hereabouts. It was as certain as when Crusoe found the footprints in the
sand. Ah, I thought, this fellow who sits in the firelight has caught an
appetite. Perhaps he bit a hole and sucked the fruit, and the skin has
burst behind. Or I wave the theory and now conceive that the volume was
read at breakfast. If so, it is my comfort that in those dim hours it stood
propped against his coffee cup.
But the trail ended with the turning of the page. There were, indeed,
further on, pencil checks against one of the paragraphs as if here the book
had raised a faint excitement, but I could not tell whether they sprang
up in derision or in approval. Toward the end there were uncut leaves, as
though even my single reader had failed in his persistence.
Being swept once beyond a usual caution, I lamented to my friend F---- of
the neglect in which readers held me, to which the above experience in
a library was a rare exception. F---- offered me such consolation as he
could, deplored the general taste and the decadence of the times, and said
that as praise was sweet to everyone, he, as far as he himself was able,
offered it anonymously to those who merited it. He was standing recently
in a picture gallery, when a long-haired man who stood before one of the
pictures was pointed out to him as the artist who had painted it. At once
F---- saw his opportunity to confer a pleasure, but as there is a touch of
humor in him, he first played off a jest. Lounging forward, he dropped his
head to one side as artistic folk do when they look at color. He made a
knot-hole of his fingers and squinted through. Next he retreated across the
room and stood with his legs apart in the very attitude of wisdom. He cast
a stern eye upon the picture and gravely tapped his chin. At last when the
artist was fretted to an extremity, F---- came forward and so cordially
praised the picture that the artist, being now warmed and comforted,
presently excused himself in a high excitement and rushed away to start
another picture while the pleasant spell was on him.
Had I been the artist, I would have run from either F----'s praise or
disapproval. As an instance, I saw a friend on a late occasion coming from
a bookstore with a volume of suspicious color beneath his arm. I had been
avoiding that particular bookstore for a week because my book lay for sale
on a forward table. And now when my friend appeared, a sudden panic seized
me and I plunged into the first doorway to escape. I found myself facing a
soda fountain. For a moment, in my blur, I could not account for the
soda fountain, or know quite how it had come into my life. Presently an
interne--for he was jacketted as if he walked a hospital--asked me what I'd
have.
Still somewhat dazed, in my discomposure, having no answer ready, my
startled fancy ran among the signs and labels of the counter until I
recalled that a bearded man once, unblushing in my presence, had ordered
a banana flip. I got the fellow's ear and named it softly. Whereupon he
placed a dead-looking banana across a mound of ice-cream, poured on colored
juices as though to mark the fatal wound and offered it to me. I ate a few
bites of the sickish mixture until the streets were safe.
I do not know to what I can attribute my timidity. Possibly it arises from
the fact that until recently my writing met with uniform rejection and
failure. For years I wrote secretly in order that few persons might know
how miserably I failed. I answered upon a question that I had given up the
practice, that I now had no time for it, that I scribbled now and then
but always burned it. All that while I gave my rare leisure and my stolen
afternoons--the hours that other men give to golf and sleep and sitting
together--these hours I gave to writing. On a holiday I was at it early. On
Saturday when other folks were abroad, I sat at my desk. It was my grief
that I was so poor a borrower of the night that I blinked stupidly on my
papers if I sat beyond the usual hour. Writing was my obsession. I need no
pity for my failures, for although I tossed my cap upon a rare acceptance,
my deeper joy was in the writing. That joy repeated failures could not
blunt.
There are paragraphs that now lie yellow in my desk with their former
meaning faded, that still recall as I think of them the first exaltation
when I wrote them--feverishly in a hot emotion. In those days I thought
that I had caught the sunlight on my pen, and the wind and the moon and the
spinning earth. I thought that the valleys and the mountains arose from the
mist obedient to me. If I splashed my pen, in my warm regard it was the
roar and fury of the sea. It was really no more than my youth crying out.
And, alas, my thoughts and my feelings escaped me when I tried to put them
down on paper, although I did not know it then. Perhaps they were too
vagrant to be held. And yet these paragraphs that might be mournful records
of failure, fill me with no more than a tender recollection for the boy
who wrote them. The worn phrases now beg their way with broken steps. Like
shrill and piping minstrels they whine and crack a melody that I still
remember in its freshness.
But perhaps, reader, we are brothers in these regards. Perhaps you, too,
have faded papers. Or possibly, even on a recent date, you sighed your soul
into an essay or a sonnet, and you now have manuscript which you would like
to sell. Do not mistake me! I am not an editor, nor am I an agent for these
wares. Rather I speak as a friend who, having many such hidden sorrows,
offers you a word of comfort. To a desponding Hamlet I exclaim, "'Tis
common, my Lord." I have so many friends that have had an unproductive
fling toward letters, that I think the malady is general. So many books are
published and flourish a little while in their bright wrappers, but yours
and theirs and mine waste away in a single precious copy.
I am convinced that a close inspection of all desks--a federal matter as
though Capital were under fire--would betray thousands of abandoned novels.
There may be a few stern desks that are so cluttered with price-sheets and
stock-lists that they cannot offer harborage to a love tale. Standing desks
in particular, such as bookkeepers affect, are not always chinked
with these softer plots. And rarely there is a desk so smothered in
learning--reeking so of scholarship--as not to admit a lighter nook for
the tucking of a sea yarn. Even so, it was whispered to me lately that
Professor B----, whose word shakes the continent, holds in a lower drawer
no fewer than three unpublished historical novels, each set up with a full
quota of smugglers and red bandits. One of these stories deals scandalously
with the abduction of an heiress, but this must be held in confidence. The
professor is a stoic before his class, but there's blood in the fellow.
There is, therefore, little use in your own denial. You will recall that
once, when taken to a ruined castle, you brooded on the dungeons until a
plot popped into your head. You crammed it with quaint phrasing from the
chroniclers. You stuffed it with soldiers' oaths. "What ho! landlord,"
you wrote gayly at midnight, "a foaming cup, good sir. God pity the poor
sailors that take the sea this night!" And on you pelted with your plot to
such conflicts and hair-breadth escapes as lay in your contrivance.
These things you have committed. Good sir, we are of a common piece. Let us
salute as brothers! And therefore, as to a comrade, I bid you continue in
your ways. And that you may not lack matter for your pen, I warmly urge
you, when by shrewdest computation you have exhausted the plots of
adventure and have worn your villains thin, that you proceed in quieter
vein. I urge you to an April mood, for the winds of Spring are up and
daffodils nod across the garden. There is black earth in the Spring and
green hilltops, and there is also the breath of flowers along the fences
and the sound of water for your pen to prattle of.
A Plague of All Cowards
Having written lately against the dog, several acquaintances have asked me
to turn upon the cat, and they have been good enough to furnish me with
instances of her faithlessness. Also, a lady with whom I recently sat at
dinner, inquired of me on the passing of the fish, whether I had ever
properly considered the cow, which she esteemed a most mischievous animal.
One of them had mooed at her as she crossed a pasture and she had hastily
climbed a fence. I get a good many suggestions first and last. I was once
taken to a Turkish bath for no other reason--as I was afterwards told--than
that it might supply me with a topic. Odd books have been put in my way.
A basket of school readers was once lodged with me, with a request that I
direct my attention to the absurd selection of the poems. I have been urged
to go against car conductors and customs men. On one occasion I received a
paper of tombstone inscriptions, with a note of direction how others might
be found in a neighboring churchyard if I were curious. A lady in whose
company I camped last summer has asked me to give a chapter to it. We were
abroad upon a lake in the full moon--we were lost upon a mountain--twice a
canoe upset--there were the usual jests about cooking. These things might
have filled a few pages agreeably, yet so far they have given me only a
paragraph.
But I am not disposed toward any of these subjects, least of all the cat,
upon which I look--despite the coldness of her nature--as a harmless and
comforting appendage of the hearth-rug. I would no more prey upon her
morals than I would the morals of the andirons. I choose, rather, to slip
to another angle of the question and say a few words about cowards, among
whom I have already confessed that I number myself.
In this year of battles, when physical courage sits so high, the reader--if
he is swept off in the general opinion--will expect under such a title
something caustic. He will think that I am about to loose against all
cowards a plague of frogs and locusts as if old Egypt had come again. But
cowardice is its own punishment. It needs no frog to nip it. Even the
sharp-toothed locust--for in the days that bordered so close upon the
mastodon, the locust could hardly have fallen to the tender greenling we
know today--even the locust that once spoiled the Egyptians could not now
add to the grief of a coward.
And yet--really I hesitate. I blush. My attack will be too intimate; for I
have confessed that I am not the very button on the cap of bravery. I have
indeed stiffened myself to ride a horse, a mightier feat than driving him
because of the tallness of the monster and his uneasy movement, as though
his legs were not well socketed and might fall out on a change of gaits. I
have ridden on a camel in a side-show, but have found my only comfort in
his hump. I have stroked the elephant. In a solemn hour of night I have
gone downstairs to face a burglar. But I do not run singing to these
dangers. While your really brave fellow is climbing a dizzy staircase to
the moon--I write in figure--I would shake with fear upon a lower platform.
Perhaps you recall Mr. Tipp of the Elia essays. "Tipp," says his pleasant
biographer, "never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned
against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or
looked down a precipice; or let off a gun." I cannot follow Tipp, it may
be, to his extreme tremors--my hair will not rise to so close a likeness of
the fretful porcupine--yet in a measure we are in agreement. We are, as it
were, cousins, with the mark of our common family strong on both of us.
There are persons who, when in your company on a country walk, will steal
apples, not with a decent caution from a tree along the fence, but far
afield. If there are grapes, they will not wait for a turn of the road,
but will pluck them in the open. Or maybe in your wandering you come on a
half-built house. You climb in through a window to look about. Here the
stairs will go. The ice-box will be set against this wall. But if your
companion is one of valor's minions, he will not be satisfied with this
safe and agreeable research--this mild speculation on bath-rooms--this
innocent placing of a stove. He must go aloft. He has seen a ladder and
yearns to climb it. The footing on the second story is bad enough. If you
fall between the joists, you will clatter to the basement. It is hard to
realize that such an open breezy place will ever be cosy and warm with
fires, and that sleepy folk will here lie snugly a-bed on frosty mornings.
But still the brazen fellow is not content. A ladder leads horribly to the
roof. For myself I will climb until the tip of my nose juts out upon the
world--until it sprouts forth to the air from the topmost timbers: But I
will go no farther. But if your companion sees a scaffold around a chimney,
he must perch on it. For him, a dizzy plank is a pleasant belvedere from
which to view the world.
The bravery of this kind of person is not confined to these few matters.
If you happen to go driving with him, he will--if the horse is of the kind
that distends his nostrils--on a sudden toss you the reins and leave you to
guard him while he dispatches an errand. If it were a motor car there would
be a brake to hold it. If it were a boat, you might throw out an anchor. A
butcher's cart would have a metal drag. But here you sit defenseless--tied
to the whim of a horse--greased for a runaway. The beast Dobbin turns his
head and holds you with his hard eye. There is a convulsive movement along
his back, a preface, it may be, to a sudden seizure. A real friend would
have loosed the straps that run along the horse's flanks. Then, if any
deviltry take him, he might go off alone and have it out.
I have in mind a livery stable in Kalamazoo. Myself and another man of
equal equestrianism were sent once to bring out a thing called a surrey and
a pair of horses. Do you happen to be acquainted with Blat's Horse Food? If
your way lies among the smaller towns, you must know its merits. They are
proclaimed along the fences and up the telegraph poles. Drinking-troughs
speak its virtues. Horses thrive on Blat's Food. They neigh for it. A
flashing lithograph is set by way of testament wherever traffic turns or
lingers. Do you not recall the picture? A great red horse rears himself
on his hind legs. His forward hoofs are extended. He is about to trample
someone under foot. His nostrils are wide. He is unduly excited. It cannot
be food, it must be drink that stirs him. He is a fearful spectacle.
There was such a picture on the wall of the stable.
"Have you any horses," I asked nervously, jerking my thumb toward the wall,
"any horses that have been fed on just ordinary food? Some that are a
little tired?"
For I remembered how Mr. Winkle once engaged horses to take the
Pickwickians out to Manor Farm and what mishaps befell them on the way.
"'He don't shy, does he?' inquired Mr. Pickwick.
"'Shy, sir?--He wouldn't shy if he was to meet a vagginload of monkeys with
their tails burnt off.'"
But how Mr. Pickwick dropped his whip, how Mr. Winkle got off his tall
horse to pick it up, how he tried in vain to remount while his horse went
round and round, how they were all spilt out upon the bridge and how
finally they walked to Manor Farm--these things are known to everybody with
an inch of reading.
"'How far is it to Dingley Dell?' they asked.
"'Better er seven mile.'
"'Is it a good road?'
"'No, t'ant.'...
"The depressed Pickwickians turned moodily away, with the tall quadruped,
for which they all felt the most unmitigated disgust, following slowly at
their heels."
"Have you any horses," I repeated, "that have not been fed on Blat's
Food--horses that are, so to speak, on a diet?"
In the farthest stalls, hidden from the sunlight and the invigorating
infection of the day, two beasts were found with sunken chests and hollow
eyes, who took us safely to our destination on their hands and knees.
As you may suspect, I do not enjoy riding. There is, it is true, one saddle
horse in North Carolina that fears me. If time still spares him, that horse
I could ride with content. But I would rather trust myself on the top of a
wobbly step-ladder than up the sides of most horses. I am not quite of a
mind, however, with Samuel Richardson who owned a hobby-horse and rode on
his hearth-rug in the intervals of writing "Pamela." It is likely that when
he had rescued her from an adventure of more than usual danger--perhaps her
villainous master has been concealed in her closet--perhaps he has been
hiding beneath her bed--it is likely, having brought her safely off, the
author locked her in the buttery against a fresh attack. Then he felt, good
man, in need of exercise. So while he waits for tea and muffins, he leaps
upon his rocking-horse and prances off. As for the hobby-horse itself, I
have not heard whether it was of the usual nursery type, or whether it was
built in the likeness of the leather camels of a German steamship.
I need hardly say that these confessions of my cowardice are for your ear
alone. They must not get abroad to smirch me. If on a country walk I have
taken to my heels, you must not twit me with poltroonery. If you charge me
with such faint-heartedness while other persons are present, I'll deny it
flat. When I sit in the company of ladies at dinner, I dissemble my true
nature, as doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat.
If then, you taunt me, for want of a better escape, I shall turn it to a
jest. I shall engage the table flippantly: Hear how preposterously the
fellow talks!--he jests to satisfy a grudge. In appearance I am whole as
the marble, founded as a rock.
But really some of us cowards are diverting persons. The lady who directed
me against the cow is a most delightful woman with whom I hope I shall
again sit at dinner. A witty lady of my acquaintance shivers when a
cat walks in the room. A man with whom I pass the time pleasantly and
profitably, although he will not admit a fear of ghosts, still will not
sleep in an empty house because of possible noises. I would rather spend a
Saturday evening in the company of the cowardly Falstaff than of the bold
Hotspur. If it were not for sack, villainous sack, and a few spots upon his
front, you would go far to find a better companion than the fat old Knight.
Bob Acres was not much for valor and he made an ass of himself when he went
to fight a duel, yet one could have sat agreeably at mutton with him.