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Imaginary Interviews
W.D. Howells
[Illustration: See page 130
AT THE OPERA]
IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS
W.D. HOWELLS
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1910
Copyright, 1910, by HARPER & BROTHERS
Published October, 1910
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR BY WAY OF
INTRODUCTION 1
II. A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH 13
III. SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES 22
IV. THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE 32
V. INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA 44
VI. THE SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS 57
VII. UNIMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN REPUBLICS 67
VIII. HAVING JUST GOT HOME 77
IX. NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE 87
X. CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH 97
XI. WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK 107
XII. THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY OF NEW
YORK 117
XIII. THE WHIRL OF LIFE IN OUR FIRST CIRCLES 127
XIV. THE MAGAZINE MUSE 137
XV. COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL 146
XVI. QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS 156
XVII. A WASTED OPPORTUNITY 166
XVIII. A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE 176
XIX. A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY 184
XX. PRACTICAL IMMORTALITY ON EARTH 194
XXI. AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 204
XXII. THE ADVANTAGES OF QUOTATIONAL CRITICISM 216
XXIII. READING FOR A GRANDFATHER 226
XXIV. SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE 236
XXV. A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK 244
OTHER ESSAYS
CHAP. PAGE
I. AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY 255
II. PERSONAL AND EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES 264
III. DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER 274
IV. THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE TO LITERARY YOUTH 283
V. THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM 296
VI. THE FICKLENESS OF AGE 306
VII. THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION 316
VIII. THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND LINDORA 326
IX. TO HAVE THE HONOR OF MEETING 338
X. A DAY AT BRONX PARK 350
ILLUSTRATIONS
AT THE OPERA _Frontispiece_
FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET _Facing_ p. 88
FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS " 94
CHARLES EMBANKMENT, BELOW HARVARD BRIDGE " 120
THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK " 156
BROADWAY AT NIGHT " 256
ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS " 260
ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK " 352
IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS
I
THE RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
It is not generally known that after forty-two years of constant use the
aged and honored movable which now again finds itself put back in its
old place in the rear of _Harper's Magazine_ was stored in the warehouse
of a certain safety-deposit company, in the winter of 1892. The event
which had then vacated the chair is still so near as to be full of a
pathos tenderly personal to all readers of that magazine, and may not be
lightly mentioned in any travesty of the facts by one who was thought of
for the empty place. He, before putting on the mask and mimic editorial
robes--for it was never the real editor who sat in the Easy Chair,
except for that brief hour when he took it to pay his deep-thought and
deep-felt tribute to its last occupant--stood with bowed face and
uncovered head in that bravest and gentlest presence which, while it
abode with us here, men knew as George William Curtis.
It was, of course, in one of the best of the fireproof warehouses that
the real editor had the Easy Chair stored, and when the unreal editor
went to take it out of storage he found it without trouble in one of
those vast rooms where the more valuable furniture and bric-a-brac are
guarded in a special tutelage. If instinct had not taught him, he would
have known it by its homely fashion, which the first unreal editor had
suggested when he described it as an "old red-backed Easy Chair that has
long been an ornament of our dingy office." That unreality was Mr.
Donald G. Mitchell, the graceful and gracious Ik Marvel, dear to the old
hearts that are still young for his _Dream Life_ and his _Reveries of a
Bachelor_, and never unreal in anything but his pretence of being the
real editor of the magazine. In this disguise he feigned that he had "a
way of throwing" himself back in the Easy Chair, "and indulging in an
easy and careless overlook of the gossiping papers of the day, and in
such chit-chat with chance visitors as kept him informed of the drift of
the town talk, while it relieved greatly the monotony of his office
hours." Not "bent on choosing mere gossip," he promised to be "on the
watch for such topics or incidents as" seemed really important and
suggestive, and to set them "down with all that gloss, and that happy
lack of sequence, which make every-day talk so much better than
every-day writing."
While the actual unreality stood thinking how perfectly the theory and
practice of the Easy Chair for hard upon fifty years had been forecast
in these words, and while the warehouse agent stood waiting his
pleasure, the Easy Chair fetched a long, deep sigh. Sigh one must call
the sound, but it was rather like that soft complaint of the woody
fibres in a table which disembodied spirits are about to visit, and
which continues to exhale from it till their peculiar vocabulary utters
itself in a staccato of muffled taps. No one who has heard that sound
can mistake it for another, and the unreal editor knew at once that he
confronted in the Easy Chair an animate presence.
"How long have I been here?" it asked, like one wakened from a deep
sleep.
"About eight years," said the unreal editor.
"Ah, I remember," the Easy Chair murmured, and, as the unreal editor
bent forward to pluck away certain sprays of foliage that clung to its
old red back, it demanded, "What is that?"
"Some bits of holly and mistletoe."
"Yes," the Easy Chair softly murmured again. "The last essay he wrote in
me was about Christmas. I have not forgotten one word of it all: how it
began, how it went on, and how it ended! 'In the very promise of the
year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question that we have to
ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas which
already shines afar off, is this: whether while we praise Christmas as a
day of general joy we take care to keep it so.... Thackeray describes a
little dinner at the Timminses'. A modest couple make themselves
miserable and spend all their little earnings in order to give a dinner
to people for whom they do not care, and who do not care for them....
Christmas is made miserable to the Timminses because they feel that they
must spend lavishly and buy gifts like their richer neighbors.... You
cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of friendly sympathy costs
little.... Should not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest
man and woman practically to protest by refusing to yield to the
extravagance?' There!" the Easy Chair broke off from quoting, "that was
Curtis! The kind and reasonable mood, the righteous conscience incarnate
in the studied art, the charming literary allusion for the sake of the
unliterary lesson, the genial philosophy--
'not too good
For human nature's daily food'--
the wisdom alike of the closet and the public square, the large patience
and the undying hopefulness! Do you think," the Easy Chair said, with a
searching severity one would not have expected of it, "that you are fit
to take his place?"
In evasion of this hard question the unreal editor temporized with the
effect of not having heard it. "I believe that he and Mr. Mitchell were
the only writers of your papers till Mr. Alden wrote the last?"
The Easy Chair responded, dryly, "You forget Aldrich."
"If I do, I am the only pebble on the shore of time that does or will,"
retorted the unreal editor. "But he wrote you for only two months. I
well remember what a pleasure he had in it. And he knew how to make his
readers share his pleasure! Still, it was Mr. Mitchell who invented you,
and it was Curtis who characterized you beyond all the rest."
"For a while," said the Easy Chair, with autobiographical relish, "they
wrote me together, but it was not long before Mr. Mitchell left off, and
Curtis kept on alone, and, as you say, he incomparably characterized me.
He had his millennial hopes as well as you. In his youth he trusted in a
time
'When the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,'
and he never lost that faith. As he wrote in one of my best papers, the
famous paper on Brook Farm, 'Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see
that the way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which will
substitute co-operation for competition.' He expected the world to be
made over in the image of heaven some time, but meanwhile he was glad to
help make it even a little better and pleasanter than he found it. He
was ready to tighten a loose screw here and there, to pour a drop of oil
on the rusty machinery, to mend a broken wheel. He was not above putting
a patch on a rift where a whiff of infernal air came up from the
Bottomless Pit--"
"And I also believe in alleviations," the unreal editor interrupted. "I
love justice, but charity is far better than nothing; and it would be
abominable not to do all we can because we cannot at once do everything.
Let us have the expedients, the ameliorations, even the compromises, _en
attendant_ the millennium. Let us accept the provisional, the makeshift.
He who came on Christmas Day, and whose mission, as every Christmas Day
comes to remind us, was the brotherhood, the freedom, the equality of
men, did not He warn us against hastily putting new wine into old
bottles? To get the new bottles ready is slow work: that kind of bottle
must grow; it cannot be made; and in the mean time let us keep our
latest vintages in the vat till we have some vessel proof against their
fermentation. I know that the hope of any such vessel is usually mocked
as mere optimism, but I think optimism is as wise and true as pessimism,
or is at least as well founded; and since the one can no more establish
itself as final truth than the other, it is better to have optimism.
That was always the philosophy of the Easy Chair, and I do not know why
that should be changed. The conditions are not changed."
There was a silence which neither the Easy Chair nor the unreal editor
broke for a while. Then the Chair suggested, "I suppose that there is
not much change in Christmas, at any rate?"
"No," said the unreal editor; "it goes on pretty much as it used. The
Timminses, who give tiresome little dinners which they cannot afford to
dull people who don't want them, are still alive and miserably bent on
heaping reluctant beneficiaries with undesired favors, and spoiling the
simple 'pleasure of the time' with the activities of their fatuous
vanity. Or perhaps you think I ought to bring a hopeful mind even to the
Timminses?"
"I don't see why not," said the Easy Chair. "They are not the architects
of their own personalities."
"Ah, take care, take care!" cried the unreal editor. "You will be saying
next that we are the creatures of our environment; that the Timminses
would be wiser and better if the conditions were not idiotic and
pernicious; and you know what _that_ comes to!"
"No, I am in no danger of that," the Easy Chair retorted. "The Timminses
are no such victims of the conditions. They are of that vast moderately
moneyed class who can perfectly well behave with sense if they will.
Nobody above them or below them asks them to be foolish and wasteful."
"And just now you were making excuses for them!"
"I said they were not the architects of their own personalities; but,
nevertheless, they are masters of themselves. They are really free to
leave off giving little dinners any day they think so. It should be the
moralist's business to teach them to think so."
"And that was what Curtis gladly made his business," the unreal editor
somewhat sadly confessed, with an unspoken regret for his own
difference. More than once it had seemed to him in considering that
rare nature that he differed from most reformers chiefly in loving the
right rather than in hating the wrong; in fact, in not hating at all,
but in pitying and accounting for the wrong as an ancient use corrupted
into an abuse. Involuntarily the words of the real editor in that
beautiful tribute to the high soul they were praising came to the unreal
editor's lips, and he quoted aloud to the Easy Chair: "'His love of
goodness was a passion. He would fain have seen all that was fair and
good, and he strove to find it so; and, finding it otherwise, he strove
to make it so.... With no heart for satire, the discord that fell upon
his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social
shams and falsehoods.... But he was a lover of peace, and, ... as he was
the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer,
without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, it never
parted company with good sense. He never wanted better bread than could
be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound,' and I may
add," the unreal editor broke off, "that he did not hurry the unripe
grain to the hopper. He would not have sent all the horses at once to
the abattoir because they made the city noisy and noisome, but would
first have waited till there were automobiles enough to supply their
place."
The Easy Chair caught at the word. "Automobiles?" it echoed.
"Ah, I forgot how long you have been stored," said the unreal editor,
and he explained as well as he could the new mode of motion, and how
already, with its soft rubber galoshes, the automobile had everywhere
stolen a march upon the iron heels of the horses in the city avenues.
He fancied the Easy Chair did not understand, quite, from the
intelligent air with which it eagerly quitted the subject.
"Well," it said at last, "this isn't such a bad time to live in, after
all, it appears. But for a supreme test of your optimism, now, what good
can you find to say of Christmas? What sermon could you preach on that
hackneyed theme which would please the fancy and gladden the heart of
the readers of a Christmas number, where you should make your first
appearance in the Easy Chair?"
To himself the unreal editor had to own that this was a poser. In his
heart he was sick of Christmas: not of the dear and high event, the
greatest in the memory of the world, which it records and embodies, but
the stale and wearisome Christmas of the Christmas presents, purchased
in rage and bestowed in despair; the Christmas of Christmas fiction; the
Christmas of heavy Christmas dinners and indigestions; the Christmas of
all superfluity and surfeit and sentimentality; the Christmas of the
Timminses and the Tiny Tims. But while he thought of these, by operation
of the divine law which renders all things sensible by their opposites,
he thought of the other kinds of Christmas which can never weary or
disgust: the Christmas of the little children and the simple-hearted and
the poor; and suddenly he addressed himself to the Easy Chair with
unexpected and surprising courage.
"Why should that be so very difficult?" he demanded. "If you look at it
rightly, Christmas is always full of inspiration; and songs as well as
sermons will flow from it till time shall be no more. The trouble with
us is that we think it is for the pleasure of opulent and elderly
people, for whom there can be no pleasures, but only habits. They are
used to having everything, and as joy dwells in novelty it has ceased to
be for them in Christmas gifts and giving and all manner of Christmas
conventions. But for the young to whom these things are new, and for the
poor to whom they are rare, Christmas and Christmasing are sources of
perennial happiness. All that you have to do is to guard yourself from
growing rich and from growing old, and then the delight of Christmas is
yours forever. It is not difficult; it is very simple; for even if years
and riches come upon you in a literal way, you can by a little trying
keep yourself young and poor in spirit. Then you can always rejoice with
the innocent and riot with the destitute.
"I once knew a father," the unreal editor continued, "a most doting and
devoted father, who, when he bent over the beds of his children to bid
them good-night, and found them 'high sorrowful and cloyed,' as the
little ones are apt to be after a hard day's pleasure, used to bid them
'Think about Christmas.' If he offered this counsel on the night, say,
of the 26th of December, and they had to look forward to a whole year
before their hopes of consolation could possibly find fruition, they had
(as they afterward confessed to him) a sense of fatuity if not of
mocking in it. Even on the Fourth of July, after the last cracker had
been fired and the last roman candle spent, they owned that they had
never been able to think about Christmas to an extent that greatly
assuaged their vague regrets. It was not till the following Thanksgiving
that they succeeded in thinking about Christmas with anything like the
entire cheerfulness expected of them."
"I don't see any application in this homily," said the Easy Chair, "or
only an application disastrous to your imaginable postulate that
Christmas is a beneficent and consolatory factor in our lives."
"That is because you have not allowed me to conclude," the unreal editor
protested, when the Easy Chair cut in with,
"There is nothing I would so willingly allow you to do," and "laughed
and shook" as if it had been "Rabelais's easy chair."
The unreal editor thought it best to ignore the untimely attempt at wit.
"The difficulty in this case with both the father and the children was
largely temperamental; but it was chiefly because of a defect in their
way of thinking about Christmas. It was a very ancient error, by no
means peculiar to this amiable family, and it consisted in thinking
about Christmas with reference to one's self instead of others."
"Isn't that rather banal?" the Easy Chair asked.
"Not at all banal," said the unreal editor, resisting an impulse to do
the Easy Chair some sort of violence. At the same time he made his
reflection that if preachers were criticised in that way to their faces
there would shortly be very few saints left in the pulpit. He gave
himself a few moments to recover his temper, and then he went on: "If
Christmas means anything at all, it means anything but one's own
pleasure. Up to the first Christmas Day the whole world had supposed
that it could be happy selfishly, and its children still suppose so. But
there is really no such thing as selfish, as personal happiness."
"Tolstoy," the Easy Chair noted.
"Yes, Tolstoy," the unreal editor retorted. "He more than any other has
brought us back to the knowledge of this truth which came into the world
with Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, has tried to
think and to live Christianity. When once you have got this vital truth
into your mind, the whole universe is luminously filled with the
possibilities of impersonal, unselfish happiness. The joy of living is
suddenly expanded to the dimensions of humanity, and you can go on
taking your pleasure as long as there is one unfriended soul and body in
the world.
"It is well to realize this at all times, but it is peculiarly fit to do
so at Christmas-time, for it is in this truth that the worship of Christ
begins. Now, too, is the best time to give the Divine Word form in deed,
to translate love into charity. I do not mean only the material charity
that expresses itself in turkeys and plum-puddings for the poor, but
also that spiritual charity which takes thought how so to amend the
sorrowful conditions of civilization that poverty, which is the
antithesis of fraternity, shall abound less and less.
'Now is the time, now is the time,
Now is the hour of golden prime'
for asking one's self, not how much one has given in goods or moneys
during the past year, but how much one has given in thought and will to
remove forever the wrong and shame of hopeless need; and to consider
what one may do in the coming year to help put the poor lastingly beyond
the need of help.
"To despair of somehow, sometime doing this is to sin against the light
of Christmas Day, to confess its ideal a delusion, its practice a
failure. If on no other day of all the three hundred and sixty-five, we
must on this day renew our faith in justice, which is the highest
mercy."
The Easy Chair no longer interrupted, and the unreal editor, having made
his point, went on after the manner of preachers, when they are also
editors, to make it over again, and to repeat himself pitilessly,
unsparingly. He did not observe that the Easy Chair had shrunk forward
until all its leathern seat was wrinkled and its carven top was bent
over its old red back. When he stopped at last, the warehouse agent
asked in whisper,
"What do you want done with it, sir?"
"Oh," said the unreal editor, "send it back to Franklin Square"; and
then, with a sudden realization of the fact, he softly added, "Don't
wake it."
There in Franklin Square, still dreaming, it was set up in the rear of
the magazine, where it has become not only the place, but the stuff of
dreams such as men are made of. From month to month, ever since, its
reveries, its illusions, which some may call deliverances, have gone on
with more and more a disposition to dramatize themselves. It has seemed
to the occupant of the Easy Chair, at times, as if he had suffered with
it some sort of land-change from a sole entity to a multiple personality
in which his several selves conversed with one another, and came and
went unbidden. At first, after a moment of question whether his
imagination was not frequented by the phantoms of delight which in the
flesh had formerly filled his place, whether the spirits which haunted
him in it were not those of Mitchell, of Curtis, of Aldrich, he became
satisfied from their multitude and nature that they were the
subdivisions of his own ego, and as such he has more and more frankly
treated them.
II
A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH
On one of those fine days which the April of the other year meanly
grudged us, a poet, flown with the acceptance of a quarter-page lyric by
the real editor in the Study next door, came into the place where the
Easy Chair sat rapt in the music of the elevated trains and the vision
of the Brooklyn Bridge towers. "Era la stagione nella quale la rivestita
terra, piu che tutto l' altro anno, si mostra bella," he said, without
other salutation, throwing his soft gray hat on a heap of magazines and
newspapers in the corner, and finding what perch he could for himself on
the window-sill.
"What is that?" he of the Easy Chair gruffly demanded; he knew perfectly
well, but he liked marring the bloom on a fellow-creature's joy by a
show of savage ignorance.
"It's the divine beginning of Boccaccio's 'Fiammetta,' it is the very
soul of spring; and it is so inalienably of Boccaccio's own time and
tongue and sun and air that there is no turning it into the language of
another period or climate. What would you find to thrill you in, 'It was
the season in which the reapparelled earth, more than in all the other
year, shows herself fair'? The rhythm is lost; the flow, sweet as the
first runnings of the maple where the woodpecker has tapped it, stiffens
into sugar, the liquid form is solidified into the cake adulterated
with glucose, and sold for a cent as the pure Vermont product."
As he of the Easy Chair could not deny this, he laughed recklessly. "I
understood what your passage from Boccaccio meant, and why you came in
here praising spring in its words. You are happy because you have sold a
poem, probably for more than it is worth. But why do you praise spring?
What do you fellows do it for? You know perfectly well that it is the
most capricious, the most treacherous, the most delusive, deadly,
slatternly, down-at-heels, milkmaid-handed season of the year, without
decision of character or fixed principles, and with only the vaguest
raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and streaming eyes.
If it did not come at the end of winter, when people are glad of any
change, nobody could endure it, and it would be cast neck and crop out
of the calendar. Fancy spring coming at the end of summer! It would not
be tolerated for a moment, with the contrast of its crude, formless
beauty and the ripe loveliness of August. Every satisfied sense of
happiness, secure and established, would be insulted by its haphazard
promises made only to be broken. 'Rather,' the outraged mortal would
say, 'the last tender hours of autumn, the first deathful-thrilling
snowfall, with all the thoughts of life wandering flake-like through the
dim air--rather these than the recurrence of those impulses and pauses,
those kisses frozen on the lips, those tender rays turning to the lash
of sleet across the face of nature. No, the only advantage spring can
claim over her sister seasons is her novelty, the only reason she can
offer for being the spoiled child of the poets is that nobody but the
poets could keep on fancying that there was any longer the least
originality in her novelty."
The poet attempted to speak, in the little stop he of the Easy Chair
made for taking breath, but he was not suffered to do so.
"Every atom of originality has been drained from the novelty of spring
'in the process of the suns,' and science is rapidly depriving her even
of novelty. What was once supposed to be the spring grass has been found
to be nothing but the fall grass, with the green stealing back into the
withered blades. As for the spring lamb which used to crop the spring
grass, it is now out of the cold-storage where the spring chicken and
the new-laid eggs of yesteryear come from. It is said that there are no
birds in last year's nests, but probably a careful examination would
discover a plentiful hatch of nestlings which have hibernated in the
habitations popularly supposed to be deserted the June before this.
Early spring vegetables are in market throughout the twelvemonth, and
spring flowers abound at the florists' in December and January. There is
no reason why spring should not be absorbed into winter and summer by
some such partition as took place politically in the case of Poland.
Like that unhappy kingdom, she has abused her independence and become a
molestation and discomfort to the annual meteorology. As a season she is
distinctly a failure, being neither one thing nor the other, neither hot
nor cold, a very Laodicean. Her winds were once supposed to be very
siccative, and peculiarly useful in drying the plaster in new houses;
but now the contractors put in radiators as soon as the walls are up,
and the work is done much better. As for the germinative force of her
suns, in these days of intensive farming, when electricity is applied to
the work once done by them, they can claim to have no virtue beyond the
suns of July or August, which most seeds find effective enough. If
spring were absorbed into summer, the heat of that season would be
qualified, and its gentler warmth would be extended to autumn, which
would be prolonged into the winter. The rigors of winter would be much
abated, and the partition of spring among the other seasons would
perform the mystic office of the Gulf Stream in ameliorating our
climate, besides ridding us of a time of most tedious and annoying
suspense. And what should we lose by it?"
The poet seemed not to be answering the Easy Chair directly, but only to
be murmuring to himself, "Youth."
"Youth! Youth!" the Easy Chair repeated in exasperation. "And what is
youth?"
"The best thing in the world."
"For whom is it the best thing?"
This question seemed to give the poet pause. "Well," he said, finally,
with a not very forcible smile, "for itself."
"Ah, there you are!" he of the Easy Chair exclaimed; but he could not
help a forgiving laugh. "In a way you are right. The world belongs to
youth, and so it ought to be the best thing for itself in it. Youth is a
very curious thing, and in that it is like spring, especially like the
spring we have just been having, to our cost. It is the only period of
life, as spring is the only season of the year, that has too much time
on its hands. Yet it does not seem to waste time, as age does, as winter
does; it keeps doing something all the while. The things it does are
apparently very futile and superfluous, some of them, but in the end
something has been accomplished. After a March of whimsical suns and
snows, an April of quite fantastical frosts and thaws, and a May, at
least partially, of cold mists and parching winds, the flowers, which
the florists have been forcing for the purpose, are blooming in the
park; the grass is green wherever it has not had the roots trodden out
of it, and a filmy foliage, like the soft foulard tissues which the
young girls are wearing, drips from the trees. You can say it is all
very painty, the verdure; too painty; but you cannot reject the picture
because of this little mannerism of the painter. To be sure, you miss
the sheeted snows and the dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the
hard, blue sky. Still, now it has come, you cannot deny that the spring
is pretty, or that the fashionable colors which it has introduced are
charming. It is said that these are so charming that a woman of the
worst taste cannot choose amiss among them. In spite of her taste, her
hat comes out a harmonic miracle; her gown, against all her endeavors,
flows in an exquisite symphony of the tender audacities of tint with
which nature mixes her palette; little notes of chiffon, of tulle, of
feather, blow all about her. This is rather a medley of metaphors, to
which several arts contribute, but you get my meaning?" In making this
appeal, he of the Easy Chair saw in the fixed eye of the poet that
remoteness of regard which denotes that your listener has been hearing
very little of what you have been saying.
"Yes," the poet replied with a long breath, "you are right about that
dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the hard, blue sky; and I wonder
if we quite do justice to the beauty of winter, of age, we poets, when
we are so glad to have the spring come."
"I don't know about winter," he of the Easy Chair said, "but in an opera
which the English Lord Chamberlain provisionally suppressed, out of
tenderness for an alliance not eventually or potentially to the
advantage of these States, Mr. William Gilbert has done his duty to the
decline of life, where he sings,
'There is beauty in extreme old age;
There's a fascination frantic
In a ruin that's romantic'
Or, at least no one else has said so much for 'that time of life,' which
another librettist has stigmatized as
'Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.'"
"Yes, I know," the poet returned, clinging to the thread of thought on
which he had cast himself loose. "But I believe a great deal more could
be said for age by the poets if they really tried. I am not satisfied of
Mr. Gilbert's earnestness in the passage you quote from the 'Mikado,'
and I prefer Shakespeare's 'bare, ruined choirs.' I don't know but I
prefer the hard, unflattering portrait which Hamlet mockingly draws for
Polonius, and there is something almost caressing in the notion of 'the
lean and slippered pantaloon.' The worst of it is that we old fellows
look so plain to one another; I dare say young people don't find us so
bad. I can remember from my own youth that I thought old men, and
especially old women, rather attractive. I am not sure that we elders
realize the charm of a perfectly bald head as it presents itself to the
eye of youth. Yet, an infant's head is often quite bald."
"Yes, and so is an egg," the Easy Chair retorted, "but there is not the
same winning appeal in the baldness of the superannuated bird which has
evolved from it--eagle or nightingale, parrot or
Many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home.
Tennyson has done his best in showing us venerable in his picture of
'the Ionian father of the rest:
A million wrinkles carved his silver skin,
A hundred winters snowed upon his breast.'
But who would not rather be Helen than Homer, her face launching a
thousand ships and burning the topless tower of Ilion--fairer than the
evening air and simply but effectively attired in the beauty of a
thousand stars? What poet has ever said things like that of an old man,
even of Methuselah?"
"Yes," the poet sighed. "I suppose you are partly right. Meteorology
certainly has the advantage of humanity in some things. We cannot make
much of age here, and hereafter we can only conceive of its being turned
into youth. Fancy an eternity of sensibility!"
"No, I would rather not!" he of the Easy Chair returned, sharply.
"Besides, it is you who are trying to make age out a tolerable, even a
desirable thing."
"But I have given it up," the poet meekly replied. "The great thing
would be some rearrangement of our mortal conditions so that once a year
we could wake from our dream of winter and find ourselves young. Not
merely younger, but _young_--the genuine article. A tree can do that,
and does it every year, until after a hundred years, or three hundred,
or a thousand, it dies. Why should not a man, or, much more importantly,
a woman, do it? I think we are very much scanted in that respect."
"My dear fellow, if you begin fault-finding with creation, there will be
no end to it. It might be answered that, in this case, you can walk
about and a tree cannot; you can call upon me and a tree cannot. And
other things. Come! the trees have not got it all their own way.
Besides, imagine the discomforts of a human springtime, blowing hot and
blowing cold, freezing, thawing, raining, and drouthing, and never
being sure whether we are young or old, May or December. We should be
such nuisances to one another that we should ask the gods to take back
their gift, and you know very well they cannot."
"Our rejuvenescence would be a matter of temperament, not temperature,"
the poet said, searching the air hopefully for an idea. "I have noticed
this spring that the isothermal line is as crooked as a railroad on the
map of a rival. I have been down in New Hampshire since I saw you, and I
found the spring temperamentally as far advanced there as here in New
York. Of course not as far advanced as in Union Square, but quite as far
as in Central Park. Between Boston and Portsmouth there were bits of
railroad bank that were as green as the sward beside the Mall, and every
now and then there was an enthusiastic maple in the wet lowlands that
hung the air as full of color as any maple that reddened the flying
landscape when I first got beyond the New York suburbs on my way north.
At Portsmouth the birds were singing the same songs as in the Park. I
could not make out the slightest difference."
"With the same note of nervous apprehension in them?"
"I did not observe that. But they were spring songs, certainly."
"Then," the Easy Chair said, "I would rather my winter were turned into
summer, or early autumn, than spring, if there is going to be any change
of the mortal conditions. I like settled weather, the calm of that time
of life when the sins and follies have been committed, the passions
burned themselves out, and the ambitions frustrated so that they do not
bother, the aspirations defeated, the hopes brought low. Then you have
some comfort. This turmoil of vernal striving makes me tired."
"Yes, I see what you mean," the poet assented. "But you cannot have the
seasons out of their order in the rearrangement of the mortal
conditions. You must have spring and you must have summer before you can
have autumn."
"Are those the terms? Then I say, Winter at once! Winter is bad enough,
but I would not go through spring again for any--In winter you can get
away from the cold, with a good, warm book, or a sunny picture, or a
cozy old song, or a new play; but in spring how will you escape the
rawness if you have left off your flannels and let out the furnace? No,
my dear friend, we could not stand going back to youth every year. The
trees can, because they have been used to it from the beginning of time,
but the men could not. Even the women----"
At this moment a beatific presence made itself sensible, and the Easy
Chair recognized the poet's Muse, who had come for him. The poet put the
question to her. "Young?" she said. "Why, you and I are _always_ young,
silly boy! Get your hat, and come over to Long Island City with me, and
see the pussy-willows along the railroad-banks. The mosquitoes are
beginning to sing in the ditches already."
III
SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES
The other day one of those convertible familiars of the Easy Chair, who
"Change and pass and come again,"
looked in upon it, after some months' absence, with the effect of having
aged considerably in the interval. But this was only his latest avatar;
he was no older, as he was no younger, than before; to support a fresh
character, he had to put on an appropriate aspect, and having, at former
interviews, been a poet, a novelist, a philosopher, a reformer, a
moralist, he was now merely looking the part of a veteran observer, of a
psychologist grown gray in divining the character of others from his own
consciousness.
"Have you ever noticed," he began, "that the first things we get stiff
in, as we advance in life, are our tastes? We suppose that it is our
joints which feel the premonitions of age; and that because we no longer
wish to dance or play ball or sprint in college races we are in the
earliest stage of that sapless condition when the hinges of the body
grind dryly upon one another, and we lose a good inch of our stature,
through shrinkage, though the spine still holds us steadfastly
upright."
"Well, isn't that so?" the Easy Chair asked, tranquilly.
"It may be so, or it may not be so," the veteran observer replied.
"Ultimately, I dare say, it is so. But what I wish to enforce is the
fact that before you begin to feel the faintest sense of stiffening
joints you are allowing yourself to fall into that voluntary senescence
which I call getting stiff in the tastes. It is something that I think
we ought to guard ourselves against as a sort of mental sclerosis which
must end fatally long before we have reached the patriarchal age which
that unbelieving believer Metchnikoff says we can attain if we fight off
physical sclerosis. He can only negatively teach us how to do this, but
I maintain we can have each of us in our power the remedy against
stiffening tastes."
"I don't see how," the Easy Chair said, more to provoke the sage to
explanation than to express dissent.
"I will teach you how," he said, "if you will allow me to make it a
personal matter, and use you in illustration."
"Why not use yourself?"
"Because that would be egotistical, and the prime ingredient of my
specific against getting stiff in the tastes is that spiritual grace
which is the very antidote, the very antithesis of egotism. Up to a
certain point, a certain time, we are usefully employed in cultivating
our tastes, in refining them, and in defining them. We cannot be too
strenuous in defining them; and, as long as we are young, the
catholicity of youth will preserve us from a bigoted narrowness. In
aesthetic matters--and I imagine we both understand that we are dealing
with these--the youngest youth has no tastes; it has merely appetites.
All is fish that comes to its net; if anything, it prefers the gaudier
of the finny tribes; it is only when it becomes sophisticated that its
appetites turn into tastes, and it begins to appreciate the flavor of
that diseased but pearl-bearing species of oyster which we call genius,
because we have no accurate name for it. With the appreciation of this
flavor comes the overpowering desire for it, the incessant and limitless
search for it. To the desire for it whole literatures owe their
continued existence, since, except for the universal genius-hunger of
youth, the classics of almost all languages would have perished long
ago. When indiscriminate and omnivorous youth has explored those vast
and mostly lifeless seas, it has found that the diseased oyster which
bears the pearls is the rarest object in nature. But having once formed
the taste for it, youth will have no other flavor, and it is at this
moment that its danger of hardening into premature age begins. The
conceit of having recognized genius takes the form of a bigoted denial
of its existence save in the instances recognized. This conceit does not
admit the possibility of error or omission in the search, and it does
not allow that the diseased oyster can transmit its pearl-bearing
qualities and its peculiar flavors; so that the attitude of aging youth,
in the stiffening of its tastes, is one of rejection toward all new
bivalves, or, not to be tediously metaphorical, books."
The veteran observer fell silent at this point, and the Easy Chair
seized the occasion to remark: "Yes, there is something in what you say.
But this stiffening of the tastes, this sclerosis of the mind, is hardly
an infectious disease----"
"Ah, but it _is_ infectious," the veteran observer exclaimed, rousing
himself, "infectious as far as the victim can possibly make it so. He
wishes nothing so much as to impart his opinions in all their rigidity
to everybody else. Take your own case, for instance----"
"No, we would rather not," the Easy Chair interposed.
"But you must make the sacrifice," the veteran observer persisted. "You
will allow that you are extremely opinionated?"
"Not at all."
"Well, then, that you are devoutly conscientious in the tenure of your
aesthetic beliefs?"
"Something like that, yes."
"And you cannot deny that in times past you have tried your best to make
others think with you?"
"It was our duty."
"Well, let it pass for that. It amounted to an effort to make your
mental sclerosis infectious, and it was all the worse because, in you,
the stiffening of the tastes had taken the form of aversions rather than
preferences. You did not so much wish your readers to like your favorite
authors as to hate all the others. At the time when there was a fad for
making lists of The Hundred Best Authors, I always wondered that you
didn't put forth some such schedule."
"We had the notion of doing something of the kind," the Easy Chair
confessed, "but we could not think of more than ten or a dozen really
first-rate authors, and if we had begun to compile a list of the best
authors we should have had to leave out most of their works. Nearly all
the classics would have gone by the board. What havoc we should have
made with the British poets! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly
have fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not to a man.
Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser's poetry is
generally duller than the Presidents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's
time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse;
Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse;
Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed not to be
Shakespeare, is reading for martyrs; Dante's science and politics
outweigh his poetry a thousandfold, and so on through the whole
catalogue. Among the novelists----"
"No, don't begin on the novelists! Every one knows your heresies there,
and would like to burn you along with the romances which I've no doubt
you would still commit to the flames. I see you are the Bourbon of
criticism; you have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But why don't
you turn your adamantine immutability to some practical account, and
give the world a list of The Hundred Worst Books?"
"Because a hundred books out of the worst would be a drop out of the
sea; there would remain an immeasurable welter of badness, of which we
are now happily ignorant, and from which we are safe, as long as our
minds are not turned to it by examples."
"Ah," our visitor said, "I see that you are afraid to confess yourself
the popular failure as a critic which you are. You are afraid that if
you made a list of The Hundred Worst Books you would send the classes to
buying them in the most expensive binding, and the masses to taking them
out of all the public libraries."
"There is something in what you say," the Easy Chair confessed. "Our
popular failure as a critic is notorious; it cannot be denied. The stamp
of our disapproval at one time gave a whole order of fiction a currency
that was not less than torrential. The flood of romantic novels which
passed over the land, and which is still to be traced in the tatters of
the rag-doll heroes and heroines caught in the memories of readers along
its course, was undoubtedly the effect of our adverse criticism. No, we
could not in conscience compile and publish a list of The Hundred Worst
Books; it would be contrary, for the reasons you give, to public
morals."
"And don't you think," the observer said, with a Socratic subtlety that
betrayed itself in his gleaming eye, in the joyous hope of seeing his
victim fall into the pit that his own admissions had digged for him,
"and don't you think that it would also bring to you the unpleasant
consciousness of having stiffened in your tastes?"
"It might up to a certain point," we consented. "But we should prefer to
call it confirmed in our convictions. Wherever we have liked or disliked
in literature it has been upon grounds hardly distinguishable from moral
grounds. Bad art is a vice; untruth to nature is the eighth of the seven
deadly sins; a false school in literature is a seminary of crime. We are
speaking largely, of course----"
"It certainly sounds rather tall," our friend sarcastically noted, "and
it sounds very familiar."
"Yes," we went on, "all the ascertained veracities are immutable. One
holds to them, or, rather, they hold to one, with an indissoluble
tenacity. But convictions are in the region of character and are of
remote origin. In their safety one indulges one's self in expectations,
in tolerances, and these rather increase with the lapse of time. We
should say that your theory of the stiffening tastes is applicable to
the earlier rather than the later middle life. We should say that the
tastes if they stiffen at the one period limber at the other; their
forbidding rigidity is succeeded by an acquiescent suppleness. One is
aware of an involuntary hospitality toward a good many authors whom one
would once have turned destitute from the door, or with a dole of
Organized Charity meal-tickets at the best. But in that maturer time
one hesitates, and possibly ends by asking the stranger in, especially
if he is young, or even if he is merely new, and setting before him the
cold potato of a qualified approval. One says to him: 'You know I don't
think you are the real thing quite, but taking you on your own ground
you are not so bad. Come, you shall have a night's lodging at least, and
if you improve, if you show a tendency to change in the right direction,
there is no telling but you may be allowed to stay the week. But you
must not presume; you must not take this frosty welcome for an effect of
fire from the hearth where we sit with our chosen friends.' Ten to one
the stranger does not like this sort of talk, and goes his way--the
wrong way. But, at any rate, one has shown an open mind, a liberal
spirit; one has proved that one has not stiffened in one's tastes; that
one can make hopeful allowances in hopeful cases."
"Such as?" the observer insinuated.