our best society, that there is no hope for it?"
"Did I say that? If I did, I will stick to it. We must let our best
society be as it now imagines itself. I don't suppose that in all that
gang of beautiful, splendid, wasteful, expensively surfeited people
there are more than two or three young men of intellectual prowess or
spiritual distinction, though there must be some clever and brilliant
toadies of the artist variety. In fact, Mr. Pulitzer says as much
outright; and it is the hard lot of some of the arts to have to tout for
custom among the vulgar ranks of our best society."
"Very well, then," we said, with considerable resolution, "we must change
the popular ideal of the best society. We must have a four hundred made up
of the most brilliant artists, authors, doctors, professors, scientists,
musicians, actors, and ministers, with their wives, daughters, and
sisters, who will walk to one another's dinners, or at worst go by
trolley, and occupy the cheaper seats at the opera, and dance in small
and early assemblages, and live in seven-room-with-bath flats. Money must
not count at all in the choice of these elect and beautiful natures. The
question is, how shall we get the dense, unenlightened masses to regard
them as the best society; how teach the reporters to run after them, and
the press to chronicle their entertainments, engagements, marriages,
divorces, voyages to and from Europe, and the other facts which now so
dazzle the common fancy when it finds them recorded in the society
intelligence of the newspapers?"
"Yes, as General Sherman said when he had once advocated the restriction
of the suffrage and had been asked how he was going to get the consent
of the majority whose votes he meant to take away--'yes, that is the
devil of it.'"
We were silent for a time, and then we suggested, "Don't you think that
a beginning could be made by those real elite we have decided on
refusing to let associate with what now calls itself our best society?"
"But hasn't our _soi-disant_ best society already made that beginning
for its betters by excluding them?" our other self responded.
"There is something in what you say," we reluctantly assented, "but by
no means everything. The beginning you speak of has been made at the
wrong end. The true beginning of society reform must be made by the
moral, aesthetic, and intellectual superiors of fashionable society as we
now have it. The _grandes dames_ must be somehow persuaded that to be
really swell, really smart, or whatever the last word for the thing is,
they must search _Who's Who in New York_ for men and women of the most
brilliant promise and performance and invite them. They must not search
the banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices for their
dancing-men, but the studios, the editorial-rooms, the dramatic
agencies, the pulpits, for the most gifted young artists, assignment
men, interviewers, actors, and preachers, and apply to the labor-unions
for the cleverest and handsomest artisans; they must look up the most
beautiful and intelligent girl-students of all the arts and sciences,
and department stores for cultivated and attractive salesladies. Then,
when all such people have received cards to dinners or dances, it will
only remain for them to have previous engagements, and the true
beginning is made. Come! You can't say the thing is impossible."
"Not impossible, no," our complementary self replied. "But difficult."
XIV
THE MAGAZINE MUSE
Two aging if not aged poets, one much better if not much older than the
other, were talking of the Muse as she was in their day and of the Muse
as she is in this. At the end, their common mind was that she was a far
more facile Muse formerly than she is now. In other words, as the elder
and better poet put it, they both decided that many, many pieces of
verse are written in these times, and hidden away in the multitude of
the magazines, which in those times would have won general recognition
if not reputation for the authors; they would have been remembered from
month to month, and their verses copied into the newspapers from the two
or three periodicals then published, and, if they were not enabled to
retire upon their incomes, they would have been in the enjoyment of a
general attention beyond anything money can buy at the present day. This
conclusion was the handsomer in the two poets, because they had nothing
to gain and something to lose by it if their opinion should ever become
known. It was in a sort the confession of equality, and perhaps even
inferiority, which people do not make, unless they are obliged to it, in
any case. But these poets were generous even beyond their unenvious
tribe, and the younger, with a rashness which his years measurably
excused, set about verifying his conviction in a practical way, perhaps
the only practical way.
He asked his publishers to get him all the American magazines published;
and has the home-keeping reader any notion of the vastness of the sea on
which this poet had embarked in his daring exploration? His publishers
sent him a list of some eighty-two monthly periodicals in all kinds,
which, when he had begged them to confine it to the literary kind, the
aesthetic kind only, amounted to some fifty. By far the greater number of
these, he found, were published in New York, but two were from
Philadelphia, one from Boston, one from Indianapolis, and one even from
Chicago; two were from the Pacific Slope generally. That is to say, in
this city there are issued every month about forty-five magazines
devoted to belles-lettres, of varying degrees of excellence, not always
connoted by their varying prices. Most of them are of the ten-cent
variety, and are worth in most cases ten cents, and in a few cases
twenty-five or thirty-five cents, quite like those which ask such sums
for themselves. The cheapest are not offensive to the eye altogether, as
they lie closed on the dealer's counter, though when you open them you
find them sometimes printed on paper of the wood-pulp, wood-pulpy sort,
and very loathly to the touch. Others of the cheapest present their
literature on paper apparently as good as that of the dearest; and as it
is not always money which buys literary value, especially from the
beginners in literature, there seemed every reason for the poet to hope
that there would be as good poetry in the one sort as in the other. In
his generous animation, he hoped to find some good poetry on the
wood-pulp paper just as in the Golden Age he might have found it carved
by amorous shepherds on the bark of trees.
He promised himself a great and noble pleasure from his verification of
the opinion he shared with that elder and better poet, and if his
delight must be mixed with a certain feeling of reserved superiority, it
could hardly be less a delight for that reason. In turning critic, the
friendliest critic, he could not meet these dear and fair young poets on
their own level, but he could at least keep from them, and from himself
as much as possible, the fact that he was looking down on them. All the
magazines before him were for the month of January, and though it was
possible that they might have shown a certain exhaustion from their
extraordinary efforts in their Christmas numbers, still there was a
chance of the overflow of riches from those numbers which would trim the
balance and give them at least the average poetic value. At this point,
however, it ought to be confessed that the poet, or critic, was never so
willing a reader as writer of occasional verse, and it cannot be denied
that there was some girding up of the loins for him before the grapple
with that half-hundred of magazines. Though he took them at their
weakest point, might they not be too much for him?
He fetched a long breath, and opened first that magazine, _clarum et
venerabile nomen_, from which he might reasonably expect the greatest
surprises of merit in the verse. There were only two pieces, and neither
seemed to him of the old-time quality, but neither was such as he would
himself have perhaps rejected if he had been editor. Then he plunged at
the heap, and in a fifteen-cent magazine of recent renown he found among
five poems a good straight piece of realistic characterization which did
much to cheer him. In this, a little piece of two stanzas, the author
had got at the heart of a good deal of America. In another cheap
magazine, professing to be devoted wholly to stories, he hoped for a
breathing-space, and was tasked by nothing less familiar than Swift's
versification of a well-known maxim of La Rouchefoucauld. In a ten-cent
magazine which is too easily the best of that sort, he found two pieces
of uncommon worth, which opened the way so promisingly, indeed, for
happier fortunes that he was not as much surprised as he might later
have been in finding five poems, all good, in one of the four greater,
or at least dearer, magazines. One of these pieces was excellent
landscape, and another a capital nature piece; if a third was somewhat
strained, it was also rather strong, and a fourth had the quiet which it
is hard to know from repose. Two poems in another of the high-priced
magazines were noticeable, one for sound poetic thinking, and the other
as very truthfully pathetic. The two in a cheap magazine, by two
Kentucky poets, a song and a landscape, were one genuinely a song, and
the other a charming communion with nature. In a pair of periodicals
devoted to outdoor life, on the tamer or wilder scale, there were three
poems, one celebrating the delights of a winter camp, which he found
simple, true in feeling, and informal in phrasing; another full of the
joy of a country ride, very songy, very blithe, and original; and a
third a study of scenery which it realized to the mind's eye, with some
straining in the wording, but much felicity in the imagining. A
Mid-Western magazine had an excellent piece by a poet of noted name, who
failed to observe that his poem ended a stanza sooner than he did. In a
periodical devoted to short stories, or abandoned to them, there were
two good pieces, one of them delicately yet distinctly reproducing
certain poetic aspects of New York, and giving the sense of a fresh
talent. Where the critic would hardly have looked for them, in a
magazine of professed fashion and avowed smartness, he came upon three
pieces, one sweet and fine, one wise and good, one fresh and well
turned. A newer periodical, rather going in for literary quality, had
one fine piece, with a pretty surprise in it, and another touched with
imaginative observation.
The researches of the critic carried him far into the night, or at least
hours beyond his bedtime, and in the dreamy mood in which he finally
pursued them he was more interested in certain psychological conditions
of his own than in many of the verses. Together with a mounting aversion
to the work, he noted a growing strength for it. He could dispatch a
dozen poems in almost as many minutes, and not slight them, either; but
he no longer jumped to his work. He was aware of trying to cheat himself
in it, of pretending that the brief space between titles in the table of
contents, which naturally implied a poem, sometimes really indicated a
short bit of prose. He would run his eye hastily over an index, and seek
to miss rather than find the word "poem" repeated after a title, and
when this ruse succeeded he would go back to the poem he had skipped
with the utmost unwillingness. If his behavior was sinful, he was duly
punished for it, in the case of a magazine which he took up well toward
midnight, rejoicing to come upon no visible sign of poetry in it. But
his glance fell to a grouping of titles in a small-print paragraph at
the bottom of the page, and he perceived, on close inspection, that
these were all poems, and that there were eighteen of them.
He calculated, roughly, that he had read from eighty-five to a hundred
poems before he finished; after a while he ceased to take accurate count
as he went on, but a subsequent review of the magazines showed that his
guess was reasonably correct. From this review it appeared that the
greater number of the magazines published two poems in each month, while
several published but one, and several five or seven or four. Another
remarkable fact was that the one or two in the more self-denying were as
bad as the whole five or seven or nine or eighteen of those which had
more freely indulged themselves in verse. Yet another singular feature
of the inquiry was that one woman had a poem in five or six of the
magazines, and, stranger yet, always a good poem, so that no editor
would have been justified in refusing it. There was a pretty frequent
recurrence of names in the title-pages, and mostly these names were a
warrant of quality, but not always of the author's best quality. The
authorship was rather equally divided between the sexes, and the poets
were both young and old, or as old as poets ever can be.
When the explorer had returned from the search, which covered apparently
a great stretch of time, but really of space, he took his notes and went
with them to that elder friend of his whose generous enthusiasm had
prompted his inquiry. Together they looked them over and discussed the
points evolved. "Then what is your conclusion?" the elder of the two
demanded. "Do you still think I was right, or have you come to a
different opinion?"
"Oh, how should I safely confess that I am of a different opinion? You
would easily forgive me, but what would all those hundred poets whom I
thought not so promising as you believed do to my next book? Especially
what would the poetesses?"
"There is something in that. But you need not be explicit. If you differ
with me, you can generalize. What, on the whole, was the impression you
got? Had none of the pieces what we call distinction, for want of a
better word or a clearer idea?"
"I understand. No, I should say, not one; though here and there one
nearly had it--so nearly that I held my breath from not being quite
sure. But, on the other hand, I should say that there was a good deal of
excellence, if you know what that means."
"I can imagine," the elder poet said. "It is another subterfuge. What do
you really intend?"
"Why, that the level was pretty high. Never so high as the sky, but
sometimes as high as the sky-scraper. There was an occasional tallness,
the effect, I think, of straining to be higher than the thought or the
feeling warranted. And some of the things had a great deal of
naturalness."
"Come! That isn't so bad."
"But naturalness can be carried to a point where it becomes affectation.
This happened in some cases where I thought I was going to have some
pleasure of the simplicity, but found at last that the simplicity was a
pose. Sometimes there was a great air of being untrammelled. But there
is such a thing as being informal, and there is such a thing as being
unmannerly."
"Yes?"
"I think that in the endeavor to escape from convention our poets have
lost the wish for elegance, which was a prime charm of the Golden Age.
Technically, as well as emotionally, they let themselves loose too much,
and the people of the Golden Age never let themselves loose. There is
too much Nature in them, which is to say, not enough; for, after all, in
her little aesthetic attempts, Nature is very modest."
The elder poet brought the younger sharply to book. "Now you are
wandering. Explain again."
"Why, when you and I were young--you were always and always will be
young--"
"None of that!"
"It seemed to me that we wished to be as careful of the form as the most
formal of our poetic forebears, and that we would not let the smallest
irregularity escape us in our study to make the form perfect. We cut out
the tall word; we restrained the straining; we tried to keep the wording
within the bounds of the dictionary; we wished for beauty in our work so
much that our very roughness was the effect of hammering; the grain we
left was where we had used the file to produce it."
"Was it? And you say that with these new fellows it isn't so?"
"Well, what do you say to such a word as 'dankening,' which occurred in
a very good landscape?"
"One such word in a hundred poems?"
"One such word in a million would have been too many. It made me feel
that they would all have liked to say 'dankening,' or something of the
sort. And in the new poets, on other occasions, I have found faulty
syntax, bad rhymes, limping feet. The editors are to blame for that,
when it happens. The editor who printed 'dankening' was more to blame
than the poet who wrote it, and loved the other ugly word above all his
other vocables." The elder poet was silent, and the other took fresh
courage. "Yes, I say it! You were wrong in your praise of the present
magazine verse at the cost of that in our day. When we were commencing
poets, the young or younger reputations were those of Stedman, of Bayard
Taylor, of the Stoddards, of Aldrich, of Celia Thaxter, of Rose Terry,
of Harriet Prescott, of Bret Harte, of Charles Warren Stoddard, of the
Piatts, of Fitz James O'Brien, of Fitzhugh Ludlow, of a dozen more, whom
the best of the newest moderns cannot rival. These were all delicate and
devoted and indefatigable artists and lovers of form. It cannot do the
later generation any good to equal them with ours."
"There is something in what you say." The elder poet was silent for a
time. Then he asked, "Out of the hundred poems you read in your fifty
magazines, how many did you say were what you would call good?"
His junior counted up, and reported, "About twenty-four."
"Well, don't you call that pretty fair, in a hundred? I do. Reflect that
these were all the magazines of one month, and it is probable that there
will be as many good poems in the magazines of every month in the year.
That will give us two hundred and eighty-eight good poems during 1907.
Before the first decade of the new century is ended, we shall have had
eleven hundred and fifty-two good magazine poems. Do you suppose that as
many good magazine poems were written during the last four years of the
first decade of the eighteenth century? Can you name as many yourself?"
"Certainly not. Nobody remembers the magazine poems of that time, and
nobody will remember the poems of the four years ending the present
decade."
"Do you mean to say that not one of them is worth remembering?"
The younger poet paused a moment. Then he said, with the air of a
cross-examined witness, "Under advice of counsel, I decline to answer."
XV
COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL
On a night well toward its noon, many years ago, a friend of the Easy
Chair (so close as to be at the same time its worst enemy) was walking
wearily up and down in the station at Portland, Maine, and wondering if
the time for his train to start would ever come, and, if the time did
come, whether his train would really take advantage of that opportunity
to leave Portland. It was, of course, a night train, and of course he
had engaged a lower berth in the sleeping-car; there are certain things
that come by nature with the comfortable classes to which the friend of
the Easy Chair belonged. He would no more have thought of travelling in
one of the empty day coaches side-tracked in the station than he would
have thought of going by stage, as he could remember doing in his
boyhood. He stopped beside the cars and considered their potential
passengers with amaze and compassion; he laughed at the notion of his
being himself one of them; and, when he turned his back on them, he was
arrested by the sight of an elderly pair looking from the vantage of the
platform into the interior of a lighted Pullman parlor-car which, for
reasons of its own, was waiting in luminous detachment apart from the
day coaches. There was something engaging in the gentle humility of the
elderly pair who peered into the long, brilliant saloon with an effect
not so much of ignorance as of inexperience. They were apparently not so
rustic as they were what another friend of the Easy Chair calls
villaginous; and they seemed not of the commonest uninformed
villaginosity, but of general intelligence such as comes of reading and
thinking of many modern things which one has never seen. As the
eavesdropper presently made out from a colloquy unrestrained by
consciousness of him, they had never seen a parlor-car before, except
perhaps as it flashed by their meek little home depot with the rest of
some express train that never stopped there.
"It _is_ splendid, John," the woman said, holding by the man's arm while
she leaned forward to the window which she tiptoed to reach with her
eager eyes.
"I guess it's all of that," the man consented, sadly.
"I presume we sha'n't ever go in one," she suggested.
"Not likely," he owned, in the same discouraged tone.
They were both silent for a time. Then the woman said, with a deep,
hopeless aspiration, "Dear! I wish I could see inside one, once!"
The man said nothing, and if he shared her bold ambition he made no
sign.
The eavesdropper faltered near their kind backs, wishing for something
more from them which should give their souls away, but they remained
silently standing there, and he did not somehow feel authorized to make
them reflect that, if the car was lighted up, it must be open, and that
the friendly porter somewhere within would not mind letting them look
through it under his eye. Perhaps they did reflect, and the woman was
trying to embolden the man to the hardy venture. In the end they did not
attempt it, but they turned away with another sigh from the woman which
found its echo in the eavesdropper's heart. Doubtless if they had
penetrated that splendid interior without having paid for seats, it
would, in some fine, mystical sort, have pauperized them; it would have
corrupted them; they would have wished after that always to travel in
such cars, when clearly they could not afford it; very possibly it might
have led to their moral if not financial ruin. So he tried to still his
bosom's ache, but he could never quite forget that gentle pair with
their unrequited longing, and the other day they came almost the first
thing into his mind when he read that a great German steamship company
had some thoughts of putting on a train of Pullman cars from the port of
arrival to the mercantile metropolis which was the real end of their
ships' voyages. He thought, whimsically, perversely, how little
difference it would make to that pair, how little to those measureless
most whose journeys shall end in heaven, where Pullman passengers, or
even passengers by the ordinary European first-class cars, may be only
too glad to meet them. He gave a looser rein to his thoughts and
considered how very little the ordinary necessities of life, such as
Pullman cars and taxicabs and electric radiators and non-storage
chickens and unsalted butter concern the great mass of the saints, who
would find them the rarest luxuries, and could hardly be imagined
coveting them; and then from this wild revery he fell to asking himself
whether a Pullman train would be such a great advance or advantage over
the old-fashioned European first-class carriages in which he had been so
long content to travel with the native nobility. Self-brought to book on
this point, he had to own that he had once had moments of thinking in a
German second-class car that he would not change to an American Pullman
if he could for even less than a third more money. He recalled a
pleasant run from Crewe to Edinburgh in a third-class English car, when
he never once thought of a Pullman car except to think it was no better.
To be sure, this was after two-thirds of his third-class
fellow-passengers had got out, and he was left to the sole enjoyment of
two-thirds of the seats. It is the luxury of space which your more money
buys you in England, where no one much lower than a duke or a prime
minister now goes first class for a long haul. For short hauls it is
different, and on the Continent it is altogether different. There you
are often uncomfortably crowded in the first-class carriages, and
doubtless would be in a Pullman if there were any, so that if you are
wise, or only well informed, you will give the guard a shilling to
telegraph before leaving London and get you a number on the Rapide from
Calais to Paris.