Perhaps they disobeyed the voice provisionally, expecting to make a
satisfactory explanation later on. Or perhaps they had put their civic
consciences in the keeping of others, who gave them an official
interpretation of the command, with instructions not to take it
literally."
"That's very interesting," the second friend said. "Then it's your idea
that no one really prefers to do wrong?"
"Not outside of the asylums. And even there they can plead authority.
No, no, no! In a world pretty full of evil there isn't any purely
voluntary evil among the sane. When the 'wicked,' as we call them, do
wrong, it is provisionally only; they mean to do right presently and
make it up with the heavenly powers. As long as an evil-doer lives he
means to cease some time to do evil. He may put it off too long, or
until he becomes ethically unsound. You know Swedenborg found that the
last state of sinners was insanity."
"Dreadful!"
"But I've always thought very few reached that state. There's this
curious thing about it all: we are not only ethically prompted by that
inner voice, we are aesthetically prompted; it's a matter of taste as
well as of conduct, too. The virtues are so clean, the vices so
repulsively dirty. Justice is beautifully symmetrical; injustice is so
shapeless, so unbalanced. Truth is such a pure line; falsehood is so out
of drawing. The iniquities make you uncomfortable. The arts deny them."
The second friend drew a long breath. "Then I don't see why there are so
many."
"Well," the first friend suggested, "there seems to be a difficulty.
Some say that they have to be employed as antitheses; we can't get on
without them, at least at this stage of the proceedings. Perhaps we
shall advance so far that we shall be able to use historical or
accomplished evil for the contrasts by which we shall know actual good."
"I don't see how you make that out."
"Why, there are already some regions of the globe where the summer does
not require the antithesis of winter for its consciousness. Perhaps in
the moral world there will yet be a condition in which right shall not
need to contrast itself with wrong. We are still meteorologically very
imperfect."
"And how do you expect to bring the condition about? By our always doing
our duty?"
"Well, we sha'n't by not doing it."
XVII
A WASTED OPPORTUNITY
The Easy Chair saw at once that its friend was full of improving
conversation, and it let him begin without the least attempt to stay
him; anything of the kind, in fact, would have been a provocation to
greater circumstance in him. He said:
"It was Christmas Eve, and I don't know whether he arrived by chance or
design at a time when the heart is supposed to be softest and the mind
openest. It's a time when, unless you look out, you will believe
anything people tell you and do anything they ask you. I must say I was
prepossessed by his appearance; he was fair and slender, and he looked
about thirty-five years old; and when he said at once that he would not
deceive me, but would confess that he was just out of the penitentiary
of a neighboring State where he had been serving a two years' sentence,
I could have taken him in my arms. Even if he had not pretended that he
had the same surname as myself, I should have known him for a brother,
and though I suspected that he was wrong in supposing that his surname
was at all like mine, I was glad that he had sent it in, and so piqued
my curiosity that I had him shown up, instead of having my pampered
menial spurn him from my door, as I might if he had said his name was
Brown, Jones, or Robinson."
"We dare say you have your self-justification," we put in at this point,
"but you must own that it doesn't appear in what you are saying. As a
good citizen, with the true interests of the poor at heart, you would
certainly have had your pampered menial spurn him from your door. His
being of your name, or claiming to be so, had nothing to do with his
merit or want of it."
"Oh, I acknowledge that, and I'll own that there was something in his
case, as he stated it, that appealed to my fancy even more than his
community of surname appealed to my family affection. He said he was a
Scotchman, which I am not, and that he had got a job on a
cattle-steamer, to work his way back to his native port. The steamer
would sail on Monday, and it was now Friday night, and the question
which he hesitated, which he intimated, in terms so tacit that I should
not call them an expression of it, was how he was to live till Monday."
"He left the calculation entirely to me, which he might not have done if
he had known what a poor head I had for figures, and I entered into it
with a reluctance which he politely ignored. I had some quite new
two-dollar notes in my pocket-book, the crisp sort, which rustle in
fiction when people take them out to succor the unfortunate or bribe the
dishonest, and I thought I would give him one if I could make it go
round for him till his steamer sailed. I was rather sorry for its being
fresh, but I had no old, shabby, or dirty notes such as one gives to
cases of dire need, you know."
"No, we don't know. We so seldom give paper at all; we prefer to give
copper."
"Well, that is right; one ought to give copper if the need is very
pressing; if not so pressing, one gives small silver, and so on up. But
here was an instance which involved a more extended application of
alms. 'You know,' I told him, while I was doing my sum in mental
arithmetic, 'there are the Mills hotels, where you can get a bed for
twenty-five cents; I don't remember whether they throw in breakfast or
not.' I felt a certain squalor in my attitude, which was not relieved by
the air of gentle patience with which he listened, my poor namesake, if
not kinsman; we were both at least sons of Adam. He looked not only
gentle, but refined; I made my reflection that this was probably the
effect of being shut up for two years where the winds were not allowed
to visit him roughly, and the reflection strengthened me to say, 'I
think two dollars will tide you over till Monday.' I can't say whether
he thought so, too, but he did not say he did not think so. He left it
quite to me, and I found another mathematical difficulty. There were
three nights' lodging to be paid for, and then he would have a dollar
and a quarter for food. I often spend as much as that on a single lunch,
including a quarter to the waiter, and I wouldn't have liked making it
pay for three days' board. But I didn't say so; I left the question
entirely to him, and he said nothing.
"In fact, he was engaged in searching himself for credentials, first in
one pocket, and then in another; but he found nothing better than a
pawn-ticket, which he offered me. 'What's this?' I asked. 'My overcoat,'
he said, and I noted that he had borrowed a dollar and a half on it. I
did not like that; it seemed to me that he was taking unfair advantage
of me, and I said, 'Oh, I think you can get along without your
overcoat.' I'm glad to think now that it hadn't begun to snow yet, and
that I had no prescience of the blizzard--what the papers fondly called
the Baby Blizzard (such a pretty fancy of theirs!)--which was to begin
the next afternoon, wasn't making the faintest threat from the moonlit
sky then. He said, 'It's rather cold,' but I ignored his position. At
the same time, I gave him a quarter."
"That was magnificent, but it was not political economy," we commented.
"You should have held to your irrefutable argument that he could get
along without his overcoat. You should have told him that he would not
need it on shipboard."
"Well, do you know," our friend said, "I really did tell him something
like that, and it didn't seem to convince him, though it made me
ashamed. I suppose I was thinking how he could keep close to the
reading-room fire, and I did not trouble to realize that he would not be
asked to draw up his chair when he came in from looking after the
cattle."
"It would have been an idle compliment, anyway," we said. "You can't
draw up the reading-room chairs on shipboard; they're riveted down."
"I remembered afterward. But still I was determined not to take his
overcoat out of pawn, and he must have seen it in my eye. He put back
his pawn-ticket, and did not try to produce any other credentials. I had
noticed that the ticket did not bear the surname we enjoyed in common; I
said to myself that the name of Smith, which it did bear, must be the
euphemism of many who didn't wish to identify themselves with their
poverty even to a pawnbroker. But I said to him, 'Here!' and I pulled
open my table drawer, and took from it a small envelope full of English
coins, which I had been left stranded with on several returns from
Europe; the inhuman stewards had failed to relieve me of them; and as I
always vow, when I have got through our customs, that I will never go to
Europe again, I had often wondered what I should do with those coins. I
now took out the largest and handsomest of them: 'Do you know what that
is?' 'Yes,' he said; 'it's two shillings and sixpence--what we call a
half-crown.' His promptness restored my faith in him; I saw that he must
be what he said; undoubtedly he had been in the penitentiary; very
likely our name was the same; an emotion of kinship stirred in my heart.
'Here!' I said, and I handed him the coin; it did not seem so bad as
giving him more American money. 'They can change that on the ship for
you. I guess you can manage now till Monday,' and my confidence in
Providence diffused such a genial warmth through my steam-heated
apartment that I forgot all about his overcoat. I wish I could forget
about it now."
We felt that we ought to say something to comfort a man who owned his
excess of beneficence. "Oh, you mustn't mind giving him so much money.
We can't always remember our duty to cut the unfortunate as close as we
ought. Another time you will do better. Come! Cheer up!"
Our friend did not seem entirely consoled by our amiability. In fact, he
seemed not to notice it. He heaved a great sigh in resuming: "He
appeared to think I was hinting that it was time for him to go, for he
got up from the lounge where I had thoughtlessly had the decency to make
him sit down, and went out into the hall, thanking me as I followed him
to the door. I was sorry to let him go; he had interested me somehow
beyond anything particularly appealing in his personality; in fact, his
personality was rather null than otherwise, as far as that asserted any
claim; such a mere man and brother! Before he put his hand on my
door-knob a belated curiosity stirred in me, which I tried, as
delicately as I could, to appease. 'Was your trouble something about
the'--I was going to say the ladies, but that seemed too mawkish, and I
boldly outed with--'women?' 'Oh no,' he said, meekly; 'it was just
cloth, a piece of cloth,' 'Breaking and entering?' I led on. 'Well, not
exactly, but--it came to grand larceny,' and I might have fancied a
touch of mounting self-respect in his confession of a considerable
offence.
"I didn't know exactly what to say, so I let myself off with a little
philosophy: 'Well, you see, it didn't pay, exactly,' 'Oh no,' he said,
sadly enough, and he went out."
Our friend was silent at this point, and we felt that we ought to
improve the occasion in his behalf. "Well, there you lost a great
opportunity. You ought to have rubbed it in. You ought to have made him
reflect upon the utter folly of his crime. You ought to have made him
realize that for a ridiculous value of forty, or fifty, or seventy-five
dollars, he had risked the loss of his liberty for two years, and not
only his liberty, but his labor, for he had come out of the penitentiary
after two years of hard work as destitute as he went in; he had not even
the piece of cloth to show for it all. Yes, you lost a great
opportunity."
Our friend rose from the dejected posture in which he had been sitting,
and blazed out--we have no milder word for it--blazed out in a sort of
fiery torrent which made us recoil: "Yes, I lost that great opportunity,
and I lost a greater still. I lost the opportunity of telling that
miserable man that, thief for thief, and robber for robber, the State
which had imprisoned him for two years, and then cast him out again
without a cent of pay for the wages he had been earning all that
dreadful time, was a worse thief and a worse robber than he! I ought to
have told him that in so far as he had been cheated of his wages by the
law he was the victim, the martyr of an atrocious survival of
barbarism. Oh, I have thought of it since with shame and sorrow! I was
sending him out into the cold that was gathering for the Baby Blizzard
without the hope of his overcoat, but since then I have comforted myself
by considering how small my crime was compared with that of the State
which had thrown him destitute upon the world after the two years' labor
it had stolen from him. At the lowest rate of wages for unskilled labor,
it owed him at least a thousand dollars, or, with half subtracted for
board and lodging, five hundred. It was his delinquent debtor in that
sum, and it had let him loose to prey upon society in my person because
it had defrauded him of the money he had earned."
"But, our dear friend!" we entreated, "don't you realize that this
theft, this robbery, this fraud, as you call it, was part of the
sanative punishment which the State had inflicted upon him?"
"And you don't think two years' prison, two years' slavery, was sanative
enough without the denial of his just compensation?"
We perceived that it would be useless to argue with a man in this
truculent mood, and we silently forbore to urge that the vision of
destitution which the criminal must have before his eyes, advancing hand
in hand with liberty to meet him at the end of his term when his prison
gates opened into the world which would not feed, or shelter, or clothe,
or in any wise employ him, would be a powerful deterrent from future
crime, and act as one of the most efficient agencies of virtue which the
ingenuity of the law has ever invented. But our silence did not wholly
avail us, for our poor misguided friend went on to say:
"Suppose he had a wife and children--he may have had several of both,
for all I know--dependent on him, would it have been particularly
sanative for them to be deprived of his earnings, too?"
"We cannot answer these sophistries," we were exasperated into replying.
"All that we can say is that anything else--anything like what you call
justice to the criminal, the prisoner--would disrupt society," and we
felt that disrupt was a word which must carry conviction to the densest
understanding. It really appeared to do so in this case, for our friend
went away without more words, leaving behind him a manuscript, which we
mentally rejected, while seeing our way to use the material in it for
the present essay; it is the well-known custom of editors to employ in
this way the ideas of rejected contributors.
A few days later we met our friend, and as we strolled beside him in the
maniacal hubbub of the New York streets, so favorable to philosophic
communion, we said, "Well, have you met your namesake since you came to
his rescue against the robber State, or did he really sail on the
cattle-steamer, as he said he was going to do?"
Our friend gave a vague, embarrassed laugh. "He didn't sail, exactly, at
least not on that particular steamer. The fact is, I have just parted
from him at my own door--the outside of it. It appears that the
authorities of that particular line wished to take advantage of him by
requiring him to pay down a sum of money as a guarantee of good faith,
and that he refused to do so--not having the money, for one reason. I
did not understand the situation exactly, but this was not essential to
his purpose, which made itself evident through a good deal of irrelevant
discourse. Since I had seen him, society had emulated the State in the
practice of a truly sanative attitude toward him. At the place where he
went to have his half-crown changed into American money they would only
give him forty cents for it, but he was afterward assured by an
acquaintance that the current rate was sixty cents. In fact, a
half-crown is worth a little more."
"Well, what can you expect of money-changers?" we returned, consolingly.
"And what is going to become of your unhappy beneficiary now?"
"Why, according to his report, fortune has smiled, or half-smiled, as
the novelists say, upon him. He has found a berth on another line of
cattle-steamers, where they don't require a deposit as a guarantee of
good faith. In fact, the head steward has taken a liking to him, and he
is going out as one of the table-stewards instead of one of the
herdsmen; I'm not sure that herdsmen is what they call them."
We laughed sardonically. "And do you believe he is really going?"
Our friend sighed heavily. "Well, I don't believe he's coming back. I
only gave him the loose change I had in my pocket, and I don't think it
will support him so handsomely to the end of the week that he will wish
to call upon me for more."
We were both silent, just as the characters are in a novel till the
author can think what to make them say next. Then we asked, "And you
still think he had been in the penitentiary?"
"I don't see why he should have said so if he wasn't."
"Well, then," we retorted bitterly, again like a character in fiction,
"you have lost another great opportunity: not a moral opportunity this
time, but an aesthetic opportunity. You could have got him to tell you
all about his life in prison, and perhaps his whole career leading up to
it, and you could have made something interesting of it. You might have
written a picaresque novel or a picaresque short story, anyway."
Our friend allowed, with a mortified air, "It was rather a break."
"You threw away the chance of a lifetime. Namesakes who have been in
jail don't turn up every day. In his intimate relation to you, he would
have opened up, he would have poured out his whole heart to you. Think
of the material you have lost."
We thought of it ourselves, and with mounting exasperation. When we
reflected that he would probably have put it into his paper, and when we
reflected that we could have given so much more color to our essay, we
could not endure it. "Well, good-day," we said, coldly; "we are going
down this way."
Our friend shook hands, lingeringly, absently. Then he came to himself
with a mocking laugh. "Well, perhaps he wasn't, after all, what he
said."
XVIII
A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE
A Veteran Novelist, who was also an intimate friend of the Easy Chair's,
sat before his desk pensively supporting his cheek in his left hand
while his right toyed with the pen from which, for the moment at least,
fiction refused to flow. His great-niece, who seemed such a
contradiction in terms, being as little and vivid personally as she was
nominally large and stately, opened the door and advanced upon him.
"Do I disturb you, uncle?" she asked; she did not call him great-uncle,
because that, she rightly said, was ridiculous; and now, as part of the
informality, she went on without waiting for him to answer, "Because,
you know, you wanted me to tell you what I thought of your last story;
and I've just read it."
"Oh yes!" the Veteran Novelist assented brightly, hiding his struggle to
recall which story it was. "Well?"
"Well," she said, firmly but kindly, "you want me to be frank with you,
don't you?"
"By all means, my dear. It's very good of you to read my story." By this
time, he had, with the help of the rather lean volume into which his
publishers had expanded a long-short story, and which she now held
intensely clasped to her breast, really remembered.
"Not at all!" she said. She sat down very elastically in the chair on
the other side of his desk, and as she talked she accented each of her
emotions by a spring from the cushioned seat. "In the first place," she
said, with the effect of coming directly to business, "I suppose you
know yourself that it couldn't be called virile."
"No?" he returned. "What is virile?"
"Well, I can't explain, precisely; but it's something that all the
critics say of a book that is very strong, don't you know; and
masterful; and relentless; and makes you feel as if somebody had taken
you by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and seems to throw you
into the air, and trample you under foot."
"Good heavens, my dear!" the Veteran Novelist exclaimed. "I hope I'm a
gentleman, even when I'm writing a novel."
"Your being a gentleman has nothing to do with it, uncle!" she said,
severely, for she thought she perceived a disposition in the Veteran
Novelist to shuffle. "You can't be virile and at the same time remember
that you are a gentleman. Lots of _women_ write virile books."
"Ladies?" the novelist asked.
"Don't I say that has nothing to do with it? If you wish to grip the
reader's attention you must let yourself go, whether you're a gentleman
or a lady. Of course," she relented, "your book's very idyllic, and
delightful, and all that; but," she resumed, severely, "do you think an
honest critic could say there was not a dull page in it from cover to
cover?"
The novelist sighed. "I'm sure I don't know. They seem to say it--in the
passages quoted in the advertisements--of all the books published.
Except mine," he added, sadly.
"Well, we will pass that point," his great-niece relented again. "I
didn't intend to wound your feelings, uncle."
"Oh, you haven't. I suppose I _am_ a little too easy-going at times."
"Yes, that is it. One can't say dull; but too easy-going. No faithful
critic could begin a notice of your book with such a passage as: 'Have
you read it? No? Then hop, skip, and jump, and get it. Don't wait to
find your hat or drink your coffee. March! It's going like the wind, and
you must kite if you want one of the first edition of fifty thousand!'
Now that," his great-niece ended, fondly, "is what I should like every
critic to say of your book, uncle."
The Veteran Novelist reflected for a moment. Then he said, more
spiritedly, "I don't believe _I_ should, my dear."
"Then you _must_; that's all. But that's a small thing. What I really
wonder at is that, with all your experience, you are not more of a
stylist."
"Stylist?"
"Yes. I don't believe there's an epigram in your book from beginning to
end. That's the reason the critics don't quote any brilliant sentences
from it, and the publishers can't advertise it properly. It makes me mad
to find the girls repeating other authors' sayings, and I never catch a
word from a book of yours, though you've been writing more than a
century."
"Not quite so long, my dear, I think; though very, very long. But just
what do you mean by style?"
"Well, you ought to say even the simplest things in a distinguished way;
and here, all through, I find you saying the most distinguished things
in the simplest way. But I won't worry you about things that are not
vital. I'll allow, for the sake of argument, that you can't have
virility if you remember that you are a gentleman even when you are
writing fiction. But you _can_ have _passion_. Why don't you?"
"Don't I? I thought--"
"Not a speck of it--not a single speck! It's rather a delicate point,
and I don't exactly know how to put it, but, if you want me to be frank,
I must." She looked at her great-uncle, and he nodded encouragement. "I
don't believe there's a single place where he crushes her to his heart,
or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. He kisses her cheek once,
but I don't call that anything. Why, in lots of the books, nowadays, the
girls themselves cling to the men in a close embrace, or put their
mouths tenderly to theirs--Well, of course, it sounds rather disgusting,
but in your own earlier books, I'm sure there's more of it--of passion.
Isn't there? Think!"
The Veteran Novelist tried to think. "To tell you the truth, my dear, I
can't remember. I hope there was, and there always will be, love, and
true love, in my novels--the kind that sometimes ends in happy marriage,
but is always rather shy of showing itself off to the reader in caresses
of any kind. I think passion can be intimated, and is better so than
brutally stated. If you have a lot of hugging and kissing--"
"Uncle!"
"--How are your lovers different from those poor things in the Park that
make you ashamed as you pass them?"
"The police ought to put a stop to it. They are perfectly disgraceful!"