were in our mind, suggested by summer-long reading of a dear, delightful
poet, altogether neglected in these days, who deserves to be known again
wherever reality is prized or simplicity is loved. It is proof, indeed,
how shallow was all the debate about realism and romanticism that the
poetic tales of George Crabbe were never once alleged in witness of the
charm which truth to condition and character has, in whatever form. But
once, long before that ineffectual clamor arose, he was valued as he
should be still. Edmund Burke was the first to understand his purpose
and appreciate his work. He helped the poet not only with praises but
with pounds till he could get upon his feet. He introduced Crabbe's
verse to his great friends, to Doctor Johnson, who perceived at once
that he would go far; to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who felt the
brother-artist in him; to the Lord Chancellor Thurlow, whose oaths were
harder than his heart toward the fearlessy fearful young singer. The
sympathy and admiration of the highest and the best followed him through
his long life to his death. The great Mr. Fox loved him and his rhyme,
and wished his tales to be read to him on the bed he never left alive.
Earl Grey, Lord Holland, and the brilliant Canning wrote him letters of
cordial acclaim; Walter Scott, the generous, the magnanimous, hailed him
brother, and would always have his books by him; none of his poems
appeared without the warmest welcome, the most discriminating and
applausive criticism from Jeffrey, the first critic of his long day.
Crabbe had not only this exquisitely intelligent hearing, but he was
accepted on his own terms, as a poet who saw so much beauty in simple
and common life that he could not help painting it. He painted it in
pieces of matchless fidelity to the fact, with nothing of flattery, but
everything of charm in the likeness. His work is the enduring witness of
persons, circumstances, customs, experiences utterly passed from the
actual world, but recognizably true with every sincere reader. These
tales of village life in England a hundred years ago are of an absolute
directness and frankness. They blink nothing of the sordid, the mean,
the vicious, the wicked in that life, from which they rarely rise in
some glimpse of the state of the neighboring gentry, and yet they abound
in beauty that consoles and encourages. They are full of keen analysis,
sly wit, kindly humor, and of a satire too conscientious to bear the
name; of pathos, of compassion, of reverence, while in unaffected
singleness of ideal they are unsurpassed.
Will our contrary-minded correspondent believe that these studies, these
finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of
the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of
verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul
abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in
which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it
often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could,
with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of
rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each
couplet. The most artificial and the most natural poets were at one in
their literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of Crabbe's
impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material unemployed in
English poetry before, that you forget all the affectations of the
outward convention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the
quaintness of their use for his purposes. How imperishable, anyway, is
the interest of things important to the spirit, the fancy, and how
largely does this interest lie in the freshness of the mind bringing
itself to the things, how little in the novelty of the things! The
demand for strangeness in the things themselves is the demand of the
sophisticated mind: the mind which has lost its simplicity in the
process of continuing unenlightened. It is this demand which betrays the
mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race, the sophistication of the English
mind, and the obfuscation (which is sophistication at second-hand) of
the American mind. The non-imaginative person is nowhere so much at home
as in a voluntary exile; and this may be why it was sometime said that
travel is the fool's paradise. For such a person to realize anything the
terms are that he shall go abroad, either into an alien scene or into a
period of the past; then he can begin to have some pleasure. He must
first of all get away from himself, and he is not to be blamed for that;
any one else would wish to get away from him. His exaction is not a
test of merit; it is merely the clew to a psychological situation which
is neither so novel nor so important as to require of our hard-worked
civilization the production of an order of more inspired criticism than
it has worried along with hitherto.
XXV
A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK
They sat together on a bench in the Park, far enough apart to
distinguish themselves from the many other pairs who were but too
obviously lovers. It could not be said quite that these two were
actually lovers; but there was an air of passionate provisionality over
and around them, a light such as in springtime seems to enfold the tree
before it takes the positive color of bud or blossom; and, with an eye
for literary material that had rarely failed him, he of the Easy Chair
perceived that they were a hero and heroine of a kind which he instantly
felt it a great pity he should not have met oftener in fiction of late.
As he looked at them he was more and more penetrated by a delicate
pathos in the fact that, such as he saw them, they belonged in their
fine sort to the great host of the Unemployed. No one else might have
seen it, but he saw, with that inner eye of his, which compassion
suffused but did not obscure, that they were out of a job, and he was
not surprised when he heard the young girl fetch a muted sigh and then
say: "No, they don't want us any more. I don't understand why; it is
very strange; but it is perfectly certain."
"Yes, there's no doubt of that," the young man returned, in a despair
tinged with resentment.
She was very pretty and he was handsome, and they were both tastefully
dressed, with a due deference to fashion, yet with a personal
qualification of the cut and color of their clothes which, if it
promised more than it could fulfil in some ways, implied a modest
self-respect, better than the arrogance of great social success or
worldly splendor. She could have been the only daughter of a widowed
father in moderate circumstances; or an orphan brought up by a careful
aunt, or a duteous sister in a large family of girls, with whom she
shared the shelter of a wisely ordered, if somewhat crowded, home; or
she could have been a serious student of any of the various arts and
sciences which girls study now in an independence compatible with true
beauty of behavior. He might have been a young lawyer or doctor or
business man; or a painter or architect; or a professor in some college
or a minister in charge of his first parish. What struck the observer in
them and pleased him was that they seemed of that finer American average
which is the best, and, rightly seen, the most interesting phase of
civilized life yet known.
"I sometimes think," the girl resumed, in the silence of her companion,
"that I made a mistake in my origin or my early education. It's a great
disadvantage, in fiction nowadays, for a girl to speak grammatically, as
I always do, without any trace of accent or dialect. Of course, if I had
been high-born or low-born in the olden times, somewhere or other, I
shouldn't have to be looking for a place now; or if I had been unhappily
married, or divorced, or merely separated from my husband, the
story-writers would have had some use for me. But I have tried always to
be good and nice and lady-like, and I haven't been in a short story for
ages."
"Is it so bad as that?" the young man asked, sadly.
"Quite. If I could only have had something askew in my heredity, I know
lots of authoresses who would have jumped at me. I can't do anything
wildly adventurous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary period,
because I'm so afraid; but I know that in the course of modern life I've
always been fairly equal to emergencies, and I don't believe that I
should fail in case of trouble, or that if it came to poverty I should
be ashamed to share the deprivations that fell to my lot. I don't think
I'm very selfish; I would be willing to stay in town all summer if an
author wanted me, and I know I could make it interesting for his
readers. I could marry an English nobleman if it was really necessary,
and, if I didn't like to live in England because I was fond of my own
country, I believe I could get him to stay here half the time with me;
and that would appeal to a large class. I don't know whether I would
care to be rescued a great deal; it would depend upon what it was from.
But I could stand a great deal of pain if need be, and I hope that if it
came to anything like right or wrong I should act conscientiously. In
society, I shouldn't mind any amount of dancing or dining or teaing, and
I should be willing to take my part in the lighter athletics. But," she
ended, as she began, with a sigh, "I'm not wanted."
"Yes, I see what you mean," the young man said, with a thoughtful knot
between his brows. "I'm not wanted myself, at present, in the short
stories; but in the last dozen or so where I had an engagement I
certainly didn't meet you; and it is pleasant to be paired off in a
story with a heroine who has the instincts and habits of a lady. Of
course, a hero is only something in an author's fancy, and I've no right
to be exacting; but it does go against me to love a girl who ropes
cattle, or a woman who has a past, or a husband, or something of the
kind. I always do my best for the author, but I can't forget that I'm a
gentleman, and it's difficult to win a heroine when the very idea of her
makes you shudder. I sometimes wonder how the authors would like it
themselves if they had to do what they expect of us in that way. They're
generally very decent fellows, good husbands and fathers, who have
married lady-like girls and wouldn't think of associating with a shady
or ignorant person."
"The authoresses are quite as inconsistent," the professional heroine
rejoined. "They wouldn't speak to the kind of young men whom they expect
a heroine to be passionately in love with. They must know how very oddly
a girl feels about people who are outside of the world she's been
brought up in. It isn't enough that a man should be very noble at heart
and do grand things, or save your life every now and then, or be
masterful and use his giant will to make you in love with him. I don't
see why they can't let one have, now and then, the kind of husbands they
get for themselves. For my part, I should like always to give my heart
to a normal, sensible, well-bred, conscientious, agreeable man who could
offer me a pleasant home--I wouldn't mind the suburbs; and I could work
with him and work for him till I dropped--the kind of man that the real
world seems to be so full of. I've never had a fair chance to show what
was in me; I've always been placed in such a false position. Now I have
no position at all, not even a false one!"
Her companion was silent for a while. Then he said: "Yes, they all seem,
authors and authoresses both, to lose sight of the fact that the
constitution of our society is more picturesque, more dramatic, more
poetical than any in the world. We can have the play of all the passions
and emotions in ordinary, innocent love-making that other peoples can
have only on the worst conditions; and yet the story-writers won't avail
themselves of the beauty that lies next to their hands. They go abroad
for impossible circumstances, or they want to bewitch ours with the
chemistry of all sorts of eccentric characters, exaggerated incentives,
morbid propensities, pathological conditions, or diseased psychology. As
I said before, I know I'm only a creature of the storyteller's fancy,
and a creature out of work at that; but I believe I was imagined in a
good moment--I'm sure _you_ were--and I should like an engagement in an
honest, wholesome situation. I think I could do creditable work in it."
"I _know_ you could," the heroine rejoined, fervently, almost tenderly,
so that it seemed to the listener there was an involuntary
_rapprochement_ of their shadowy substances on the bench where they
floated in a sitting posture. "I don't want to be greedy; I believe in
living and letting live. I think the abnormal has just as good a right
to be in the stories as the normal; but why shut the normal out
altogether? What I should like to ask the short-story writers is whether
they and their readers are so bored with themselves and the people they
know in the real world that they have no use for anything like its
average in their fiction. It's impossible for us to change--"
"I shouldn't wish _you_ to change," the hero said, so fondly that the
witness trembled for something more demonstrative.
"Thank you! But what I mean is, couldn't _they_ change a little?
Couldn't they give us another trial? They've been using the abnormal, in
some shape or other, so long that I should think they would find a hero
and heroine who simply fell in love at a dance or a dinner, or in a
house-party or at a picnic, and worked out their characters to each
other, through the natural worry and difficulty, and pleasure and
happiness, till they got married--a relief from, well, the other thing.
I'm sure if they offered me the chance, I could make myself attractive
to their readers, and I believe I should have the charm of novelty."
"You would have more than the charm of novelty," the hero said, and the
witness trembled again for the _convenances_ which one so often sees
offended on the benches in the Park. But then he remembered that these
young people were avowedly nice, and that they were morally incapable of
misbehavior. "And for a time, at least, I believe you--I believe _we_,
for I must necessarily be engaged with you--would succeed. The
difficulty would be to get the notion of our employment to the authors."
It was on the listener's tongue to say that he thought he could manage
that, when the hero arrested him with the sad misgiving, "But they would
say we were commonplace, and that would kill the chance of our ever
having a run."
A tremendous longing filled the witness, a potent desire to rescue this
engaging pair from the dismay into which they fell at the fatal word.
"No, no!" he conjured them. "_Not_ commonplace. A judicious paragraph
anticipative of your reappearance could be arranged, in which you could
be hailed as the _normal_ hero and heroine, and greeted as a grateful
relief from the hackneyed freaks and deformities of the prevalent short
story, or the impassioned paper-doll pattern of the mediaeval men and
maidens, or the spotted and battered figures of the studies in morbid
analysis which pass for fiction in the magazines. We must get that
luminous word _normal_ before the reading public at once, and you will
be rightly seen in its benign ray and recognized from the start--yes! in
_advance_ of the start--for what you are: types of the loveliness of
our average life, the fairest blossoms of that faith in human nature
which has flourished here into the most beautiful and glorious
civilization of all times. With us the average life is enchanting, the
normal is the exquisite. Have patience, have courage; your time is
coming again!"
It seemed to him that the gentle shapes wavered in his vehement breath,
and he could not realize that in their alien realm they could not have
heard a word he uttered. They remained dreamily silent, as if he had not
spoken, and then the heroine said: "Perhaps we shall have to wait for a
new school of short-story writers before we can get back into the
magazines. Some beginner _must_ see in us what has always pleased: the
likeness to himself or herself, the truth to nature, the loyalty to the
American ideal of happiness. He will find that we easily and probably
_end well_, and that we're a consolation and refuge for readers, who can
take heart from our happy denouements, when they see a family
resemblance in us, and can reasonably hope that if they follow our
examples they will share our blessings. Authors can't really enjoy
themselves in the company of those degenerates, as _I_ call them.
They're mostly as young and right-principled and well-behaved as
ourselves, and, if they could get to know us, we should be the best of
friends. They would realize that there was plenty of harmless fun, as
well as love, in the world, and that there was lots of good-luck."
"Like ours, now, with no work and no prospect of it?" he returned, in
his refusal to be persuaded, yet ready to be comforted.
Having set out on that road, she would not turn back; she persisted,
like any woman who is contraried, no matter how far she ends from her
first position: "Yes, like ours now. For this is probably the dark hour
before the dawn. We must wait."
"And perish in the mean time?"
"Oh, we shall not perish," she responded, heroinically. "It's not for
nothing that we are immortal," and as she spoke she passed her
translucent hand through his arm, and, rising, they drifted off together
and left the emissary of the Easy Chair watching them till they mixed
with the mists under the trees in the perspective of the Mall.
OTHER ESSAYS
I
AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY
In the morning the trees stood perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green,
crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air stirred their stricken foliage, but
the leaves left the spray and dripped silently, vertically down, with a
faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears of a grief which is too
inward for any other outward sign; an absent grief, almost
self-forgetful. By-and-by, softly, very softly, as Nature does things
when she emulates the best Art and shuns the showiness and noisiness of
the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea, which turned
iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the trees began to bend, and
writhe, and sigh, and moan; and their leaves flew through the air, and
blew and scuttled over the grass, and in an hour all the boughs were
bare. The summer, which had been living till then and dying, was now
dead.
That was the reason why certain people who had been living with it, and
seemed dying in it, were now in a manner dead with it, so that their
ghosts were glad to get back to town, where the ghosts of thousands and
hundreds of thousands of others were hustling in the streets and the
trolleys and subways and elevateds, and shops and factories and offices,
and making believe to be much more alive than they were in the country.
Yet the town, the haunt of those harassed and hurried spectres, who are
not without their illusory hilarity, their phantasmal happiness, has a
charm which we of the Easy Chair always feel, on first returning to it
in the autumn, and which the representative of the family we are
imagining finds rather an impassioned pleasure in. He came on to New
York, while the others lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused
himself very well, in a shadowy sort, looking at those other shades who
had arrived in like sort, or different, and were there together with him
in those fine days just preceding the election; after which the season
broke in tears again, and the autumn advanced another step toward
winter.
There is no moment of the New York year which is more characteristic of
it than that mid-autumnal moment, which the summer and the winter are
equally far from. Mid-May is very well, and the weather then is perfect,
but that is a moment pierced with the unrest of going or getting ready
to go away. The call of the eld in Europe, or the call of the wild in
Newport, has already depopulated our streets of what is richest and
naturally best in our city life; the shops, indeed, show a fevered
activity in the near-richest and near-best who are providing for their
summer wants at mountain or sea-shore; but the theatres are closing like
fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every outward breeze;
the tables d'hote express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the
management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms;
the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show
of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with
their retarded displays of butcher's meats and poultry.
[Illustration: BROADWAY AT NIGHT]
But with what a difference the mid-autumn of the town welcomes its
returners! Ghosts, we have called them, mainly to humor a figure we
began with, but they are ghosts rather in the meaning of _revenants_,
which is a good meaning enough. They must be a very aged or very stupid
sort of _revenants_ if their palingenetic substance does not thrill at
the first nightly vision of Broadway, of that fairy flare of electric
lights, advertising whiskeys and actresses and beers, and luring the
beholder into a hundred hotels and theatres and restaurants. It is now
past the hour of roof-gardens with their songs and dances, but the
vaudeville is in full bloom, and the play-houses are blossoming in the
bills of their new comedies and operas and burlesques. The pavements are
filled, but not yet crowded, with people going to dinner at the tables
d'hote; the shop windows glitter and shine, and promise a delight for
the morrow which the morrow may or may not realize.
But as yet the town is not replete to choking, as it will be later, when
those who fancy they constitute the town have got back to it from their
Europes, their Newports, their Bar Harbors, their Lenoxes, their
Tuxedos, weary of scorning delights and living laborious days in that
round of intellectual and moral events duly celebrated in the society
news of the Sunday papers. Fifth Avenue abounds in automobiles but does
not yet super-abound; you do not quite take your life in your hand in
crossing the street at those corners where there is no policeman's hand
to put it in. Everywhere are cars, carts, carriages; and the motorist
whirs through the intersecting streets and round the corners, bent on
suicide or homicide, and the kind old trolleys and hansoms that once
seemed so threatening have almost become so many arks of safety from the
furious machines replacing them. But a few short years ago the passer on
the Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty automobiles in his
walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza; now he can easily number hundreds,
without an emotion of self-approval.
But their abundance is only provisional, a mere forecast of the
superabundance to come. All things are provisional, all sights, all
sounds, and this forms the peculiar charm of the hour, its haunting and
winning charm. If you take the omnibus-top to be trundled whiningly up
to one of the farther east-side entrances of the Park, and then dismount
and walk back to the Plaza through it, you are even more keenly aware of
the suspensive quality of the time. The summer, which you left for dead
by mountain or sea-shore, stirs with lingering consciousness in the
bland air of the great pleasance. Many leaves are yet green on the
trees, and where they are not green and not there they are gay on the
grass under the trees. There are birds, not, to be sure, singing, but
cheerfully chirping; and there are occasional blazons of courageous
flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern blasts will
soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who have
frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who cumber the
footway before them with their perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle
over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar at the
passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is high carnival of the
children with hoops and balls; it is the supreme moment of the
saddle-donkeys in the by-paths, and the carriage-goats in the Mall, and
of the rowboats on the ponds, which presently will be withdrawn for
their secret hibernation, where no man can find them out. When the first
snow flies, even while it is yet poising for flight in the dim pits of
air, all these delights will have vanished, and the winter, which will
claim the city for its own through a good four months, will be upon it.