often seem to the public which has tried to spoil them with praise.
There is much in doing a thing which makes a man modest in regard to the
way he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it well, if the
testimony of all his faculties is to that effect, there is somehow the
lurking sense that it was not he who really did it, but that there is a
power, to turn Matthew Arnold's phrase to our use, "not ourselves, that
works for" beauty as well as righteousness, and that it was this
mystical force which wrought through him to the exquisite result. If you
come to the second-best results, to the gold so alloyed that you may
confidently stamp it your own, do you wish to proclaim it the precious
metal without alloy? Do you wish to declare that it is to all intents
and purposes quite as good as pure gold, or even better? Do you hold
yourself quit of the duty of saying that it is second-best, that it is
something mixed with copper or nickel, and of the value of oroide, say?
You cannot bring yourself to this extreme of candor, and what right,
then, have you to recognize that something else is fine gold when it is
really so? Ought not you to feign that it is only about thirteen carats
when it is actually eighteen?
Considerations like these always stayed Eugenio when it came to the
point of deciding whether he would care to be his own reviewer, but the
desire to be adequately reviewed still remained with him, a fond longing
amid repeated disappointments. An author often feels that he has got too
much praise, though he never has got all he wants. "Why don't they
clap?" Doctor Holmes once whimsically demanded, speaking of his
audiences in those simple early days when he went about lecturing like
Emerson and Alcott and other saints and sages of New England. "Do they
think I can't stand it? Why don't they give me three times three? I can
stand it very well." An author may sometimes think he is fulsomely
praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation
trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused of
insincerity. He may confidently count upon being regarded as a fine
fellow who has at worst gone wrong in the right direction. It ought,
therefore, to be a very simple matter to content a veteran author in the
article of criticism, but somehow it is not.
Perhaps the trouble is in the nature of criticism, which, unwillingly
enough, no doubt, assumes to be and to do more than it can. Its
convention is that it is an examination of a book and a report upon its
qualities. But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the limits
assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits with the reader. The
author would not mind if the critic's report were physically
commensurate with his book; but, of course, the reader could not stand
that; and, generous as they are, other authors might complain.
Sometimes, as it is, they think that any one of their number who gets
something like a good report from a critic is getting more than his
deserts. Yet authors, though a difficult, are not an impossible
generation. Few of them would allow that they are even unreasonable with
regard to criticism, and they would probably hail any improvement in its
theories and methods with gratitude.
As criticism cannot be an adequate report upon the qualities of a book,
even a book which has not been examined, why should it assume to do more
than talk about it and talk all the better for being merely tentative
and altogether unfinal? Nobody can really be authoritative concerning
anything, for there is no one whose wisdom will not be disputed by
others of the wise. The best way, then, might be for a reviewer to go
round collecting sentiment and opinion about the book he means to talk
of, and then to give as many qualifying varieties of impression as the
general unhandsomeness of human nature will allow him to give when they
differ from his own impression. On the terms of the old and still
accepted convention of criticism, Eugenio had himself done a vast deal
of reviewing, an amount of it, in fact, that he could not consider
without amaze, and in all this reviewing he had not once satisfied
himself with his work. Never once had he written a criticism which
seemed to him adequate, or more than an approximation to justice, even
when he had most carefully, almost prayerfully, examined the work he
reported upon. He was aware of writing from this mood or that, of
feeling hampered by editorial conditions, of becoming impatient or
jaded, and finally employing the hay-scales when he ought to have used
the delicate balances with which one weighs out life-giving elixirs or
deadly poisons. But he used to imagine that if he could have put himself
in the attitude of easy discussion or light comment, instead of the
judicial pose he felt obliged to take, he could have administered a far
finer and more generous measure of justice. In these moments he used to
wonder whether something stated and organized in the way of intelligent
talk about books might not be substituted for the conventional verdicts
and sentences of the courts of criticism.
In this notion he proceeded upon a principle evolved from his own
experience in fields far from the flinty and sterile ranges of
criticism. He had not only done much reviewing in those days, but he had
already written much in the kinds which he could not, in his modesty,
bring himself to call "creative," though he did not mind others calling
it so. Whatever had been the shortcomings of the conventional reports
upon his work, it was his glad experience that nothing he said or meant,
not the slightest intention or airiest intimation in his books, was ever
wholly lost. Somewhere, some one, somehow had caught it, liked it,
remembered it, and had by a happy inspiration written him of it, it
might be diffident, it might be confident, of his pleasure in the
recognition.
Such recognition was always more precious than the reports of the
conventional critics, though if these were favorable the author was glad
of them, as of any good that the gods gave. But what struck Eugenio was
that such recognition was the real, the very, the vital criticism, and
that if it could be evoked in behalf of others, in its sincerity, it
might be helpful to the cause of literature far beyond anything that the
courts of criticism could do or effect in its behalf. After all, as he
said to himself, an author wrote for his readers and not for his
critics, for pleasure and not for judgment; and if he could be assured
publicly, as he sometimes was assured privately, that nothing he did was
lost, he might be encouraged to keep on doing his best. Why, indeed,
should not there be a critical journal embodying in a species of
fragrant bouquet the flowers of thought and emotion springing up in the
brains and bosoms of readers responsive to the influence of a new book?
Such readers would have only to suppose themselves addressing the author
direct, and the thing could be done. It might be done in another way by
the authors contributing the praises privately sent him. In a time when
personal letters to authors are constantly quoted in advertisements,
this might not seem so immodest as in some earlier literary condition.
In the mean time the question of what shall be done for veteran authors
who are always breaking new ground still remains, and it is complicated
by a fact of psychological import for the reader as well as the author.
What first gives an author his hold upon the reader is not the novelty
of his theme, but a pleasing, it may be a painfully pleasing, quality
which in its peculiar variation must be called his personal quality. It
is the sense of this in each of his successive books which deepens his
hold upon the reader, and not the style, or the characters, or the
intrigue. As long as this personal quality delights, he is new whether
he breaks new ground or not, or he is newly welcome. With his own
generation, with the readers who began young with him and have grown old
with him, he is always safe. But there is danger for him with the
readers who begin young with him after he has grown old. It is they who
find his tales twice told and himself hackneyed, unless they have been
trained to like his personal quality by their elders. This might be
difficult, but it is not impossible, and ought not it to be the glad,
the grateful care of such elders?
VI
THE FICKLENESS OF AGE
All forms of literature probably hold a great deal more meaning than
people commonly get out of them; but prose may be likened to a cup which
one can easily see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper and
fuller than it looks; while verse is the fount through which thought and
feeling continually bubble from the heart of things. The sources that
underlie all life may be finding vent in a rhyme where the poet imagined
he was breathing some little, superficial vein of his own; but in the
reader he may unawares have reached the wells of inmost passion and
given them release. The reader may himself live with a certain verse and
be aware of it now and then merely as a teasing iterance that
"From some odd corner of the mind
Beats time to nothing in the brain."
But suddenly some experience, or perhaps the exfoliation of the outer
self through the falling away of the withered years, shall open to him
its vital and cosmical significance. He shall know then that it is not
an idle whisper of song, but a message to his soul from the senate where
the immortals gather in secular counsel and muse the wisdom of all the
centuries since humanity came to its earliest consciousness. The bearer
of the message may not have known it in the translation which it wears
to the receiver; each must read it in his own tongue and read meaning
into it; perhaps it always takes two to make a poet, and singer and
listener are the twin spheres that form one star.
A valued correspondent of ours, one of those whose letters are oftener
than we should like to own fraught with the suggestion of our most
fortunate inspirations, believes himself to have been recently the
confidant of the inner sense of certain lines in a familiar poem of
Longfellow's. Its refrain had, from the first reading, chanted in the
outer chamber of his ear, but suddenly, the other day, it sang to his
soul with a newly realized purport in the words,
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
The words are, as the poet promptly declares, the burden of a Lapland
song, which "is haunting his memory still," which "murmurs and whispers
still," which "is singing and saying still," which "is mournful" and
"sweet" and "fitful" and "fatal" and "strange" and "beautiful." Yet he
seems not to have known, as our friend now thinks he himself knows, that
they express a difference, unrecognized hitherto, between youth and age,
and rightfully attribute to the young a steadfastness and persistence in
objects and ideals formerly supposed the distinguishing qualities of the
old. In other words, they have precipitated into his consciousness a
truth unwittingly held in solution by both the poets in their verse. Or,
if it was conveyed to him by their sensible connivance, he is the first
who has been made its repository. Or, if he cannot claim an exclusive
property in the revelation, it is now his, in his turn, by that sad
right of seniority whose advantages are not ours till there are few or
none left to contest them with us. One has not been promoted to them
because of any merit or achievement; one has simply lived into them; and
how much of one has died in the process of survival! The lines speak to
our friend's age a language which his youth could not have understood,
and it is because he is no longer young that he perceives how long the
thoughts of youth were and how brief the thoughts of age.
He had always fancied that his later years should be a time of repose in
the faiths, loves, and joys through which he realized himself. But
nothing apparently was farther from the fact. Such length of thoughts as
he had, such abiding pleasures, such persistent hopes, were from his
youth; and the later sort were as the leaves of the tree to the tree
itself. He put them forth at the beginning of an epoch, a season, and
they dropped from him at the close. In as great bitterness as is
consonant with his temperament he has asked us why youth should ever
have been deemed fickle and age constant when so precisely the contrary
is true. Youth, he owns, is indeed full of vain endeavors and of
enterprises that come to nothing, but it is far more fixed than age in
its aspirations. His aspirations change now with such rapidity that they
seem different not only from year to year, but from month to month, from
day to day. He has not merely discarded his old ideals, he loathes them.
He used to like going out to dinner, above all things; and he was fond
of lunches, even of afternoon teas; but in a day, in an hour, such
delights became wearinesses and vexations of spirit. Formerly he enjoyed
travel with all its necessary concomitants. It amused him to check his
baggage and depart from stations, to arrive at hotels and settle himself
in new rooms; the very domiciliation in sleeping-cars or the
domestication in diners had a charm which was apparently perennial; a
trip in a river-boat was rapture; an ocean voyage was ecstasy. The
succession of strange faces, new minds, was an unfailing interest, and
there was no occurrence, in or out of the ordinary, which did not give
him release from self and form a true recreation. The theatre does not
amuse him now, though the time has been, and lately, for the curtain,
when it rose on a play, new or old, to lift his spirit with it and to
hold him entranced till its fall. As for the circus, he once rejoiced in
all its feats; performing elephants could not bore him, nor acts of
horsemanship stale its infinite variety. But the time has come abruptly
when the smell of the sawdust, or the odor of the trodden weed, mixed
with the aroma of ice-cold lemonade, is a stench in his nostrils.
These changes of ideal have occurred, not through the failure of any
powers that he can note in himself, but as part of the great change from
youth to age, which he thinks is far greater morally than physically. He
is still fairly strong; he has not lost his appetite or the teeth to
gratify it; he can walk his miles, always rather two than ten, and rest
refreshed from them; except that he does not like to kill things, he
could trudge the whole day through fields and woods with his gun on his
shoulder; though he does not golf, and cannot know whether or no it
would bore him, he likes to wield the axe and the scythe in the groves
and meadows of his summer place. When he stretches himself on the breast
of the mother alike of flesh and grass, it is with a delicious sense of
her restorative powers and no fear of rheumatism. If he rests a little
longer than he once used, he is much more rested when he rises from his
repose.
His body rejoices still in its experiences, but not his soul: it is not
interested; it does not care to have known its experiences or wish to
repeat them. For this reason he thinks that it is his spirit which is
superannuated, while its "muddy vesture of decay" is in very tolerable
repair. His natural man is still comparatively young, and lives on in
the long, long thoughts of youth; but his supernatural man has aged,
with certain moral effects which alarm his doubts of the pleasures he
once predicated of eternity. "If it is going to be like _this_ with me!"
he says to himself, and shrinks from supplying the responsive clause of
his conditional.
But mainly his mind turns upon itself in contemplation of its earthly
metamorphoses, in which it hardly knows itself for the mind of the same
man. Its apprehensions are for the time when, having exhausted all the
differences, it shall care for none; but meanwhile it is interested in
noting the absurdity of that conventional view of age as the period of
fixed ideals. It may be the period of fixed habits, of those helpless
iterances which imply no intentions or purposes; but it is not the
period in which the mind continues in this or that desire and strives
for its fulfilment. The same poet who sang at second hand those words of
the Lapland song,
"The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,"
erred, to our friend's sense, in singing of
"The young heart hot and restless,
And the old subdued and slow."
He believes the reverse would rightly characterize the heart of youth
and the heart of age. Age is not slow in its mental motions; it is
hurried and anxious, with that awful mystical apprehension of the
swift-coming moment when time shall be no more and nothing but eternity
shall be left. It is not subdued; its heart is hot with rebellion
against the inevitable. But for youth there is no inevitable; there is
no conclusion, no catastrophe, which it may not hope to escape; and, so
it is patient of chances, it is glad of them. Its heart is not restless;
it is quite at peace in the bosom which is secure of all the time there
is.
Our friend believes that a variety of popular superstitions will fall at
the recognition of the truth in this matter, and none more finally than
that which attributes to the junior partner the unhappiness of those
marriages in which youth and crabbed age try to live together. In such
hazardous unions the junior partner is, for some unexplained reason, of
the sex which has the repute of a generic fickleness as well as the
supposed volatility of its fewer years. Probably repute wrongs it as
much in one respect as in the other, but our friend contends only for
greater justice to it in the last. In the light that he has come into,
he holds that where such unions are unhappy, though they may have been
formed with a fair appearance of affection, it is the senior partner who
is to blame if blame may ever be attached to involuntary change. It is
the senior partner who has wearied first of the companionship and wished
for release with the impatience natural to age. This is intolerant of
the annoyances which seem inherent in every union of the kind, and
impatient of those differences of temperament which tell far more than
any disparities of age, and which exist even where there are no such
disparities. The intolerance, the impatience, is not more characteristic
of the husband where he is the elder than of the wife in the much fewer
instances of her seniority. In the unions where two old people join
their faltering destinies, the risks of unhappiness are, logically,
doubled; and our friend holds it a grotesque folly to expect anything
else of marriages in which two lovers, disappointed of each other in
their youth, attempt to repair the loss in their age. Where any such
survive into later life, with the passion of earlier life still rife in
their hearts, he argues that they had much better remain as they are,
for in such a belated union as they aspire to the chances are
overwhelmingly against them.
Very probably, like other discoverers, he is too much impressed with the
value of his divination. It is something that, at any rate, can appeal
for recognition only to the aged or the aging. With these we could
imagine it bringing a certain consolation, a relief from vain regret, an
acquittal from self-accusation. If one has suddenly changed for no
apparent reason, one must be glad to find a reason in the constitution
of things, and to attribute one's fickleness to one's time of life.
Youth's errors have possibly been too much condoned upon grounds where
age could more justly base its defence. It may be more reckless than
age, but it is not nearly so rash. It keeps thinking its long, long
thoughts and questioning the conclusions to which age eagerly hobbles or
hurls itself from its crutches. Youth is deliberate, for it has plenty
of time, while, as our friend notes, age has little but eternity before
it. Not youth, but age, leaps from life's trolley while it is still in
motion, or, after mismeasuring the time and space, limps impatiently
before it and is rolled under its fender. You may see physical proof of
this difference, our friend insists, in the behavior of two people, one
young and one old, at any street-crossing; and why should so many old
ladies fall on the stairs, but that they are apt to precipitate
themselves wildly from landings where young girls linger to dream yet
one dream more before they glide slowly down to greet the young men who
would willingly wait years for them?
The distrust of eternity at which our friend hints is perhaps the
painfulest of his newly discovered differences between youth and age.
Resting so serenely as it does in practically unlimited time, with
ideals and desires which scarcely vary from year to year, youth has no
fears of infinity. It is not afraid but it shall have abundant
occupation in the aeons before it, or that its emotions or volitions
shall first be exhausted. Its blithe notion of immortality is that it is
immortal youth. It has no conception of age, and could not imagine an
eternity of accomplished facts. It is, perhaps, for this reason that
doubt of immortality never really comes to youth. One of the few things
which our friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals honestly
with his only history must be aware of an hour, almost a moment, of
waning youth, when the vague potentiality of disbelief became a living
doubt, thence-forward to abide with him till death resolve it. Endless
not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after it endless being is
unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable endless being is all that is left to
age, and it is in the notion of it alone that age can get back to the
long, long thoughts in which is surcease from unrest. Our old friend may
accuse us of proposing the most impossible of paradoxes when we invite
him to take refuge from his whirling ideals, not in an unavailing
endeavor to renew the conditions of youth in time, but in the forecast
of youth in eternity. We think that the error of his impatience, his
despair with the state he has come to here, is largely if not wholly
through his failure to realize that he is not going to wake up old in
some other being, but young, and that the capacity of long, long
thoughts will be renewed in him with the renewal of his life. The
restlessness of age, its fickleness, its volatility, is the expression
of immense fatigue. It tosses from side to side and tries for this and
that like a sick man from sheer weakness; or, rather, if the reader
prefers another image, it is like some hapless wild thing caught by
rising floods on a height of land which they must soon submerge, and
running incessantly hither and thither as the water more narrowly hems
it in.
Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has been increased of
late by the restriction of human hope to the years which remain, few and
brief to the longest earthly life, by the sciences which provisionally
darken counsel. When these shall have penetrated to a point where they
can discern the light, they will "pour the day" on the dim orbs of age
and illumine the future with new hope. Then doubting age can enter into
the rest now forbidden it and take its repose between illimitable
horizons in the long, long thoughts of eternal youth. We speak here in
behalf of the sceptic, the agnostic few. For the many who have not lost
their hope because they have never lost their faith, doubtless all the
trouble of change which disquiets our friend will seem something
temperamental merely, and not something essential or inseparable from
human nature. Their thoughts have remained long, their ideals steadfast,
because they have not lost the most precious jewel of their youth--the
star of trust and hope which
"Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."
These are the most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that
their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their numbers
have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a paper by
a man of that science which deals with life on strictly physical lines,
and drawing from it an immense consolation because it reaffirmed that
the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of
an automatic universe and the necessity of an intentional first cause,
but with Evolution, in the regard of some scientists, tottering on its
throne, and Natural Selection entering the twilight into which the elder
pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in claiming existence as
that indestructible life-property or organizing power which
characterizes kind through kind from everlasting to everlasting. In this
consolation we seemed well on our way back to the encounter of a human
spirit such as used to be rapt to heaven or cast into hell for very
disproportionate merits or demerits; but we were supported for the
meeting by the probability that in the fortunate event the spirit would
be found issuing from all the clouds of superstition, and when it was
reconstituted in the universal belief, that the time, with eternity in
its train, would have returned for fitly hailing it in the apostrophe of
the Addisonian Cato:
"But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds."
VII
THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION