intellectual food when the stock he has long been drawing upon seems
finally exhausted. There is not a grain left in the barns where he had
garnered up the harvests of the past; there is not a head of wheat to be
found in the fields where he had always been able to glean something; if
he shakes the tree of knowledge in the hope of a nut to crack or a
frozen-thaw to munch, nothing comes down but a shower of withered
leaves. His condition is what, in the parlance of his vocation, he calls
being out of a subject, and it is what may happen to him equally whether
he is preaching twice a Sunday from the pulpit, or writing leaders every
day for a prominent journal, or merely contributing a monthly essay to a
magazine. As the day or hour or moment approaches when he must give
forth something from his destitution, he envies the hungriest of his
auditors or readers who do not yet know that there is nothing in him to
appease their famine. There is only the barren will to give which only a
miracle can transform into a vitalizing bounty.
Yet is not this miracle always wrought? When did a pulpit ever fail of a
sermon, or a journal of a leading article, or a magazine of its stated
essay? The fact might argue the very contrary of the appearance and
convince the desperate purveyor that what he mistook for hopeless need
was choice which mocked him with a myriad alternatives. From cover to
cover the Scripture is full of texts; every day brings forth its
increase of incident; the moral and social and aesthetical world is open
on every side to polite inquiry and teems with inspiring suggestion. If
ever the preacher or editor or essayist fancies he has exhausted these
resources, he may well pause and ask whether it is not himself that he
has exhausted. There may be wanting the eye to see the riches which lie
near or far, rather than the riches which are always inviting the eye.
A curious trait of the psychology of this matter is that it is oftener
the young eye than the old which lacks the visual force. When Eugenio
was beginning author and used to talk with other adolescent immortals of
the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of their high calling, the dearth of
subjects was the cause of much misgiving and even despair among them.
Upon a certain occasion one of that divine company, so much diviner than
any of the sort now, made bold to affirm: "I feel that I have got my
technique perfect. I believe that my poetic art will stand the test of
any experiment in the handling of verse, and now all that I want is a
subject." It seemed a great hardship to the others, and they felt it the
more keenly because every one of them was more or less in the same case.
They might have none of them so frankly owned their fitness for their
work as the one who had spoken, but they were all as deeply aware of it;
and if any subject had appeared above the horizon there could have been
no question among them except as to which should first mount his winged
steed and ride it down. It did not occur to any of them that the want of
a subject was the defect of their art, and that until they were
equipped with the eye that never fails to see occasion for song all
round the heavens they were not yet the champions of poetry which they
fancied themselves. He who had uttered their common belief sufficiently
proved afterward, in the range of things he did, that he had ultimately
come into possession of the highest of the poetic gifts, the poetic
vision of life, and that he had completed his art at a point where it
had been most imperfect before, when he supposed it so perfect. As soon
as he ceased looking for subjects, which were mainly the conventional
themes of verse, the real and vital subjects began looking for him.
Eugenio himself, on his lower level, had something of the same
experience. When he first began those inventions in prose which long
seemed to him worthy of the best that his kindest friends said of them,
he had great trouble in contriving facts sufficiently wonderful for the
characters who were to deal with them, and characters high and noble
enough to deal with the great and exalted facts. On one hand or the
other his scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy which
painted itself so alluringly before him faded on his advance and left
him planted heavy-footed in the desert sands. In other words, he was
always getting out of a subject. In the intervals between his last
fiction and his next, when his friends supposed he was purposely letting
his mind lie fallow (and perhaps willingly acquiesced in the rest they
were sharing with him), he was really in an anguish of inquiry for
something on which to employ his powers; he was in a state of
excruciating activity of which the incessant agitation of the atoms in
the physical world is but a faint image; his repose was the mask of
violent vibrations, of volcanic emotions, which required months to clear
themselves in the realization of some ideal altogether disproportioned
to the expenditure of energy which had been tacitly taking place. At
these periods it seemed to him that his lot had been cast in a world
where he was himself about the only interesting fact, and from which
every attractive subject had been removed before he came into it.
He could never tell just how or when all this changed, and a little ray,
very faint and thin at first, stole in upon his darkness and broadened
to an effulgence which showed his narrow circle a boundless universe
thronged with the most available passions, interests, motives,
situations, catastrophes and denouements, and characters eagerly fitting
themselves with the most appropriate circumstances. As nearly as he
could make out, his liberation to this delightful cosmos took place
through his gradual perception that human nature was of a vast equality
in the important things, and had its difference only in trifles. He had
but to take other men in the same liberal spirit that he took himself to
find them all heroes; he had but to take women at their own estimate to
find them all heroines, if not divinely beautiful, then interesting,
fascinating, irresistibly better than beautiful. The situation was
something like this; it will not do to give away his whole secret; but
the reader needs only a hint in order to understand how in his new mind
Eugenio was overwhelmed with subjects.
After this illumination of his the only anxiety he had was concerning
his ability to produce all the masterpieces he felt himself capable of
in the short time allotted to the longest-lived writer. He was aware of
a duty to the material he had discovered, and this indeed sometimes
weighed upon him. However, he took courage from the hope that others
would seize his point of view and be able to carry on the work of
producing masterpieces indefinitely. They could never use up all the
subjects, any more than men can exhaust the elements of the aluminium
which abound in every piece of the common earth; but, in their constant
reliance upon every-day life as the true and only source of surprise and
delight in art, they could never be in the terrible despair which had
afflicted him from time to time before his illumination.
Doubtless there is an overruling Providence in this matter which we may
not distrust without accusing the order which has not yet failed in the
due succession of the seasons and the days and nights. While we are
saying it is never going to rain, it rains; or when it seems as if
nature were finally frozen up, a thaw begins; when we feel that the dark
will not end, the dawn is already streaking the east. If the preacher
thinks that the old texts are no longer applicable to life, there is
suddenly reported an outbreak of vice in the city which puts him in mind
of Sodom and Gomorrah; or the opportune flight of a defaulter furnishes
material for a homily which searches the consciences of half the
congregation with the words of the commandment against stealing. The
journalist wakes in heavy-eyed despair, but he finds from the papers on
his breakfast-table that there has been a revolution in South America,
or that the Socialists have been doing something in Belgium almost too
bad even for Socialists as the capitalists imagine them, and his heart
rises again. Even the poor magazine essayist, who has lived through the
long month in dread of the hour when his copy shall be due, is not
forbidden his reprieve. He may not have anything to say, but he
certainly has something to say it about. The world is always as
interesting to-day as it was yesterday, and probably to-morrow will not
be so dull as it promises.
One reason for the disability of the essayist, as distinguished from the
preacher or the journalist, is that he does not give himself range
enough. Expecting to keep scrupulously to one subject, he cannot put his
hand on a theme which he is sure will hold out under him to the end.
Once it was not so. The essayists of antiquity were the most vagariously
garrulous people imaginable. There was not one of them who, to our small
acquaintance with them, kept to his proposition or ended anywhere in
sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, they talk
of anything but the matter in hand, after mentioning it; and when you
come down to the moderns, for instance, to such a modern as Montaigne,
you find him wandering all over the place. He has no sooner stated his
subject than he begins to talk about something else; it reminds him
(like Lincoln) of a story which has nothing to do with it; and that
story reminds him of another, and so on, till the original thesis is
left flapping in the breeze somewhere at the vanishing-point in the
tortuous perspective and vainly signalling the essayist back. It was the
same, or nearly the same, with the English essayists quite down to the
beginning of the last century, when they began to cease being. The
writers in the _Spectator_, the _Guardian_, the _Tatler_, the _Rambler_,
and the rest, contrived to keep a loose allegiance to the stated topic,
because they treated it so very briefly, and were explicitly off to
something else in the next page or two with a fresh text. But if we come
to such delightful masters of the art as Lamb and Leigh Hunt and De
Quincey and Hazlitt, it will not be easy, opening at any chance point,
to make out what they are talking about. They are apparently talking
about everything else in the world but the business they started with.
But they are always talking delightfully, and that is the great matter
with any sort of talker.
When the reviewers began to supplant the essayists, they were even more
contemptuously indifferent to the obligations of constancy. Their text
was nominally some book, but almost as soon as they had named it they
shut it and went off on the subject of it, perhaps, or perhaps not. It
was for the most part lucky for the author that they did so, for their
main affair with the author was to cuff him soundly for his ignorance
and impudence, and then leave him and not return to him except for a few
supplementary cuffs at the close, just to show that they had not
forgotten him. Macaulay was a notorious offender in this sort; though
why do we say offender? Was not he always delightful? He was and he is,
though we no longer think him a fine critic; and he meant to be just, or
as just as any one could be with a man whom one differed from in the
early Victorian period.
But Macaulay certainly did not keep harking back to his text, if ever he
returned to it at all. His instinct was that a preacher's concern was
with his text, but not an essayist's or a reviewer's, and he was right
enough. The essayist certainly has no such obligation or necessity. His
reader can leave him at any moment, unless he is very interesting, and
it does not matter where they part company. In fact, it might be argued
that the modern fidelity to its subject is one of the chief evidences or
causes of the essay's decay. The essayist tries to make a mechanical
conscience perform the duty of that fine spiritual freedom in which the
essay once had its highest effect with the reader, and in his dull
loyalty to the stated thesis he is superficial as well as tiresome.
The true subject is not one subject only, but many. It is like that
pungent bulb whose odorous energy increases with exfoliation, and
remains a potent fragrance in the air after the bulb has substantially
ceased to be under the fingers. The error of the modern essayist is to
suppose that he can ever have a single subject in hand; he has a score,
he has a hundred, as his elders and betters all know; and what he
mistakes for his destitution is really his superfluity. If he will be
honest (as he may with difficulty be), must not he recognize that what
seems a search for one theme is a hesitation between many pressing
forward for his choice? If he will make this admission we believe he
will be nearer the fact, and he will be a much more respectable figure
than he could feel himself in blindly fumbling about for a single
thesis. Life is never, and in nothing, the famine, perhaps, that we
imagine it. Much more probably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are
the pangs of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More people
are suffering from too much than from too little. Especially are the
good things here in a demoralizing profusion. Ask any large employer of
labor, and he will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an
excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any workman what ails
his employer, and he will say that it is the ownership of the earth,
with a mortgage on planetary space. Both are probably right, or at least
one is as right as the other.
When we have with difficulty made our selection from the divine
redundancy of the ideal world, and so far as we could have reduced
ourselves to the penury of a sole possession, why do not we turn our
eyes to the example of Nature in not only bringing forth a hundred or a
thousand fold of the kind of seed planted, but in accompanying its
growth with that of an endless variety of other plants, all coming to
bear in a like profusion? Observe that wise husbandwoman (this is not
the contradiction in terms it seems), how when her business is
apparently a hay harvest, she mingles myriads of daisies and milkweed
and wild carrot and redtop with the grass, and lets her fancy riot all
round the meadow in a broidery of blackberries and asters and dogroses
and goldenrod. She never works without playing; and she plays even while
man is working--plays so graciously and winningly that it takes the
heart with joy. Who has ever looked upon an old-world wheat-field, where
poppies and vetches are frolicking among the ears, and begrudged Nature
her pastime? No one, we will venture, but the owner of the field, who is
perhaps also too much of a philosopher to grieve over it. In the ideal
world it is much the same. There, too, art having chosen a kind brings
it to bear with all the other kinds which have been lurking in the
unconscious soil of the mind and only waiting tilth for any purpose
before springing up in company with the selected seed. This is what
makes the poets and novelists and dramatists so much more profitable
reading than the moralists. From whom, indeed, has the vital wisdom of
the race been garnered? Not from those hard, ethical masters who have
sought to narrow culture to the business of growing precepts, but from
the genial teachers who have inculcated amusement and breathed into the
unwary mind some inspiration which escaped as unconsciously from
themselves. Which philosopher or sage of them all has instructed mankind
a hundredth part as much as Shakespeare, who supposed himself to be
merely providing diversion for the patrons of the Globe Theatre?
It follows, if not directly, then a long way about, from what we have
been saying, that the real artist is never at a loss for a subject. His
trouble is too many themes, not too few; and, having chosen among them,
his error will be in an iron sequence rather than in a desultory
progression. He is to arrive, if at all, laden with the spoil of the
wayside, and bringing with him the odor of the wild flowers carpeting or
roofing the by-paths; if he is a little bothered by the flowering
brambles which have affectionately caught at him in his course, that
does not greatly matter; or, at least, it is better than coming back to
his starting-point in boots covered with the mud of the high-road or
coat powdered with its dust. The sauntering ease, the excursive delays,
will be natural to the poet or the novelist, who is born to them; but
the essayist must in a manner make them his own, if he would be an
artist and survive among the masters, which there has been some doubt of
his doing. It should be his care to shun every appearance of continuity;
only in the practice of the fitful, the capricious, the desultory, can
he hope to emulate the effects of the creative. With any other ideal he
cannot hope to be fit company for the high minds who have furnished
mankind with quotations. But for the prevalence of the qualities which
we have been urging the essayist to cultivate, in the essays of Bacon,
it is not probable that any one would ever have fancied that Bacon wrote
Shakespeare.
VIII
THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND LINDORA
At the moment of this writing, everybody is hurrying into the country,
eager to escape the horrors of summer in the city; at the moment when it
becomes that reading we hope for, everybody will be hurrying into the
city, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the country. At either
moment the experiences of Florindo and Lindora should have a certain
interest.
Florindo and Lindora are a married pair, still comparatively happy after
forty years of wedded life, who have spent the part or the whole of each
hot season out of town, sometimes in the hills, sometimes by the sea,
sometimes in Europe. Their acquaintance with either form of sojourn, if
not exhaustive, is so comprehensive that it might be cited as
encyclopaedic.
The first season or so they did not think of shutting up their house in
the city, or doing more than taking, the latter part of August, a trip
to Niagara or Saratoga or Cape May or Lake George, or some of those
simple, old-fashioned resorts whose mere mention brings a sense of
pre-existence, with a thrill of fond regret, to the age which can no
longer be described as middle and is perhaps flattered by the epithet of
three-quartering. No doubt people go to those places yet, but Florindo
and Lindora have not been to any of them for so many summers that they
can hardly realize them as still open: for them they were closed in the
earliest of the eighteen-seventies.
After that, say the third summer of their marriage, it appeared to
Lindora essential to take board somewhere for the whole summer, at such
an easy distance that Florindo could run up or down or out every
Saturday afternoon and stay Sunday with her and the children; for there
had now begun to be children, who could not teethe in town, and for whom
the abundance of pure milk, small fruits, and fresh vegetables promised
with the shade and safety of the farm was really requisite. She kept the
house in town still open, as before, or rather half-open, for she left
only the cook in it to care for her husband, and do the family wash,
sent to and fro by express, while she took the second girl with her as
maid. In the first days of September, when the most enterprising of the
fresh vegetables were beginning to appear on the table, and the
mosquitoes were going, and the smell of old potatoes in the cellar and
rats in the walls was airing out, and she was getting used to the
peculiar undulations of her bed, she took the little teethers back to
town with her; and when she found her husband in the comfortable
dimensions of their own house, with melons and berries and tender steak,
and rich cream (such as never comes on "pure milk"), and hot and cold
baths, and no flies, she could not help feeling that he had been very
selfish. Now she understood, at least, why he never failed on Monday
morning to wake in time for the stage to carry him to the station, and
she said, No more farm-board for her if she knew it.
In those idyllic days, while they were making their way, and counting
the cost of every step as if it were the proverbial first step, the next
step for Lindora was a large boarding-house for the summer. She tried
it first in the country, and she tried it next at the seaside, with the
same number of feet of piazza in both cases, and with no distinct
difference except in the price. It was always dearer at the seaside, but
if it had been better she should not have thought it so dear. Yet, as it
was dearer, she could not help thinking it was better; and there was the
beach for the teethers to dig in, and there was an effect of superior
fashion in the gossipers on the piazza, one to every three of the three
hundred feet of the piazza, rocking and talking, and guessing at the
yachts in the offing, and then bathing and coming out to lie on the sand
and dry their hair.
At the farm she had paid seven dollars a week for herself, and
half-price for the children; at the country boarding-house she had paid
ten for herself, and again half-price for the children; at the seaside
boarding-house the rate for her was fourteen dollars, and nine for the
children and the maid. Everybody on the piazza said it was very cheap,
but to Lindora it was so dear that she decided for Florindo that they
could not go on keeping the house open and the cook in it just for him,
as the expressage on the wash took away all the saving in that. If she
allowed him to sleep in the house, he could pick up his meals for much
less than they now cost. They must not burn their candle at both ends;
he must put out his end. There was reason in this, because now Florindo
was sometimes kept so late at business that he could not get the last
train Saturday night for the beach, and he missed the Sunday with his
family on which she counted so much. Thinking these things over during
the ensuing winter, she began to divine, toward spring, that the only
thing for the teethers, and the true way for Florindo, was for her to
get away from the city to a good distance, where there would be a real
change of air, and that a moderate hotel in the White Mountains or the
Adirondacks was the only hopeful guess at their problem. If Florindo
could not come for Sunday when they were off only an hour or two, it
would be no worse for them to be seven or eight hours off. Florindo
agreed the more easily because he had now joined a club, where he got
his meals as comfortably as at home and quite as economically, counting
in the cook. He could get a room also at the club, and if they shut the
house altogether, and had it wired by the burglar-insurance company,
they would be cutting off a frightful drain.
It was, therefore, in the interest of clearly ascertained economy that
Lindora took her brood with her to a White Mountain hotel, where she
made a merit of getting board for seventeen dollars and a half a week,
when so many were paying twenty and twenty-five. Florindo came up twice
during the summer, and stayed a fortnight each time, and fished, and
said that it had been a complete rest. On the way back to town Lindora
stopped for October in one of those nice spring-and-fall places where
you put in the half-season which is so unwholesome in the city after a
long summer in the country, and afterward she always did this.
Fortunately, Florindo was prospering, and he could afford the increased
cost of this method of saving. The system was practised with great
success for four or five years, and then, suddenly, it failed.