fellows? What is there in the nature of literary or agricultural
achievement which justifies the outrage of his modest sense of
inadequacy? It is a preposterous performance, but it does not reach the
climax of its absurdity till the honored guest rises, with his mouth
filled with taffy, and, dripping drawn butter all over the place,
proceeds to ladle out from the lordly dish, restored to its place
before the chairman, a portion for each of the preceding speakers. He
may not feel quite like doing it. In their fierce rivalry of adulation,
some of them, in order to give fresh flavor to the taffy, may have
mingled a little vinegar with it. One may have said that the bantams of
the honored guest were not perhaps as small as some other bantams, but
that the colossal size of his shanghais was beyond parallel. Another may
have hinted, for the purpose of superiorly praising his masterly
treatment of the pip, that the diet of his hens was not such as to
impart to their eggs the last exquisite flavor demanded by the pampered
palate of the epicure. Another yet may have admitted that the honored
guest had not successfully grappled with the great question of how to
make hens lay every working-day of the year, and he may have done this
in order to heighten his grand climax that the man who teaches a hen to
lay an egg with two yolks where she laid eggs of but one yolk before is
a greater benefactor to the human race than all the inventors of all the
missiles of modern warfare. Such a poultry-farmer, he may have declared,
preparatory to taking his seat amid thunders of applause, is to other
poultry-farmers what the poet who makes the songs of a people is to the
boss who makes their laws. This sentiment may have been met with a
furore of acceptance, all the other guests leaning forward to look at
the honored guest and concentrate their applause upon him, as they
clapped and cheered, and one fine fellow springing to his feet and
shouting, "Here's to the man who made two-yolk eggs grow where one-yolk
eggs grew before."
Yet these artfully studied qualifications of the cloying sweet may have
been all of the taste of wormwood to the honored guest, who cared
nothing for his easy triumph with shanghais and the pip and these
two-yolk eggs, but prided himself on his bantams and his hen-food, and
was clinging to the hope that his discoveries in the higher education
would teach hens to observe the legal holidays if they could not be
taught to lay on every working-day, and was trusting to keep his measure
of failure a secret from the world. It would not do, however, to betray
anything of his vexation. That would be ungracious and ungrateful, and
so he must render back taffy for taffy, drawn butter for drawn butter,
till the whole place sticks and reeks with it.
Of course, the reader--especially if he has never been asked to a
personal dinner of this sort--will be saying that the fault is not with
the solemnity or its nature, but with the taste of those who conduct the
ceremony. He will no doubt be thinking that if he were ever made the
object of such a solemnity, or the chairman, or the least of the
speakers, he would manage differently. Very likely he will allege the
example of the Greeks, as we have it recorded in the accounts of the
banquet offered to Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and the
supper given to AEschylus on the hundredth performance of the _OEdipus_
of Sophocles.
The supper has always been considered rather a refinement upon the
banquet, in taste, as it was offered to the venerable poet not upon the
occasion of any achievement of his own, but in recognition of the
prolonged triumph of his brother dramatist, in which it was assumed that
he would feel a generous interest. The banquet to Themistocles was more
in the nature of a public rejoicing, for it celebrated a victory due as
much to the valor of all the Greeks as to the genius of the admiral; and
it could, therefore, be made more directly a compliment to him. Even
under these circumstances, however, the guest of the evening occupied an
inconspicuous place at the reporters' table, while he was represented
on the chairman's right by the bust of Poseidon, hastily modelled for
the occasion by Praxiteles, and dedicated to Themistocles, who was a
plain man, but whose portrait, even if he had been handsome, it was
thought would not have looked well in such a position at a time when
portrait-statuary was unknown. The only direct allusion to him was in
the opening toast, "The Dewey of Our Day," which was drunk sitting, the
guests rising from their recumbent postures in honor of it. The
chairman's opening address was almost wholly a plea for the enlargement
of the Athenian navy: the implication that the republic had been saved,
in spite of its inefficient armament, was accepted as the finest
possible compliment to the guest of the evening. The note of all the
other speeches was their exquisite impersonality. They got further and
further from the occasion of the evening, until the effort of
Demosthenes closed the speaking with a scathing denunciation of the
machine politicians who had involved the Athenians in a war with Persia
to further the interests of Sparta. It was held that this was the
noblest tribute which could be paid to the genius of the man who had
brought them safely out of it. As the company broke up, Diogenes with
his lantern approached Themistocles, who was giving the reporters copies
of the speech he had not been asked to deliver, and, after examining his
countenance with a sigh of disappointment, accompanied him home as far
as his own tub; Athens at that time being imperfectly lighted, and the
reform government having not yet replaced the street names wantonly
obliterated under the regime of the Thirty Tyrants.
At the supper to AEschylus the tablets of the menu were inscribed with
verses from the elder poet ingeniously chosen for their imaginable
reference to the masterpiece of the younger, whose modesty was
delicately spared at every point. It was a question whether the
committee managing the affair had not perhaps gone too far in giving the
supper while Sophocles was away from Athens staging the piece at
Corinth; but there was no division of opinion as to the taste with which
some of the details had been studied. It was considered a stroke of
inspiration to have on the speaker's left, where Sophocles would have
sat if he had been present at a supper given to AEschylus, the sitting
figure of Melpomene, crowned with rosemary for remembrance. No allusion
was made to AEschylus during the evening, after his health had been
proposed by the chairman and drunk in silence, but a great and exquisite
surprise was reserved for him in the matter of the speeches that
followed. By prior agreement among the speakers they were all ostensibly
devoted to the examination of the _OEdipus_ and the other dramas of
Sophocles, which in his absence were very frankly dealt with. But the
unsparing criticism of their defects was made implicitly to take the
character of appreciation of the AEschylus tragedies, whose good points
were all turned to the light without open mention of them. This afforded
the aged poet an opportunity of magnanimously defending his younger
_confrere_, and he rose to the occasion, beaming, as some one said, from
head to foot and oozing self-satisfaction at every pore. He could not
put from him the compliments not ostensibly directed at him, but he
could and did take up the criticisms of the Sophoclean drama, point by
point, and refute them in the interest of literature, with a masterly
elimination of himself and his own part in it. A Roman gentleman present
remarked that he had seen nothing like it, for sincere deprecation,
since Caesar had refused the thrice-offered crown on the Lupercal; and
the effect was that intended throughout--the supreme honor of AEschylus
in the guise of a tribute to Sophocles. The note of the whole affair was
struck by the comic poet Aristophanes, whom the chairman called upon to
make the closing speech of the evening, and who merely sat up long
enough to quote the old Attic proverb, "Gentlemen, there are many ways
to kill a dog besides choking him to death with butter," and then lay
down again amid shrieks of merriment from the whole company.
There is, perhaps, a middle course between the American and Athenian
ways of recognizing achievement in the arts or interests, or of
commemorating great public events. This would probably derive from each
certain advantages, or at least the ancient might temper the modern
world to a little more restraint than it now practises in the
celebration of private worth, especially. The public events may be more
safely allowed to take care of themselves, though it is to be questioned
whether it is well for any people to make overmuch of themselves. They
cannot do it without making themselves ridiculous, and perhaps making
themselves sick of what little real glory there is in any given affair;
they will have got that so inextricably mixed up with the vainglory that
they will have to reject the one to free themselves from the humiliating
memory of the other.
There is nothing that so certainly turns to shame in the retrospect as
vainglory, and this is what the personal dinner is chiefly supposed to
inspire in the victim of it. If he is at all honest with himself, and he
probably is before he can have done anything worthy of notice, he knows
perfectly well that he has not merited all if any of the fond flatteries
with which he is heaped, as he sits helpless with meat and drink, and
suffers under them with the fatuous smile which we all have seen and
which some of us have worn. But as the flatterers keep coming on and on,
each with his garland of tuberoses or sunflowers, he begins to think
that there must be some fire where there is so much smoke, and to feel
the glow of the flame which he is not able exactly to locate. He burns
in sympathy with his ardent votaries, he becomes inevitably a partner in
his own apotheosis. It is the office of the sad, cold morrow, and the
sadder and colder after-morrows, to undo this illusion, to compress his
head to the measure of his hat, to remove the drawn butter from his
soul.
They may never wholly succeed, but this is not probable, and it is not
against a permanent _folie des grandeurs_ that we need seek to guard the
victim of a personal dinner. We have, indeed, so much faith in the
ultimate discretion of the race that we should be quite willing to
intrust the remarkable man himself with the office of giving himself a
public dinner when he felt that his work merited signal recognition. In
this way the whole affair could be kept within bounds. He could strike
the note, he could set the pace, in his opening address; and, having
appointed the speakers, with a full knowledge of their honesty and
subordination, he could trust the speeches to be sane and temperate. In
calling the speakers successively up, he could protest against anything
that seemed excessive eulogy in the words already spoken, and could
invite a more modest estimate of his qualities and achievements in the
speeches to follow.
X
A DAY AT BRONX PARK
In the beginning of the season which is called Silly in the world of
journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and
the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something
to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in
search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were that
the Easy Chair should not exact material of weight or importance, but
should gratefully accept whatever they brought back to it, and make the
most of it. On these terms they set out on their labor of love.
* * * * *
By the time the sun had quitted the face of the vast apartment-house on
which the day habitually broke, and had gone about its business of
lighting and heating the city roofs and streets, the holiday companions
were well on their way up the Third Avenue Elevated toward that region
of the Bronx which, in all their New York years, they had never yet
visited. They exulted at each stop and start of the train in the long
succession of streets which followed so fast upon one another that the
guards gave up trying to call them out as a hundred-and-so-many, and
simply said Fifty-fifth, and Sixty-sixth, and Seventy-seventh Street.
This slight of their duty to the public comported agreeably with the
slip-shod effectiveness of the whole apparatus of the New York life:
the rows and rows of shops, the rows and rows of flats, the rows and
rows of back yards with miles of wash flying in the soft May wind,
which, probably, the people in the open car ahead felt almost a gale.
When the train got as far as the composite ugliness of the ships and
tugs and drawbridges of Harlem River, the companions accepted the
ensemble as picturesqueness, and did not require beauty of it. Once they
did get beauty in a certain civic building which fronted the track and
let fall a double stairway from its level in a way to recall the Spanish
Steps and to get itself likened to the Trinita de' Monti at Rome.
It was, of course, like that only in their fond remembrance, but this
was not the only Roman quality in their cup of pleasure that day; and
they did not care to inquire whether it was merely the flavoring extract
of fancy, or was a genuine infusion from the Italian sky overhead, the
classic architectural forms, the loosely straggling grass, the flowering
woods, the rapture of the birds, the stretches of the river, the
tumbling rapids, which so delicately intoxicated them. There was a
certain fountain gave a peculiar authenticity to their pleasure, as of
some assurance blown in the bottle from which their joy-draught was
poured. Nowhere else but in Rome could they have imagined such a group
of bronze men and maidens and web-footed horses struggling so bravely,
so aimlessly (except to show their figures), in a shallow bowl from
which the water spilled so unstintedly over white marble brims beginning
to paint themselves palely green.
At the end of their glad day this fountain came last of the things that
made Bronx Park such a paradise for eight hours; though it might have
been their first delight if they had taken one way about instead of
another in their tour of the large, easy pleasance. But suddenly at
half-past eleven they found themselves ravenously hungry, and demanded
to be driven to the best restaurant by the shortest way that the mild
youth whom they fell to at once inside the park gate could find.
He had the very horse he ought to have had--old, weary, infirm, decently
hiding its disabilities under a blanket, and, when this was stripped
away, confessing them in a start so reluctant that they had to be
explained as the stiffness natural to any young, strong, and fresh horse
from resting too long. It did, in fact, become more animated as time
went on, and perhaps it began to take an interest in the landscape left
so charmingly wild wherever it could be. It apparently liked being alive
there with its fares, kindred spirits, who could appreciate the privacy
of a bland Monday after the popular outing of the day before. Almost
nobody else was in the park. For a time they noted only a young fellow
with a shut book in his hand taking his way up a woody slope and fading
into a green shadow; but presently they came to a grassy point running
down to the road, where, under a tree, there was a young mother sitting
with an open book in her lap, and, a little way from her outstretched
little foot, her baby asleep in the smallest of go-carts--the
collapsible sort that you can fold and carry in the cars and then unfold
for use when you come to the right place. The baby had a white
sunbonnet, and a thick fringe of her straw-colored hair came out over
her forehead under it, and when the companions smiled together at the
baby, and the horse intelligently faltered, the young mother fluttered
the idle leaves of her book with her hand and smiled back at them, and
took the credit of the little one, not unkindly, yet proudly. They
said it was all as nice as it could be, and they were still so content
in her and her baby that, when they had to drive out of the park to
cross a street to the section where the restaurant and the menagerie
were, they waited deferentially for a long, long funeral to get by. They
felt pity for the bereaved, and then admiration for people who could
afford to have so many carriages; and they made their driver ask the
mounted policeman whose funeral it was. He addressed the policeman by
name, and the companions felt included in the circle of an acquaintance
where a good deal of domesticity seemed to prevail. The policeman would
not join in the conjecture that it was some distinguished person; he did
not give his reasons; and the pair began to fret at their delay, and
mentally to hurry that poor unknown underground--so short is our
patience with the dead! When at last their driver went up round the
endless queue of hacks, it suddenly came to an end, and they were again
in the park and among the cages and pens and ranges of the animals, in
the midst of which their own restaurant appeared. An Italian band of
mandolins and guitars was already at noonday softly murmuring and
whimpering in the corner of the veranda where the tables were set; and
they got an amiable old waiter, whose fault it was not if spring-lamb
matures so early in the summer of its brief term as to seem
last-fall-lamb. There is no good reason either to suppose he did not
really believe in the pease. But why will pease that know they have been
the whole winter in the can pretend to be just out of the pod? Doubtless
it is for every implication that all vegetation is of one ichor with
humanity; but the waiter was honester than the pease. He telephoned for
two wheeled chairs, and then said he had countermanded them because
they would be half an hour coming; but again he telephoned, for by this
time the pair had learned that they might drive into the zoological
grounds, but not drive round them; and they saw from the window the sun
smoking hot on the asphalt paths their feet must press.
[Illustration: ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK]
While the chairs lingered on the way, they went to get what comfort they
could from the bears, whose house was near at hand. They might well have
learned patience here from a bear trying to cope with a mocking cask in
a pool. He pushed it under the water with his paw and held it hard down;
when he turned away as if _that_ cask were done for, there it was
bobbing about on the surface, and he had to down it again and hold it
under till life seemed extinct. At last he gave it up and left it
floating in triumph, but one could infer with what perseverance he would
renew the struggle presently.
There might have been too many bears; but this was the fault of all
their fellow-captives except perhaps the elephants. One cannot really
have enough of elephants; and one would have liked a whole herd of
giraffes, and a whole troop of gnus would not have glutted one's
pleasure in their goat-faces, cow-heads, horse-tails, and pig-feet. But
why so many snakes of a kind? Why such a multiplicity of crocodiles? Why
even more than one of that special pattern of Mexican iguana which
looked as if cut out of zinc and painted a dull Paris green? Why, above
all, so many small mammals?
Small mammals was the favorite phrase of the friendly colored chairman,
who by this time had appeared with an old-soldier comrade and was
pushing the companions about from house to house and cage to cage. Small
mammals, he warned them, were of an offensive odor, and he was right;
but he was proud of them and of such scientific knowledge of them as he
had. The old soldier did not pretend to have any such knowledge. He fell
into a natural subordination, and let his colored superior lead the way
mostly, though he asserted the principle that this is a white man's
country by pushing first to the lions' house instead of going to the
flying-cage, as his dark comrade instructed him.
It was his sole revolt. "But what," we hear the reader asking, "is the
flying-cage?" We have not come to that yet; we are lingering still at
the lions' house, where two of the most amiable lions in the world
smilingly illustrate the effect of civilization in such of their savage
species as are born in the genial captivity of Bronx Park. We are
staying a moment in the cool stone stable of the elephants and the
rhinoceroses and the hippopotamuses; we are fondly clinging to the wires
of the cages where the hermit-thrushes, snatched from their loved
solitude and mixed with an indiscriminate company of bolder birds, tune
their angelic notes only in a tentative staccato; we are standing rapt
before the awful bell-bird ringing his sharp, unchanging, unceasing
peal, as unconscious of us as if he had us in the heart of his tropical
forest; we are waiting for the mighty blue Brazilian macaw to catch our
names and syllable them to the shrieking, shrilling, snarling society of
parrots trapezing and acrobating about him; we are even stopping to see
the white peahen wearing her heart out and her tail out against her
imprisoning wires; we are delaying to let the flying-cage burst upon us
in the unrivalled immensity promised. That is, we are doing all this in
the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the
cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated
upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and
wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other
water-fowl soars and swims. It was well, they felt, to have had this
kept for the last, with its great lesson of a communistic captivity in
which all nations of men might be cooped together in amity and equality,
instead of being, as now, shut up each in his own cell of need and fear.
Not having come in an automobile, the companions were forced by an
invidious regulation to find their carriage outside the gate of the
Concourse; but neither the horse nor the driver seemed to feel the
slight of the discrimination. They started off to complete the round of
the park with all their morning cheerfulness and more; for they had now
added several dollars to their tariff of charges by the delay of their
fares, and they might well be gayer. Their fares did not refuse to share
their mood, and when they crossed the Bronx and came into the region of
the walks and drives they were even gayer than their horse and man.
These were more used to the smooth level of the river where it stretched
itself out between its meadowy shores and mirrored the blue heaven,
rough with dusky white clouds, in its bosom; they could not feel, as
their fares did, the novelty in the beauty of that hollow, that wide
grassy cup by which they drove, bathed in the flowery and blossomy
sweetness that filled it to its wood-bordered brim.
But what is the use of counting one by one the joys of a day so richly
jewelled with delight? Rather let us heap them at once in the reader's
lap and not try to part the recurrence of the level-branched dogwoods in
bloom; the sunny and the shadowy reaches of the woods still in the
silken filminess of their fresh young leaves; the grass springing
slenderly, tenderly on the unmown slopes of the roadsides, or giving up
its life in spicy sweetness from the scythe; the gardeners pausing from
their leisurely employ, and once in the person of their foreman touching
their hats to the companions; the wistaria-garlanded cottage of the
keeper of the estate now ceded to the city; the Gothic stable of the
former proprietor looking like a Gothic chapel in its dell; the stone
mansion on its height opening to curiosity a vague collection of
minerals, and recalling with its dim, hardwood interior the ineffectual
state of a time already further outdated than any colonial prime; the
old snuff-mill of the founders, hard by; the dam breaking into foam in
the valley below; the rustic bridge crossing from shore to shore, with
steel-engraving figures leaning on its parapet and other steel-engraving
presences by the water's brink.
The supreme charm is that you are so free to all things in that generous
park; that you may touch them and test them by every sense; that you may
stray among the trees, and lie down upon the grass, and possess yourself
indiscriminately of them quite as if they were your own.
They are indeed yours in the nobler sense of public proprietorship which
will one day, no doubt, supersede all private ownership. You have your
share of the lands and waters, the birds in the cages and the beasts,
from the lions and elephants in their palaces, and the giraffes freely
browsing and grazing in their paddock, down to the smallest of the small
mammals giving their odor in their pens. You have as much right as
another to the sculptures (all hand-carved, as your colored chairman
will repeatedly tell you) on the mansions of the lordlier brutes, and
there is none to dispute your just portion of the Paris-green zinc
iguana, for you have helped pay for them all.
The key-word of this reflection makes you anxious to find whether your
driver will make you pay him too much, but when you tot up the hours by
his tariff, and timidly suggest that it will be so many dollars and
offer him a bill for the same, he surprises you by saying, No, he owes
you fifty cents on that; and paying it back.