I do not recall a feeling of greater triumph than on last Saturday when
I walked off the eighteenth green of the Country Club with my opponent
four down. I have the card before me now with its pleasant row of fives
and sixes, and a four, _and a three_. Usually my card has mounted here
and there to an eight or nine, or I have blown up altogether in a
sandpit. Like Byron--but, oh, how differently!--I have wandered in the
pathless wood. Like Ruth I have stood in tears amid the alien corn.
In those old days--only a week ago, but dim already (so soon does time
wash the memory white)--in those old days, if I were asked to make up a
foursome, some green inferior fellow, a novice who used his sister's
clubs, was paired against me; or I was insulted with two strokes a hole,
with three on the long hole past the woods. But now I shall ascend to
faster company. It was my elbow. I now square it and cock it forward a
bit. And I am cured. Keep your head down, Fritzie Boy, I say. Mind your
elbow--I say it aloud--and I have no trouble.
There is a creek across the course. Like a thread in the woof it cuts
the web of nearly every green. It is a black strand that puts trouble in
the pattern, an evil thread from Clotho's ancient loom. Up at the sixth
hole this creek is merely a dirty rivulet and I can get out of the
damned thing--one must write, they say, as one talks and not go on
stilts--I can get out with a niblick by splashing myself a bit. But even
here, in its tender youth, as it were, the rivulet makes all the
mischief that it can. Gargantua with his nurses was not so great a
rogue. It crawls back and forth three times before the tee with a kind
of jeering tongue stuck out. It seems foredoomed from the cradle to a
villainous course. Farther down, at the seventeenth and second holes,
which are near together, it cuts a deeper chasm. The bank is shale and
steep. As I drive I feel like a black sinner on the nearer shore of
Styx, gazing upon the sunny fields of Paradise beyond. I put my caddy at
the top of the slope, where he sits with his apathetic eye upon the
sullen, predestined pool.
But since last Saturday all is different. I sailed across on every
drive, on every approach. The depths beckoned but I heeded not. And,
when I walked across the bridge, I snapped my fingers in contempt, as at
a dog that snarls safely on a leash.
I play best with a niblick. It is not entirely that I use it most. (Any
day you can hear me bawling to my caddy to fetch it behind a bunker or
beyond a fence.) Rather, the surface of the blade turns up at a
reassuring, hopeful angle. Its shining eye seems cast at heaven in a
prayer. I have had spells, also, of fondness for my mashie. It is fluted
for a back-spin. Except for the click and flight of a prosperous drive I
know nothing of prettier symmetry than an accurate approach. But my
brassie I consider a reckless creature. It has bad direction. It treads
not in the narrow path. I have driven. Good! For once I am clear of the
woods. That white speck on the fairway is my ball. But shall my ambition
o'erleap itself? Shall I select my brassie and tempt twice the gods of
chance? No! I'll use my mashie. I'll creep up to the hole on hands and
knees and be safe from trap and ditch.
Has anyone spent more time than I among the blackberry bushes along the
railroad tracks on the eleventh? It is no grossness of appetite. My
niblick grows hot with its exertions.
Once our course was not beset with sandpits. In those bright days woods
and gulley were enough. Once clear of the initial obstruction I could
roll up unimpeded to the green. I practiced a bouncing stroke with my
putter that offered security at twenty yards. But now these approaches
are guarded by traps. The greens are balanced on little mountains with
sharp ditches all about. I hoist up from one to fall into another. "What
a word, my son, has passed the barrier of your teeth!" said Athene once
to Odysseus. Is the game so ancient? Were there sandpits, also, on the
hills of stony Ithaca? Or in Ortygia, sea-girt? Was the dear wanderer
off his game and fallen to profanity? The white-armed nymph Calypso must
have stuffed her ears.
But now my troubles are behind me. I have cured my elbow of its fault. I
keep my head down. My very clubs have taken on a different look since
Saturday. I used to remark their nicks against the stones. A bit of
green upon the heel of my driver showed how it was that I went sidewise
to the woods. In those days I carried the bag spitefully to the shower.
Could I leave it, I pondered, as a foundling in an empty locker? Or
should I strangle it? But now all is changed. My clubs are servants to
my will, kindly, obedient creatures that wait upon my nod. Even my
brassie knows me for its master. And the country seems fairer. The
valleys smile at me. The creek is friendly to my drive. The tall hills
skip and clap their hands at my approach. My game needs only thought and
care. My fives will become fours, my sixes slip down to fives. And here
and there I shall have a three.
Except for a row of books my mantelpiece is bare. Who knows? Some day I
may sweep off a musty row of history and set up a silver cup.
Later--Saturday again. I have just been around in 123. Horrible! I was
in the woods and in the blackberry bushes, and in the creek seven times.
My envious brassie! My well-beloved mashie! Oh, vile conspiracy!
Ambition's debt is paid. 123! Now--now it's my shoulder.
[Illustration]
The Posture of Authors.
There is something rather pleasantly suggestive in the fashion employed
by many of the older writers of inscribing their books from their
chambers or lodging. It gives them at once locality and circumstance. It
brings them to our common earth and understanding. Thomas Fuller, for
example, having finished his Church History of Britain, addressed his
reader in a preface from his chambers in Sion College. "May God alone
have the glory," he writes, "and the ingenuous reader the benefit, of my
endeavors! which is the hearty desire of Thy servant in Jesus Christ,
Thomas Fuller."
One pictures a room in the Tudor style, with oak wainscot, tall
mullioned windows and leaded glass, a deep fireplace and black beams
above. Outside, perhaps, is the green quadrangle of the college,
cloistered within ancient buildings, with gay wall--flowers against the
sober stones. Bells answer from tower to belfry in agreeable dispute
upon the hour. They were cast in a quieter time and refuse to bicker on
a paltry minute. The sunlight is soft and yellow with old age. Such a
dedication from such a place might turn the most careless reader into
scholarship. In the seat of its leaded windows even the quirk of a Latin
sentence might find a meaning. Here would be a room in which to meditate
on the worthies of old England, or to read a chronicle of forgotten
kings, queens, and protesting lovers who have faded into night.
Here we see Thomas Fuller dip his quill and make a start. "I have
sometimes solitarily pleased myself," he begins, and he gazes into the
dark shadows of the room, seeing, as it were, the pleasant spectres of
the past. Bishops of Britain, long dead, in stole and mitre, forgetful
of their solemn office, dance in the firelight on his walls. Popes move
in dim review across his studies and shake a ghostly finger at his
heresy. The past is not a prude. To her lover she reveals her beauty.
And the scholar's lamp is her marriage torch.
Nor need it entirely cool our interest to learn that Sion College did
not slope thus in country fashion to the peaceful waters of the Cam,
with its fringe of trees and sunny meadow; did not possess even a gothic
tower and cloister. It was built on the site of an ancient priory,
Elsing Spital, with almshouses attached, a Jesuit library and a college
for the clergy. It was right in London, down near the Roman wall, in the
heart of the tangled traffic, and street cries kept breaking
in--muffins, perhaps, and hot spiced gingerbread and broken glass. I
hope, at least, that the good gentleman's rooms were up above, somewhat
out of the clatter, where muffins had lost their shrillness.
Gingerbread, when distance has reduced it to a pleasant tune, is not
inclined to rouse a scholar from his meditation. And even broken glass
is blunted on a journey to a garret. I hope that the old gentleman
climbed three flights or more and that a range of chimney-pots was his
outlook and speculation.
It seems as if a rather richer flavor were given to a book by knowing
the circumstance of its composition. Not only would we know the
complexion of a man, whether he "be a black or a fair man," as Addison
suggests, "of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor,"
but also in what posture he works and what objects meet his eye when he
squares his elbows and dips his pen. We are concerned whether sunlight
falls upon his papers or whether he writes in shadow. Also, if an
author's desk stands at a window, we are curious whether it looks on a
street, or on a garden, or whether it squints blindly against a wall. A
view across distant hills surely sweetens the imagination, whereas the
clatter of the city gives a shrewder twist to fancy.
And household matters are of proper concern. We would like to be
informed whether an author works in the swirl of the common
sitting-room. If he writes within earshot of the kitchen, we should know
it. There has been debate whether a steam radiator chills a poet as
against an open fire, and whether a plot keeps up its giddy pace upon a
sweeping day. Histories have balked before a household interruption.
Novels have been checked by the rattle of a careless broom. A smoky
chimney has choked the sturdiest invention.
If a plot goes slack perhaps it is a bursted pipe. An incessant grocer's
boy, unanswered on the back porch, has often foiled the wicked Earl in
his attempts against the beautiful Pomona. Little did you think, my dear
madam, as you read your latest novel, that on the very instant when the
heroine, Mrs. Elmira Jones, deserted her babies to follow her conscience
and become a movie actress--that on that very instant when she slammed
the street door, the plumber (the author's plumber) came in to test the
radiator. Mrs. Jones nearly took her death on the steps as she waited
for the plot to deal with her. Even a Marquis, now and then, one of the
older sort in wig and ruffles, has been left--when the author's ashes
have needed attention--on his knees before the Lady Emily, begging her
to name the happy day.
Was it not Coleridge's cow that calved while he was writing "Kubla
Khan"? In burst the housemaid with the joyful news. And that man from
Porlock--mentioned in his letters--who came on business? Did he not
despoil the morning of its poetry? Did Wordsworth's pigs--surely he
owned pigs--never get into his neighbor's garden and need quick
attention? Martin Luther threw his inkpot, supposedly, at the devil. Is
it not more likely that it was at Annie, who came to dust? Thackeray is
said to have written largely at his club, the Garrick or the Athenaeum.
There was a general stir of feet and voices, but it was foreign and did
not plague him. A tinkle of glasses in the distance, he confessed, was
soothing, like a waterfall.
Steele makes no complaint against his wife Prue, but he seems to have
written chiefly in taverns. In the very first paper of the _Tatler_ he
gratifies our natural curiosity by naming the several coffee-houses
where he intends to compose his thoughts. "Foreign and domestic news,"
he says, "you will have from Saint James's Coffee-House." Learning will
proceed from the Grecian. But "all accounts of gallantry, pleasure and
entertainment shall be under the article of White's Chocolate-House." In
the month of September, 1705, he continues, a gentleman "was washing his
teeth at a tavern window in Pall Mall, when a fine equipage passed by,
and in it, a young lady who looked up at him; away goes the coach--"
Away goes the beauty, with an alluring smile--rather an ambiguous smile,
I'm afraid--across her silken shoulder. But for the continuation of this
pleasant scandal (you may be sure that the pretty fellow was quite
distracted from his teeth) one must turn up the yellow pages of the
_Tatler_.
We may suppose that Steele called for pens and paper and a sandbox, and
took a table in one of White's forward windows. He wished no garden view
or brick wall against the window. We may even go so far as to assume
that something in the way of punch, or canary, or negus _luke_, _my
dear_, was handy at his elbow. His paragraphs are punctuated by the gay
procession of the street. Here goes a great dandy in red heels, with
lace at his beard and wrists. Here is a scarlet captain who has served
with Marlborough and has taken a whole regiment of Frenchmen by the
nose. Here is the Lady Belinda in her chariot, who is the pledge of all
the wits and poets. That little pink ear of hers has been rhymed in a
hundred sonnets--ear and tear and fear and near and dear. The King has
been toasted from her slipper. The pretty creature has been sitting at
ombre for most of the night, but now at four of the afternoon she takes
the morning air with her lap dog. That great hat and feather will slay
another dozen hearts between shop and shop. She is attended by a female
dragon, but contrives by accident to show an inch or so of charming
stocking at the curb. Steele, at his window, I'm afraid, forgets for the
moment his darling Prue and his promise to be home.
There is something rather pleasant in knowing where these old authors,
who are now almost forgotten, wrote their books. Richardson wrote
"Clarissa" at Parson's Green. That ought not to interest us very much,
for nobody reads "Clarissa" now. But we can picture the fat little
printer reading his daily batch of tender letters from young ladies,
begging him to reform the wicked Lovelace and turn the novel to a happy
end. For it was issued in parts and so, of course, there was no
opportunity for young ladies, however impatient, to thumb the back pages
for the plot.
Richardson wrote "Pamela" at a house called the Grange, then in the open
country just out of London. There was a garden at the back, and a
grotto--one of the grottoes that had been the fashion for prosperous
literary gentlemen since Pope had built himself one at Twickenham. Here,
it is said, Richardson used to read his story, day by day, as it was
freshly composed, to a circle of his lady admirers. Hugh Thompson has
drawn the picture in delightful silhouette. The ladies listen in
suspense--perhaps the wicked Master is just taking Pamela on his
knee--their hands are raised in protest. La! The Monster! Their noses
are pitched up to a high excitement. One old lady hangs her head and
blushes at the outrage. Or does she cock her ear to hear the better?
Richardson had a kind of rocking-horse in his study and he took his
exercise so between chapters. We may imagine him galloping furiously on
the hearth--rug, then, quite refreshed, after four or five dishes of
tea, hiding his villain once more under Pamela's bed. Did it never occur
to that young lady to lift the valance? Half a dozen times at least he
has come popping out after she has loosed her stays, once even when she
has got her stockings off. Perhaps this is the dangerous moment when the
old lady in the silhouette hung her head and blushed. If Pamela had gone
rummaging vigorously with a poker beneath her bed she could have cooled
her lover.
Goldsmith wrote his books, for the most part, in lodgings. We find him
starving with the beggars in Axe Lane, advancing to Green Arbour
Court--sending down to the cook-shop for a tart to make his
supper--living in the Temple, as his fortunes mended. Was it not at his
window in the Temple that he wrote part of his "Animated Nature"? His
first chapter--four pages--is called a sketch of the universe. In four
pages he cleared the beginning up to Adam. Could anything be simpler or
easier? The clever fellow, no doubt, could have made the
universe--actually made it out of chaos--stars and moon and fishes in
the sea--in less than the allotted six days and not needed a rest upon
the seventh. He could have gone, instead, in plum-colored coat--"in full
fig"--to Vauxhall for a frolic. Goldsmith had nothing in particular
outside of his window to look at but the stone flagging, a pump and a
solitary tree. Of the whole green earth this was the only living thing.
For a brief season a bird or two lodged there, and you may be sure that
Goldsmith put the remnant of his crumbs upon the window casement.
Perhaps it was here that he sent down to the cook-shop for a tart, and
he and the birds made a common banquet across the glass.
Poets, depending on their circumstance, are supposed to write either in
garrets or in gardens. Browning, it is true, lived at Casa Guidi, which
was "yellow with sunshine from morning to evening," and here and there a
prosperous Byron has a Persian carpet and mahogany desk. But, for the
most part, we put our poets in garrets, as a cheap place that has the
additional advantage of being nearest to the moon. From these high
windows sonnets are thrown, on a windy night. Rhymes and fancies are
roused by gazing on the stars. The rumble of the lower city is potent to
start a metaphor. "These fringes of lamplight," it is written,
"struggling up through smoke and thousandfold exhalation, some fathoms
into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads
his Hunting-dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? That
stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest...."
Here, under a sloping roof, the poet sits, blowing at his fingers.
Hogarth has drawn him--the _Distressed Poet_--cold and lean and shabby.
That famous picture might have been copied from the life of any of a
hundred creatures of "The Dunciad," and, with a change of costume, it
might serve our time as well. The poor fellow sits at a broken table in
the dormer. About him lie his scattered sheets. His wife mends his
breeches. Outside the door stands a woman with the unpaid milk-score.
There is not a penny in the place--and for food only half a loaf and
something brewing in a kettle. You may remember that when Johnson was a
young poet, just come to London, he lived with Mr. Cave in St. John's
Gate. When there were visitors he ate his supper behind a screen because
he was too shabby to show himself. I wonder what definition he gave the
poet in his dictionary. If he wrote in his own experience, he put him
down as a poor devil who was always hungry. But Chatterton actually died
of starvation in a garret, and those other hundred poets of his time and
ours got down to the bone and took to coughing. Perhaps we shall change
our minds about that sonnet which we tossed lightly to the moon. The
wind thrusts a cold finger through chink and rag. The stars travel on
such lonely journeys. The jest loses its relish. Perhaps those merry
verses to the Christmas--the sleigh bells and the roasted goose--perhaps
those verses turn bitter when written on an empty stomach.
But do poets ever write in gardens? Swift, who was by way of being a
poet, built himself a garden-seat at Moor Park when he served Sir
William Temple, but I don't know that he wrote poetry there. Rather, it
was a place for reading. Pope in his prosperous days wrote at
Twickenham, with the sound of his artificial waterfall in his ears, and
he walked to take the air in his grotto along the Thames. But do poets
really wander beneath the moon to think their verses? Do they compose
"on summer eve by haunted stream"? I doubt whether Gray conceived his
Elegy in an actual graveyard. I smell oil. One need not see the thing
described upon the very moment. Shelley wrote of mountains--the awful
range of Caucasus--but his eye at the time looked on sunny Italy. Ibsen
wrote of the north when living in the south. When Bunyan wrote of the
Delectable Mountains he was snug inside a jail. Shakespeare, doubtless,
saw the giddy cliffs of Dover, the Rialto, the Scottish heath, from the
vantage of a London lodging.
Where did Andrew Marvell stand or sit or walk when he wrote about
gardens? Wordsworth is said to have strolled up and down a gravel path
with his eyes on the ground. I wonder whether the gardener ever broke
in--if he had a gardener--to complain about the drouth or how the
dandelions were getting the better of him. Or perhaps the lawn-mower
squeaked--if he had a lawn-mower--and threw him off. But wasn't it
Wordsworth who woke up four times in one night and called to his wife
for pens and paper lest an idea escape him? Surely he didn't take to the
garden at that time of night in his pajamas with an inkpot. But did
Wordsworth have a wife? How one forgets! Coleridge told Hazlitt that he
liked to compose "walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the
straggling branches of a copse-wood." But then, you recall that a calf
broke into "Kubla Khan." On that particular day, at least, he was snug
in his study.
No, I think that poets may like to sit in gardens and smoke their pipes
and poke idly with their sticks, but when it comes actually to composing
they would rather go inside. For even a little breeze scatters their
papers. No poet wishes to spend his precious morning chasing a frisky
sonnet across the lawn. Even a heavy epic, if lifted by a sudden squall,
challenges the swiftest foot. He puts his stick on one pile and his pipe
on another and he holds down loose sheets with his thumb. But it is
awkward business, and it checks the mind in its loftier flight.
Nor do poets care to suck their pencils too long where someone may see
them--perhaps Annie at the window rolling her pie-crust. And they can't
kick off their shoes outdoors in the hot agony of composition. And also,
which caps the argument, a garden is undeniably a sleepy place. The bees
drone to a sleepy tune. The breeze practices a lullaby. Even the
sunlight is in the common conspiracy. At the very moment when the poet
is considering Little Miss Muffet and how she sat on a tuffet--doubtless
in a garden, for there were spiders--even at the very moment when she
sits unsuspectingly at her curds and whey, down goes the poet's head and
he is fast asleep. Sleepiness is the plague of authors. You may remember
that when Christian--who, doubtless, was an author in his odd
moments--came to the garden and the Arbour on the Hill Difficulty, "he
pulled his Roll out of his bosom and read therein to his comfort....
Thus pleasing himself awhile, he at last fell into a slumber." I have no
doubt--other theories to the contrary--that "Kubla Khan" broke off
suddenly because Coleridge dropped off to sleep. A cup of black coffee
might have extended the poem to another stanza. Mince pie would have
stretched it to a volume. Is not Shakespeare allowed his forty winks?
Has it not been written that even the worthy Homer nods?
"A pleasing land of drowsyhed it was:
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer sky."
No, if one has a bit of writing to put out of the way, it is best to
stay indoors. Choose an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair. Toss the
sheets into a careless litter. And if someone will pay the milk-score
and keep the window mended, a garret is not a bad place in which to
write.
Novelists--unless they have need of history--can write anywhere, I
suppose, at home or on a journey. In the burst of their hot imagination
a knee is a desk. I have no doubt that Mr. Hugh Walpole, touring in this
country, contrives to write a bit even in a Pullman. The ingenious Mr.
Oppenheim surely dashes off a plot on the margin of the menu-card
between meat and salad. We know that "Pickwick Papers" was written
partly in hackney coaches while Dickens was jolting about the town.
An essayist, on the other hand, needs a desk and a library near at hand.
Because an essay is a kind of back-stove cookery. A novel needs a hot
fire, so to speak. A dozen chapters bubble in their turn above the
reddest coals, while an essay simmers over a little flame. Pieces of
this and that, an odd carrot, as it were, a left potato, a pithy bone,
discarded trifles, are tossed in from time to time to enrich the
composition. Raw paragraphs, when they have stewed all night, at last
become tender to the fork. An essay, therefore, cannot be written
hurriedly on the knee. Essayists, as a rule, chew their pencils. Their
desks are large and are always in disorder. There is a stack of books on
the clock shelf. Others are pushed under the bed. Matches, pencils and
bits of paper mark a hundred references. When an essayist goes out from
his lodging he wears the kind of overcoat that holds a book in every
pocket. His sagging pockets proclaim him. He is a bulging person, so
stuffed, even in his dress, with the ideas of others that his own
leanness is concealed. An essayist keeps a notebook, and he thumbs it
for forgotten thoughts. Nobody is safe from him, for he steals from
everyone he meets.
An essayist is not a mighty traveler. He does not run to grapple with a
roaring lion. He desires neither typhoon nor tempest. He is content in
his harbor to listen to the storm upon the rocks, if now and then, by a
lucky chance, he can shelter someone from the wreck. His hands are not
red with revolt against the world. He has glanced upon the thoughts of
many men; and as opposite philosophies point upon the truth, he is
modest with his own and tolerant toward the opinion of others. He looks
at the stars and, knowing in what a dim immensity we travel, he writes
of little things beyond dispute. There are enough to weep upon the
shadows, he, like a dial, marks the light. The small clatter of the city
beneath his window, the cry of peddlers, children chalking their games
upon the pavement, laundry dancing on the roofs and smoke in the
winter's wind--these are the things he weaves into the fabric of his
thoughts. Or sheep upon the hillside--if his window is so lucky--or a
sunny meadow, is a profitable speculation. And so, while the novelist is
struggling up a dizzy mountain, straining through the tempest to see the
kingdoms of the world, behold the essayist snug at home, content with
little sights. He is a kind of poet--a poet whose wings are clipped. He
flaps to no great heights and sees neither the devil, the seven oceans
nor the twelve apostles. He paints old thoughts in shiny varnish and, as
he is able, he mends small habits here and there. And therefore, as
essayists stay at home, they are precise--almost amorous--in the posture
and outlook of their writing. Leigh Hunt wished a great library next his
study. "But for the study itself," he writes, "give me a small snug
place, almost entirely walled with books. There should be only one
window in it looking upon trees." How the precious fellow scorns the
mountains and the ocean! He has no love, it seems, for typhoons and
roaring lions. "I entrench myself in my books," he continues, "equally
against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I
look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my
movables." And by movables he means his books. These were his screen
against cold and trouble. But Leigh Hunt had been in prison for his
political beliefs. He had grappled with his lion. So perhaps, after all,
my argument fails.
Mr. Edmund Gosse had a different method to the same purpose. He "was so
anxious to fly all outward noise" that he desired a library apart from
the house. Maybe he had had some experience with Annie and her
clattering broomstick. "In my sleep," he writes, "'Where dreams are
multitude' I sometimes fancy that one day I shall have a library in a
garden. The phrase seems to contain the whole felicity of man.... It
sounds like having a castle in Spain, or a sheep-walk in Arcadia."
Montaigne's study was a tower, walled all about with books. At his table
in the midst he was the general focus of their wisdom. Hazlitt wrote
much at an inn at Winterslow, with Salisbury Plain around the corner of
his view. Now and then, let us hope, when the London coach was due, he
received in his nostrils a savory smell from the kitchen stove. I taste
pepper, sometimes, and sharp sauces in his writing. Stevenson, except
for ill-health and a love of the South Seas (here was the novelist
showing himself), would have preferred a windy perch over--looking
Edinburgh.
It does seem as if a rather richer flavor were given to a book by
knowing the circumstance of its composition. Consequently, readers, as
they grow older, turn more and more to biography. It is chiefly not the
biographies that deal with great crises and events, but rather the
biographies that are concerned with small circumstance and agreeable
gossip, that attract them most. The life of Gladstone, with its hard
facts of British policy, is all very well; but Mr. Lucas's life of Lamb
is better. Who would willingly neglect the record of a Thursday night at
Inner Temple Lane? In these pages Talfourd, Procter, Hazlitt and Hunt
have written their memories of these gatherings. It was to his partner
at whist, as he was dealing, that Lamb once said, "If dirt was trumps,
what hands you would hold!" Nights of wit and friendly banter! Who would
not crowd his ears with gossip of that mirthful company?--George Dyer,
who forgot his boots until half way home (the dear fellow grew forgetful
as the smoking jug went round)--Charles Lamb feeling the stranger's
bumps. Let the Empire totter! Let Napoleon fall! Africa shall be
parceled as it may. Here will we sit until the cups are empty.
Lately, in a bookshop at the foot of Cornhill, I fell in with an old
scholar who told me that it was his practice to recommend four books,
which, taken end on end, furnished the general history of English
letters from the Restoration to a time within our own memory. These
books were "Pepys' Diary," "Boswell's Johnson," the "Diary and Letters
of Madame d'Arblay" and the "Diary of Crabb Robinson."
Beginning almost with the days of Cromwell here is a chain of pleasant
gossip across the space of more than two hundred years. Perhaps, at the
first, there were old fellows still alive who could remember
Shakespeare--who still sat in chimney corners and babbled through their
toothless gums of Blackfriars and the Globe. And at the end we find a
reference to President Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves.
Here are a hundred authors--perhaps a thousand--tucking up their cuffs,
looking out from their familiar windows, scribbling their large or
trivial masterpieces.
[Illustration]
After-Dinner Pleasantries.
There is a shop below Fourteenth Street, somewhat remote from fashion,
that sells nothing but tricks for amateur and parlor use. It is a region
of cobblers, tailors and small grocers. Upstairs, locksmiths and
buttonhole cutters look through dusty windows on the L, which, under
some dim influence of the moon, tosses past the buildings here its human
tide, up and down, night and morning. The Trick Shop flatters itself on
its signboard that it carries the largest line of its peculiar trickery
on the western hemisphere--hinting modestly that Baluchistan, perhaps,
or Mesopotamia (where magic might be supposed to flourish) may have an
equal stock. The shop does not proclaim its greatness to the casual
glance. Its enormity of fraud offers no hint to the unsuspecting curb.
There must be caverns and cellars at the rear--a wealth of baffling sham
un-rumored to the street, shelves sagging with agreeable deception, huge
bales of sleight-of-hand and musty barrels of old magic.
But to the street the shop reveals no more than a small show-window, of
a kind in which licorice-sticks and all-day-suckers might feel at home.
It is a window at which children might stop on their way from school and
meditate their choice, fumbling in their pockets for their wealth.
I have stood at this window for ten minutes together. There are cards
for fortune tellers and manuals of astrology, decks with five aces and
marked backs, and trick hats and boxes with false bottoms. There are
iron cigars to be offered to a friend, and bleeding fingers, and a
device that makes a noise like blowing the nose, "only much louder."
Books of magic are displayed, and conjurers' outfits--shell games and
disappearing rabbits. There is a line of dribble-glasses--a humorous
contrivance with little holes under the brim for spilling water down the
front of an unwary guest. This, it is asserted, breaks the social ice
and makes a timid stranger feel at home. And there are puzzle pictures,
beards for villains and comic masks--Satan himself, and other painted
faces for Hallowe'en.
Some persons, of course, can perform their parlor tricks without this
machinery and appliance. I know a gifted fellow who can put on the
expression of an idiot. Or he wrinkles his face into the semblance of
eighty years, shakes with palsy and asks his tired wife if she will love
him when he's old. Again he puts a coffee cup under the shoulder of his
coat and plays the humpback. On a special occasion he mounts a table--or
two kitchen chairs become his stage--and recites Richard and the winter
of his discontent. He needs only a pillow to smother Desdemona. And then
he opens an imaginary bottle--the popping of the cork, the fizzing, the
gurgle when it pours. Sometimes he is a squealing pig caught under a
fence, and sometimes two steamboats signaling with their whistles in a
fog.
I know a young woman--of the newer sort--who appears to swallow a
lighted cigarette, with smoke coming from her ears. This was once a
man's trick, but the progress of the weaker sex has shifted it. On
request, she is a nervous lady with a fear of monkeys, taking five
children to the circus. She is Camille on her deathbed. I know a man,
too, who can give the Rebel yell and stick a needle, full length, into
his leg. The pulpy part above his knee seems to make an excellent
pincushion. And then there is the old locomotive starting on a slippery
grade (for beginners in entertainment), the hand-organ man and his
infested monkey (a duet), the chicken that is chased around the
barnyard, Hamlet with the broken pallet (this is side-splitting in any
company) and Moriarty on the telephone. I suppose our best vaudeville
performers were once amateurs themselves around the parlor lamp.
And there is Jones, too, who plays the piano. Jones, when he is asked,
sits at the keyboard and fingers little runs and chords. He seems to be
thinking which of a hundred pieces he will play. "What will you have?"
he asks. And a fat man wants "William Tell," and a lady with a powdered
nose asks for "Bubbles." But Jones ignores both and says, "Here's a
little thing of Schumann. It's a charming bit." On the other hand, when
Brown is asked to sing, it is generally too soon after dinner. Brown,
evidently, takes his food through his windpipe, and it is, so to speak,
a one-way street. He can hardly permit the ascending "Siegfried" to
squeeze past the cheese and crackers that still block the crowded
passage.
There is not a college dinner without the mockery of an eccentric
professor. A wag will catch the pointing of his finger, his favorite
phrase. Is there a lawyers' dinner without its imitation of Harry
Lauder? Isn't there always someone who wants to sing "It's Nice to Get
Up in the Mornin'," and trot up and down with twinkling legs? Plumbers
on their lodge nights, I am told, have their very own Charlie Chaplin.
And I suppose that the soda clerks' union--the dear creatures with their
gum--has its local Mary Pickford, ready with a scene from _Pollyanna_.
What jolly dinners dentists must have, telling one another in dialect
how old Mrs. Finnigan had her molars out! Forceps and burrs are their
unwearied jest across the years. When they are together and the doors
are closed, how they must frolic with our weakness!
And undertakers! Even they, I am informed, throw off their solemn
countenance when they gather in convention. Their carnation and mournful
smile are gone--that sober gesture that waves the chilly relations to
the sitting-room. But I wonder whether their dismal shop doesn't cling
always just a bit to their mirth and songs. That poor duffer in the poem
who asked to be laid low, wrapped in his tarpaulin jacket--surely,
undertakers never sing of him. They must look at him with disfavor for
his cheap proposal. He should have roused for a moment at the end, with
a request for black broadcloth and silver handles.
I once sat with an undertaker at a tragedy. He was of a lively sympathy
in the earlier parts and seemed hopeful that the hero would come through
alive. But in the fifth act, when the clanking army was defeated in the
wings and Brutus had fallen on his sword, then, unmistakably his
thoughts turned to the peculiar viewpoint of his profession. In fancy he
sat already in the back parlor with the grieving Mrs. Brutus, arranging
for the music.
To undertakers, Caesar is always dead and turned to clay. Falstaff is
just a fat old gentleman who drank too much sack, a' babbled of green
fields and then needed professional attention. Perhaps at the very pitch
of their meetings when the merry glasses have been three times filled,
they pledge one another in what they are pleased to call the embalmers'
fluid. This jest grows rosier with the years. For these many centuries
at their banquets they have sung that it was a cough that carried him
off, that it was a coffin--Now then, gentlemen! All together for the
chorus!--that it was a coffin they carried him off in.
I dined lately with a man who could look like a weasel. When this was
applauded, he made a face like the Dude of _Palmer Cox's Brownies_. Even
Susan, the waitress, who knows her place and takes a jest soberly, broke
down at the pantry door. We could hear her dishes rattling in
convulsions in the sink. And then our host played the insect with his
fingers on the tablecloth, smelling a spot of careless gravy from the
roast with his long thin middle finger. He caught the habit that insects
have of waving their forward legs.
I still recall an uncle who could wiggle his ears. He did it every
Christmas and Thanksgiving Day. It was as much a part of the regular
program as the turkey and the cranberries. It was a feature of his
engaging foolery to pretend that the wiggle was produced by rubbing the
stomach, and a circle of us youngsters sat around him, rubbing our
expectant stomachs, waiting for the miracle. A cousin brought a guitar
and played the "Spanish Fandango" while we sat around the fire, sleepy
after dinner. And there was a maiden aunt with thin blue fingers, who
played waltzes while we danced, and she nodded and slept to the drowsy
sound of her own music.
Of my own after-dinner pleasantries I am modest. I have only one trick.
Two. I can recite the fur-bearing animals of North America--the bison,
the bear, the wolf, the seal, and sixteen others--and I can go
downstairs behind the couch for the cider. This last requires little
skill. As the books of magic say, it is an easy and baffling trick. With
every step you crook your legs a little more, until finally you are on
your knees, hunched together, and your head has disappeared from view.
You reverse the business coming up, with tray and glasses.
But these are my only tricks. There is a Brahms waltz that I once had
hopes of, but it has a hard run on the second page. I can never get my
thumb under in time to make connections. My best voice, too, covers only
five notes. You cannot do much for the neighbors with that cramped kind
of range. "A Tailor There Sat on His Window Ledge" is one of the few
tunes that fall inside my poverty. He calls to his wife, you may
remember, to bring him his old cross-bow, and there is a great Zum! Zum!
up and down in the bass until ready, before the chorus starts. On a
foggy morning I have quite a formidable voice for those Zums. But
after-dinner pleasantries are only good at night and then my bass is
thin. "A Sailor's Life, Yo, Ho!" is a very good tune but it goes up to
D, and I can sing it only when I am reckless of circumstance, or when I
am taking ashes from the furnace. I know a lady who sings only at her
sewing-machine. She finds a stirring accompaniment in the whirling of
the wheel. Others sing best in tiled bathrooms. Sitting in warm and
soapy water their voices swell to Caruso's. Laundresses, I have noticed,
are in lustiest voice at their tubs, where their arms keep a vigorous
rhythm on the scrubbing-board. But I choose ashes. I am little short of
a Valkyr, despite my sex, when I rattle the furnace grate.
With hymns I can make quite a showing in church if the bass part keeps
to a couple of notes. I pound along melodiously on some convenient low
note and slide up now and then, by a happy instinct, when the tune seems
to require it. The dear little lady, who sits in front of me, turns what
I am pleased to think is an appreciative ear, and now and then, for my
support, she throws in a pretty treble. But I have no tolerance with a
bass part that undertakes a flourish and climbs up behind the tenor.
This is mere egotism and a desire to shine. "Art thou there, true-penny?
You hear this fellow in the cellarage?" That is the proper bass.
Dear me! Now that I recall it, we have guests--guests tonight for
dinner. Will I be asked to sing? Am I in voice? I tum-a-lum a little, up
and down, for experiment. The roar of the subway drowns this from my
neighbors, but by holding my hand over my mouth I can hear it. Is my low
F in order? No--undeniably, it is not. Thin. And squeaky. The Zums would
never do. And that fast run in Brahms? Can I slip through it? Or will my
thumb, as usual, catch and stall? Have my guests seen me go
down--stairs behind the couch for the cider? Have they heard the
fur-bearing animals--the bison, the bear, the wolf, the seal, the
beaver, the otter, the fox and raccoon?
Perhaps--perhaps it will be better to stop at the Trick Shop and buy a
dribble-glass and a long black beard to amuse my guests.
[Illustration]
Little Candles.
High conceit of one's self and a sureness of one's opinion are based so
insecurely in experience that one is perplexed how their slight
structure stands. One marvels why these emphatic builders trust again
their glittering towers. Surely anyone who looks into himself and sees
its void or malformation ought by rights to shrink from adulation of
self, and his own opinion should appear to him merely as one candle
among a thousand.
And yet this conceit of self outlasts innumerable failures, and any new
pinnacle that is set up, neglecting the broken rubble on the ground and
all the wreckage at the base, boasts again of its sure communion with
the stars. A man, let us say, has gone headlong from one formula of
belief into another. In each, for a time, he burns with a hot
conviction. Then his faith cools. His god no longer nods. But just when
you think that failure must have brought him modesty, again he amazes
you with the golden prospect of a new adventure. He has climbed in his
life a hundred hillocks, thinking each to be a mountain. He has
journeyed on many paths, but always has fallen in a bog. Conceit is a
thin bubble in the wind, it is an empty froth and breath, yet, hammered
into ship-plates, it defies the U-boat.
On every sidewalk, also, we see some fine fellow, dressed and curled to
his satisfaction, parading in the sun. An accident of wealth or birth
has marked him from the crowd. He has decked his outer walls in gaudy
color, but is bare within. He is a cypher, but golden circumstance, like
a figure in the million column, gives him substance. Yet the void cries
out on all matters in dispute with firm conviction.
But this cypher need not dress in purple. He is shabby, let us say, and
pinched with poverty. Whose fault? Who knows? But does misfortune in
itself give wisdom? He is poor. Therefore he decides that the world is
sick with pestilence, and accordingly he proclaims himself a doctor. Or
perhaps he sits at ease in middle circumstance. He judges that his is an
open mind because he lets a harsh opinion blow upon his ignorance until
it flames with hatred. He sets up to be a thinker, and he is resolved to
shatter the foundations of a thousand years.
The outer darkness stretches to such a giddy distance! And these
thousand candles of belief, flickering in the night, are so insufficient
even in their aggregate! Shall a candle wink at flaming Jupiter as an
equal? By what persuasion is one's own tiny wick, shielded in the
fingers from misadventure, the greatest light?
Who is there who has read more than a single chapter in the book of
life? Most of us have faltered through scarcely a dozen paragraphs, yet
we scribble our sure opinion in the margin. We hear a trifling pebble
fall in a muddy pool, and we think that we have listened to the pounding
of the sea. We hold up our little candle and we consider that its light
dispels the general night.
But it has happened once in a while that someone really strikes a larger
light and offers it to many travelers for their safety. He holds his
candle above his head for the general comfort. And to it there rush the
multitude of those whose candles have been gutted. They relight their
wicks, and go their way with a song and cry, to announce their
brotherhood. If they see a stranger off the path, they call to him to
join their band. And they draw him from the mire.
And sometimes this company respects the other candles that survive the
wind. They confess with good temper that their glare, also, is
sufficient; that there is, indeed, more than one path across the night.
But sometimes in their intensity--in their sureness of exclusive
salvation--they fall to bickering. One band of converts elbows another.
There is a mutual lifting of the nose in scorn, an amused contempt, or
they come to blows and all candles are extinguished. And sometimes,
with candles out, they travel onward, still telling one another of their
band how the darkness flees before them.
We live in a world of storm, of hatred, of blind conceit, of shrill and
intolerant opinion. The past is worshiped. The past is scorned. Some
wish only to kiss the great toe of old convention. Others shout that we
must run bandaged in the dark, if we would prove our faith in God and
man. It is the best of times, and the worst of times. It is the dawn. We
grope toward midnight. Our fathers were saints in judgment. Our fathers
were fools and rogues. Let's hold minutely to the past! Any change is
sacrilege. Let's rip it up! Let's destroy it altogether!
We'll kill him and stamp on him: He's a Montague. We'll draw and quarter
him: He's a Capulet. He's a radical: He must be hanged. A conservative:
His head shall decorate our pike.
A plague on both your houses!
Panaceas are hawked among us, each with a magic to cure our ills.
Universal suffrage is a leap to perfection. Tax reform will bring the
golden age. With capital and interest smashed, we shall live in heaven.
The soviet, the recall from office, the six-hour day, the demands of
labor, mark the better path. The greater clamor of the crowd is the
guide to wisdom. Men with black beards and ladies with cigarettes say
that machine-guns and fire and death are pills that are potent for our
good. We live in a welter of quarrel and disagreement. One pictures a
mighty shelf with bottles, and doctors running to and fro. The poor
world is on its back, opening its mouth to every spoon. By the hubbub in
the pantry--the yells and scuffling at the sink--we know that drastic
and contrary cures are striving for the mastery.
There was a time when beacons burned on the hills to be our guidance.
The flames were fed and moulded by the experience of the centuries. Men
might differ on the path--might even scramble up a dozen different
slopes--but the hill-top was beyond dispute.
But now the great fires smoulder. The Constitution, it is said,--pecked
at since the first,--must now be carted off and sold as junk. Art has
torn down its older standards. The colors of Titian are in the dust.
Poets no longer bend the knee to Shakespeare.