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Transcriber's note:
Words or phrases in italics are enclosed by underscores.
An underscore is also used in the chapter "Through the
Scuttle with the Tinman" in the equation
a=(Dx/2T)f(a, b c T_3)
to indicate that the "3" is a subscript.
JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD
by
CHARLES S. BROOKS
Illustrated with Original Wood-Cuts by Allen Lewis
[Illustration]
Yale University Press
New Haven Connecticut
M D CCCC XV
Copyright, 1915, by
Yale University Press
First printed November, 1915, 1000 copies
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
The Yale University Press makes grateful acknowledgment to the
Editors of the _Yale Review_ and of the _New Republic_ for
permission to include in the present work essays of which they were
the original publishers.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Journeys to Bagdad
II. The Worst Edition of Shakespeare
III. The Decline of Night-Caps
IV. Maps and Rabbit-Holes
V. Tunes for Spring
VI. Respectfully Submitted--To a Mournful Air
VII. The Chilly Presence of Hard-headed Persons
VIII. Hoopskirts and Other Lively Matter
IX. On Traveling
X. Through the Scuttle with the Tinman
JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD
[Illustration]
JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD
Are you of that elect who, at certain seasons of the year--perhaps in
March when there is timid promise of the spring or in the days of October
when there are winds across the earth and gorgeous panic of fallen
leaves--are you of that elect who, on such occasion or any occasion else,
feel stirrings in you to be quit of whatever prosy work is yours, to throw
down your book or ledger, or your measuring tape--if such device marks
your service--and to go forth into the world?
I do count myself of this elect. And I will name such stimuli as most set
these stirrings in me. And first of all there is a smell compounded out of
hemp and tar that works pleasantly to my undoing. Now it happens that
there is in this city, down by the river where it flows black with city
stain as though the toes of commerce had been washed therein, a certain
ship chandlery. It is filthy coming on the place, for there is reek from
the river and staleness from the shops--ancient whiffs no wise enfeebled
by their longevity, Nestors of their race with span of seventy lusty
summers. But these smells do not prevail within the chandlery. At first
you see nothing but rope. Besides clothesline and other such familiar and
domestic twistings, there are great cordages scarce kinsmen to them, which
will later put to sea and will whistle with shrill enjoyment at their
release. There are such hooks, swivels, blocks and tackles, such confusion
of ships' devices as would be enough for the building of a sea tale. It
may be fancied that here is Treasure Island itself, shuffled and laid
apart in bits like a puzzle-picture. (For genius, maybe, is but a
nimbleness of collocation of such hitherto unconsidered trifles.) Then you
will go aloft where sails are made, with sailormen squatting about,
bronzed fellows, rheumatic, all with pipes. And through all this shop is
the smell of hemp and tar.
In finer matters I have no nose. It is ridiculous, really, that this very
messenger and forerunner of myself, this trumpeter of my coming, this
bi-nasal fellow in the crow's-nest, should be so deficient. If smells were
bears, how often I would be bit! My nose may serve by way of ornament or
for the sniffing of the heavier odors, yet will fail in the nice detection
of the fainter waftings and olfactory ticklings. Yet how will it dilate on
the Odyssean smell of hemp and tar! And I have no explanation of this, for
I am no sailor. Indeed, at sea I am misery itself whenever perchance "the
ship goes _wop_ (with a wiggle between)." Such wistful glances have I cast
upon the wide freedom of the decks when I leave them on the perilous
adventure of dinner! So this relish of hemp and tar must be a legacy from
a far-off time--a dim atavism, to put it as hard as possible--for I seem
to remember being told that my ancestors were once engaged in buccaneering
or other valiant livelihood.
But here is a peculiar thing. The chandlery gives me no desire to run away
to sea. Rather, the smell of the place urges me indeterminately,
diffusedly, to truantry. It offers me no particular chart. It but cuts my
moorings for whatever winds are blowing. If there be blood of a pirate in
me, it is a shame what faded juice it is. It would flow pink on the
sticking. In mean contrast to skulls, bowie-knives and other red villainy,
my thoughts will be set toward the mild truantry of trudging for an
afternoon in the country. Or it is likely that I'll carry stones for the
castle that I have been this long time building. Were the trick of prosody
in me, I would hew a poem on the spot. Such is my anemia. And yet there is
a touch of valiancy, too, as from the days when my sainted ancestors
sailed with their glass beads from Bristol harbor; the desire of visiting
the sunset, of sailing down on the far side of the last horizon where the
world itself falls off and there is sky with swirl of stars beyond.
[Illustration]
In the spring of each year everyone should go to Bagdad--not particularly
to Bagdad, for I shall not dictate in matter of detail--but to any such
town that may happen to be so remote that you are not sure when you look
it up whether it is on page 47 which is Asia, or on page 53 which is
Persia. But Bagdad will serve: For surely, Reader, you have not forgotten
that it was in Bagdad in the surprising reign of Haroun-al-Raschid that
Sinbad the Sailor lived! Nor can it have escaped you that scarce a mule's
back distance--such was the method of computation in those golden
days--lived that prince of medieval plain-clothes men, Ali Baba!
Historically, Bagdad lies in that tract of earth where purple darkens into
night. Geographically, it lies obliquely downward, and is, I compute,
considerably off the southeast corner of my basement. It is such distant
proximity, doubtless, that renders my basement--and particularly its
woodpile, which lies obscurely beyond the laundry--such a shadowy, grim
and altogether mysterious place. If there be any part of the house,
including certain dark corners of the attic, that is fearfully
Mesopotamian after nightfall, it is that woodpile. Even when I sit above,
secure with lights, if by chance I hear tappings from below--such noises
are common on a windy night--I know that it is the African Magician
pounding for the genie, the sound echoing through the hollow earth. It is
matter of doubt whether the iron bars so usual on basement windows serve
chiefly to keep burglars out, or whether their greater service is not
their defense of western Christianity against the invasion from the East
which, except for these bars, would enter here as by a postern. At a
hazard, my suspicion would fall on the iron doors that open inwards in the
base of chimneys. We have been fondly credulous that there is nothing but
ash inside and mere siftings from the fire above; and when, on an
occasion, we reach in with a trowel for a scoop of this wood-ash for our
roses, we laugh at ourselves for our scare of being nabbed. But some day
if by way of experiment you will thrust your head within--it's a small
hole and you will be besmirched beyond anything but a Saturday's
reckoning--you will see that the pit goes off in darkness--_downward_. It
was but the other evening as we were seated about the fire that there came
upward from the basement a gibbering squeak. Then the woodpile fell over,
for so we judged the clatter. Is it fantastic to think that some dark and
muffled Persian, after his dingy tunneling from the banks of the Tigris,
had climbed the pile of wood for a breath of night at the window and, his
foot slipping, the pile fell over? Plainly, we heard him scuttling back to
the ash-pit.
Be these things as they may, when you have arrived in Bagdad--and it is
best that you travel over land and sea--if you be serious in your zest,
you will not be satisfied, but will journey a thousand miles more at the
very least, in whatever direction is steepest. And you will turn the
flanks of seven mountains, with seven villainous peaks thereon. For the
very number of them will put a spell on you. And you will cross running
water, that you leave no scent for the world behind. Such journey would be
the soul of truantry and you should set out upon the road every spring
when the wind comes warm.
Now the medieval pilgrimage in its day, as you very well know, was a most
popular institution. And the reasons are as plentiful as blackberries. But
in the first place and foremost, it came always in the spring. It was like
a tonic, iron for the blood. There were many men who were not a bit pious,
who, on the first warm day when customers were scarce, yawned themselves
into a prodigious holiness. Who, indeed, would resign himself to changing
moneys or selling doves upon the Temple steps when such appeal was in the
air? What cobbler even, bent upon his leather, whose soul would not mount
upon such a summons? Who was it preached the first crusade? There was no
marvel in the business. Did he come down our street now that April's here,
he would win recruits from every house. I myself would care little whether
he were Christian or Mohammedan if only the shrine lay over-seas and deep
within the twistings of the mountains.
[Illustration]
If, however, your truantry is domestic, and the scope of the seven seas
with glimpse of Bagdad is too broad for your desire, then your yearning
may direct itself to the spaces just outside your own town. If such myopic
truantry is in you, there is much to be said for going afoot. In these
days when motors are as plentiful as mortgages this may appear but
discontented destitution, the cry of sour grapes. And yet much of the
adventuring of life has been gained afoot. But walking now has fallen on
evil days. It needs but an enlistment of words to show its decadence.
Tramp is such a word. Time was when it signified a straight back and
muscular calves and an appetite, and at nightfall, maybe, pleasant gossip
at the hearth on the affairs of distant villages. There was rhythm in the
sound. But now it means a loafer, a shuffler, a wilted rascal. It is
patched, dingy, out-at-elbows. Take the word vagabond! It ought to be of
innocent repute, for it is built solely from stuff that means to wander,
and wandering since the days of Moses has been practiced by the most
respectable persons. Yet Noah Webster, a most disinterested old gentleman,
makes it clear that a vagabond is a vicious scamp who deserves no better
than the lockup. Doubtless Webster, if at home, would loose his dog did
such a one appear. A wayfarer, also, in former times was but a goer of
ways, a man afoot, whether on pilgrimage or itinerant with his wares and
cart and bell. Does the word not recall the poetry of the older road, the
jogging horse, the bush of the tavern, the crowd about the peddler's pack,
the musician piping to the open window, or the shrine in the hollow? Or
maybe it summons to you a decked and painted Cambyses bellowing his wrath
to an inn-yard.
[Illustration]
One would think that the inventor of these scandals was a crutched and
limping fellow, who being himself stunted and dwarfed below the waist was
trying to sneer into disuse all walking the world over, or one who was
paunched by fat living beyond carrying power, larding the lean earth,
fearing lest he sweat himself to death, some Falstaff who unbuttons him
after supper and sleeps on benches after noon. Rather these words should
connote the strong, the self-reliant, the youthful. He is a tramp, we
should say, who relies most on his own legs and resources, who least
cushions himself daintily against jar in his neighbor's tonneau, whose eye
shines out seldomest from the curb for a lift. The wayfarer must go forth
in the open air. He must seek hilltop and wind. He must gather the dust of
counties. His prospects must be of broad fields and the smoking chimneys
of supper.
But the goer afoot must not be conceived as primarily an engine of muscle.
He is the best walker who keeps most widely awake in his five senses. Some
men might as well walk through a railway tunnel. They are so concerned
with the getting there that a black night hangs over them. They plunge
forward with their heads down as though they came of an antique race of
road builders. Should there be mileposts they are busied with them only,
and they will draw dials from their pokes to time themselves. I fell into
this iniquity on a walk in Wales from Bala to Dolgelley. Although I set
out leisurely enough, with an eye for the lake and hills, before many
hours had elapsed I had acquired the milepost habit and walked as if for a
wager. I covered the last twenty miles in less than five hours, and when
the brown stone village came in sight and I had thumped down the last hill
and over the peaked bridge, I was a dilapidated and foot-sore vagrant and
nothing more. To this day Wales for me is the land where one's feet have
the ugly habit of foregathering in the end of the shoes.
Worse still than the athletic walker is he who takes Dame Care out for a
stroll. He forever runs his machinery, plans his business ventures and
introduces his warehouse to the countryside.
Nor must walking be conceived as merely a means of resting. One should set
out refreshed and for this reason morning is the best time. Yours must be
an exultant mood. "Full many a glorious morning have I seen flatter the
mountain-tops with sovereign eye." Your brain is off at a speed that was
impossible in your lack-luster days. You have a flow of thoughts instead
of the miserable trickle that ordinarily serves your business purposes and
keeps you from under the trolley cars.
But all truantry is not in the open air. I know a man who while it is yet
winter will get out his rods and fit them together as he sits before the
fire. Then he will swing his arm forward from the elbow. The table has
become his covert and the rug beyond is his pool. And sometimes even when
the rod is not in his hand he will make the motion forward from the elbow
and will drop his thumb. It will show that he has jumped the seasons and
that he stands to his knees in an August stream.
It was but yesterday on my return from work that I witnessed a sight that
moved me pleasantly to thoughts of truantry. Now, in all points a grocer's
wagon is staid and respectable. Indeed, in its adherence to the business
of the hour we might use it as a pattern. For six days in the week it
concerns itself solely with its errands of mercy--such "whoas" and running
up the kitchen steps with baskets of potatoes--such poundings on the
door--such golden wealth of melons as it dispenses. Though there may be a
kind of gayety in this, yet I'll hazard that in the whole range of
quadricycle life no vehicle is more free from any taint of riotous
conduct. Mark how it keeps its Sabbath in the shed! Yet here was this
sturdy Puritan tied by a rope to a motor-car and fairly bounding down the
street. It was a worse breach than when Noah was drunk within his tent.
Was it an instance of falling into bad company? It was Nym, you remember,
who set Master Slender on to drinking. "And I be drunk again," quoth he,
"I'll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken
knaves." Or rather did not every separate squeak of the grocer's wagon cry
out a truant disposition? After years of repression here was its chance at
last. And with what a joyous rollic, with what a lively clatter, with what
a hilarious reeling, as though in gay defiance of the law of gravity, was
it using its liberty! Had it been a hearse in a runaway, the comedy would
not have been better. If I had been younger I would have pelted after and
climbed in over the tailboard to share the reckless pitch of its
enfranchisement.
Then there is a truantry that I mention with hesitation, for it comes
close to the heart of my desire, and in such matter particularly I would
not wish to appear a fool to my fellows. The child has this truantry when
he plays at Indian, for he fashions the universe to his desires. But some
men too can lift themselves, though theirs is an intellectual bootstrap,
into a life that moves above these denser airs. Theirs is an intensity
that goes deeper than daydreaming, although it admits distant kinship.
Through what twilight and shadows do such men climb until night and
star-dust are about them! Theirs is the dizzy exaltation of him who mounts
above the world. Alas, in me is no such unfathomable mystery. I but trick
myself. Yet I have my moments. These stones that I carry on the mountain,
what of them? On what windy ridge do I build my castle? It is shrill and
bleak, they say, on the topmost peaks of the Delectable Mountains, so
lower down I have reared its walls. There is no storm in these upland
valleys and the sun sits pleasantly on their southern slopes. But even if
there be unfolded no broad prospect from the devil to the sunrise, there
are pleasant cottages in sight and the smoke of many suppers curling up.
If you happened to have been a freshman at Yale some eighteen years ago
and were at all addicted to canoeing on Lake Whitney, and if, moreover, on
coming off the lake there burned in you a thirst for ginger-beer--as is
common in the gullet of a freshman--doubtless you have gone from the
boathouse to a certain little white building across the road to gratify
your hot desires. When you opened the door, your contemptible person--I
speak with the vocabulary of a sophomore--is proclaimed to all within by
the jangling of a bell. After due interval wherein you busy yourself in an
inspection of the cakes and buns that beam upon you from a show-case--your
nose meanwhile being pressed close against the glass for any slight
blemish that might deflect your decision (for a currant in the dough often
raises an unsavory suspicion and you'll squint to make the matter
sure)--there will appear through a back door a little old man to minister
unto you. You will give no great time to the naming of your drink--for the
fires are hot in you--but will take your bottle to a table. The braver
spirits among you will scorn glasses as effeminate and will gulp the
liquor straight from the bottle with what wickedest bravado you can
muster.
Now it is likely that you have done this with a swagger and have called
your servitor "old top" or other playful name. Mark your mistake! You were
in the presence, if you but knew it, of a real author, not a tyro fumbling
for self-expression, but a man with thirty serials to his credit. Shall I
name the periodical? It was the _Golden Hours_, I think. Ginger-beer and
jangling bells were but a fringe upon his darker purpose. His desk was
somewhere in the back of the house, and there he would rise to all the
fury of a South-Sea wreck--for his genius lay in the broader effects. Even
while we simpletons jested feebly and practiced drinking with the open
throat--which we esteemed would be of service when we had progressed to
the heavier art of drinking real beer--even as we munched upon his ginger
cakes, he had left us and was exterminating an army corps in the back
room. He was a little man, pale and stooped, but with a genius for
truantry--a pilgrim of the Bagdad road.
But we move on too high a plane. Most of us are admitted into truantry by
the accidents, merely, of our senses. By way of instance, the sniff of a
rotten apple will set a man off as on seven-league boots to the valleys of
his childhood. The dry rustling of November leaves re-lights the fires of
youth. It was only this afternoon that so slight a circumstance as a ray
of light flashing in my eye provided me an agreeable and unexpected
truantry. It sent me climbing the mountains of the North and in no less
company than that of Brunhilda and a troop of Valkyrs.
It is likely enough that none of you have heard of Long Street. As far as
I am aware it is not known to general fame. It is typically a back street
of the business of a city, that is, the ventages of its buildings are
darkened most often by packing cases and bales. Behind these ventages are
metal shoots. To one uninitiated in the ways of commerce it would appear
that these openings were patterned for the multiform enactment of an Amy
Robsart tragedy, with such devilish deceit are the shoots laid up against
the openings. First the teamster teeters and cajoles the box to the edge
of the dray, then, with a sudden push, he throws it off down the shoot,
from which it disappears with a booming sound. As I recall it was by some
such treachery that Amy Robsart met her death. Be that as it may, all day
long great drays go by with Earls of Leicester on their lofty seats,
prevailing on their horses with stout, Elizabethan language. If there
comes a tangle in the traffic it is then especially that you will hear a
largeness of speech as of spacious and heroic days.
During the meaner hours of daylight it is my privilege to occupy a desk
and chair at a window that overlooks this street. Of the details of my
activity I shall make no mention, such level being far below the flight of
these enfranchised hours of night wherein I write. But in the pauses of
this activity I see below me wagon loads of nails go by and wagon loads of
hammers hard after, to get a crack at them. Then there will be a truck of
saws, as though the planking of the world yearned toward amputation. Or
maybe, at a guess, ten thousand rat-traps will move on down the street.
It's sure they take us for Hamelin Town, and are eager to lay their
ambushment. There is something rather stirring in such prodigious
marshaling, but I hear you ask what this has to do with truantry.
It was near quitting time yesterday that a dray was discharging cases down
a shoot. These cases were secured with metal reinforcement, and this metal
being rubbed bright happened to catch a ray of the sun at such an angle
that it was reflected in my eye. This flash, which was like lightning in
its intensity, together with the roar of the falling case, transported
me--it's monstrous what jumps we take when the fit is on us--to the slopes
of dim mountains in the night, to the heights above Valhalla with the
flash of Valkyrs descending. And the booming of the case upon the
slide--God pity me--was the music. It was thus that I was sent aloft upon
the mountains of the North, into the glare of lightning, with the cry of
Valkyrs above the storm....
But presently there was a voice from the street. "It's the last case
to-night, Sam, you lunk-head. It's quitting time."
The light fades on Long Street. The drays have gone home. The Earls of
Leicester drowse in their own kitchens, or spread whole slices of bread on
their broad, aristocratic palms. Somewhere in the dimmest recesses of
those cluttered buildings ten thousand rat-traps await expectant the
oncoming of the rats. And in your own basement--the shadows having
prospered in the twilight--it is sure (by the beard of the prophet, it is
sure) that the ash-pit door is again ajar and that a pair of eyes gleam
upon you from the darkness. If, on the instant, you will crouch behind the
laundry tubs and will hold your breath--as though a doctor's thermometer
were in your mouth, you with a cold in the head--it's likely that you will
see a Persian climb from the pit, shake the ashes off him, and make for
the vantage of the woodpile, where--the window being barred--he will sigh
his soul for the freedom of the night.
[Illustration]
THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE
[Illustration]
THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE
Reader, if by fortunate chance you have a son of tender years--the age is
best from the sixth to the eleventh summer--or in lieu of a son, a nephew,
only a few years in pants--mere shoots of nether garments not yet
descending to the knees--doubtless, if such fortunate chance be yours, you
went on one or more occasions last summer to a circus.
If the true holiday spirit be in you--and you be of other sort, I'll not
chronicle you--you will have come early to the scene for a just
examination of what mysteries and excitements are set forth in the
side-shows. Now if you be a man of humane reasoning, you will stand
lightly on your legs, alert to be pulled this way or that as the nepotic
wish shall direct, whether it be to the fat woman's booth or to the
platform where the thin man sits with legs entwined behind his neck, in
delightful promise of what joy awaits you when you have dropped your
nickel in the box and gone inside. To draw your steps, it is the showman's
privilege to make what blare he please upon the sidewalk; to puff his
cheeks with robustious announcement.
If by further fortunate chance, you are addicted, let us say, in the
quieter hours of winter, to writing of any kind--and for your joy, I pray
that this be so, whether this writing be in massive volumes, or obscure
and unpublished beyond its demerit--if such has been your addiction, you
have found, doubtless, that your case lies much like the fat woman's; that
it is the show you give before the door that must determine what numbers
go within--that, to be plain with you, much thought must be given to the
taking of your title. It must be a most alluring trumpeting, above the din
of rival shows.
So I have named this article with thought of how I might stir your learned
curiosity. I have set scholars' words upon my platform, thereby to make
you think how prodigiously I have stuffed the matter in. And all this
while, my article has to do only with a certain set of Shakespeare in nine
calfskin volumes, edited by a man named John Bell, now long since dead,
which set happens to have stood for several years upon my shelves; also,
how it was disclosed to me that he was the worst of all editors, together
with the reasons thereto and his final acquittal from the charge.
John Bell has stood, for the most part, in unfingered tranquillity, for I
read from a handier, single volume. Only at cleaning times has he been
touched, and then but in the common misery with all my books. Against this
cleaning, which I take to be only a quirk of the female brain, I have
often urged that the great, round earth itself has been subjected to only
one flood, and that even that was a failure, for, despite Noah's
shrewdness at the gangway, villains still persist on it. How then shall my
books profitably endure a deluge both autumn and spring?
Thereafter, when the tempest has spent itself and the waters have returned
from off my shelves, I'll venture in the room. There will be something
different in the sniff of the place, and it will be marvelously picked up.
Yet I can mend these faults. But it does fret me how books will be
standing on their heads. Were certain volumes only singled out to stand
upon their heads, Shaw for one, and others of our moderns, I would suspect
the housemaid of expressing in this fashion a sly and just criticism of
their inverted beliefs. I accused her on one occasion of this subtlety,
but was met by such a vacant stare that I acquitted her at once. However,
as she leaves my solidest authors also on their heads, men beyond the
peradventure of such antics, I must consider it but a part of her
carelessness, for which I have warned her twice. Were it not for her
cunning with griddlecakes, to which I am much affected, I would have
dismissed her before this.
And now this Bell, which has ridden out so many of my floods, is
proclaimed to me a villain. We had got beyond the April freshets and there
was in consequence a soapy smell about. It is clear in my mind that a
street organ had started up a gay tune and that there were sounds of
gathering feet. I was reading at the time, in the green rocker by the
lamp, a life of John Murray, by one whose name I have forgotten, when my
eyes came on the sentence that has shaken me. Bell, it said, Bell of my
own bookshelf, of all the editors of Shakespeare was the worst.
In my agitation I removed my glasses, breathed upon the lenses, and
polished them. Here was one of my familiars accused of something that was
doubtless heinous, although in what particulars I was at a loss to know.
It came on me suddenly. It was like a whispered scandal, sinister in its
lack of detail. All that I had known of Bell was that its publication had
dated from the eighteenth century. Yet its very age had seemed a patent of
respectability. If a thing does not rot and smell in a hundred and forty
years, it would seem to be safe from corruption: it were true peacock. But
here at last from Bell was an unsavory whiff. My flood had abated only a
fortnight since, and here was a stowaway escaped. Bell was proclaimed a
villain. Again had a flood proved itself a failure.
[Illustration]
Now, I feel no shame in having an outsider like Murray display to me these
hidden evils; for I owe no inquisitorial duty to my books. There are
people who will not admit a volume to their shelves until they have thrown
it open and laid its contents bare. This is the unmannerly conduct of the
customs wharf. Indeed, it is such scrutiny, doubtless, that induces some
authors to pack their ideas obscurely, thereby to smuggle them. However,
there being now a scandal on my shelves, I must spy into it.
John Murray, wherein I had read the charge, had been such a friendly,
tea-and-gossip book, not the kind to hiss a scandal at you. It was bound
in blue cloth and was a heavy book, so that I held it on a cushion. (And
this device I recommend to others.) It was the kind of book that stays
open at your place, if you leave it for a moment to poke the fire. Some
books will flop a hundred pages, to make you thumb them back and forth,
though whether this be the binder's fault or a deviltry set therein by
their authors I am at a loss to say. But Shaw would be of this kind,
flopping and spry to mix you up. And in general, Shaw's humor is like that
of a shell-man at a country fair--a thimble-rigger. No matter where you
guess that he has placed the bean, you will be always wrong. Even though
you swear that you have seen him slip it under, it's but his cunning to
lead you off. But Murray was not that kind. It would stand at its post,
unhitched, like a family horse.
Here was quandary. I looked at Bell, but God forgive me, it was not with
the old trustfulness. He was on the top shelf but one, just in line with
the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. I had set him thus
conspicuous with intention, because of his calfskin binding, quite old and
worn. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. A set of
British Essayists, if disordered, takes you back of the black walnut. To
what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence?
(I had bought Bell, secondhand, on Farringdon Road, London, from a cart,
cheap, because a volume was missing.)
And now it seemed he was in some sort a villain. Although shocked, I felt
a secret joy. For somewhat too broadly had Bell smirked his sanctity on
me. When piety has been flaunting over you, you will steal a slim occasion
to proclaim a flaw. There is much human nature goes to the stoning of a
saint. In my ignorance I had set the rogue in the company of the decorous
Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell. It is not that I admire
that chaste assembly. But it were monstrous, even so, that I should
neighbor them with this Bell, who, as it appeared, was no better than a
wolf in calf's clothing. It was Little Red Riding Hood, you will recall,
who mistook a wolf for her grandmother. And with what grief do we look on
her unhappy end!
My hand was now raised to drag Bell out by the heels, when I reflected
that what I had heard might be unfounded gossip, mere tattle, and that
before I turned against an old acquaintance, it were well to set an
inquiry afoot. First, however, I put him alongside Herbert Spencer. If it
were Bell's desire to play the grandmother to him, he would find him tough
meat.
Bell, John--I looked him up, first in volume Aus to Bis of the
encyclopedia, without finding him, and then successfully in the National
Biography--Bell, John, was a London bookseller. He was born in 1745,
published his edition of Shakespeare in 1774, and after this assault, with
the blood upon him, lived fifty years. This was reassuring. It was then
but a bit of wild oats, no hanging matter. I now went at the question
deeply. Yet I left him awhile with the indigestible Herbert.
It was in 1774 that Bell squirted his dirty ink. In _The Gentleman's
Magazine_ for that year appear mutterings from America, since called the
Boston Tea Party. I set this down to bring the time more warmly to your
mind, for a date alone is but a blurred signpost unless you be a scholar.
And it is advisedly that I quote from this particular periodical, because
its old files can best put the past back upon its legs and set it going.
There is a kind of history-book that sorts the bones and ties them all
about with strings, that sets the past up and bids it walk. Yet it will
not wag a finger. Its knees will clap together, its chest fall in. Such
books are like the scribblings on a tombstone; the ghost below gives not
the slightest squeal of life. But slap it shut and read what was written
hastily at the time on the pages of _The Gentleman's Magazine_, and it
will be as though Gabriel had blown a practice toot among the headstones.
It is then that you will get the gibbering of returning life.
So it was in 1774 that Bell put out his version of Shakespeare. Bell was
not a man of the schools. Caring not a cracked tinkle for learning, it was
not to the folios, nor to any authority that he turned for the texts of
his plays. Instead, he went to Drury Lane and Covent Garden and took their
acting copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very
plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for
word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with
pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to draw the gallery laugh.
A few nights later, having by grace of God escaped a dinner out, and being
of a consequence in a kindly mood, the scandal, too, having somewhat
abated in my memory, I took down a brown volume and ran my fingers over
its sides and along its yellow edges. Then I made myself comfortable and
opened it up.
There is nothing to-day more degenerate than our title-pages. It is in a
mean spirit that we pinch and starve them. I commend the older kind
wherein, generously ensampled, is the promise of the rich diet that shall
follow. At the circus, I have said, I'll go within that booth that has
most allurement on its canvas front, and where the hawker has the biggest
voice. If a fellow will but swallow a snake upon the platform at the door,
my money is already in my palm. Thus of a book I demand an earnest on the
title-page.
Bell's title-page is of the right kind. In the profusion and variety of
its letters it is like a printer's sample book, with tall letters and
short letters, dogmatic letters for heaping facts on you and script
letters reclining on their elbows, convalescent in the text. There are
slim letters and again the very progeny of Falstaff. And what flourishes
on the page! It is like a pond after the antics of a skater.
There follows the subscribers' list. It is a Mr. Tickle's set that has
come to me, for his name is on the fly-leaf. But for me and this set of
Bell, Mr. Tickle would seem to have sunk into obscurity. I proclaim him
here, and if there be anywhere at this day younger Tickles, even down to
the merest titillation, may they see these lines and thus take a greeting
from the past.
Then follows an essay on oratory. It made me grin from end to end. Yet, as
on the repeating of a comic story, it is hard to get the sting and rollic
on the tongue. And much quotation on a page makes it like a foundling
hospital--sentences unparented, ideas abandoned of their proper text.
"Where grief is to be expressed," says Bell, "the right hand laid slowly
on the left breast, the head and chest bending forward, is a just
expression of it.... Ardent affection is gained by closing both hands
warmly, at half arm's length, the fingers intermingling, and bringing them
to the breast with spirit.... Folding arms, with a drooping of the head,
describe contemplation." I have put it to you and you can judge it.
Let us consider Bell's marginalia of the plays! Every age has importuned
itself with words. _Reason_ was such a word, and _fraternity_, and
_liberty_. _Efficiency_, maybe, is the latest, though it is sure that when
you want anything done properly, you have to fight for it. It is below the
dignity of my page to put a plumber on it, yet I have endured occasions!
This word _efficiency_, then, comes from our needs and not from our
accomplishment. It is at best a marching song, not a shout of victory. It
is when the house is dirty that the cry goes up for brooms.
So Bell in the notes upon the margins of his pages echoes a world that is
talking about _delicacy_, about _sentiment_, about _equality_. (For a
breeze blows up from France.) It was these words that the eighteenth
century most babbled when it grew old. It had horror for what was low and
vulgar. It wore laces on its doublet front, and though it seldom washed,
it perfumed itself. And all this is in Bell, for his notes are a running
comment of a shallow, puritanistic prig, who had sharp eyes and a gossip's
tongue. This was the time, too, when such words as _blanket_ were not
spoken by young ladies if men were about; for it is a bedroom word and
therefore immoral. Bell objected from the bottom of his silly soul that
Lady Macbeth should soil her mouth with it. "Blanket of the dark," he
says, "is an expression greatly below our author. Curtain is evidently
better." "Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself?" Whereat Bell
again complains that Lady Macbeth is "unnecessarily indelicate." "Though
this tragedy," says Bell, "must be allowed a very noble composition, it is
highly reprehensible for exhibiting the chimeras of witchcraft, and still
more so for advancing in several places the principles of fatalism. We
would not wish to see young, unsettled minds to peruse this piece without
proper companions to prevent absurd prejudices."
It must appear from this, that, although one gains no knowledge of
Shakespeare, one does gain a considerable knowledge of Bell and of his
time. And this is just as well. For Bell's light on Shakespeare would be
but a sulphur match the more at carnival time. Indeed, Shakespeare
criticism has been such a pageantry of spluttering candle-ends and
sniffing wicks that it is well that one or two tallow dips leave the
rabble and illuminate the adjacent alleys. It is down such an alley that
Bell's smoking light goes wandering off.
As I read Bell this night, it is as though I listen at the boxes and in
the pit, in that tinkling time of 'seventy-four. The patched Lætitia sits
surrounded by her beaux. It was this afternoon she had the vapors. Next to
her, as dragon over beauty, is a fat dame with "grenadier head-dress."
"The Rivals" has yet to be written. London still hears "The Beggar's
Opera." Lady Macbeth is played in hoopskirts. The Bastille is a tolerably
tight building. Robert Burns is strewn with his first crumbs. It is the
age of omber, of sonnets to Chloe's false ringlets, of odes to red heels
and epics to lap dogs, of tinseled struttings in gilded drawing-rooms. It
was town-and-alley, this age; and though the fields lay daily in their new
creation with sun and shadow on them, together with the minstrelsy of the
winds across them and the still pipings of leaf and water, London, the
while, kept herself in her smudgy convent, her ear tuned only to the
jolting music of her streets, the rough syncope of wheel and voice. Since
then what countless winds have blown across the world, and cloud-wrack!
And this older century is now but a clamor of the memory. What mystery it
is! What were the happenings in that pin-prick of universe called London?
Of all the millions of ant hills this side Orion, what about this one?
London was so certain it was the center of circumambient space.
Tintinnabulate, little Bell!
So you see that the head and front of Bell's villainy was that he was a
little man with an abnormal capacity for gossip. If gossip, then, be a
gallows matter, let Bell unbutton him for the end. On the contrary, if
gossip be but a trifle, here were a case for clement judgment.
In the first place, there is no vice of necessity in gossip. This must be
clearly understood. It is proximity in time and place that makes it
intolerable. A gossip next door may be a nuisance. A gossip in history may
be delightful. No doubt if I had lived in Auchinleck in the days when
Boswell lived at home, I would have thought him a nasty little "skike."
But let him get to London and far off in the revolving years, and I admit
him virtuous.
A gossip seldom dies. The oldest person in every community is a gossip and
there are others still blooming and tender, who we know will live to be
leathery and hard. That the life-insurance actuaries do not recognize this
truth is a shame to their perception. Ancestral lesions should bulk for
them no bigger than any slightest taint of keyhole lassitude. For it is by
thinking of ourselves that we die. It leads to rheums and indigestions and
off we go. And even an ignoble altruism would save us. I know one old lady
who has been preserved to us these thirty years by no other nostrum than a
knot-hole appearing in her garden fence.
[Illustration]
It is a matter of doubt whether at the fashionable cures it is the water
that has chief potency; or whether, so many being met together each
morning at the pump, it is not the exchange of these bits of news that
leads to convalescence. It is marvelous how a dull eye lights up if the
bit be spicy. There was a famous cure, I'm told, though I answer not for
the truth of this, closed up for no other reason than that a deeper
scandal being hissed about (a lady's maid affair), all the inmates became
distracted from their own complaints, and so, being made new, departed. To
this day the building stands with broken doors and windows as testament to
the blight such a sudden miracle put on the springs.
This shows, therefore, that gossipry must be judged by its effects. If it
allay the stone or give a pleasant evening it should have reward instead
of punishment. And here had Bell diverted me agreeably for an hour. It is
true he had given me no "chill and arid knowledge" of Shakespeare, but I
had had ample substitute and the clock had struck ten before its time. It
were justice, then, that I cast back the lie on Murray and give Bell full
acquittal.
No sooner was this decision made than I lifted him tenderly from the shelf
where I had sequestered him. Volume seven was on its head, but I set it
upright. Then I stroked its sides and blew upon its top, as is my custom.
At the last I put him on his former shelf in the company of the chaste
Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell.
He sits there now, this night, on the top shelf but one, just in line with
the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. A decayed Gibbon, I
had thought, proclaims a grandfather. To what length, then, of cultured
ancestry must not this Bell give evidence?
[Illustration]
THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS
[Illustration]
THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS
It sounds like the tinkle of triviality to descend from the stern business
of this present time to write of night-caps: And yet while the discordant
battles are puffing their cheeks upon the rumbling bass pipes, it is
relief if there be intermingled a small, shrill treble--any slightest
squeak outside the general woe.
There was a time when the chief issue of fowl was feather-beds. Some few
tallest and straightest feathers, maybe, were used on women's hats, and a
few of better nib than common were set aside for poets' use--goose
feathers in particular being fashioned properly for the softer flutings,
whether of Love or Spring--but in the main the manifest destiny of a
feather was a feather-bed.
In those days it was not enough that you plunged to the chin in this hot
swarm of feathers, for discretion, in an attempt to ward off from you all
snuffling rheums, coughings, hackings and other fleshly ills, required you
before kicking off the final slippers to shut the windows against what
were believed to be the dank humors of the night. Nor was this enough. You
slept, of course, in a four-post bed; and the curtains had to be pulled
together beyond the peradventure of a cranny. Then as a last prophylaxis
you put on a night-cap. Mr. Pickwick's was tied under the chin like a
sunbonnet and the cords dangled against his chest, but this was a matter
of taste. It was behind such triple rampart that you slept, and were
adjudged safe from the foul contagion of the dark. Consequently your bed
was not exactly like a little boat. Rather it was like a Pullman sleeper,
which, as you will remember, was invented early in the nineteenth century
and stands as a monument to its wisdom.
I have marveled at the ease with which Othello strangled Desdemona.
Further thought gives it explanation. The poor girl was half suffocated
before he laid hands on her. I find also a solution of Macbeth's enigmatic
speech, "Wicked dreams abuse the curtain'd sleep." Any dream that could
get at you through the circumvallation of glass, brocade, cotton and
feathers could be no better than a quadruplicated house-breaker,
compounded out of desperate villainies.
Reader, have you ever purchased a pair of pajamas in London? This is
homely stuff I write, yet there's pathos in it. That jaunty air betokens
the beginning of your search before question and reiteration have dulled
your spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle in your eye. What! Do not
the English wear pajamas? Does not the sex that is bifurcated by day keep
by night to its manly bifurcation? Is not each separate leg swathed in
complete divorcement from its fellow? Or, womanish, do they rest in the
common dormitory of a shirt _de nuit_? The Englishman _does_ wear pajamas,
but the word with him takes on an Icelandic meaning. They are built to the
prescription of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and the width of a
finger thick. If I were a night-watchman, "doom'd for a certain term to
walk the night," I should insist on English pajamas to keep me awake. If
Saint Sebastian, who, I take it, wore sackcloth for the glory of his soul,
could have lighted on the pair of pajamas that I bought on Oxford Circus,
his halo would have burned the brighter.
Just how the feathery and billowy nights of our great-grandparents were
changed into the present is too deep for explanation. Perhaps Annie left a
door or window open--such neglect fitting with her other heedlessness--and
notwithstanding this means of entry, it was found in the morning that no
sprite or ooph had got in to pinch the noses of the sleepers. At least,
there was no evidence of such a visitation, unless the snoring that
abounded all the night did proceed from the pinching of the nose (the
nasal orifice being so clamped betwixt the forefinger and the thumb of
these devilish sprites that the breath was denied its proper channel).
Unless snoring was so caused, it is clear that no ooph had clambered
through the window.
Or perhaps some brave man--a brother to him who first ate an oyster--put
up the window out of bravado to snap thereby his fingers at the forms of
darkness, and being found whole and without blemish or mark of witch upon
his throat and without catarrhal snuffling in his nose, of a consequence
the harsh opinion against the night softened.
Or maybe some younger woman threw up her window to listen to the slim
tenor of moonlight passion with such strumming business as
accompanied--tinkling of cithern or mandolin--and so with chin in hand,
she sighed her soul abroad, to the result that the closing was forgotten.
It is like enough that her dreams were all the sweeter for the breeze that
blew across her bed--loaded with the rhythmic memory of the words she had
heard within the night.