despite the horrible examples at the top of this barrel. Perhaps our own
literature shivers in too thin a shift. For once upon a time somewhere
between the age of bustles and ourselves there were writers who ended
their stories "and they were married and lived happily ever after."
Whereas at this present day stories are begun "They were married and
straightway things began to go to the devil." And for my own part I have
read enough of family quarrels. I am tired of the tune upon the triangle
and I am ready for softer flutings. When I visit my neighbors, I want them
to make a decent pretense. It was Charles Lamb who found his married
friends too loving in his presence, but let us not go to extremes! And so,
after I have read a few books of marital complication, I yearn for the
old-fashioned couple in the older books who went hand in hand to old age.
At this minute there is a black book that looks down upon me like a crow.
It is "Crime and Punishment." I read it once when I was ill, and I nearly
died of it. I confess that after a very little acquaintance with such
books I am tempted to sequester them on a top shelf somewhere, beyond
reach of tiptoe, where they may brood upon their banishment and rail
against the world.
Encyclopedias and the tonnage of learning properly take their places on
the lowest shelves, for their lump and mass make a fitting foundation. I
must say, however, that the habit of the dictionary of secreting itself in
the darkest corner of the lowest shelf contributes to general illiteracy.
I have known families wrangle for ten minutes on the meaning of a word
rather than lift this laggard from its depths. Be that as it may, the
novels and poetry should be on the fifth shelf from the bottom, just off
the end of the nose, so to speak.
Now, the vinegar cruet is never the largest vessel in the house. So by
strict analogy, sour books--the kind that bite the temper and snarl upon
your better moods--should be in a small minority. Do not mistake me! I
shall find a place, maybe, for a volume or two of Nietzsche, and all of
Ibsen surely. I would admit _uplift_ too, for my taste is catholic. And
there will be other books of a kind that never rouse a chuckle in you. For
these are necessary if for no more than as alarm clocks to awake us from
our dreaming self-content. But in the main I would not have books too
insistent upon the wrongs of the world and the impossibility of remedy.
I confess to a liking for tales of adventure, for wrecks in the South
Seas, for treasure islands, for pirates with red shirts. Mark you, how a
red shirt lights up a dull page! It is like a scarlet leaf on a gray
November day. Also I have a weakness for the bang of pistols, round oaths
and other desperate rascality. In such stories there is no small mincing.
A villain proclaims himself on his first appearance--unless John Silver be
an exception--and retains his villainy until the rope tightens about his
neck in the last chapter but one; the very last being set aside for the
softer commerce of the hero and heroine.
You will remember that about twenty years ago a fine crop of such stories
came out of the Balkans. At that time it was a dim, unknown land, a kind
of novelists' Coast of Bohemia, an appropriate setting for distressed
princesses. I'll hazard a guess that there was not a peak in all that
district on which there was not some Black Rudolph's castle, not a road
that did not clack romantically with horses' hoofs on bold adventure. But
the wars have changed all this by bringing too sharp a light upon the dim
scenery of this pageantry, and swash-bucklery is all but dead.
To confess the truth, it is in such stories that I like horses best. In
real life I really do not like them at all. I am rather afraid of them as
of strange organisms that I can neither start with ease nor stop with
safety. It is not that I never rode or drove a horse. I have achieved
both. But I don't urge him to deviltry. Instead I humor his whims. Some
horses even I might be fond of. Give me a horse that nears the age of
slippered pantaloon and is, moreover, phlegmatic in his tastes, and then,
as the stories say "with tightened girth and feet well home"--but enough!
I must not be led into boasting.
But in these older stories I love a horse. With what fire do his hoofs
ring out in the flight of elopement! "Pursuit's at the turn. Speed my
brave Dobbin!" And when the Prince has kissed the Princess' hand, you know
that the story is nearly over and that they will live happily ever after.
Of course there is always someone to suggest that Cinderella was never
happy after she left her ashes and pumpkins and went to live in the
palace. But this is idle gossip. Even if there were "occasional
bickerings" between her and the Prince, this is as Lamb says it should be
among "near relations."
I nearly died of "Crime and Punishment." These Russian novelists have too
distressful a point of view. They remind me too painfully of the poem--
It was dreadful dark
In that doleful ark
When the elephants went to bed.
Doubtless if the lights burn high in you, it is well to read such gloom as
is theirs. Perhaps they depict life. These things may be true and if so,
we ought to know them. At the best, theirs is a real attempt "to cleanse
the foul body of the infected world." But if there be a blast without and
driving rain, must we be always running to the door to get it in our face?
Will not one glance in the evening be enough? Shall we be always exposing
ourselves "to feel what wretches feel"? It is true that we are too content
under the suffering of others, but it is true, also, that too few of us
were born under a laughing star. Gray shadows fall too often on our minds.
A sunny road is the best to travel by. Furthermore--and here is a deep
platitude--there is many a man who sobs upon a doleful book, who to the
end of time will blithely underpay his factory girls. His grief upon the
book is diffuse. It ranges across the mountains of the world, but misses
the nicer point of his own conduct. Is this not sentimentally like the
gray yarn hysteria under the spell of which wealthy women clicked their
needles in public places for the soldiers? Let me not underrate the number
of garments that they made--surely a single machine might produce as many
within a week. But there is danger that their work was only a sentimental
expression of their world-grief. I'll sink to depths of practicality and
claim that a pittance from their allowances would have bought more and
better garments in the market.
Perhaps we read too many tragical books. In the decalogue the inheritance
of evil is too strongly visited on the children to the third and fourth
generation, and there is scant sanction as to the inheritance of goodness.
It is the sins of the fathers that live in the children. It is the evil
that men do that lives after them, while the good, alas, is oft interred
with their bones. If a doleful book stirs you up to life, for God's sake
read it! If it wraps you all about as in a winding sheet for death, you
had best have none of it.
[Illustration]
I had now burned several matches--and my fingers too--in the inspection of
the closet where the women's garments hung. And it came on me as I poked
the books within the barrel and saw what silly books were there, that
perhaps I have overstated my position. It would be a lighter doom, I
thought, to be rived and shriveled by the lightning flash of a modern
book, even "Crime and Punishment," than stultified by such as were within.
Then, like the lady of the poem
Having sat me down upon a mound
To think on life,
I concluded that my views were sound
And got me up and turned me round,
And went me home again.
ON TRAVELING
[Illustration]
ON TRAVELING
In old literature life was compared to a journey, and wise men rejoiced to
question old men because, like travelers, they knew the sloughs and
roughnesses of the long road. Men arose with the sun, and toddled forth as
children on the day's journey of their lives, and became strong to endure
the heaviness of noonday. They strived forward during the hours of early
afternoon while their sun's ambition was hot, and then as the heat cooled
they reached the crest of the last hill, and their road dipped gently to
the valley where all roads end. And on into the quiet evening, until, at
last, they lie down in that shadowed valley, and await the long night.
This figure has lost its meaning, for we now travel by rail, and life is
expressed in terms of the railway time-table. As has been said, we leave
and arrive at places, but we no longer travel. Consequently we cannot
understand the hubbub that Marco Polo must have caused among his townsmen
when he swaggered in. He and his crew were bronzed by the sun, were
dressed as Tartars, and could speak their native Italian with difficulty.
To convince the Venetians of their identity, Marco gave a magnificent
entertainment, at which he and his officers received, clad in oriental
dress of red satin. Three times during the banquet they changed their
dress, distributing the discarded garments among their guests. At last,
the rough Tartar clothing worn on their travels was displayed and then
ripped open. Within was a profusion of jewels of the Orient, the gifts of
Kublai Khan of Cathay. The proof was regarded as perfect, and from that
time Marco was acknowledged by his countrymen, and loaded with
distinction. When Drake returned from the Straits of Magellan and,
powdered and beflunkied, told his lies at fashionable London dinners, no
doubt he was believed. And his crew, let loose on the beer-shops, gathered
each his circle of listeners, drank at his admirers' expense, and yarned
far into the night. It was worth one's while to be a traveler in those
times.
But traveling has fallen to the yellow leaf. The greatest traveler is now
the brakeman. Next is he who sells colored cotton. A poor third pursues
health and flees from restlessness. Wise men have ceased to question
travelers, except to inquire of the arrival of trains and of the comfort
of hotels.
To-day I am a thousand miles from home. From my window the world stretches
massive, homewards. Even though I stood on the most distant range of
mountains and looked west, still I would look on a world that contained no
suggestion of home; and if I leaped to that horizon and the next, the
result would be the same--so insignificant would be the relative distance
accomplished. And here I am set down with no knowledge of how I came.
There was a continuous jar and the noise of motion. We passed a barn or
two, I believe, and on one hillside animals were frightened from their
grazing as we passed. There were the cluttered streets of several cities
and villages. There was a prodigious number of telegraph poles going in
the opposite direction, hell-bent as fast as we, which poles considerately
went at half speed through towns, for fear of hitting children. The United
States was once an immense country, and extended quite to the sunset. For
convenience we have reduced its size, and made it but a map of its former
self. Any section of this map can be unrolled and inspected in a day's
time.
In the books for children is the story of the seven-league
boots--wonderful boots, worth a cobbler's fortune. If a prince is escaping
from an ogre, if he is eloping with a princess, if he has an engagement at
the realm's frontier and the wires are down, he straps these boots to his
feet and strides the mountains and spans the valleys. For with the
clicking of the silver buckles he has destroyed the dimensions of space.
Length, breadth and depth are measured for him but in wishes. One wish and
perhaps a snap of the fingers, or an invocation to the devil of
locomotion, and he stands on a mountain-top, the next range of hills blue
in the distance; another wish and another snap and he has leaped the
valley. Wonderful boots, these! Worth a king's ransom. And this prince,
too, as he travels thus dizzily may remember one or two barns, animals
frightened from their grazing, and the cluttered streets nested in the
valley. When he reaches his journey's end he will be just as wise and just
as ignorant as we who now travel by rail in magic, seven-league fashion.
For here I am set down, and all save the last half-mile of my path is lost
in the curve of the mountains. From my window I see the green-covered
mountains, so different from city streets with their horizon of buildings.
I fancy that, on the memorable morning when Aladdin's Palace was set down
in Africa after its magic night's ride from the Chinese capital, a
housemaid must have gone to the window, thrown back the hangings and
looked out, astounded, on the barren mountains, when she expected to see
only the courtyard of the palace and its swarm of Chinese life. She then
recalled that the building rocked gently in the night, and that she heard
a whirling sound as of wind. These were the only evidences of the
devil-guided flight. Now she looked on a new world, and the familiar
pagodas lay far to the east within the eye of the rising sun.
There are summer evenings in my recollection when I have traveled the
skies, landing from the sky's blue sea upon the cloud continent, and
traversing its mountain ranges, its inland lakes, harbors and valleys.
Over the wind-swept ridges I have gone, watching the world-change, seeing
the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the Kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store.
The greatest traveler that I know is a little man, slightly bent, who
walks with a stick in his garden or sits passive in his library. Other
friends have boasted of travels in the Orient, of mornings spent on the
Athenian Acropolis, of visiting the Theatre of Dionysius, and of hallooing
to the empty seats that re-echoed. They warn me of this and that hotel,
and advise me concerning the journey from London. The usual tale of
travelers is that Athens is a ruin. I have heard it rumored, for instance,
that the Parthenon marbles are in London, and that the Parthenon itself
has suffered from the "wreckful siege of battering days"; that the walls
to Piræus contain hardly one stone left upon another.
And this sets me to thinking, for my friend denies all this with such an
air of sincerity that I am almost inclined to believe his word against all
the others. The Athens he pictures is not ruinous. The Parthenon stands
before him as it left the hand of Phidias. The walls to Piræus stand high
as on that morning, now almost forgotten, when Athens awaited the Spartan
attack. For him the Dionysian Theatre does not echo to tourists' shouts,
but gives forth the sounds of many-voiced Greek life. He knows, too, the
people of Athens. He walked one day with Socrates along the banks of the
Ilissus, and afterwards visited him in his prison when about to drink the
hemlock. It is of the grandeur of Athens and her sons that he speaks, not
of her ruins. The best of his travels is that he buys no tickets of Cook,
nor, indeed, of any one, and when he has seen the cities' sights, his wife
enters and says, "Isn't it time for the bookworm to eat?" So he has his
American supper in the next room overlooking Attica, so to speak.
[Illustration]
THROUGH THE SCUTTLE WITH THE TINMAN
[Illustration]
THROUGH THE SCUTTLE WITH THE TINMAN
Yesterday I was on the roof with the tinman. He did not resemble the
tinman of the "Wizard of Oz" or the flaming tinman of "Lavengro," for he
wore a derby hat, had a shiny seat, and smoked a ragged cigar. It was a
flue he was fixing, a thing of metal for the gastronomic whiffs journeying
from the kitchen to the upper airs. There was a vent through the roof with
a cone on top to shed the rain. I watched him from the level cover of a
second-story porch as he scrambled up the shingles. I admire men who can
climb high places and stand upright and unmoved at the gutter's edge. But
their bravado forces on me unpleasantly how closely I am tied because of
dizziness to Mother Earth's apron strings. These fellows who perch on
scaffolds and flaunt themselves on steeple tops are frontiersmen. They
stand as the outposts of this flying globe. Often when I observe a workman
descend from his eagle's nest in the open steel frame of a lofty building,
I look into his face for some trace of exaltation, some message from his
wider horizon. You may remember how they gazed into Alcestis' face when
she returned from the House of Hades, that they might find there a token
of her shadowed journey. It is lucky that I am no taller than six feet; if
ten, giddiness would set in and reversion to type on all fours. An
undizzied man is to me as much of a marvel as one who in his heart of
hearts is not afraid of a horse.
Maybe after all, it is just because I am so cowardly and dizzy that I have
a liking for high places and especially for roofs. Although here my people
have lived for thousands of years on the very rim of things, with the
unimagined miles above them and the glitter of Orion on their windows, so
little have I learned of these verities that I am frightened on my shed
top and the grasses below make me crouch in terror. And yet to my fearful
perceptions there may be pleasures that cannot exist for the accustomed
and jaded senses of the tinman. Could he feel stimulus in Hugo's
description of Paris from the towers of Notre Dame? He is too much the
gargoyle himself for the delights of dizziness.
Quite a little could be said about the creative power of gooseflesh. If
Shakespeare had been a tinman he could not have felt the giddy height and
grandeur of the Dover Cliffs; Ibsen could not have wrought the climbing of
the steeple into the crisis and calamity of "The Master Builder";
Teufelsdröckh could not have uttered his extraordinary night thoughts
above the town of Weissnichtwo; "Prometheus Bound" would have been
impossible. Only one with at least a dram of dizziness could have
conceived an "eagle-baffling mountain, black, wintry, dead, unmeasured."
In the days when we read Jules Verne, was not our chief pleasure found in
his marvelous way of suspending us with swimming senses over some fearful
abyss; wet and slippery crags maybe, and void and blackness before us and
below; and then just to give full measure of fright, a sound of running
water in the depths. Doesn't it raise the hair? Could a tinman have
written it?
But even so, I would like to feel at home on my own roof and have a
slippered familiarity with my slates and spouts. A chimney-sweep in the
old days doubtless had an ugly occupation, and the fear of a sooty death
must have been recurrent to him. But what a sable triumph was his when he
had cleared his awful tunnel and had emerged into daylight, blooming, as
Lamb would say, in his first tender nigritude! "I seem to remember," he
continues, "that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush to
indicate which way the wind blew." After observing the tinman for a while,
I put on rubber shoes and slunk up to the ridgepole, the very watershed of
my sixty-foot kingdom, my legs slanting into the infinities of the North
and South. It sounds unexciting when written, but there I was, astride my
house, up among the vents and exhausts of my former cloistered life, my
head outspinning the weathercock. My Matterhorn had been climbed, "the
pikes of darkness named and stormed." Next winter when I sit below snug by
the fire and hear the wind funneling down the chimney, will not my peace
be deeper because I have known the heights where the tempest blows, and
the rain goes pattering, and the whirling tin cones go mad?
Right now, if I dared, I would climb to the roof again, and I would sit
with my feet over the edge and crane forward and do crazy things just
because I could. Then maybe my neighbors would mistake the point of my
philosophy and lock me up; would sympathize with my fancies as did Sir
Toby and Maria with Malvolio. If one is to escape bread and water in the
basement, one's opinions on such slight things as garters and roofs must
be kept dark. Be a freethinker, if you will, on the devil, the deep sea,
and the sunrise, but repress yourself in the trifles.
I like flat roofs. There is in my town a public library on the top story
of a tall building, and on my way home at night I often stop to read a bit
before its windows. When my eyes leave my book and wander to the view of
the roofs, I fancy that the giant hands of a phrenologist are feeling the
buildings which are the bumps of the city. And listening, I seem to hear
his dictum "Vanity"; for below is the market of fashion. The world has
sunk to ankle height. I sit on the shoulders of the world, above the
tar-and-gravel scum of the city. And at my back are the books--the past,
all that has been, the manners of dress and thought--they too peeping
aslant through these windows. Soon it will be dark and this day also will
be done and burn its ceremonial candles; and the roar from the pavement
will be the roar of yesterday.
Astronomy would have come much later if it had not been for the flat roofs
of the Orient and its glistening nights. In the cloudy North, where the
roofs were thatched or peaked, the philosophers slept indoors tucked to
the chin. But where the nights were hot, men, banished from sleep, watched
the rising of the stars that they might point the hours. They studied the
recurrence of the star patterns until they knew when to look for their
reappearance. It was under a cloudless, breathless sky that the
constellations were named and their measures and orbits allotted. On the
flat roof of some Babylonian temple of Bel came into life astrology,
"foolish daughter of a wise mother," that was to bind the eyes of the
world for nearly two thousand years, the most enduring and the strongest
of superstitions. It was on these roofs, too, that the planets were first
maligned as wanderers, celestial tramps; and this gossip continued until
recent years when at last it appeared that they are bodies of regular and
irreproachable habits, eccentric in appearance only, doing a cosmic beat
with a time-clock at each end, which they have never failed to punch at
the proper moment.
Somewhere, if I could but find it, must exist a diary of one of these
ancient astronomers--and from it I quote in anticipation. "Early this
night to my roof," it runs, "the heavens being bare of clouds (_coelo
aperto_). Set myself to measure the elevation of Sagittarius Alpha with my
new astrolabe sent me by my friend and master, Hafiz, from out Arabia. Did
this night compute the equation a=(Dx/2T)f(a, b c T_3). Thus did I prove
the variations of the ellipse and show Hassan Sabah to be the mule he is.
Then rested, pacing my roof even to the rising of the morning star, which
burned red above the Sultan's turret. To bed, satisfied with this night."
Northern literature has never taken the roof seriously. There have been
many books written from the viewpoint of windows. The study window is
usual. Then there is the college window and the Thrums window. Also there
is a window viewpoint as yet scarcely expressed; that of the boy of
Stevenson's poems with his nose flattened against the glass--convalescence
looking for sailormen with one leg. What is "Un Philosophe sous les Toits"
but a garret and its prospect? But does Souvestre ever go up on the roof?
He contents himself with opening his casement and feeding crumbs to the
birds. Not once does he climb out and scramble around the mansard. On
wintry nights neither his legs nor thoughts join the windy devils that
play tempest overhead. Then again, from Westminster bridges, from country
lanes, from crowded streets, from ships at sea, and mountain tops have
sonnets been thrown to the moon; not once from the roof.
Is not this neglect of the roof the chief reason why we Northerners fear
the night? When darkness is concerned, the cowardice of our poetry is
notorious. It skulks, so to speak, when beyond the glare of the street
lights. I propound it as a question for scholars.
'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.
Why is the night conceived as the time for the bogey to be abroad?--an
... evil thing that walks by night,
In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen,
Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time.
Why does not this slender, cerulean dame keep normal hours and get sleepy
after dinner with the rest of us--and so to bed? Such a baneful thing is
night, "hideous," reeking with cold shivers and gloom, from which morning
alone gives relief.
Pack, clouds, away! and welcome, day!
With night we banish sorrow.
Day is jocund that stands on the misty mountain tops.
But we cannot expect the night to be friendly and wag its tail when we
slam against it our doors and, until lately, our windows. Naturally it
takes to ghoulishness. It was in the South where the roofs are flat and
men sleep as friends with the night that it was written, "The heavens
declare the glory of God: and the firmament showeth his handiwork."