“George Eliot wrote with a pen; Wells writes with a clinical
thermometer and a stethoscope. I may be behind the times, but I prefer
novels to be written with a pen. In the long run I firmly believe that
for the purposes of literature the pen is mightier than the surgical
instrument.”
“That may be,” conceded Jones with reluctance, “but why not keep one’s
mind open to every sincere and interesting experiment in the world of
letters or the world of anything else? And there can be no question at
all of Wells’s sincerity. With a most extraordinary intellectual
equipment and gift for expression through the medium of words, he has
undertaken in his novels to examine the Anglo-Saxon mind and heart and
soul; to strip them of every vestige of their conventional garments and
to display them quivering, real, naked. It is not only an attempt
entirely new in English fiction, which in itself attracts my literary
attention; it is, in the case of Wells, a successful attempt which both
attracts my attention and firmly holds it.”
“But I hate and detest and loathe ‘quivering’ souls and minds and hearts
running around loose in fiction,” Smith almost shrieked. “I don’t wish
to encounter them there; as a matter of fact, I don’t wish to encounter
them anywhere. Sometimes on the journey through life one has to; the
meeting is unavoidable, but I declare and protest that I have never
sought an introduction to them. I don’t want them to be thrust upon me,
ever.”
At this point Mrs. Robinson suddenly tossed aside the doily she had been
all along crocheting in receptive silence, and exclaimed:
“I’ve read the book you two helpless and rather ridiculous men have been
trying to discuss, and I think you have both missed the entire point of
it. You’ve been chattering and gabbling about art and literature and
morality but you haven’t touched at all on what is the backbone of the
book. I’ve been listening to you, and you both express yourselves with
conviction and some force; but both of you have missed the point.” Mrs.
Robinson smiled at us wisely and maternally, including me, although I
had kept out of the discussion. She is a woman of sixty-five. She has
known the world, she has lived and she has thought, and on the subject
of “Ann Veronica” she spoke as follows:
“I read the book. It of course interested me; if it hadn’t I should not
have finished it. Now listen, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, to an old woman
and try to realize where she rises intellectually above you both. To Mr.
Smith the book is out of the question, impossible. To Mr. Jones it is an
important, perhaps a great study of certain phases of contemporary life.
Neither of you will concede an inch, and neither of you seem to be aware
of the fact that the interest of the book does not consist in its
frankness of phrase, in its matter-of-fact acceptance of
unconventionality. What the story crystallizes, in a fashion that will
make the average middle-aged parent sit up and gasp, is the tragic
impossibility of a parent comprehending and sympathizing with its own
offspring. As you know, I have long been a mother of grown-up children,
and my family is remarkably ‘united,’ as the saying is; but if you take
your courage in your hands, open wide your eyes and honestly,
pitilessly examine almost any family however theoretically, technically
‘united,’ what do you discover? I am not talking of the idealist and the
sentimentalist. I am referring to cool and calm investigators like, let
us say, this man Wells you both have been talking about. He has examined
a certain family. It is just one small family, but the writer has
succeeded to an astonishing degree in typifying the modern family in
general, although to admit that he has may be repellent.
“The world,” declared Mrs. Robinson, “is moving with a rather
frightening, breath-taking rapidity. Even parents, comparatively young,
no longer live the lives of their children. I’m not such an old fool as
to believe for a moment that I know what my boys are doing or what my
girls are thinking. I used to consider it possible; I now am convinced
that it is impossible. Such character as I have developed and
solidified, I achieved under circumstances that do not now obtain,
although I tried, wrongly perhaps, to keep them up, to prolong them and
make them influences in the lives of the beings for whom I am
responsible. My greatest claim to modernity consists in the fact that I
have gracefully recognized and accepted defeat. My children are my
children, but they also are children of a period in the world’s history
to which I really do not in a heartfelt way belong. This in many
respects is sad, it is even at times horrible. But here we are! What are
we going to do about it? Ann Veronica belonged violently to her time.
Her father belonged tenaciously to his. To preserve a united family,
what, given these conditions, must happen? Simply concessions. To
preserve the happy family, Ann must always forfeit some of her
intelligence and modernity; Papa and Mamma must always concede to--oh,
all sorts of little things (sometimes they are dreadfully big things)
that they abominate. Parents and children have to scare up a kind of
domestic philosophy and meet one another half way. When they don’t there
is no longer a ‘united’ family. There is a drama of some sort and Mr.
Wells sits down and writes a story about it. Ann was the kind of
offspring who would not concede. Her father was the kind of parent who
would not concede. You have seen what happened. I am not so sure that
Mr. Wells himself is aware of what is really the lesson of his novel,
but it is that sixty rarely has sympathy with and genuine understanding
of twenty, and twenty in its heart of hearts looks upon sixty, not as
perhaps experienced and wise, but as rather absurd. Concessions! All
life is an endless succession of them. If we didn’t at every moment make
them, everybody in the world would have to live in absolute solitude,
and even then he would have to concede to the forces of nature, the sun
and the rain, the cold and the dark, hunger, weariness and sleep.
“Now stop this wrangling, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones,” the good lady went
on, “and both concede a little. You, Mr. Smith, must concede that the
book is interesting and written with a skill, a gift for observation and
expression possessed by few, although I shall allow you to retain your
temperamental bias and consider the story uncalled for and the
treatment coarse.
“You, Mr. Jones, must concede that this manner of writing, of depicting
life, is an innovation in English; that although you enjoy it, it may
not be a wise one; that instead of merely amusing and doing good it may
have the power to do harm, and that Mr. Smith is entitled to his opinion
even if it doesn’t coincide with yours. There is much to be said in
favor of Mr. Smith’s opinion.”
“And what is your opinion, Mrs. Robinson?” I at this point inquired.
“Oh, I haven’t any,” she replied gayly. “A really wise old woman never
has.”
HOLIDAYS
With me, at least, holidays finally became an issue that had to be met,
faced and, once and for all, disposed of. For years I half-consciously
postponed the matter and went through many of the motions supposed to be
essential to their respective spirits. On the Fourth of July, for
instance, I would try to feel noisily inclined and patriotic, although
my patriotism is not of a blatant variety and I had begun to dread noise
almost more than I dreaded any other ill to which the human flesh is
heir. On Christmas I endeavored, in the most painstaking fashion, to
scare up a good-will-to-everybody sensation that I didn’t sincerely
possess. On Thanksgiving Day I tried to observe the convention, not of
giving thanks, for that has never become a convention, but of
pretending that I desired more than usual to eat, which I never did and
never do. But, all the while, firecrackers were becoming more and more
abhorrent, geniality around the Yule log more of a bore, the sight of
excessive food more repulsive, and, finally, I began to realize what was
happening to me. Quite simply and naturally and inevitably, darling “was
growing old; silver threads among the gold,” and not only silver threads
(they are the least of it) but a lot of other things were taking place.
It is all very interesting, and one of the most interesting things about
it is the incredibly short time in which it seems to happen. Perhaps my
memory is extremely erratic; in fact I feel sure it is, for sometimes
last week is almost a total blank, whereas twenty and occasionally even
thirty (dear Heaven!) years ago are vivid, clear-cut and intelligible.
The more ancient date often seems more real and alive than the later. I
haven’t the vaguest idea of what I did last Tuesday. There undoubtedly
was a last Tuesday, but now, as far as I am concerned, it did not exist,
although I am reasonably sure that while it ticked itself away I was
clothed and in my right mind. On the other hand, I can most accurately
recall, for example, the early morning of the Fourth of July, 1884. How
we “conspired at every pore”! I remember going to bed most respectably
and innocently at the usual time, waiting until the more mature members
of the family were sound asleep and then sneaking down to the
drawing-room and dozing restlessly on a sofa until about half-past two
<small>A.M.</small> At that weird and ecstatic hour we emerged from a French window,
extricated our firecrackers from the little “dog-house” in which we had
secreted them and proceeded to make the rest of the night altogether
odious. It comes back to me that an accidental spark popped into the
ammunition box and, with a heart-rending, rip-snorting crash, flash and
agonized detonation, destroyed everything in about one and a half tragic
minutes. It was astonishing and glorious while it lasted, but it lasted
such a short time that the rest of the night would have been left, so to
speak, on our hands, if someone had not reluctantly tiptoed to his
house and produced the supply he had been hoarding for the daylight
hours. Then, with a huge bonfire, we all but ruined a beautiful elm
tree, set fire to the fence, burned great chasms in the wooden sidewalk
and had a perfectly delightful time generally.
I refer to these ordinary activities of the American male child only
because I feel as if I had been engaging in them yesterday morning
instead of twenty-five years ago, and because, in spite of my
photographic recollection, so many queer things have taken place. To
begin with, whereas I still, in memory, am able to reëxperience the
exquisite thrill I had when, at the age of thirteen, I would hold a
giant firecracker in my hand until the last advisable fraction of a
second. I now have a horror of giant firecrackers, or indeed of anything
that noisily explodes with possible dire results. In Mexico, for
instance, when my brother and I are making, on mule back, a journey in
an isolated part of the country, he always insists on my carrying a
revolver in a large, visible holster. Mexicans have a most erroneous
idea that with a revolver all Americans have an accurate and deadly aim.
My brother considers this a great moral support and declares that the
idea ought to be encouraged. Well, I carry the revolver, but I don’t
mind confessing that I am much more afraid of it than I am of anything
else in Mexico. The dangerous implement keeps bumping against my hip,
reminding me that it is there and that it might tear six large holes in
me at any moment. It is always an immense relief to arrive somewhere
and, in a gingerly fashion, take it off and put it on a table or a
bureau. Yet twenty-five years ago, nothing could have made me feel so
proud, so brave, so competent to face the entire world as a revolver
bumping against my hip. The old feeling for the Fourth of July has
simply gone, disappeared, evaporated in some inscrutable fashion. It now
has become for me a day of genuine misery, unless I am happy enough to
spend it where it is not “observed.” In addition to loathing the noise
because I can’t help it, I more and more every year hate it because I am
increasingly depressed by the knowledge of all the so easily preventable
mutilations with which it is associated; I hate it because of the pain I
have known it to inflict upon the sick and dying. Even many of the lower
animals of my acquaintance, dogs and horses in particular, regularly
once a year spend twenty-four hours of mental and physical agony on the
Fourth of July. While trying to reassure an old dog who had crawled
under a bed and collapsed with a nervous chill, while trying to calm the
uncontrollable terror of a steady, sensible, intelligent horse, I have
often fervently wished that there had been no Revolution and that we had
remained a British colony.
Thanksgiving Day became a horror of an entirely different kind. As I
look back on the evolution of what has finally become my attitude toward
holidays, I am convinced that the impulse to my detestation of the
well-meant festival was given originally by the annual proclamations of
the Presidents of the United States and the governors of the state in
which I happened to have been born and brought up. To be President of
the United States of America is, we are told, to hold the highest
possible public office in the universe, but apparently one of the
conditions of election to this exalted estate is that no President shall
ever officially write anything for publication that is not obvious,
pompous, platitudinous and unreadable. The printed remarks of governors
are even, if possible, more so. Reading, once in so often, dear, dead
old phrases about the “universal prosperity now existing throughout the
length and breadth of this great land,” was, I am sure, what first began
to make me realize that Thanksgiving Day is a most dreadful affair.
If the Fourth of July drives one distracted with its fiendish noise, the
day of giving thanks has almost the same effect if one pays any special
attention to it, by reason of its unnatural quiet. It comes at a dreary
time of year when outside there is nothing in particular to do and
nowhere in particular to go. One stays in the house and, some time
during the day, eats a variety of rather unusual and not necessarily
agreeable things one would never think of ordering at a restaurant or a
club. Until one has freed oneself from the thralldom of holidays (I
have), the semi-historical, semi-culinary torpidity of Thanksgiving Day
usually upsets one’s routine, one’s digestion, one’s entire scheme of
life. It is as if the Fourth of July had eloped with Christmas and the
result of the union had been a kind of illegitimate Sunday.
And then Christmas. As I grow older, its original significance, its
reason for being a holiday at all, becomes more full of meaning, more
touching, more beautiful. It is not in the least obligatory to be
religiously inclined in order to be profoundly moved by the symbolism of
its pathos and poetry. The incident stands out, sums up, crystallizes
for us, all that in our gentlest and best moods we believe about the
great facts of birth, of motherhood, of infancy, of the family relation.
It is our standard, our ideal; a serious contemplation of it must
arouse in us everything that is most kindly, affectionate, generous,
humble. The birth of the Infant Jesus, the attendant circumstances, the
general scene and the significance of it all is, I happen to know, one
of the few things that can cause a hard-faced, avaricious old
billionaire to sink his head on his library table and burst into
uncontrollable sobs.
But Christmas itself! I mean the day we have made of it. It is really a
terrible day unless, perhaps, you are pretending to relieve it with the
children which some of us don’t possess. Just as I can recall delirious
Fourths of July, I can recall Christmas days that were a scream of
delight from energetic dawn until tired and sleepy midnight. The
delicious, exciting smell of the pine tree, the feel of the “excelsior”
in which the fragile ornaments were packed, the taste of those red and
yellow animals made out of transparent candy, the taste of the little
candles (for some strange, youthful reason we always purloined several
of the candles and chewed them, even green ones, in secret. I can’t
imagine now why they didn’t poison us), the thrilling effect of cotton
batting spread on the floor at the tree’s base (there were always, of
course, acres of real snow just outside the front door but it quite
lacked the power to entrance possessed by a few square feet of cotton
batting)--for years I haven’t smelled or tasted or seen any of these
things. But how wonderful they used to be. Even the Christmas we spent
at the ages of eight and five, in Gibraltar, and where our tree
consisted of a small orange tree propped up in a slop jar, was the real
thing. Every moment of it returns palpitating with the old Christmas
sensation.
But now the day, aside from its real significance, to which apparently
no great attention is paid, has, as far as I am concerned, lost all its
old magic and charm. Of late years, when I have been sufficiently
foolish to attempt to “make merry” on Christmas, I have found the
twenty-fifth of December merely a memory that one can revive, but to
which one may not give life or even a very successful, galvanic
semblance of life. If, nowadays, I permitted Christmas to make any
particular impression on me, which I don’t, it would, I fear, be chiefly
an annoying impression that I ought to be spending more money than I can
afford in order to give, to persons I take but little interest in,
presents they don’t need. At any rate, that is the principal impression
I seem to derive from the ante-Christmas conversation of most of my
acquaintances who still conventionally observe the day.
In fact, the whole question of holidays had to be met and solved, and I
rejoice in the fact that I have at last done it as successfully as have
many other much more sensible people. It is the easier to do, I suppose,
if circumstances have often necessitated one’s spending the more
important days in an environment lacking the slightest suggestion of
domesticity. I have spent Christmas in a hotel in Athens, in a hotel in
Paris, on shipboard, on a railway train, in the desert of Sahara, in
tropical countries where it was all but impossible to recall anything
that remotely suggested the annual festival. Once I spent all of
Christmas on the back of a lame mule.
This sort of thing, unless one happily possesses a temperament unusually
innocent and robust, has but one result: holidays become mere dates on a
calendar. They are welcome intruders if one happens to be tied down day
after day, as most of us are, to any one exacting and monotonous
occupation, but the way to enjoy them, to extract the best from them is,
I have found, to ignore them. It is an immeasurable satisfaction when
you at last haul down the flag and tell yourself that you don’t in the
least care what other people are doing on a certain day; when you
finally cast out the disturbing belief that you ought to engage in some
irritating or melancholy activity, generally supposed to be in keeping
with the occasion. To observe Christmas by not observing it at all but
by doing what you really feel like doing on a day of leisure, to dine on
bread and butter and a cup of tea on Thanksgiving Day because they are
what you most want, to seek on the Fourth of July a locality in which
there is absolute quiet, all require some courage and, I regret to say,
a certain age, but it is worth it.
SERVANTS
Polite existence seems to be composed, in part, of a warp (or do I,
perhaps, mean a woof?) of funny little pretensions and affectations, of
rather meaningless standards and conventions, make-believes and poses.
The polite world, broadly speaking, always seems to be divided into two
classes; those who swallow it all whole, who believe in it, who practice
and live up to it, and those who really don’t, but who pretend they do
for fear of forfeiting the esteem of the others. We all know persons who
quite simply have been born into the world with what might be called
aristocratic temperaments and instincts. They do not affect it; they
cannot help it; it is innate, and they automatically observe the
conventions because they like to, because it is the line of least
resistance. On the other hand, no end of us go through almost precisely
the same motions, but without conviction, and, when we feel reasonably
sure that we sha’n’t be found out, we relax and give a certain amount of
free play to what happens to be our natures.
In few human relations does this fact seem to me to be more clearly
revealed than in the attitude of the polite toward their servants. There
is really, if one pauses to think about it, a tremendous amount of
bunkum in the alleged relations between most of one’s acquaintances and
the people who attend to their various needs. I don’t say all, because
the sincere exceptions at once suggest themselves, but in the case of
most I am inclined to believe that the matter is largely regulated by
“what other people would think,” rather than by natural promptings--by
human spontaneity. How often have I heard a woman or a man scornfully
exclaim, “Servant’s gossip!” or, “She’s the sort of woman who listens to
her servants!” The first great crime apparently is to take the slightest
interest in the point of view, the ideas, the information or the
conversation of one’s servants. Conventionally they are, none of them,
supposed to have intelligence, integrity or the gift of being agreeable.
Of course no end of people converse with their servants incessantly and
derive from the proceeding much interest and amusement, but they very
rarely admit it, and when they do, it is always in a deprecating,
apologetic fashion calculated to impress you with the fact that the
incident was quite out of the ordinary--which, secretly, I never believe
it is. “Sometimes I let Mary Ann run on. For a maid she is really
rather,” etc. For some, to me inscrutable, reason, hardly anybody admits
that he ever talks to a servant on a basis of intellectual equality, and
furthermore, hardly anybody ever admits, without in some way qualifying
the admission, that a servant is good-looking; that he, or she, as the
case may be, in different clothes and removed from the yoke of
servitude, might be indistinguishable from the persons he serves, and in
many instances much more charming in appearance.
“When Connor, the second man, is dressed up, he isn’t a bad-looking man
at all. You might almost mistake him for something else,” I have had a
fat, coarse-skinned, rich, middle-aged woman half humorously assure me
in speaking of one of her footmen, whose mere presence in the room made
her entire family appear to be even more common than they actually were.
The aristocratic tendency must have been omitted from me, for I have
never been able to detect on my part the slightest desire to apologize
for either intelligence or beauty wherever I wonderfully discovered it.
If it is there, it is there, and instantly recognizable. But in the case
of servants, it, for some reason, does not seem to be quite “the thing”
to admit it.
Frankly, I like to talk to servants and always do when I feel
conversationally inclined, and one of them is available. I extremely
enjoy hearing what they have to say about their employment, their wages,
their ambitions, the kind of treatment they receive from their employers
and the characteristics of their employers. From servants I have
learned many curious and amazing things about people I thought I knew
tolerably well and really didn’t because I had never been their servant.
And I am not in the least ashamed of having learned these things by
chatting pleasantly with servants; I am glad of it, for it has added
greatly to my understanding of people and life. Nothing is more
interesting than the contemplation of our little world from as many
different angles as possible. The servant’s angle is one of the most
acute. From servants one learns how a striking variety of persons
conduct themselves under almost all the circumstances to which human
beings are subjected. It is, indeed, from them alone that one can find
out about such matters; one’s personal experience, after all, is
necessarily limited to so few intimate, human contacts and incidents. To
talk frankly with intelligent servants is to receive a great light and
to re-awaken the interest in one’s fellow-man that at times has a
tendency to doze.