the moon, and were a wild, unfriendly bird, every man's hand would be
against him. But we forgive him his ugliness and conceit, not only
because he is a dutiful citizen of the barnyard, but also because now,
as in the days of the noble Horatio, he obligingly acts as "trumpet to
the morn." On account of this romantic and sometimes useful custom, he
wears a sentimental halo. M. Rostand has made him the hero of a drama.
When will some wise playwright celebrate his urban prototype, the alarm
clock?
The spirit in which this question is asked is not wholly one of mockery.
For the alarm clock is close to humanity; in the city household, few
bits of furniture are more personal and necessary. It is a faithful
servant, this loud-voiced creature of steel and glass, obedient,
punctual, patient. And its association with its owner, I had almost
written its master, is so peculiarly intimate as to give it a
personality and an attitude toward life.
In the first place, it is irresistibly egotistic. There are some usual
possessions which become subconscious things, their identities merging
with the shadows of the vague land of habit. One may, for instance,
possess a watch and yet not be aware of the watch as he is aware of his
alarm clock. He lifts it from and returns it to his pocket; he winds it,
with a gesture almost involuntary; he takes his information from his
dial as thoughtlessly as he takes his breath from the atmosphere. Though
it be made of fine gold, cunningly chased and blazoned with precious
stones, it is to him, after the first delight of its acquisition, the
unregarded means to an important end. So long as it serves him
unprotestingly, he thinks of it no more than of his soul. People do not
specifically ask him to consult his watch, they ask, "What time is it?"
and even "Have you the time?"
Not thus does an alarm clock sink into oblivion. At least twice in
twenty-four hours its owner must be vividly aware of its existence. It
imperiously demands of him conscious action. In the morning
clangorously, at night dumbly, it insists on attention. He must with
thought adjust its mechanism, he must give it intelligent orders. And
whether he rises at its summons or instead shuts out with a pillow its
voice and that of conscience, he cannot ignore it. By no effort of will
could Frankenstein forget his monster.
Not that the alarm clock is always a thing monstrous and threatening. It
obeys orders with soldierly exactness but its sympathy is most
unmartial. Routine cannot deaden its sensitivity. True, its ordinary
note is something dry and monotonous. This comes from its perfect sense
of the fitness of things; the call to business should be business-like.
But what triumphant peals burst from its tiny belfry when it bids you
rise and put on robes of honor! It can mimic the proud mirth of wedding
bells; it knows the mighty song that rang from all the towers of London
to cheer Dick Whittington. And that it can utter harsh and strident
grief, those know who lie down with Sorrow and must awaken with her.
Even the most materialistic man has for his alarm clock a shame-faced
personal regard. He speaks of it deprecatingly, with a humorous show of
indignation. He tells how he maltreated it, knocked it from the mantel,
smothered it with blankets, and there is a note of almost paternal
exultation in his voice when he describes its persistence in ringing.
Franker souls actually parade what may be termed their
alarm-clockophilia. A friend of mine, one Carolus Dillingham, talks by
the hour of his Nellie. Nellie is not, to the casual observer, an alarm
clock of extraordinary merit. She was constructed many years ago and her
nickel-plating is nearly gone. She is a small, weak-looking thing, with
a great dome absolutely out of proportion to her rickety body. A result
of her ridiculous construction is that when the alarm rings, she becomes
slightly overbalanced, trembles, and moves a fraction of an inch forward
on her feeble legs.
This, according to Carolus, is her chief charm. "I put Nellie," he says,
"on the very edge of the shelf by the foot of my bed. When she rings in
the morning she topples off and lands on the blankets. So I don't need
to get up and walk across the cold floor. I can just reach out and choke
her. I think she is the most faithful alarm clock in the world."
One little regarded virtue of the alarm clock is its sturdy democracy.
It belongs irrevocably to the people, nothing can make it a snob. There
is a watch for every rank; there are coarse peasant watches, fat
bourgeois watches, and watches delicately aristocratic. But the alarm
clock in the tenement of the laborer is the exact duplicate of that
which wakens his employer; an alarm clock's an alarm clock for a' that.
America will never really be a decadent nation until its alarm clocks
are jeweled and soft-voiced.
The captious critic may object that the reason for the plainness of
alarm clocks is that their use is restricted to what is loosely called
"the working class." There is some truth in this.
Up to the present I have never witnessed the awaking of an aristocrat,
or even of a captain of industry, but, I suppose that they are hailed in
soft tones by liveried menials, who bring them golden trays absolutely
overflowing with breakfast food and remarkably thick cream. But
aristocrats and captains of industry are rare birds, and all other
people must have alarm clocks.
All other people, that is, who live in cities. For the alarm clock, in
spite of its numerous excellences, is as inappropriate in the country as
rouge on a milkmaid. The farmer must try to live up to his craft, and
one of the aesthetic duties is to depend on mechanism as little as
possible. His wife should rise when she hears the poultry saluting the
dawn. Then, so nearly as I remember her obligations, she should go out
on the front porch and blow a conchshell until her husband wakes up.
The dweller in the suburbs is a creature of compromise. He grows
vegetables and keeps chickens, perhaps he grows vegetables for the use
of the chickens, and he cultivates a rural manner of speech. But he
spends most of his waking hours in the city and every night he brings
out with him on the five-twenty-seven some device to alter the
simplicity of the country. He is an ambiguous creature, analogous to the
merman. And the conspicuous symbol of his ambiguity is his alarm clock.
It is in ruralia but not of it. It stands by a window that opens on an
orchard, but it indicates the factory and market-place. It is a link
between its owner's two personalities, it is the skeleton at the feast,
reminding him, when he comes in from weeding the strawberry patch, that
he must get up at a quarter to seven the next morning and hurry to the
noisy train. Never does an alarm clock look so blatantly mechanical as
when it stands in a cottage of one of the people barbarously termed
"commuters."
For in the city, where everything is mechanical, the alarm clock seems
pleasantly personal. It is at home there, it is perfectly in keeping
with its surroundings. It takes on as comfortable an air of domesticity
as the most ornate Swiss timepiece that ever said "Cuckoo"; it is
contented, sociable, a member of the family. There is a sense of
strangeness in the apartment that has no alarm clock; it is like a
catless fireside.
And by association with the other sounds of awaking life, which even in
the most sordid slum have about them something of energy and hope, the
morning chorus of alarm clocks, echoing down the paved canyons from six
to eight, make, in the ears of the unprejudiced listener, a cheerful
noise. With them comes the mysterious creaking of the dumb-waiter as it
ascends with the milk, an adequate substitute for the lowing of the
herd. Kitchens and kitchenettes take on new life, and issue grateful
odors of coffee and bacon. And babies, seeing that their weary parents
are leaving them, decide at last that it is time to go to sleep.
An alarm clock can, on occasion, preach a sermon that would arouse the
envy of Savonarola. When the jaded reveler returns to his home at
day-break, wastes ten minutes in a frantic attempt to awaken the
elevator boy, and climbs, with cursing and gnashing of teeth, the eight
flights of stairs that lead to his apartment, then nothing more sharply
reminds him of his truancy than the voices of the alarm clocks calling
to each other in the bedrooms of his virtuous neighbors.
Not even the laziest or the weariest man can hate the alarm clock as he
does the factory whistle. The shrill blast that comes every morning from
the iron throat of this monster has in it a note of contemptuous menace.
The tired laborers awaken at their master's bidding; there is something
unnatural about this abrupt wholesale termination of sleep. But the
discipline of the alarm clock is another matter; he who hears it
listens, it may be said, to his own voice. He himself has set it, he has
fixed the very moment of his own awaking. And there is dignity in
observing rules self-imposed, however irksome they may be. The alarm
clock is the symbol of civilization, that is, of voluntary submission,
of free will obedience.
The careful reader will be aware that many aspects of this excellent
device have been neglected in this brief consideration. I have said
nothing of the alarm clock's sense of humor and of its willingness to
become a party to practical jokes. I have said nothing of how it may be
pleased, of its pride, for instance, in being referred to as an "alarum
clock." But it has one characteristic which I must mention, its
usefulness to the suddenly rich.
There is a delightful sort of novel, Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote
one, and so did Mr. H. G. Wells, which deals with the adventures of a
young man who has unexpectedly inherited a fortune. Samuel Warren's "Ten
Thousand a Year" is perhaps the greatest example of this manner of
fiction. Well, if I were T. Tembarom, or Kipps, or Tittlebat Titmouse
(Dr. Warren's hero), my alarm clock would be necessary for my first act
of celebration. Perhaps I should throw it from a window, perhaps I
should remove its bell, perhaps I should merely enjoy letting it run
down. At any rate, its presence would be necessary to the complete
enjoyment of my new freedom.
DAILY TRAVELING
Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Call the custom of daily travel
"commuting" and deliver it over to the whips of the scorner. The
intransitive verb "to commute" is a barbarous thing; he who is called
"commuter" is thereby rudely and ungrammatically taunted with journeying
at reduced rates, with being (terrible thought!) the recipient of a
railway's charity.
It is lamentable that so picturesque a habit as daily railway travel
should be thus misnamed. That it is a picturesque habit is perceived by
anyone who takes the trouble to consider it scientifically, shutting
resolutely from his mind the odium brought upon it by its odious name.
Suppose, for instance, that you were to go into the tap-room of the
Mermaid Tavern some winter evening during the reign of the, so to speak,
Good Queen Bess. The venerable Mr. Alfred Noyes would lead you to the
table always reserved for Messrs. Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. You
would take from your pocket your commutation ticket, and, holding aloft
that cabalistically inscribed oblong of colored cardboard, would
sonorously declaim:
"By means of this talisman I daily fly across leagues of the New World,
from my cottage in a primeval forest to the heart of a mighty city. It
enables me to lead two lives; I am on week days urban, sophisticated, a
man of commerce; at night and on Sundays I am a smocked yokel, innocent
among my innocent vegetables. This little square of cardboard enables me
to ride in a splendid vehicle propelled by Nature herself more swiftly
than the wind, a vehicle which laughs at time and obliterates space. The
masters of romance, bowing in homage, have bestowed upon me the mystic
and awful name 'commuter.'"
Such a tale would draw Marlowe from his Malmsey and thrill the stout
heart of mighty Ben. And Avon's bard, charmed by a fact more golden than
all his imaginings, would augustly murmur "Very good, Eddie!"
It is a picturesque thing, this daily trip between the meadows and the
pavements. By general consent, a vagabond is the most romantic of men;
an allusion to the open road, wandering feet or the starlight on one's
face is sufficient to turn an ordinary rhymer into that radiant being, a
"tramp-poet." Then what glory must cling to those habitual vagabonds,
those devotees of the steel highway, whom we call commuters. The common
tramp seldom covers more than ten miles from sunrise to sundown; as a
rule his pilgrimage is even briefer. Yet he is called a knight of the
open road and even the staidest householder has a sneaking admiration
for him. The gypsy is no true vagabond, for he takes with him his wife,
children, dogs, furniture, and even his canvas-roofed house. Yet our
writers, from Borrow to Kipling, delight to urge us to ha' done with the
tents of Shem, dear lass, and follow the Romany patteran. The only
authentic vagabond is he who every day goes thirty miles from his rural
home to the city and every night thirty miles back, diving through
mountains, plunging under rivers; twice on every week-day, a wanderer
more free and venturesome than Lavengro himself.
But its picturesqueness is not the sole recommendation of daily railway
travel. The greatest of its numerous virtues is that it is democratic,
the only absolutely democratic institution in the United States of
America. It is the mighty leveler, the irresistible enemy of social
subordination.
In a city, town or village in which the citizens remain night and day
there can be no true democracy. The intentions of its inhabitants may be
excellent, but circumstances will be stronger. There is the minister,
there is the banker, there is the doctor, there is the grocer, there is
the cobbler, there is the minister's hired man. If a New England rural
community is under observation there will also be noted the village
atheist, the village drunkard, and the village Democrat. The population
is sharply divided into classes; there may be friendliness among the
various grades of humanity, there may be liberty, but there can be no
fraternity, no equality.
How different is the community in which people merely dwell, having
their business elsewhere! What is their occupation? They go to The
City--that is sufficient answer to admit them to fellowship. If
curiosity be still unsatisfied, there is the mention of the name of a
great firm, and all is well.
The cobbler, you see, keeps his last in the city, away from his home and
his neighbors; he does not stick to it, as the unpleasant adage bids
him. As he sits on his red velvet chair, enjoying with his neighbors
tobacco smoke, rapid travel, and the news of the world, who shall say
whether he deals in shoes or in empires? Next to him is Dusenbury, who
in addition to going to New York, goes to Wall Street, rumor has it.
What does he do in Wall Street? Does he corner the wheat market or clean
out waste baskets? Those who know, who say to him, "Sir" or "Hey, you,"
are not his companions on the 7.57.
There is a certain charm about what is called, ridiculously enough, a
"commuting town," which is altogether lacking in other communities. A
"commuting town" is wholly a place of homes--not of homes diluted with
offices, factories and shops. It is therefore the quintessence of
domesticity, being domestic with an intensity which no village which is
remote from the centers of civilization, which furnishes employment and
supplies to its own citizens can hope to approach.
Such a town is daily divided and joined, diminished and completed,
thereby keeping in a state of healthy activity. The 7.57 takes away, the
5.24 brings back. These recurrent separations and reunions are not
without their ethical and emotional value.
INCONGRUOUS NEW YORK
That dislike of the obvious which is the chief characteristic of
American humor is clearly exemplified in the names of most of New York's
streets.
The dwellers in a great European city would give their proudest avenue
of great shops and rich clubs some dignified and significant title, like
the Rue de la Paix or the Friedrichstrasse. The Asiatics would give it a
name more definitely descriptive and laudatory, like "The Street of the
Thousand and One Mirrors of Delight." The New Yorkers, "laconic and
Olympian," designate it by a simple numeral. They call it Fifth Avenue.
It comes partly from the national reticence, this prosaic name of a
poetic thoroughfare. It is a manifestation of that attitude of mind
which makes us to call a venerated and beloved statesman merely "Old
Abe," when the English would call him "the Grand Old Man" and the
Italians "the Star-crowned Patriarch." Also it is a phase of our
democracy. We will not seem to exalt one avenue over another by giving
it a fairer name; Fifth Avenue sounds to the uninitiated no more wealthy
and aristocratic than Fourth Avenue. Indeed, if there be any partiality
in the awarding of names, it would seem to be exercised in favor of
First Avenue or Avenue A.
It may be objected that the sponsors of Fifth Avenue did not foresee its
destined splendor. But this fact does not alter the case; we continue to
call it Fifth Avenue, whereas Europeans would alter its name to
something more appropriate to its grandeur.
There was a pilgrim from the Five Towns who said that Fifth Avenue was
architecturally the finest street in the world. This might pass for a
guest's flattery, were it not that Mr. Arnold Bennett is of a nation
which does not count gracious insincerity among its vices. New York must
blushingly admit the truth of his judgment.
It is not (he said) harmonious. Its beauty is made up of units of beauty
related only by position. This, too, is characteristically American.
Each building must have its distinctive excellence.
To give a street of wonders an austere name, to build palaces and fill
them with offices and shops--these are the acts by which Americans are
known. And especially does the New Yorker delight in the whimsical, the
inconsistent, the unexpected. He is like a child who likes to dig in the
sand with a silver spoon and to eat porridge with a toy shovel.
And this delicate perversity has its refreshing aspect. Fifth Avenue,
surely, is a thing to admire in the new sense as well as the old. It
sometimes suggests, perhaps, the ill-natured definition of a New Yorker
as a man who, when he makes a set of chimes, puts it in a life insurance
building. But it more often suggests a restatement of this definition;
that is, that a New Yorker is a man who, when he makes a life insurance
building, puts a set of chimes in it.
Now, certain masters of the mirthless science of psychology teach that
humor depends on incongruity. Whether or not this is true, incongruity
has much to do with making life worth while. For incongruity is the soul
of romance.
Nobility, love, courage, beauty--the possession of these qualities does
not give to a man or a woman romantic charm. A person is a hero or a
heroine of romance because he or she lives in a contrasting place or
age. For example, a cowboy riding a bucking bronco and whirling his
lariat under a canvas roof in some sedate Eastern town is properly
considered by the spectators to be a romantic figure. A cowboy engaged
in the same interesting occupations on a Texas ranch would not be
considered a romantic figure by his neighbors. It is incongruity of
environment that romantically transforms him.
People and things of bygone ages are romantic to us because the years
have gilded them. They were not romantic to their contemporaries. Says
Edwin Arlington Robinson:
Minniver loved the Medici
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediaeval grace
Of iron clothing.
Exactly. Minniver Cheevy was a true romanticist. A plumed knight, armed
cap-a-pie, is a romantic figure when we merely see him through the years
from our modern surroundings by means of imagination's powerful lens; he
would be a figure even more romantic if we could actually see him shake
his lance and lead his warriors against a drab-suited, machine-like
company of present-day soldiers. Why, even horse cars, commonplace
enough in their day, take on a certain sentimental luster when they lie
abandoned in the outskirts of cities proud with electricity. And a
subway train will one day be as romantic a spectacle as a stage coach.
Sometimes a building is deliberately given the romance of incongruity.
This certainly is the case with the New York Stock Exchange. This
splendid Grecian temple, with its lofty columns and noble facade, would,
if it stood in ancient Athens, be, of course, beautiful, but in no
respect romantic. It is romantic because it is in a place where it would
not naturally be expected and because it is devoted to uses for which it
does not seem to have been intended. If the god therein worshiped were
not Mammon, but altisonant Jupiter, if white-robed priests found the
future prefigured in the warm blood of the lambs therein
sacrificed--then the building which now houses the clamoring merchants
would be merely dignified and practical and not, as it is today,
romantic.
The use of this Grecian temple as a counting house is a splendid example
of the poetic tendency of a popular mind. The common business
terms--"Bull" and "Bear," for example--are incongruous, and therefore
romantic. And a successful business man is not realistically called a
successful business man; he is romantically called a "merchant prince"
or a "captain of industry."
But most of New York's romantic places get their glory not by plan, but
by the accident of design. You turn the corner from a sombre street
lined by tall concrete and steel structures that obviously are of your
own period and come suddenly upon a mellow bit of New Amsterdam. You
would not be surprised to see old Peter Stuyvesant stump down Coenties
Slip and drop in for his morning's Hollands at "22-1/2," across the way.
There are streets and squares and alleys in downtown New York that look
now exactly as they did when Times Square was a cow pasture and the
Bowery really bowery. But these places were not romantic to the citizens
of that time; they would not be romantic to us if by some strange
backward transmigration of souls we should inhabit a vanished century.
No, we are fortunate to live when Battery Place and Coenties Slip have
acquired romance's glamour. Incongruity is the soul of romance. And
these quaint time-hallowed places have the loveliest sort of
incongruity--the magical incongruity of archaisms.
IN MEMORIAM: JOHN BUNNY
There was a clown named Joseph Grimaldi. And when his agile limbs and
mobile features were stilled by death there lingered in the minds of the
thousands who had laughed at him in Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden
only the memory of their mirth.
There was a clown named John Bunny. Now he is dead. But we still may
see, and our children's children may see, the gestures and grimaces that
made him a welcome visitor in every quarter of the globe. For by grace
of the motion-picture camera, John Bunny's art endures.
It is art, this power of conveying ideas without the use of words, of
exciting laughter by actually being, instead of saying, a joke. It is
the difficult and venerable art of the clown, the art of the
shaven-headed mime in variegated robes whose antics drove care from
Caesar's furrowed brow, the art of Garrick's harlequin friend, John Rich,
and of the mirth-compelling Pinkethman, whose "frolic gestures" won the
praise of Alexander Pope.
Of course, John Bunny could play in speaking parts. Before he found his
real vocation, before the motion pictures claimed him as their great
comedian, he trod the boards of the "legitimate" stage, and with no
small success. He ran the theatrical gamut from minstrelsy to
Shakespeare. Annie Russell, Maude Adams, Weber and Fields--these are a
few of the stars whose radiance he augmented during the first
twenty-five years of his professional life. But to-day the regular drama
offers little opportunity to the true clown, and it was not until he
appeared on the screen that John Bunny reach his own public--that is,
the world.