means of reversing the direction of the earth. Perhaps an explosion of
gases backfired against the east. Perhaps he built a monstrous lever
and contrived the moon to be his fulcrum. Anyway, here at last was the
earth spinning backward in its course--the spring preceding
winter--the sun rising in the west--one o'clock going before
twelve--soup trailing after nuts--the seed-time following upon the
harvest. And so it began to appear--so ran the story--that human life,
too, was reversed. Persons came into the world as withered grandames
and as old gentlemen with gold-headed canes, and then receded like
crabs backward into their maturity, then into their adolescence and
babyhood. To return from a protracted voyage was to find your younger
friends sunk into pinafores. But the story was really too ridiculous.
But in these last few years no doubt I do grow younger. The great
camera of the Master rolls its moving pictures backward. Perhaps I am
only thirty-eight now that the direction is reversed.
[Illustration]
I wonder what you thought, my dear X----, when we met recently at
dinner. We had not seen one another very often in these last few
years. Our paths have led apart and we have not been even at shouting
distance across the fields. It is needless to remind you, I hope, that
I once paid you marked attention. It began when we were boy and girl.
Our friends talked, you will recall. You were then less than a year
younger than myself, although no doubt you have since lost distance.
What a long time I spent upon my tie and collar--a stiff high collar
that almost touched my ears! Some other turn of fortune's
wheel--circumstance--a shaft of moonlight (we were young, my dear)--a
white frock--your acquiescence--who knows?
I jilted you once or twice for other girls--nothing formal, of
course--but only when you had jilted me three or four times. We once
rowed upon a river at night. Did I take your hand, my dear? If I
listen now I can hear the water dripping from the oar. There was
darkness--and stars--and youth (yourself, white-armed, the symbol of
its mystery). Yes, perhaps I am older now.
Was it not Byron who wrote?
I am ashes where once I was fire,
And the soul in my bosom is dead;
What I loved I now merely admire,
And my heart is as gray as my head.
I cannot pretend ever to have had so fierce a passion, but at least my
fire still burns and with a cheery blaze. But you will not know this
love of mine--unless, of course, you read this page--and even so, you
can only suspect that I write of you, because, my dear, to be quite
frank, I paid attention to several girls beside yourself.
Yes, they say that I have come to the top of the hill and that
henceforth the view is back across my shoulder. I am counseled that
with a turn of the road I had best sit with my back to the horses, for
the mountains are behind. A little while and the finer purple will be
showing in the west. Yet a little while, they say, and the bewildering
peaks of youth will be gray and cold.
Perhaps some of the greener pleasures are mine no longer. Certainly,
last night I went to the Winter Garden, but left bored after the first
act; and I had left sooner except for climbing across my neighbors. I
suppose there are young popinjays who seriously affirm that Ziegfeld's
Beauty Chorus is equal to the galaxy of loveliness that once pranced
at Weber and Field's when we came down from college on Saturday night.
At old Coster and Bial's there was once a marvelous beauty who swung
from a trapeze above the audience and scandalously undressed herself
down to the fifth encore and her stockings. And, really, are there
plays now as exciting as the _Prisoner of Zenda_, with its great fight
upon the stairs--three men dead and the tables overturned--Red
Rudolph, in the end, bearing off the Princess? Heroes no longer wear
cloak and sword and rescue noble ladies from castle towers.
And Welsh rabbit, that was once a passion and the high symbol of
extravagance, in these days has lost its finest flavor. In vain do we
shake the paprika can. Pop-beer and real beer, its manly cousin, have
neither of them the old foaming tingle when you come off the water.
Yes, already, I am told, I am on the long road that leads down to the
quiet inn at the mountain foot. I am promised, to be sure, many wide
prospects, pleasant sounds of wind and water, and friendly greetings
by the way. There will be a stop here and there for refreshments, a
pause at the turn where the world shows best, a tightening of the
brake. Get up, Dobbin! Go 'long! And then, tired and nodding, at last,
we shall leave the upland and enter the twilight where all roads end.
A pleasant picture, is it not--a grandfather in a cap--yourself, my
dear sir, hugging your cold shins in the chimney corner? Is it not a
brave end to a stirring business? Life, you say, is a journey up and
down a hill--aspirations unattained and a mild regret, castles at
dawn, a brisk wind for the noontide, and at night, at best, the lights
of a little village, the stir of water on the stones, and silence.
Is this true? Or do we not reiterate a lie? I deny old age. It is a
false belief, a bad philosophy dimming the eyes of generations. Men
and women may wear caps, but not because of age. In each one's heart,
if he permit, a child keeps house to the very end. If Welsh rabbit
lose its flavor, is it a sign of decaying power? I have yet to know
that a relish for Shakespeare declines, or the love of one's friends,
or the love of truth and beauty. Youth does not view the loftiest
peaks. It is at sunset that the tallest castles rise.
My dear sir--you of seventy or beyond--if no rim of mountains
stretches up before you, it is not your age that denies you but the
quality of your thought. It has been said of old that as a man thinks
so he is, but who of us has learned the lesson?
The journey has neither a beginning nor an end. Now is eternity. Our
birth is but a signpost on the road--our going hence, another post to
mark transition and our progress. The oldest stars are brief lamps
upon our way. We shall travel wisely if we see peaks and castles all
the day, and hold our childhood in our hearts. Then, when at last the
night has come, we shall plant our second post upon a windy height
where it will be first to catch the dawn.
On the Difference Between Wit and Humor.
I am not sure that I can draw an exact line between wit and humor.
Perhaps the distinction is so subtle that only those persons can
decide who have long white beards. But even an ignorant man, so long
as he is clear of Bedlam, may have an opinion.
I am quite positive that of the two, humor is the more comfortable and
more livable quality. Humorous persons, if their gift is genuine and
not a mere shine upon the surface, are always agreeable companions
and they sit through the evening best. They have pleasant mouths
turned up at the corners. To these corners the great Master of
marionettes has fixed the strings and he holds them in his nimblest
fingers to twitch them at the slightest jest. But the mouth of a
merely witty man is hard and sour until the moment of its discharge.
Nor is the flash from a witty man always comforting, whereas a
humorous man radiates a general pleasure and is like another candle in
the room.
I admire wit, but I have no real liking for it. It has been too often
employed against me, whereas humor is always an ally. It never points
an impertinent finger into my defects. Humorous persons do not sit
like explosives on a fuse. They are safe and easy comrades. But a
wit's tongue is as sharp as a donkey driver's stick. I may gallop the
faster for its prodding, yet the touch behind is too persuasive for
any comfort.
Wit is a lean creature with sharp inquiring nose, whereas humor has a
kindly eye and comfortable girth. Wit, if it be necessary, uses malice
to score a point--like a cat it is quick to jump--but humor keeps the
peace in an easy chair. Wit has a better voice in a solo, but humor
comes into the chorus best. Wit is as sharp as a stroke of lightning,
whereas humor is diffuse like sunlight. Wit keeps the season's
fashions and is precise in the phrases and judgments of the day, but
humor is concerned with homely eternal things. Wit wears silk, but
humor in homespun endures the wind. Wit sets a snare, whereas humor
goes off whistling without a victim in its mind. Wit is sharper
company at table, but humor serves better in mischance and in the
rain. When it tumbles wit is sour, but humor goes uncomplaining
without its dinner. Humor laughs at another's jest and holds its
sides, while wit sits wrapped in study for a lively answer. But it is
a workaday world in which we live, where we get mud upon our boots and
come weary to the twilight--it is a world that grieves and suffers
from many wounds in these years of war: and therefore as I think of my
acquaintance, it is those who are humorous in its best and truest
meaning rather than those who are witty who give the more profitable
companionship.
And then, also, there is wit that is not wit. As someone has written:
Nor ever noise for wit on me could pass,
When thro' the braying I discern'd the ass.
I sat lately at dinner with a notoriously witty person (a really witty
man) whom our hostess had introduced to provide the entertainment. I
had read many of his reviews of books and plays, and while I confess
their wit and brilliancy, I had thought them to be hard and
intellectual and lacking in all that broader base of humor which aims
at truth. His writing--catching the bad habit of the time--is too
ready to proclaim a paradox and to assert the unusual, to throw aside
in contempt the valuable haystack in a fine search for a paltry
needle. His reviews are seldom right--as most of us see the right--but
they sparkle and hold one's interest for their perversity and
unexpected turns.
In conversation I found him much as I had found him in his
writing--although, strictly speaking, it was not a conversation, which
requires an interchange of word and idea and is turn about. A
conversation should not be a market where one sells and another buys.
Rather, it should be a bargaining back and forth, and each person
should be both merchant and buyer. My rubber plant for your victrola,
each offering what he has and seeking his deficiency. It was my friend
B---- who fairly put the case when he said that he liked so much to
talk that he was willing to pay for his audience by listening in his
turn.
But this was a speech and a lecture. He loosed on us from the cold
spigot of his intellect a steady flow of literary allusion--a practice
which he professes to hold in scorn--and wit and epigram. He seemed
torn from the page of Meredith. He talked like ink. I had believed
before that only people in books could talk as he did, and then only
when their author had blotted and scratched their performance for a
seventh time before he sent it to the printer. To me it was an
entirely new experience, for my usual acquaintances are good common
honest daytime woollen folk and they seldom average better than one
bright thing in an evening.
At first I feared that there might be a break in his flow of speech
which I should be obliged to fill. Once, when there was a slight
pause--a truffle was engaging him--I launched a frail remark; but it
was swept off at once in the renewed torrent. And seriously it does
not seem fair. If one speaker insists--to change the figure--on laying
all the cobbles of a conversation, he should at least allow another to
carry the tarpot and fill in the chinks. When the evening was over,
although I recalled two or three clever stories, which I shall botch
in the telling, I came away tired and dissatisfied, my tongue dry with
disuse.
Now I would not seek that kind of man as a companion with whom to be
becalmed in a sailboat, and I would not wish to go to the country with
him, least of all to the North Woods or any place outside of
civilization. I am sure that he would sulk if he were deprived of an
audience. He would be crotchety at breakfast across his bacon.
Certainly for the woods a humorous man is better company, for his
humor in mischance comforts both him and you. A humorous man--and here
lies the heart of the matter--a humorous man has the high gift of
regarding an annoyance in the very stroke of it as another man shall
regard it when the annoyance is long past. If a humorous person falls
out of a canoe he knows the exquisite jest while his head is still
bobbing in the cold water. A witty man, on the contrary, is sour until
he is changed and dry: but in a week's time when company is about, he
will make a comic story of it.
My friend A---- with whom I went once into the Canadian woods has
genuine humor, and no one can be a more satisfactory comrade. I do not
recall that he said many comic things, and at bottom he was serious as
the best humorists are. But in him there was a kind of joy and
exaltation that lasted throughout the day. If the duffle were piled
too high and fell about his ears, if the dinner was burned or the tent
blew down in a driving storm at night, he met these mishaps as though
they were the very things he had come north to get, as though without
them the trip would have lacked its spice. This is an easy philosophy
in retrospect but hard when the wet canvas falls across you and the
rain beats in. A---- laughed at the very moment of disaster as another
man will laugh later in an easy chair. I see him now swinging his axe
for firewood to dry ourselves when we were spilled in a rapids; and
again, while pitching our tent on a sandy beach when another storm had
drowned us. And there is a certain cry of his (dully, _Wow!_ on paper)
expressive to the initiated of all things gay, which could never issue
from the mouth of a merely witty man.
Real humor is primarily human--or divine, to be exact--and after that
the fun may follow naturally in its order. Not long ago I saw Louis
Jouvet of the French Company play Sir Andrew Ague-Cheek. It was a most
humorous performance of the part, and the reason is that the actor
made no primary effort to be funny. It was the humanity of his
playing, making his audience love him first of all, that provoked the
comedy. His long thin legs were comical and so was his drawling talk,
but the very heart and essence was this love he started in his
audience. Poor fellow! How delightfully he smoothed the feathers in
his hat! How he feared to fight the duel! It was easy to love such a
dear silly human fellow. A merely witty player might have drawn as
many laughs, but there would not have been the catching at the heart.
As for books and the wit or humor of their pages, it appears that wit
fades, whereas humor lasts. Humor uses permanent nutgalls. But is
there anything more melancholy than the wit of another generation? In
the first place, this wit is intertwined with forgotten circumstance.
It hangs on a fashion--on the style of a coat. It arose from a
forgotten bit of gossip. In the play of words the sources of the pun
are lost. It is like a local jest in a narrow coterie, barren to an
outsider. Sydney Smith was the most celebrated wit of his day, but he
is dull reading now. Blackwood's at its first issue was a witty daring
sheet, but for us the pages are stagnant. I suppose that no one now
laughs at the witticisms of Thomas Hood. Where are the wits of
yesteryear? Yet the humor of Falstaff and Lamb and Fielding remains
and is a reminder to us that humor, to be real, must be founded on
humanity and on truth.
On Going to a Party.
Although I usually enjoy a party when I have arrived, I seldom
anticipate it with pleasure. I remain sour until I have hung my hat. I
suspect that my disorder is general and that if any group of formal
diners could be caught in preparation midway between their tub and
over-shoes, they would be found a peevish company who might be
expected to snap at one another. Yet look now at their smiling faces!
With what zest they crunch their food! How cheerfully they clatter on
their plates! Who would suspect that yonder smiling fellow who strokes
his silky chin was sullen when he fixed his tie; or that this pleasant
babble comes out of mouths that lately sulked before their mirrors?
I am not sure from what cause my own crustiness proceeds. I am of no
essential unsociability. Nor is it wholly the masquerade of
unaccustomed clothes. I am deft with a bow-knot and patient with my
collar. It may be partly a perversity of sex, inasmuch as we men are
sometimes "taken" by our women folk. But chiefly it comes from an
unwillingness to pledge the future, lest on the very night my own
hearth appear the better choice. Here we are, with legs stretched for
comfort toward the fire--easy and unbuttoned. Let the rain beat on the
glass! Let chimneys topple! Let the wind whistle to its shrill
companions of the North! But although I am led growling and reluctant
to my host's door--with stiffened paws, as it were, against the
sill--I usually enjoy myself when I am once inside. To see me across
the salad smiling at my pretty neighbor, no one would know how
churlish I had been on the coming of the invitation.
I have attended my share of formal dinners. I have dined with the
magnificent H----s and their Roman Senator has announced me at the
door; although, when he asked my name in the hall, I thought at first
in my ignorance that he gave me directions about my rubbers. No one
has faced more forks and knives, or has apportioned his implements
with nicer discrimination among the meats. Not once have I been forced
to stir my after-dinner coffee with a soup spoon. And yet I look back
on these grand occasions with contentment chiefly because they are
past. I am in whole agreement with Cleopatra when she spoke
slightingly of her salad days--surely a fashionable afternoon affair
at a castle on the river Nile--when, as she confessed, she was young
and green in judgment.
It is usually a pleasure to meet distinguished persons who, as a rule,
are friendly folk who sit in peace and comfort. But if they are lugged
in and set up stiffly at a formal dinner they are too much an
exhibition. In this circumstance they cannot be natural and at their
best. And then I wonder how they endure our abject deference and
flabby surrender to their opinions. Would it not destroy all interest
in a game of bowling if the wretched pins fell down before the hit
were made? It was lately at a dinner that our hostess held in
captivity three of these celebrated lions. One of them was a famous
traveler who had taken a tiger by its bristling beard. The second was
a popular lecturer. The third was in distemper and crouched quietly at
her plate. The first two are sharp and bright and they roared to
expectation. But I do not complain when lions take possession of the
cage, for it reduces the general liability of talk, and a common man,
if he be industrious, may pluck his bird down to the bone in peace.
A formal reception is even worse than a dinner. One stands around with
stalled machinery. Good stout legs, that can go at a trot all day,
become now weak and wabbly. One hurdles dispiritedly over trailing
skirts. One tries in conversation to think of the name of a play he
has just seen, but it escapes him. It is, however, so nearly in his
grasp, that it prevents him from turning to another topic. Benson, the
essayist, also disliked formal receptions and he quotes Prince Hal in
their dispraise. "Prithee, Ned," says the Prince--and I fancy that he
has just led a thirsty Duchess to the punchbowl, and was now in the
very act of escaping while her face was buried in the cup--"Prithee,
Ned," he says, "come out of this fat room, and lend me thy hand to
laugh a little!" And we can imagine these two enfranchised rogues,
easy at heart, making off later to their Eastcheap tavern, and the
passing of a friendly cup. But now, alas, today, all of the rooms of
the house are fat and thick with people. There is a confusion of
tongues as when work on the tower of Babel was broken off. There is no
escape. If it were one's good luck to be a waiter, one could at least
console himself that it was his livelihood.
The furniture has been removed from all the rooms in order that more
persons may be more uncomfortable. Or perhaps the chairs and tables,
like rats in a leaky ship, have scuttled off, as it were, now that
fashion has wrecked the home. A friend of mine, J----, resents these
entertainments. No sooner, recently, did he come into such a bare
apartment where, in happier days his favorite chair had stood, than he
hinted to the guests that the furniture had been sold to meet the
expenses of the day. This sorry jest lasted him until, on whispering
to a servant, he learned that the chairs had been stored in an upper
hall. At this he proposed that the party reassemble above, where at
least they might sit down and be comfortable. When I last saw J----
that evening he was sitting at the turn of the stairs behind an exotic
shrubbery, where he had found a vagrant chair that had straggled
behind the upper emigration.
The very envelope that contains a formal invitation bears a forbidding
look. It is massive and costly to the eye. It is much larger than a
letter, unless, perhaps, one carries on a correspondence with a giant
from Brobdingnag. You turn it round and round with sad premonition.
The very writing is coldly impersonal without the pinch of a more
human hand. It practices a chill anonymity as if it contains a warrant
for a hanging. At first you hope it may be merely an announcement from
your tailor, inasmuch as commerce patterns its advertisements on these
social forms. I am told that there was once a famous man--a
distinguished novelist--who so disliked formal parties but was so
timid at their rejection that he took refuge in the cellar whenever
one of these forbidding documents arrived, until he could forge a
plausible excuse; for he believed that these colder and more barren
rooms quickened his invention. The story goes that once when he was in
an unusually timid state he lacked the courage to break the seal and
so spent an uneasy morning upon the tubs, to the inconvenience of the
laundress who thought that he fretted upon the plot. At last, on
tearing off the envelope, he found to his relief that it was only a
notice for a display of haberdashery at a fashionable shop. In his
gratitude at his escape he at once sought his desk and conferred a
blushing heiress on his hero.
But perhaps there are persons of an opposite mind who welcome an
invitation. Even the preliminary rummage delights them when their
clothes are sent for pressing and their choice wavers among their
plumage. For such persons the superscription on the envelope now seems
written in the spacious hand of hospitality.
But of informal dinners and the meeting of friends we can all approve
without reserve. I recall, once upon a time, four old gentlemen who
met every week for whist. Three of them were of marked eccentricity.
One of them, when the game was at its pitch, reached down to the rungs
of his chair and hitched it first to one side and then to the other,
mussing up the rugs. The second had the infirmity of nodding his head
continuously. Even if he played a trivial three spot, he sat on the
decision and wagged his beard up and down like a judge. The third
sucked his teeth and thereby made hissing noises. Later in the evening
there would be served buttermilk or cider, and the sober party would
adjourn at the gate. But there were two young rascals who practiced
these eccentricities and after they had gone to bed, for the
exquisite humor of it, they nodded their heads, too, and sucked their
teeth with loud hissing noises.
No one entertains more pleasantly than the S---- family and no one is
more informal. If you come on the minute for your dinner, it is likely
that none of the family is about. After a search J---- is found in a
flannel shirt in his garden with a watering-can. "Hello!" he says in
surprise. "What time is it? Have you come already for dinner?"
"For God's sake," you reply--for I assume you to be of familiar and
profane manners--"get up and wash yourself! Don't you know that you
are giving a party?"
J---- affects to be indignant. "Who is giving this party, anyway?" he
asks. "If it's yours, you run it!" And then he leads you to the house,
where you abuse each other agreeably as he dresses.
Once a year on Christmas Eve they give a general party. This has been
a custom for a number of years and it is now an institution as fixed
as the night itself. Invitations are not issued. At most a rumor goes
abroad to the elect that nine o'clock is a proper time to come, when
the children, who have peeked for Santa Claus up the chimney, have at
last been put to bed. There is a great wood fire in the sitting-room
and, by way of andirons, two soldiers of the Continental Army keep up
their endless march across the hearth. The fireplace is encircled by a
line of leather cushions that rest upon the floor, like a window-seat
that has undergone amputation of all its legs.