PONKAPOG PAPERS
By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
TO FRANCIS BARTLETT
THESE miscellaneous notes and essays are called _Ponkapog Papers_ not
simply because they chanced, for the most part, to be written within
the limits of the old Indian Reservation, but, rather, because there is
something typical of their unpretentiousness in the modesty with which
Ponkapog assumes to being even a village. The little Massachusetts
settlement, nestled under the wing of the Blue Hills, has no illusions
concerning itself, never mistakes the cackle of the bourg for the sound
that echoes round the world, and no more thinks of rivalling great
centres of human activity than these slight papers dream of inviting
comparison between themselves and important pieces of literature.
Therefore there seems something especially appropriate in the
geographical title selected, and if the author's choice of name need
further excuse, it is to be found in the alluring alliteration lying
ready at his hand.
REDMAN FARM, _Ponkapog_, 1903.
CONTENTS
LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK
ASIDES
TOM FOLIO
FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES
A NOTE ON “L'AIGLON”
PLOT AND CHARACTER
THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE
LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL
DECORATION DAY
WRITERS AND TALKERS
ON EARLY RISING
UN POETE MANQUE
THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD
ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION
WISHMAKERS' TOWN
HISTORICAL NOVELS
POOR YORICK
THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER
ROBERT HERRICK
LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK
IN his Memoirs, Kropotkin states the singular fact that the natives of
the Malayan Archipelago have an idea that something is extracted from
them when their likenesses are taken by photography. Here is the motive
for a fantastic short story, in which the hero--an author in vogue or
a popular actor--might be depicted as having all his good qualities
gradually photographed out of him. This could well be the result of
too prolonged indulgence in the effort to “look natural.” First the man
loses his charming simplicity; then he begins to pose in intellectual
attitudes, with finger on brow; then he becomes morbidly self-conscious,
and finally ends in an asylum for incurable egotists. His death might be
brought about by a cold caught in going out bareheaded, there being, for
the moment, no hat in the market of sufficient circumference to meet his
enlarged requirement.
THE evening we dropped anchor in the Bay of Yedo the moon was hanging
directly over Yokohama. It was a mother-of-pearl moon, and might have
been manufactured by any of the delicate artisans in the Hanchodori
quarter. It impressed one as being a very good imitation, but nothing
more. Nammikawa, the cloisonne-worker at Tokio, could have made a better
moon.
I NOTICE the announcement of a new edition of “The Two First Centuries
of Florentine Literature,” by Professor Pasquale Villari. I am not
acquainted with the work in question, but I trust that Professor Villari
makes it plain to the reader how both centuries happened to be first.
THE walking delegates of a higher civilization, who have nothing to
divide, look upon the notion of property as a purely artificial creation
of human society. According to these advanced philosophers, the time
will come when no man shall be allowed to call anything his. The
beneficent law which takes away an author's rights in his own books just
at the period when old age is creeping upon him seems to me a handsome
stride toward the longed-for millennium.
SAVE US from our friends--our enemies we can guard against. The
well-meaning rector of the little parish of Woodgates, England, and
several of Robert Browning's local admirers have recently busied
themselves in erecting a tablet to the memory of “the first known
forefather of the poet.” This lately turned up ancestor, who does not
date very far back, was also named Robert Browning, and is described on
the mural marble as “formerly footman and butler to Sir John Bankes of
Corfe Castle.” Now, Robert Browning the poet had as good right as Abou
Ben Adhem himself to ask to be placed on the list of those who love
their fellow men; but if the poet could have been consulted in the
matter he probably would have preferred not to have that particular
footman exhumed. However, it is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Sir
John Bankes would scarcely have been heard of in our young century if
it had not been for his footman. As Robert stood day by day, sleek and
solemn, behind his master's chair in Corfe Castle, how little it entered
into the head of Sir John that his highly respectable name would be
served up to posterity--like a cold relish--by his own butler! By
Robert!
IN the east-side slums of New York, somewhere in the picturesque Bowery
district, stretches a malodorous little street wholly given over to
long-bearded, bird-beaked merchants of ready-made and second-hand
clothing. The contents of the dingy shops seem to have revolted, and
rushed pell-mell out of doors, and taken possession of the sidewalk. One
could fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this point, and that
those ghastly rows of complete suits strung up on either side of the
doorways were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders. But as you
approach these limp figures, each dangling and gyrating on its cord in a
most suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the lapel of a coat here
and there, a strip of paper announcing the very low price at which you
may become the happy possessor. That dissipates the illusion.
POLONIUS, in the play, gets killed--and not any too soon. If it only
were practicable to kill him in real life! A story--to be called The
Passing of Polonius--in which a king issues a decree condemning to death
every long-winded, didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of rank,
and is himself instantly arrested and decapitated. The man who suspects
his own tediousness is yet to be born.
WHENEVER I take up Emerson's poems I find myself turning automatically
to his Bacchus. Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in mediocre
verse, he rises for a moment to heights not reached by any other of our
poets; but Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its texture can
bear comparison with the world's best in this kind. In imaginative
quality and austere richness of diction what other verse of our period
approaches it? The day Emerson wrote Bacchus he had in him, as Michael
Drayton said of Marlowe, “those brave translunary things that the first
poets had.”
IMAGINE all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one
man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine
him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and
hearing a ring at the door-bell!
No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest portrait of himself
in an autobiography, however sedulously he may have set to work about
it. In spite of his candid purpose he omits necessary touches and adds
superfluous ones. At times he cannot help draping his thought, and the
least shred of drapery becomes a disguise. It is only the diarist who
accomplishes the feat of self-portraiture, and he, without any such end
in view, does it unconsciously. A man cannot keep a daily record of
his comings and goings and the little items that make up the sum of his
life, and not inadvertently betray himself at every turn. He lays bare
his heart with a candor not possible to the selfconsciousness that
inevitably colors premeditated revelation. While Pepys was filling those
small octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he never once suspected
that he was adding a photographic portrait of himself to the world's
gallery of immortals. We are more intimately acquainted with Mr.
Samuel Pepys, the inner man--his little meannesses and his large
generosities--then we are with half the persons we call our dear
friends.
THE young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism is
to light. Whenever anybody praises her she breaks into colors.
IN the process of dusting my study, the other morning, the maid replaced
an engraving of Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the mantel-shelf,
and his majesty has remained in that undignified posture ever since. I
have no disposition to come to his aid. My abhorrence of the wretch is
as hearty as if he had not been dead and--otherwise provided for
these last three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England was nearly as
merciless, but she was sincere and uncompromising in her extirpation of
heretics.
Philip II., whose one recorded hearty laugh was occasioned by the news
of the St. Bartholomew massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop it
for the time being, when it seemed politic to do so. Queen Mary was a
maniac; but the successor of Torquemada was the incarnation of cruelty
pure and simple, and I have a mind to let my counterfeit presentment
of him stand on its head for the rest of its natural life. I cordially
dislike several persons, but I hate nobody, living or dead, excepting
Philip II. of Spain. He appears to give me as much trouble as Charles I.
gave the amiable Mr. Dick.
AMONG the delightful men and women whom you are certain to meet at an
English country house there is generally one guest who is supposed to be
preternaturally clever and amusing--“so very droll, don't you know.” He
recites things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and mimics public
characters. He is a type of a class, and I take him to be one of the
elementary forms of animal life, like the acalephae. His presence is
capable of adding a gloom to an undertaker's establishment. The last
time I fell in with him was on a coaching trip through Devon, and in
spite of what I have said I must confess to receiving an instant of
entertainment at his hands. He was delivering a little dissertation on
“the English and American languages.” As there were two Americans on
the back seat--it seems we term ourselves “Amurricans”--his choice
of subject was full of tact. It was exhilarating to get a lesson in
pronunciation from a gentleman who said _boult_ for bolt, called St.
John _Sin' Jun_, and did not know how to pronounce the beautiful name of
his own college at Oxford. Fancy a perfectly sober man saying _Maudlin_
for Magdalen! Perhaps the purest English spoken is that of the English
folk who have resided abroad ever since the Elizabethan period, or
thereabouts.
EVERY one has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it.
The fool and his bookplate are soon parted. To distribute one's _ex
libris_ is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that of
indicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it is
placed.
WHEN an Englishman is not highly imaginative he is apt to be the most
matter-of-fact of mortals. He is rarely imaginative, and seldom has an
alert sense of humor. Yet England has produced the finest of humorists
and the greatest of poets. The humor and imagination which are diffused
through other peoples concentrate themselves from time to time in
individual Englishmen.
THIS is a page of autobiography, though not written in the first
person: Many years ago a noted Boston publisher used to keep a large
memorandum-book on a table in his personal office. The volume always
lay open, and was in no manner a private affair, being the receptacle of
nothing more important than hastily scrawled reminders to attend to
this thing or the other. It chanced one day that a very young, unfledged
author, passing through the city, looked in upon the publisher, who was
also the editor of a famous magazine. The unfledged had a copy of verses
secreted about his person. The publisher was absent, and young Milton,
feeling that “they also serve who only stand and wait,” sat down and
waited. Presently his eye fell upon the memorandum-book, lying there
spread out like a morning newspaper, and almost in spite of himself he
read: “Don't forget to see the binder,” “Don't forget to mail E----- his
contract,” “Don't forget H-----'s proofs,” etc. An inspiration seized
upon the youth; he took a pencil, and at the tail of this long list of
“don't forgets” he wrote: “Don't forget to accept A 's poem.” He left
his manuscript on the table and disappeared. That afternoon when the
publisher glanced over his memoranda, he was not a little astonished at
the last item; but his sense of humor was so strong that he did accept
the poem (it required a strong sense of humor to do that), and sent the
lad a check for it, though the verses remain to this day unprinted. That
kindly publisher was wise as well as kind.
FRENCH novels with metaphysical or psychological prefaces are always
certain to be particularly indecent.
I HAVE lately discovered that Master Harry Sandford of England, the
priggish little boy in the story of “Sandford and Merton,” has a worthy
American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore, who sedately pirouettes through
a seemingly endless succession of girls' books. I came across a nest of
fifteen of them the other day. This impossible female is carried from
infancy up to grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still leisurely
pursuing her way down to the tomb in an ecstatic state of uninterrupted
didacticism. There are twenty-five volumes of her and the granddaughter,
who is also christened Elsie, and is her grandmother's own child, with
the same precocious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to her
elders. An interesting instance of hereditary talent!
H-----'s intellect resembles a bamboo--slender, graceful, and hollow.
Personally, he is long and narrow, and looks as if he might have
been the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put together, like
an ill-constructed sentence, and affects me like one. His figure is
ungrammatical.
AMERICAN humor is nearly as ephemeral as the flowers that bloom in the
spring. Each generation has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists on
cultivating a new kind. That of 1860, if it were to break into blossom
at the present moment, would probably be left to fade upon the stem.
Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing hectic flush of its time.
The current-topic variety is especially subject to very early frosts, as
is also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor is not to be classed
with the fragile plants; it has a serious root striking deep down into
rich earth, and I think it will go on flowering indefinitely.
I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical journal, whose plan should
involve the discharge of the chief literary critic and the installment
of a fresh censor on the completion of each issue. To place a man in
permanent absolute control of a certain number of pages, in which to
express his opinions, is to place him in a position of great personal
danger, It is almost inevitable that he should come to overrate
the importance of those opinions, to take himself with far too much
seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of his own infallibility.
The liberty to summon this or that man-of-letters to a supposititious
bar of justice is apt to beget in the self-appointed judge an
exaggerated sense of superiority. He becomes impatient of any rulings
not his, and says in effect, if not in so many words: “I am Sir Oracle,
and when I ope my lips let no dog bark.” When the critic reaches this
exalted frame of mind his slight usefulness is gone.
AFTER a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and
signs it with a rainbow.
I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every
detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the
desire to use its own wings. The partly draped statue has a charm which
the nude lacks. Who would have those marble folds slip from the raised
knee of the Venus of Melos? Hawthorne knew how to make his lovely
thought lovelier by sometimes half veiling it.
I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a slight fancy which Herrick
has handled twice in the “Hesperides.” The fancy, however, is not
Herrick's; it is as old as poetry and the exaggeration of lovers, and I
have the same privilege as another to try my fortune with it:
UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE CHAUCER
When some hand has partly drawn The cloudy curtains of her bed, And my
lady's golden head Glimmers in the dusk like dawn, Then methinks is day
begun. Later, when her dream has ceased And she softly stirs and
wakes, Then it is as when the East A sudden rosy magic takes From the
cloud-enfolded sun, And full day breaks!
Shakespeare, who has done so much to discourage literature by
anticipating everybody, puts the whole matter into a nutshell:
But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and
Juliet is the sun.
THERE is a phrase spoken by Hamlet which I have seen quoted innumerable
times, and never once correctly. Hamlet, addressing Horatio, says:
Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my
heart's core, ay, in my _heart of heart_.
The words italicized are invariably written “heart of hearts”--as if a
person possessed that organ in duplicate. Perhaps no one living, with
the exception of Sir Henry Irving, is more familiar with the play of
Hamlet than my good friend Mr. Bram Stoker, who makes his heart plural
on two occasions in his recent novel, “The Mystery of the Sea.” Mrs.
Humphry Ward also twice misquotes the passage in “Lady Rose's Daughter.”
BOOKS that have become classics--books that ave had their day and now
get more praise than perusal--always remind me of venerable colonels and
majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves
retired upon half pay.
WHETHER or not the fretful porcupine rolls itself into a ball is
a subject over which my friend John Burroughs and several brother
naturalists have lately become as heated as if the question involved
points of theology. Up among the Adirondacks, and in the very heart
of the region of porcupines, I happen to have a modest cottage. This
retreat is called The Porcupine, and I ought by good rights to know
something about the habits of the small animal from which it derives
its name. Last winter my dog Buster used to return home on an average of
three times a month from an excursion up Mt. Pisgah with his nose
stuck full of quills, and _he_ ought to have some concrete ideas on the
subject. We two, then, are prepared to testify that the porcupine in its
moments of relaxation occasionally contracts itself into what might be
taken for a ball by persons not too difficult to please in the matter
of spheres. But neither Buster nor I--being unwilling to get into
trouble--would like to assert that it is an actual ball. That it is a
shape with which one had better not thoughtlessly meddle is a conviction
that my friend Buster stands ready to defend against all comers.
WORDSWORTH'S characterization of the woman in one of his poems as “a
creature not too bright or good for human nature's daily food” has
always appeared to me too cannibalesque to be poetical. It directly sets
one to thinking of the South Sea islanders.
THOUGH Iago was not exactly the kind of person one would select as a
superintendent for a Sunday-school, his advice to young Roderigo was
wisdom itself--“Put money in thy purse.” Whoever disparages money
disparages every step in the progress of the human race. I listened
the other day to a sermon in which gold was personified as a sort of
glittering devil tempting mortals to their ruin. I had an instant
of natural hesitation when the contribution-plate was passed around
immediately afterward. Personally, I believe that the possession of gold
has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have
been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of
poverty the world will never know. “After the love of knowledge,” says
Buckle, “there is no one passion which has done so much good to mankind
as the love of money.”
DIALECT tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication
between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care
for anything properly said.
DR. HOLMES had an odd liking for ingenious desk-accessories in the
way of pencil-sharpeners, paper-weights, penholders, etc. The latest
contrivances in this fashion--probably dropped down to him by the
inventor angling for a nibble of commendation--were always making one
another's acquaintance on his study table. He once said to me: “I 'm
waiting for somebody to invent a mucilage-brush that you can't by any
accident put into your inkstand. It would save me frequent moments of
humiliation.”
THE deceptive Mr. False and the volatile Mrs. Giddy, who figure in the
pages of seventeenth and eighteenth century fiction, are not tolerated
in modern novels and plays. Steal the burglar and Palette the artist
have ceased to be. A name indicating the quality or occupation of the
bearer strikes us as a too transparent device. Yet there are such names
in contemporary real life. That of our worthy Adjutant-General Drum
may be instanced. Neal and Pray are a pair of deacons who linger in the
memory of my boyhood. Sweet the confectioner and Lamb the butcher are
individuals with whom I have had dealings. The old-time sign of Ketchum
& Cheetam, Brokers, in Wall Street, New York, seems almost too good to
be true. But it was once, if it is not now, an actuality.
I HAVE observed that whenever a Boston author dies, New York immediately
becomes a great literary centre.
THE possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man.
There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.
EVERY living author has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that
goes about in near and remote places making friends or enemies for him
among persons who never lay eyes upon the writer in the flesh. When he
dies, this phantasmal personality fades away, and the author lives only
in the impression created by his own literature. It is only then that
the world begins to perceive what manner of man the poet, the novelist,
or the historian really was. Not until he is dead, and perhaps some long
time dead, is it possible for the public to take his exact measure.
Up to that point contemporary criticism has either overrated him or
underrated him, or ignored him altogether, having been misled by the
eidolon, which always plays fantastic tricks with the writer temporarily
under its dominion. It invariably represents him as either a greater or
a smaller personage than he actually is. Presently the simulacrum
works no more spells, good or evil, and the deception is unveiled. The
hitherto disregarded author is recognized, and the idol of yesterday,
which seemed so important, is taken down from his too large pedestal and
carted off to the dumping-ground of inadequate things. To be sure, if he
chances to have been not entirely unworthy, and on cool examination is
found to possess some appreciable degree of merit, then he is set up on
a new slab of appropriate dimensions. The late colossal statue shrinks
to a modest bas-relief. On the other hand, some scarcely noticed bust
may suddenly become a revered full-length figure. Between the reputation
of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is
ever a wide discrepancy.
A NOT too enchanting glimpse of Tennyson is incidentally given by
Charles Brookfield, the English actor, in his “Random Recollections.”
Mr. Brookfield's father was, on one occasion, dining at the Oxford and
Cambridge Club with George Venables, Frank Lushington, Alfred Tennyson,
and others. “After dinner,” relates the random recollector, “the poet
insisted upon putting his feet on the table, tilting back his chair
_more Americano_. There were strangers in the room, and he was
expostulated with for his uncouthness, but in vain. 'Do put down your
feet!' pleaded his host. 'Why should I?' retorted Tennyson. 'I 'm very
comfortable as I am.' 'Every one's staring at you,' said another.
'Let 'em stare,' replied the poet, placidly. 'Alfred,' said my father,
'people will think you're Longfellow.' Down went the feet.” That _more
Americano_ of Brookfield the younger is delicious with its fine insular
flavor, but the holding up of Longfellow--the soul of gentleness, the
prince of courtesy--as a bugaboo of bad manners is simply inimitable. It
will take England years and years to detect the full unconscious humor
of it.
GREAT orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct
historical shadows to the generations immediately following them. The
spell vanishes with the voice. A man's voice is almost the only part of
him entirely obliterated by death. The violet of his native land may be
made of his ashes, but nature in her economy seems to have taken no care
of his intonations, unless she perpetuates them in restless waves of air
surging about the poles. The well-graced actor who leaves no perceptible
record of his genius has a decided advantage over the mere orator. The
tradition of the player's method and presence is associated with works
of enduring beauty. Turning to the pages of the dramatist, we can
picture to ourselves the greatness of Garrick or Siddons in this or that
scene, in this or that character. It is not so easy to conjure up
the impassioned orator from the pages of a dry and possibly illogical
argument in favor of or against some long-ago-exploded measure of
government. The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art
wither quickly.
ALL the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of
the hour-glass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do
so, would I?
SHAKESPEARE is forever coming into our affairs--putting in his oar, so
to speak--with some pat word or sentence. The conversation, the other
evening, had turned on the subject of watches, when one of the gentlemen
present, the manager of a large watch-making establishment, told us a
rather interesting fact. The component parts of a watch are produced
by different workmen, who have no concern with the complex piece
of mechanism as a whole, and possibly, as a rule, understand it
imperfectly. Each worker needs to be expert in only his own special
branch. When the watch has reached a certain advanced state, the work
requires a touch as delicate and firm as that of an oculist performing
an operation. Here the most skilled and trustworthy artisans are
employed; they receive high wages, and have the benefit of a singular
indulgence. In case the workman, through too continuous application,
finds himself lacking the steadiness of nerve demanded by his task,
he is allowed without forfeiture of pay to remain idle temporarily, in
order that his hand may recover the requisite precision of touch. As
I listened, Hamlet's courtly criticism of the grave-digger's want of
sensibility came drifting into my memory. “The hand of little employment
hath the daintier sense,” says Shakespeare, who has left nothing unsaid.
IT was a festival in honor of Dai Butsu or some one of the auxiliary
deities that preside over the destinies of Japland. For three days and
nights the streets of Tokio--where the squat little brown houses look
for all the world as if they were mimicking the favorite sitting posture
of the Japanese--were crowded with smiling holiday makers, and made
gay with devices of tinted tissue paper, dolphins, devils, dragons, and
mythical winged creatures which at night amiably turned themselves into
lanterns. Garlands of these, arranged close together, were stretched
across the streets from ridgepoles to ridgepole, and your jinrikisha
whisked you through interminable arbors of soft illumination. The
spectacle gave one an idea of fairyland, but then all Japan does that.
A land not like ours, that land of strange flowers,
Of daemons and spooks with mysterious powers--
Of gods who breathe ice, who cause peach-blooms and rice
And manage the moonshine and turn on the showers.
Each day has its fair or its festival there,
And life seems immune to all trouble and care--
Perhaps only seems, in that island of dreams,
Sea-girdled and basking in magical air.
They've streets of bazaars filled with lacquers and jars,
And silk stuffs, and sword-blades that tell of old wars;
They've Fuji's white cone looming up, bleak and lone,
As if it were trying to reach to the stars.
They've temples and gongs, and grim Buddhas in throngs,
And pearl-powdered geisha with dances and songs:
Each girl at her back has an imp, brown or black,
And dresses her hair in remarkable prongs.
On roadside and street toddling images meet,
And smirk and kotow in a way that is sweet;
Their obis are tied with particular pride,
Their silken kimonos hang scant to the feet.
With purrs like a cat they all giggle and chat,
Now spreading their fans, and now holding them flat;
A fan by its play whispers, “Go now!” or “Stay!”
“I hate you!” “I love you!”--a fan can say that!
Beneath a dwarf tree, here and there, two or three
Squat coolies are sipping small cups of green tea;
They sputter, and leer, and cry out, and appear
Like bad little chessmen gone off on a spree.
At night--ah, at night the long streets are a sight,
With garlands of soft-colored lanterns alight--
Blue, yellow, and red twinkling high overhead,
Like thousands of butterflies taking their flight.
Somewhere in the gloom that no lanterns illume
Stand groups of slim lilies and jonquils in bloom;
On tiptoe, unseen 'mid a tangle of green,
They offer the midnight their cups of perfume.
At times, sweet and clear from some tea-garden near,
A ripple of laughter steals out to your ear;
Anon the wind brings from a samisen's strings
The pathos that's born of a smile and a tear.
THE difference between an English audience and a French audience at the
theatre is marked. The Frenchman brings down a witticism on the wing.
The Briton pauses for it to alight and give him reasonable time for
deliberate aim. In English playhouses an appreciable number of seconds
usually precede the smile or the ripple of laughter that follows a
facetious turn of the least fineness. I disclaim all responsibility for
this statement of my personal observation, since it has recently been
indorsed by one of London's most eminent actors.
AT the next table, taking his opal drops of absinthe, was a French
gentleman with the blase aspect of an empty champagne-bottle, which
always has the air of saying: “I have lived!”
WE often read of wonderful manifestations of memory, but they are always
instances of the faculty working in some special direction. It is memory
playing, like Paganini, on one string. No doubt the persons performing
the phenomenal feats ascribed to them have forgotten more than they
remember. To be able to repeat a hundred lines of verse after a single
reading is no proof of a retentive mind, excepting so far as the hundred
lines go. A man might easily fail under such a test, and yet have a good
memory; by which I mean a catholic one, and that I imagine to be nearly
the rarest of gifts. I have never met more than four or five persons
possessing it. The small boy who defined memory as “the thing you forget
with” described the faculty as it exists and works in the majority of
men and women.
THE survival in publishers of the imitative instinct is a strong
argument in support of Mr. Darwin's theory of the descent of man. One
publisher no sooner brings out a new style of book-cover than half a
dozen other publishers fall to duplicating it.
THE cavalry sabre hung over the chimney-place with a knot of violets
tied to the dinted guard, there being no known grave to decorate. For
many a year, on each Decoration Day, a sorrowful woman had come and
fastened these flowers there. The first time she brought her offering
she was a slender girl, as fresh as her own violets. It is a slender
figure still, but there are threads of silver in the black hair.
FORTUNATE was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who in early youth was taught
“to abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing”--especially the
fine writing. Simplicity is art's last word.
The man is clearly an adventurer. In the seventeenth century he would
have worn huge flintlock pistols stuck into a wide leather belt, and
been something in the seafaring line. The fellow is always smartly
dressed, but where he lives and how he lives are as unknown as “what
song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself
among women.” He is a man who apparently has no appointment with his
breakfast and whose dinner is a chance acquaintance. His probable banker
is the next person. A great city like this is the only geography for
such a character. He would be impossible in a small country town, where
everybody knows everybody and what everybody has for lunch.
I HAVE been seeking, thus far in vain, for the proprietor of the saying
that “Economy is second or third cousin to Avarice.” I went rather
confidently to Rochefoucauld, but it is not among that gentleman's light
luggage of cynical maxims.
THERE is a popular vague impression that butchers are not allowed to
serve as jurors on murder trials. This is not really the case, but it
logically might be. To a man daily familiar with the lurid incidents of
the _abattoir_, the summary extinction of a fellow creature (whether the
victim or the criminal) can scarcely seem a circumstance of so serious
moment as to another man engaged in less strenuous pursuits. WE do not,
and cannot, read many of the novels that most delighted our ancestors.
Some of our popular fiction is doubtless as poor, but poor with a
difference. There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In
every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.
There is ragtime literature as well as ragtime music for the many.
G----- is a man who had rather fail in a great purpose than not
accomplish it in precisely his own way. He has the courage of his
conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to
the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have any one
electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject.
I HAVE thought of an essay to be called “On the Art of Short-Story
Writing,” but have given it up as smacking too much of the shop. It
would be too _intime_, since I should have to deal chiefly with my own
ways, and so give myself the false air of seeming to consider them of
importance. It would interest nobody to know that I always write the
last paragraph first, and then work directly up to that, avoiding all
digressions and side issues. Then who on earth would care to be told
about the trouble my characters cause me by talking too much? They will
talk, and I have to let them; but when the story is finished, I go over
the dialogue and strike out four fifths of the long speeches. I fancy
that makes my characters pretty mad.
THIS is the golden age of the inventor. He is no longer looked upon as
a madman or a wizard, incontinently to be made away with. Two or three
centuries ago Marconi would not have escaped a ropeless end with his
wireless telegraphy. Even so late as 1800, the friends of one Robert
Fulton seriously entertained the luminous idea of hustling the poor man
into an asylum for the unsound before he had a chance to fire up the
boiler of his tiny steamboat on the Hudson river. In olden times
the pillory and the whipping-post were among the gentler forms of
encouragement awaiting the inventor. If a man devised an especially
practical apple-peeler he was in imminent danger of being peeled with it
by an incensed populace. To-day we hail with enthusiasm a scientific or
a mechanical discovery, and stand ready to make a stock company of it.
A MAN is known by the company his mind keeps. To live continually
with noble books, with “high-erected thoughts seated in the heart of
courtesy,” teaches the soul good manners.
THE unconventional has ever a morbid attraction for a certain class of
mind. There is always a small coterie of highly intellectual men and
women eager to give welcome to whatever is eccentric, obscure, or
chaotic. Worshipers at the shrine of the Unpopular, they tingle with a
sense of tolerant superiority when they say: “Of course this is not the
kind of thing _you_ would like.” Sometimes these impressionable souls
almost seem to make a sort of reputation for their fetish.
I HEAR that B----- directed to have himself buried on the edge of the
pond where his duckstand was located, in order that flocks of migrating
birds might fly over his grave every autumn. He did not have to die, to
become a dead shot. A comrade once said of him: “Yes, B----- is a great
sportsman. He has peppered everything from grouse in North Dakota to his
best friend in the Maine woods.”
WHEN the novelist introduces a bore into his novel he must not let him
bore the reader. The fellow must be made amusing, which he would not
be in real life. In nine cases out of ten an exact reproduction of
real life would prove tedious. Facts are not necessarily valuable,
and frequently they add nothing to fiction. The art of the realistic
novelist sometimes seems akin to that of the Chinese tailor who
perpetuated the old patch on the new trousers. True art selects and
paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.
THE last meeting I had with Lowell was in the north room of his house at
Elmwood, the sleeping-room I had occupied during a two years' tenancy
of the place in his absence abroad. He was lying half propped up in
bed, convalescing from one of the severe attacks that were ultimately to
prove fatal. Near the bed was a chair on which stood a marine picture
in aquarelle--a stretch of calm sea, a bit of rocky shore in the
foreground, if I remember, and a vessel at anchor. The afternoon
sunlight, falling through the window, cast a bloom over the picture,
which was turned toward Lowell. From time to time, as he spoke, his eyes
rested thoughtfully on the water-color. A friend, he said, had just
sent it to him. It seemed to me then, and the fancy has often haunted me
since, that that ship, in the golden haze, with topsails loosened, was
waiting to bear his spirit away.
CIVILIZATION is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades. If
somebody has already said that, I forgive him the mortification he
causes me. At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throw
off its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently as
in the Middle Ages.
WHAT is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the
purist in the next. On the other hand, expressions that once were not
considered inelegant are looked at askance in the period following. The
word “brass” was formerly an accepted synonym for money; but at present,
when it takes on that significance, it is not admitted into genteel
circles of language. It may be said to have seen better days, like
another word I have in mind--a word that has become slang, employed in
the sense which once did not exclude it from very good society. A
friend lately informed me that he had “fired” his housekeeper--that
is, dismissed her. He little dreamed that he was speaking excellent
Elizabethan.
THE “Journal des Goncourt” is crowded with beautiful and hideous things,
like a Japanese Museum.
“AND she shuddered as she sat, still silent, on her seat, and he saw
that she shuddered.” This is from Anthony Trollope's novel, “Can You
Forgive Her?” Can you forgive him? is the next question.
A LITTLE thing may be perfect, but perfection is not a little thing.
Possessing this quality, a trifle “no bigger than an agate-stone on the
forefinger of an alderman” shall outlast the Pyramids. The world will
have forgotten all the great masterpieces of literature when it forgets
Lovelace's three verses to Lucasta on his going to the wars. More
durable than marble or bronze are the words, “I could not love thee,
deare, so much, loved I not honor more.”
I CALLED on the dear old doctor this afternoon to say good-by. I shall
probably not find him here when I come back from the long voyage which
I have in front of me. He is very fragile, and looks as though a puff
of wind would blow him away. He said himself, with his old-time
cheerfulness, that he was attached to this earth by only a little piece
of twine. He has perceptibly failed since I saw him a month ago; but
he was full of the wise and radiant talk to which all the world
has listened, and will miss. I found him absorbed in a newly made
card-catalogue of his library. “It was absurd of me to have it done,” he
remarked. “What I really require is a little bookcase holding only two
volumes; then I could go from one to the other in alternation and always
find each book as fresh as if I never had read it.” This arraignment of
his memory was in pure jest, for the doctor's mind was to the end like
an unclouded crystal. It was interesting to note how he studied himself,
taking his own pulse, as it were, and diagnosing his own case in a sort
of scientific, impersonal way, as if it were somebody else's case and he
were the consulting specialist. I intended to spend a quarter of an hour
with him, and he kept me three hours. I went there rather depressed,
but I returned home leavened with his good spirits, which, I think, will
never desert him, here or hereafter. To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be
hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent--that is to triumph over old age.
THE thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The
thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is
the sincere thing. I am describing the impression left upon me by Mr.
Howells's blank-verse sketch called “Father and Mother: A Mystery”--a
strangely touching and imaginative piece of work, not unlike in effect
to some of Maeterlinck's psychical dramas. As I read on, I seemed to be
standing in a shadow cast by some half-remembered experience of my own
in a previous state of existence. When I went to bed that night I had to
lie awake and think it over as an event that had actually befallen me.
I should call the effect _weird_, if the word had not lately been worked
to death. The gloom of Poe and the spirituality of Hawthorne touch cold
finger-tips in those three or four pages.
FOR a character-study--a man made up entirely of limitations. His
conservatism and negative qualities to be represented as causing him to
attain success where men of conviction and real ability fail of it.
A DARK, saturnine man sat opposite me at table on board the steamer.
During the entire run from Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed no
one at meal-times excepting his table steward. Seated next to him, on
the right, was a vivacious gentleman, who, like Gratiano in the play,
spoke “an infinite deal of nothing.” He made persistent and pathetic
attempts to lure his silent neighbor (we had christened him “William
the Silent”) into conversation, but a monosyllable was always the poor
result--until one day. It was the last day of the voyage. We had stopped
at the entrance to Queenstown harbor to deliver the mails, and some fish
had been brought aboard. The vivacious gentleman was in a high state of
excitement that morning at table. “Fresh fish!” he exclaimed; “actually
fresh! They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish, of course. Can
you tell me, sir,” he inquired, turning to his gloomy shipmate, “what
_kind_ of fish these are?” “Cork soles,” said the saturnine man, in a
deep voice, and then went on with his breakfast.
LOWELL used to find food for great mirth in General George P. Morris's
line,
“Her heart and morning broke together.”
Lowell's well-beloved Dr. Donne, however, had an attack of the same
platitude, and possibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature seems to
have its mischief-making bacilli. The late “incomparable and ingenious
Dean of St. Paul's” says,
“The day breaks not, it is my heart.”
I think Dr. Donne's case rather worse than Morris's. Chaucer had the
malady in a milder form when he wrote:
“Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye.”
The charming naivete of it!
SITTING in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the Lyceum Theatre one evening
during that lady's temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bernhardt
picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty word on the mirror--_Dearling_,
mistaking it for the word darling. The French actress lighted by chance
upon a Spenserianism now become obsolete without good reason. It is a
more charming adjective than the one that has replaced it.
A DEAD author appears to be bereft of all earthly rights. He is scarcely
buried before old magazines and newspapers are ransacked in search of
matters which, for reasons sufficient to him, he had carefully excluded
from the definitive edition of his collected writings.
He gave the people of his best;
His worst he kept, his best he gave.
One can imagine a poet tempted to address some such appeal as this to
any possible future publisher of his poems:
Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line,
Take all, take nothing--and God send thee cheer!
But my anathema on thee and thine
If thou add'st aught to what is printed here.
THE claim of this country to call itself “The Land of the Free” must be
held in abeyance until every man in it, whether he belongs or does not
belong to a labor organization, shall have the right to work for his
daily bread.
THERE is a strain of primitive poetry running through the entire Irish
race, a fleeting lyrical emotion which expresses itself in a flash,
usually in connection with love of country and kindred across the sea.
I had a touching illustration of it the other morning. The despot who
reigns over our kitchen was gathering a mess of dandelions on the rear
lawn. It was one of those blue and gold days which seem especially to
belong New England. “It's in County Westmeath I 'd be this day,” she
said, looking up at me. _“I'd go cool my hands in the grass on my ould
mother's grave in the bit of churchyard foreninst the priest's house at
Mullingar.”_ I have seen poorer poetry than that in the magazines.
SPEAKING of the late Major Pond, the well-known director of a lecture
bureau, an old client of his remarked: “He was a most capable manager,
but it always made me a little sore to have him deduct twenty-five
per cent. commission.” “Pond's Extract,” murmured one of the gentlemen
present.
EACH of our great towns has its “Little Italy,” with shops where nothing
is spoken but Italian and streets in which the alien pedestrian had
better not linger after nightfall. The chief industry of these exotic
communities seems to be spaghetti and stilettos. What with our Little
Italys and Chinatowns, and the like, an American need not cross the
ocean in order to visit foreign lands and enjoy the benefits of older
civilizations.
POETS are made as well as born, the proverb notwithstanding. They are
made possible by the general love of poetry and the consequent imperious
demand for it. When this is nonexistent, poets become mute, the
atmosphere stifles them. There would have been no Shakespeare had there
been no Elizabethan audience. That was an age when, as Emerson finely
puts it,
Men became
Poets, for the air was fame.
THE stolid gentleman in livery who has his carriage-stand at the corner
opposite my house is constantly touching on the extremes of human
experience, with probably not the remotest perception of the fact.
Now he takes a pair of lovers out for an airing, and now he drives the
absconding bank-teller to the railway-station. Excepting as question
of distance, the man has positively no choice between a theatre and a
graveyard. I met him this morning dashing up to the portals of Trinity
Church with a bridal party, and this afternoon, as I was crossing
Cambridge Bridge, I saw him creeping along next to the hearse, on his
way to Mount Auburn. The wedding afforded him no pleasure, and the
funeral gave him no grief; yet he was a factor in both. It is his odd
destiny to be wholly detached from the vital part of his own acts. If
the carriage itself could speak! The autobiography of a public hack
written without reservation would be dramatic reading.
IN this blotted memorandum-book are a score or two of suggestions for
essays, sketches, and poems, which I have not written, and never shall
write. The instant I jot down an idea the desire to utilize it leaves
me, and I turn away to do something unpremeditated. The shabby volume
has become a sort of Potter's Field where I bury my literary intentions,
good and bad, without any belief in their final resurrection.
A STAGE DIRECTION: _exit time; enter Eternity--with a soliloquy._
ASIDES
TOM FOLIO