lsabe 
 
 l$ood brid 
 
DAYS OUT AND OTHER PAPERS. 
 MORE JONATHAN PAPERS. 
 THE JONATHAN PAPERS. 
 
 HOUGHTON MTFFLIN COMPANY 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
Days Out and Other Papers 
 
Days Out 
 
 and Other Papers 
 
 By 
 
 NW. Elisabeth Woodbridge 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 J&re&l CambriDoe 
 1917 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE MORRIS 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published November 79/7 
 
Contents 
 
 DAYS OUT 3 
 
 AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 12 
 
 A BRIEF FOR THE HAT 19 
 
 THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR .... 24 
 
 CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 31 
 
 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST .... 37 
 
 AN APPENDIX TO BACON 49 
 
 THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY .... 53 
 
 THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 61 
 
 THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 69 
 
 HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 77 
 
 THE HUMOR-FETISH 85 
 
 IN THE MATTER OF "FAITH" 93 
 
 * !N THEIR SEASON" 103 
 
 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN Ill 
 
 A MATTER OF PLANES 123 
 
 A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS . . . .129 
 
 THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 135 
 
 THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 141 
 
 TRAVELERS LETTERS 148 
 
 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 155 
 
 THE LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 191 
 
 372196 
 
Days Out and Other Papers 
 
Days Out 
 
 I HAD followed up her advertisement, and 
 she stood before me in the dim hallway to 
 which she had given me entrance. As she 
 fingered the front door knob she told me her 
 qualities. "Yes, mum," she concluded, "I 
 does my work, mum. I don t never have 
 company, and I don t never want days out." 
 
 I protested, "I always give my cook one 
 day a week, afternoon and evening." 
 
 "Yes, mum, I know. But when I gets my 
 work done, I likes to set right down in the 
 kitchen. I don t want to go nowhere. If 
 there s somethin I need, a spool o cotton, 
 or some stockin s, why, I most gen ally 
 tells the lady, two-three days ahead, and 
 then I runs out of a Saturday evenin , mebbe, 
 fer an hour or two." 
 
 "And Sundays?" I asked faintly, "I 
 let my cook and waitress both go out on 
 Sunday afternoon." 
 
 "No, I don t never go out on Sundays at 
 all. Ye see, I likes to do my work, and when 
 
4 DAYS OUT 
 
 I gets through I likes to rest. That s the 
 kind I am." 
 
 I sighed. Undoubtedly hers was a good 
 kind, but undoubtedly I did n t want her. 
 I had had one experience of that kind. She 
 stayed with me two years, and in all that 
 time was never away over a meal-hour. She 
 was as good a creature as ever lived, but 
 when she left, I said to myself, "Henceforth 
 I shall insist on days out." 
 
 The fact is, I have an unconquerable love 
 for my own kitchen and pantries. When I 
 was a child they were to me realms of bliss, 
 where I was often tolerated, often even wel 
 comed. They still seem this to me, and 
 not to be tolerated at all it is too much ! 
 
 Perhaps that is an exaggeration. My cooks 
 have usually tolerated me. They have even 
 been polite to me. When I slink half -apolo 
 getically into the kitchen, to have a finger, 
 so to speak, in the pie, they bring me dishes, 
 and materials, and clear tables for me, and 
 try to make believe I am not in the way at 
 least the nice ones do. But they watch me 
 furtively. If they are self-righteous, their 
 attitude is slightly critical, if they are self- 
 
DAYS OUT 5 
 
 distrustful, it is apprehensive: what am I 
 going to find out about their pantry? And as 
 I am idiotically sensitive to my cook s atti 
 tude, I am conscious of this, and it spoils the 
 fun. I slip out of my kitchen their kitchen 
 and hie me to other parts of the house, 
 that seem more truly mine. 
 
 But, on the days out, ah, those deli 
 cious days out! For the cook s outings are 
 my innings. She is happy, too. How she 
 works ! The luncheon dishes are whisked out 
 of the way, the kitchen is "redd up," and she 
 flies to her room to dress. I slip out, glance up 
 the back stairs, go to the range and poke the 
 fire, change the draughts, shift the kettle a 
 little, then hastily retreat to the parlor, and 
 play the piano, with the soft pedal down, 
 until I hear the back door shut. Then! No 
 more piano for me! I can play the piano any 
 time. 
 
 I walk swiftly and boldly out into the 
 kitchen my kitchen MY kitchen. I perch 
 on a table and swing my feet, in a glory of 
 possession. What shall I make? I go over 
 to the range again. Good fire, good oven. 
 I can make anything, anything! A feeling of 
 
6 DAYS OUT 
 
 power comes over me. I go to the pantry and 
 scan its contents. I am always careful to 
 have it well stocked on these days, that my 
 creative impulses, no matter how freakish, 
 may suffer no thwarting by reason of a lack 
 of materials. I pick up the cook-book and re 
 sume my perch. I am in no special hurry. 
 It is not yet four, and one can do almost any 
 thing between four and half -past six. 
 
 The telephone rings. I go, with my thumb 
 in the cooky recipes. I lay the book open 
 on the table beside me, and my eye runs over 
 the page as I take down the receiver. 
 
 "Yes? Yes, this is Mrs. Oh, Mrs. 
 
 Grundy, good afternoon. What? An 
 other bridge? Are n t you a gay lady! Oh, 
 I m so sorry. I don t play well, of course you 
 know, but I suppose I would come to fill up, 
 only you see I can t. It s my cook s day out. 
 (I m so glad I ordered molasses this morn 
 ing!) No, I can t change, she s gone al 
 ready. (Would sugar-cookies be better, I 
 wonder.) Yes, of course, it is inconvenient 
 sometimes, but they do want their days out, 
 don t they? Thank you, I m sorry too. I 
 hope you 11 find somebody, I m sure you will. 
 
DAYS OUT 7 
 
 Yes, good-bye." I hang up the receiver 
 with a sigh of relief. Yes, I think, gin 
 ger cookies. Hester and Tom will be in soon, 
 
 and they re so good when they re just 
 out of the oven. 
 
 I go back, get into my big apron, give an 
 other look to my fire and my oven, and plunge 
 in. There arises a delicious odor of spices and 
 molasses and butter an aroma of cooking, 
 in short. 
 
 The front door opens and shuts, there is a 
 stampede of feet up and downstairs. Then 
 the kitchen door bursts open. "Oh, GOOD! 
 It s Sarah s day out! Hester! Come on. It s 
 Sarah s day out!" 
 
 Hester arrives. " May we make the toast? " 
 "May I set the table?" "What do I smell?" 
 "May I stir?" "May we scrape the bowl?" 
 "May we make griddle-cakes?" 
 
 It is like a frog-chorus in spring. 
 
 Perhaps I try to be severe. 
 
 "Griddle-cakes? Nonsense! Who ever 
 heard of griddle-cakes at night? Ginger 
 cookies are queer enough. Besides, they don t 
 go well together." 
 
 "No matter! Who cares! We always do 
 
8 DAYS OUT 
 
 nice, queer things when Sarah is out. And 
 we can eat up all the cookies as soon as 
 they re done, and then they won t interfere 
 with the cakes." 
 
 It makes really very little difference how 
 it turns out, what things finally get cooked. 
 The important thing is, that the cooking goes 
 merrily on, and joy reigns. 
 
 It is, I maintain, a joy to rejoice in. I am 
 heartily sorry for people who never do their 
 own cooking. Cooking is an art, not only 
 creative but social. It takes the raw mate 
 rials and converts them into a product that is 
 every way pleasing, and that brings the peo 
 ple who enjoy it into social harmony. The 
 immediate products do not abide : the better 
 they are, the more quickly they vanish; but 
 they leave behind something spiritual and 
 permanent. A busy mother, who was a won 
 derful cook, once said to me, "Sometimes it 
 hardly seems worth while to cook things when 
 they go so fast; but then, I think, after all, 
 they leave behind them a memory of a jolly 
 home-table that does last, so perhaps it 
 pays." 
 
 I am sure she was right. The memory of 
 
DAYS OUT 9 
 
 that home-table has lasted forty years and 
 more, and does not yet seem to be fading. 
 
 There are other things to remember about 
 that home, there are other things that are 
 worth while in any home, but I think that 
 in our modern conditions we lose too much of 
 the pleasure that comes through doing prac 
 tical things together. Almost all the physical 
 work of our daily lives is delegated. Life is 
 being systematized on that basis, and though 
 there are great gains, there are also losses. 
 The change is deeply affecting the character 
 and quality of our hospitality. This is a big 
 subject, and I am not going to be drawn into 
 it too deeply. All I want to say is, that I be 
 lieve we are letting ourselves be so involved 
 in the machinery of our hospitality that we 
 are cheated of some of its pleasures. We have 
 submitted to certain conventions of "enter 
 taining," and if we cannot satisfy these, we 
 do not "entertain." What a pity! And yet, 
 while I say this, I am aware that I too am 
 enslaved. There are many people whom I 
 have not the courage to invite to my house 
 except on my cook s day out. Then I am 
 emancipated. There is no one whom I dare 
 
10 DAYS OUT 
 
 not invite, if I want her, when I am my own 
 cook. Mrs. Grundy herself may come and 
 welcome. And I believe Mrs. Grundy would 
 have a good time. She might not ask to scrape 
 the bowl, but I fancy she would be delighted 
 to turn the griddle-cakes, or run out for the 
 hot toast. 
 
 It is irresistible, this charm of doing things 
 one s self, of doing things together. People 
 have talked about the simple life until we 
 are sick of the name. But we are not sick of 
 the thing, the seal thing. And our present 
 conditions are not satisfying us. They need 
 to be shaken up and recombined. We cannot 
 go backward, but we can, perhaps, while 
 accepting what is good in the new order, try 
 to hold fast to what was good in the old. 
 Probably it is best for me not to do all my 
 own housework, but it would, I am convinced, 
 be little short of a calamity if I never did any. 
 To feel that my cook is doing her work con 
 tentedly, that she needs her wages and I need 
 my time this is all very well. But, like 
 Antaeus, I must touch earth often. I yearn 
 for the poker, I hanker for the mixing-bowl, 
 I sigh for the frying-pan. Man does not live 
 
DAYS OUT 11 
 
 by bread alone, but neither does he live by 
 taking thought alone. I love to think, and 
 talk, and feel, but I cannot forget that I have 
 hands which clamor to be put to use, arms 
 which will not hang idle. It does not satisfy 
 me to do make-believe work that does not 
 need to be done: picture-puzzles and burnt- 
 wood and neckties. I want real work, primi 
 tive work. Hurrah for the coal-hod ! Hurrah 
 for the tea-kettle! Hurrah for the Day Out! 
 
An Unlovely Virtue 
 
 WHEN I was a child, I was often not a little 
 hampered by the fact that I could not, with 
 any comfort, utter an untruth. Not that I 
 had any inherent aptitude for truthfulness, 
 on the contrary, I was a lover of devious 
 ways, and my nature was framed for deceit, 
 but early training had imposed upon me 
 an ineradicable habit of truth-telling. It had 
 so wrought that for me the lie was shorn of 
 every pleasurable association, and invested 
 with painful suggestion. My only compensa 
 tion lay in a dim feeling of superior righteous 
 ness, but this was not very sincere, not very 
 constant, and, indeed, not wholly gratifying. 
 Gladly would I have relinquished it for the 
 ability to tell a good, comfortable lie not a 
 bad, malicious, devouring-lion of a lie, but a 
 little harmless, playful-kitten of a lie. Now 
 and then, indeed, I did lay hands upon the 
 forbidden weapon, but being unfamiliar with 
 it, I used it clumsily lied at the wrong 
 time, or in the wrong way, or when there 
 
AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 13 
 
 was no need of lying, and I never got any fun 
 out of the lie, and seldom any advantage. 
 
 Now that I am quite grown up, my plight 
 is worse, for even the sense of superior right 
 eousness has left me. I have been forced to 
 recognize that the most charming, the most 
 really admirable, of my friends are in general 
 people who can, for the sake of harmony, of 
 good fellowship, of friendship, utter the thing 
 which is not. This, without disturbing my 
 habits of truth-telling, has seriously shaken 
 up my theories. 
 
 For one thing, I have come to realize that 
 one must often tell a lie in order to convey a 
 true impression, since the matter of a lie, as 
 of a jest, 
 
 " lies in the ear 
 
 Of him who hears it, never in the mouth 
 Of him who speaks it." 
 
 For example, a certain youth was escorting 
 to his steamer a venerable Englishman whose 
 name stands high among the dignitaries of 
 the Church. Their train was late, and outside 
 the Grand Central, as ill luck would have it, 
 but a single cab was visible. There was need 
 of haste, yet the great man had not been 
 
14 AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 
 
 accustomed to hasten, and it looked as though 
 the cab would be preempted by some of the 
 ardent but unimportant New Yorkers who 
 were scurrying toward it. The young man 
 singled out an official and said impressively, 
 "This is an English duke. He is late for his 
 steamer. Get him that cab." The cab was 
 theirs. 
 
 Now, according to the precepts in which I 
 had been reared, that young man had by his 
 act seriously jeopardized his spiritual future. 
 Yet, might it not be maintained that he had 
 lied in the interests of truth? He said "duke," 
 which was not the fact; the official received 
 the notion "great man," which was the fact. 
 Whereas if he had said, "Here is an English 
 canon, get him a cab," it is safe to say that 
 the mind of the worthy official would have 
 been filled with confusion, if not with dis 
 tinctly bellicose images totally foreign to the 
 occasion. 
 
 But there is another sort of lie whose justi 
 fication cannot be framed after this fashion. 
 There is the lie, not in the cause of truth, but 
 in the cause of friendliness or of comfort. A 
 friend has just given a dinner. "Did you 
 
AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 15 
 
 notice that the fish was burned?" she asks. 
 You had noticed, every one had noticed. You 
 answer, "My dear, I cannot deceive you, it 
 was burned." You save your soul, but you 
 make your friend miserable. Suppose instead 
 that you say cheerfully, "No, indeed, it was 
 perfectly delicious"; she will take heart, and 
 think, "Well, it was only my nervousness." 
 You will have increased the sum of happiness 
 in the world but how about your soul? 
 
 Suppose, again, that your best friend is 
 engaged to be married, but there are reasons 
 why she cannot announce the fact. Society 
 suspects, society insinuates, finally, society 
 asks point-blank, "Celia, is Rosalind engaged 
 to Orlando?" Three courses are open: you 
 may keep silent, but that is equivalent to 
 saying "yes"; or you may give an evasive 
 answer, like the servant who, when asked if 
 her mistress was at home, replied, "Was your 
 grandmother a monkey?" The objections to 
 this policy are obvious. Or you may take your 
 conscience by the throat, look society firmly 
 in the eye, and say, "Rosalind engaged? No, 
 indeed! What in the world could have made 
 you think such a thing? She does n t care for 
 
16 AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 
 
 Orlando, and anyway he is really in love with 
 Audrey, you know, and only flirting to make 
 her jealous." Your conscience may bear for 
 days the marks of fingers on its throat, while 
 at the same time you will keep saying to your 
 self, in the manner of Henry James s devious- 
 minded people, "But I could n t, could I, 
 not have done it. No, I could n t not have 
 done it." 
 
 Is there, perhaps, something wrong with a 
 training that leaves one no comfortable escape 
 from so common a predicament? I myself 
 am quite incapable of judging, being hope 
 lessly bigoted in favor of truth-telling. A lie 
 still seems, in spite of all arguments, a bad 
 thing. But I am driven to wonder whether 
 this is not the result of that rigidity of temper 
 and of habit which was at once the strength 
 and the weakness of our Puritan forbears. 
 My grandfather, a man of sternest Puritan 
 traditions, came near losing his life through 
 that same characteristic. He was going to 
 ward the garden, when a venomous-minded 
 cow spied him and marked him for her prey. 
 She came on, head down, sharp horns a-prick 
 for his gore. A little grandson, taking in the 
 
AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 17 
 
 situation, shouted from the rear, "Cheese it, 
 grandpa! Cheese it!" The old gentleman 
 heard, he apprehended danger, but he hated 
 slang, and this particular phrase had been an 
 object of special abhorrence. He turned, grim 
 and contemptuous, and used up his moment 
 of escape in the withering reply, "Cheese 
 what?" The cow arrived, and only the huge 
 basket that the old gentleman carried saved 
 him from being impaled, principles and all. 
 The long horns were buried in the basket, and 
 its bearer was hurled backward through the 
 garden gate. And to the youngster s puzzled 
 query, "Why did n t you run, when you 
 heard me tell you? " there seemed no adequate 
 reply. 
 
 If Mr. Brooke, of "Middlemarch," had 
 witnessed this scene, I believe his comment 
 would have been, "Ah, sir, principles are good 
 things in their place, but don t let them carry 
 you too far not too far, you know." 
 
 And it is just possible that this matter of 
 truth-telling cannot be settled by any rigid 
 rulings whatever. Other virtues may be car 
 ried to excess, why not truthfulness? It is 
 one of my regrets that I was not clever enough 
 
18 AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 
 
 long ago to notice that lying, as such, is not 
 forbidden in the Decalogue. We are, it is 
 true, commanded not to "bear false witness," 
 but only false witness against our neighbor. 
 About false witness in his behalf nothing 
 whatever is said : that is, malicious lying is 
 forbidden, benevolent lying is left to our dis 
 cretion. I should be quite willing, if my train 
 ing would allow me, to stand with Moses in 
 this whole matter. 
 
A Brief for the Hat 
 
 I ENTERED the crowded railway car and 
 walked slowly up the aisle, examining peo 
 ple s backs to see which looked most inviting 
 as a seat-mate. Ah! Slim, pretty shoulders, 
 and a head beautifully poised! I paused: "Is 
 this seat taken?" 
 
 "No, indeed," a sweet voice answered. 
 "Oh! How do you do? Is n t this pleasant?" 
 
 Pleasant, indeed. I sat down happily, and 
 as I turned to look in my friend s face I had 
 an added thrill of pleasure. There was some 
 thing a-little-more-than-usual about it. I con 
 sidered yes! the hat! It had a little pinch 
 in the brim, just in front, making a sort of 
 gable-end, below which the face looked out at 
 me with added piquancy. Silly idea that 
 pinch ! Yet I was grateful to it for something 
 it did to the always lovely face beneath it. 
 
 The incident set me thinking. I have al 
 ways been one to scoff at the vagaries of 
 fashion. They have all seemed about equally 
 absurd to me. But now I am growing more 
 
20 A BRIEF FOR THE HAT 
 
 tolerant, especially in regard to hats. I am, 
 in fact, evolving a philosophy of hats. 
 
 It is based on a fundamental and familiar 
 trait of human nature. What we see con 
 stantly we cease to see vividly. The faces we 
 notice least are those we know and perhaps 
 really love best; our eyes are a bit jaded 
 by following the familiar lines. The same is 
 true of pure color. Water and sky are beauti 
 ful, and you may suppose that you are duly 
 appreciative of them; but lie on the deck of a 
 cat-boat and look at them with your head in 
 an unaccustomed position sideways or up 
 side down and note how the colors flare 
 out upon your vision. Or stay indoors for 
 a few weeks, in a room where you do not get 
 much outlook, and then go out. You -frill be 
 blinded by the glory of the world. But not 
 for long. The glory, alas, fades quickly, and 
 habit settles upon you once more. 
 
 With our friends faces somewhat the same 
 thing happens. When we first meet them they 
 pique us pleasantly with their unfamiliar line 
 and color. Gradually we grow wonted to 
 them. The first vision has passed. What 
 then? Must we turn upside down to look at 
 
A BRIEF FOR THE HAT 21 
 
 them? Or perhaps turn them upside down? 
 Or mew ourselves up, socially speaking, in 
 dim back bedrooms, in order to regain that 
 coveted first impression? 
 
 Not at all. Fashion has found a way. It 
 claps a new hat on our friend s head a hat 
 with a funny nip in it, or a queer wiggle of the 
 brim, or a long, soft droop, or a dashing tilt, or 
 a jaunty up-fling, or any kind of line what 
 ever, that has distinctive meaning and is not 
 the kind of line we have been used to. 
 
 What happens? First of all, we are inter 
 ested, our eyes are challenged anew. Then 
 the interest and the challenge give us a fresh 
 interpretation. We see the familiar face as 
 though it were a stranger s, and we find in it 
 things we have never noticed. The funny 
 pinch in the brim may bring out all its gayety, 
 the long, soft droop may accentuate its pa 
 thos, the jaunty up-fling of the side may give 
 it a sudden brave note. I have seen a pretty, 
 refined New England face turned suddenly, 
 by a sweep of brim and a green feather, 
 into the face pretty and refined still of 
 one who breaks bonds, blood-sister to Robin 
 Hood. 
 
22 A BRIEF FOR THE HAT 
 
 Passing strange, this witchery of line! Not 
 always working altogether for good. For if 
 there are hats that we "like" on our friends, 
 there are also hats that we "don t like." Nat 
 urally. Since a line can evoke good points, it 
 can also evoke bad ones, and the wrong line 
 may accentuate in a face, not its bravery but 
 its coarseness, not its prettiness but its pet 
 tiness, not its pathos but its heaviness. 
 
 Yet even with this danger, one must wel 
 come the change, merely as change. For the 
 rest of us, from the neck down, fashion pro 
 vides some possibility of this change that we 
 seem so to need. The waist-line may be "worn 
 high" one year, and "low" the next. Now 
 and then it may even chance I noted this 
 carefully in a good journal a while ago that 
 the waist-line will for a short season be "at 
 the waist." Shoulders and hips may be made 
 to seem broader or narrower, neck shorter or 
 longer, by means best known to those who 
 use them. But features cannot be so easily 
 manipulated. At least, if they can, the meth 
 ods are not, on the whole, regarded as alto 
 gether desirable or reputable. Fashion does 
 not quite dare say, "Noses are this winter 
 
A BRIEF FOR THE HAT 23 
 
 being worn retrousse, but next spring the tips 
 will drop a little, and by summer there is a 
 chance that the aquiline line will come in 
 again." Or, "Eyes are to be large and round 
 this fall, but smaller and narrower toward win 
 ter." Or, "Lips are fuller than they were in 
 July, while chins promise to be longer and 
 upper lips shorter than for several years." 
 
 No, this is not yet done. But instead, a way 
 has been found to get some of the same effects 
 of change. By its means faces seem longer or 
 shorter, noses appear to raise or lower their 
 little tips, eyes seem to grow large or small, 
 slanting or straight, and all by the magic of 
 a line, a shift of mass, a flare of color. The 
 hat! The hat s the thing! 
 
The Cat and the Bell-Collar 
 
 IT was, by sorrowful count, the twenty- 
 seventh bird Fur-Cat had killed that spring 
 
 song-birds all, and protected by law from 
 gun and trap, but not from claw and tooth. 
 The decree went forth that Fur-Cat must be 
 belled, and a bell-collar was accordingly pro 
 cured. The offending one was called, and 
 came, rubbing and purring against chair-legs 
 and folk-legs. With a touching confidence he 
 submitted to having the collar fastened on, 
 and it settled most becomingly into its place 
 
 a dash of red melting into deep gray fur. 
 When he was released there was a moment 
 of pause, then the purrings and rubbings 
 changed to frantic clawings and chewings, 
 aimed at the millstone and designed to re 
 move it instantly and forever from the out 
 raged person of Fur-Cat. There followed a 
 dash through the open door and across the 
 lawn. 
 
 We felt anxious. Would the fluffy neck 
 be clawed to ravelings? W T ould insanity set 
 
THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 25 
 
 in? Suddenly Fur-Cat reappeared, bounding 
 lightly and gayly, scarcely touching earth. 
 He came on, with little whirls and pirouet- 
 tings, toying daintily with his tail; he leaped 
 into the air to paw at some creature of his 
 fancy, he chased imaginary worsted balls 
 about over the grass and the piazzas. Finally, 
 in a burst of enthusiasm born purely of his 
 own mood, he shot up a tree and poised him 
 self, in beautiful ease, on an upper branch. 
 
 We laughed, and we marveled a little too. 
 Fur-Cat was not young, the days of his kit- 
 tenhood lay in a dim past. Yet now the kit 
 ten in him had reasserted itself nay, more 
 than reasserted, for in his antics there had been 
 not only all the gay and whimsical impulses 
 of youth, but all the power of maturity. It 
 was a complete, a satisfying, a deeply artistic 
 expression of cat-nature in all its possibilities. 
 
 "If this is what a bell-collar can do," we 
 said, "let us give all cats bell-collars." 
 
 But why stop at cats? 
 
 For the incident set me wondering how a 
 bell-collar could be provided for this or that 
 friend of mine picturing what the effect 
 would be. 
 
26 THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 
 
 I fancy that most of us need to have worked 
 in us just the change that the bell-collar 
 brought about in Fur-Cat. Not that I desire 
 to see every lady of my acquaintance bound 
 ing lightly about her lawn, or posturing in the 
 tree-tops, or toying with fancied images of 
 the air. These things were right in Fur-Cat 
 because he was Fur-Cat. They were the 
 expression of his nature and therefore beauti 
 ful. It is a correspondingly complete and sat 
 isfying expression of their inherent nature 
 that I long for in the good ladies, and good 
 gentlemen, of whom I am thinking. 
 
 It is, perhaps, a habit of the Northern races 
 to repress extreme impulses. It is certainly a 
 habit of the New Englander. Do we not know 
 many and many a character whose natural 
 colors are veiled are overlaid indeed 
 with the deep gray of reserve or the pale gray 
 of hesitation? These are they whom I want 
 to draw to me for a moment, slip on the bell- 
 collar, and then see! 
 
 Sometimes I have watched this very thing 
 happen. There is, for instance, a young man 
 who in ordinary life is bound hand and foot 
 by his own self -consciousness. Eye and tongue 
 
THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 27 
 
 are held in slavery to it, and he walks as one 
 compelled, looking neither to the right nor to 
 the left. He sits, as it were, always on the 
 edge of his chair. But give him a rag or two 
 of costume, and a song to sing, and a miracle 
 is wrought. He grows taller, his step is firm 
 and elastic, his bearing has the grace of com 
 plete ease, he looks the world gayly in the eye, 
 he not only sings his song and acts his part, 
 but he flings out extempore witticisms and 
 meets unforeseen emergencies with blithe un 
 concern. On a wave of sympathy and suc 
 cess he is carried, not out of himself but into 
 himself. He enters into possession of his own 
 personality. 
 
 And when the bell-collar is off, is the spell 
 over? Not quite. Something remains. Each 
 time the transformation is effected it leaves 
 behind it traces. Some day, I believe, he will 
 no longer need the material bell-collar. He 
 will carry one, as Rosalind did not carry her 
 doublet and hose, in his disposition. 
 
 There are many to whom the bit of rag and 
 the song, or the speech, bring a similar eman 
 cipation. But there are more for whom these 
 would never break chains, but rather fasten 
 
28 THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 
 
 them tighter. Fortunately, there are other 
 bell-collars, and not the least among them is 
 raiment. Undoubtedly clothes are abused, 
 yet they have their uses, aside from those of 
 protection. Look at Cinderella! Does any 
 one suppose she would have come into her 
 own place without the help of those gorgeous 
 gowns and those little glass slippers? Does 
 any one fancy her manners were the same, 
 her eyes as bright, her wit as ready, when she 
 sat among the cinders in her dingy rags? No 
 indeed! The slippers and the gowns and the 
 golden coach were an enfranchisement; they 
 were her bell-collar. The Prince was never so 
 dull as to fall in love with a thing of satin and 
 glass. What charmed him was the adorable 
 spirit within, which these had served to re 
 lease. 
 
 Would that we had each of us a fairy god 
 mother to fasten on us, at the right moment, 
 just the right, the magic collar! 
 
 The world, out of fairy books, is chary in 
 furnishing its fairy godmothers, yet most of 
 us have friends at whose touch we become 
 more truly and happily ourselves than at 
 other times. They seem able to endow us, 
 
THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 29 
 
 through some magic of their own, with the 
 beauteous vestments and the glass slippers 
 that free the spirit. These are our fairy god 
 mothers. We do well to love them and pay 
 them good heed, for through them we may 
 enter into such possession of the precious 
 gifts that we need have no dread of the strik 
 ing hour. This, we must suppose, is what 
 Cophetua did for his beggar-maid. At his 
 glance, the queen in her blossomed, which 
 later all the world could see. 
 
 Some there are, indeed, who are able to 
 play the beneficent part, not to one alone, nor 
 to two or three, but to all whom they meet. 
 They go among people flinging bell-collars to 
 right and left. I have seen such a person come 
 into a room, and instantly every one in it 
 grew more vivid, more truly and happily 
 individual. These fairy godmothers them 
 selves are never quite aware of the spell they 
 exert; they think, perhaps, that the room was 
 the same before they entered it. They see 
 people, inevitably, with their bell-collars on, 
 and to them the world never looks as it often 
 does to the rest of us a little colorless, a 
 little dull, a little unresponsive. 
 
SO THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 
 
 Success to their magic wands ! It is through 
 them, if at all, that the boulevards of the 
 world grow rich with golden coaches, and 
 the assemblies of the world grow bright with 
 the gleaming robes and crystal slippers of 
 spiritual enfranchisement. 
 
Clubs among the Cubs 
 
 "MOTHER, I don t think it s fair!" 
 
 Jack burst into the room and dumped him 
 self on the lounge. 
 
 "What is n t fair?" said his mother. 
 
 "I got up a club with Ned and Tommy, 
 and they lected me president, and then I 
 just went into the house for a minute, and 
 while I was gone they lected Tommy presi 
 dent!" 
 
 About half the history of the world is typi 
 fied in this incident, and about three quarters 
 of the history of politics. But the aspect of it 
 that particularly struck me when I heard the 
 story was the extreme youth of the protago 
 nist. Jack was seven years old. It seemed to 
 me that things were beginning- early. 
 
 As always happens, once my attention was 
 directed to the matter, other little incidents 
 of a similar nature began to present them 
 selves to my notice. Six-year-old Paul was 
 taking me for a walk up the farm-lane. 
 
 "That th where they nithated me," he 
 
32 CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 
 
 lisped, trying to give his momentous words 
 the air of a careless aside. 
 
 "They what?" I asked, surveying the gray 
 rock half buried in huckleberry bushes. 
 
 " Nithated," said Paul slowly. 
 
 " What s that?" I asked again. 
 
 I was really very stupid, but children bear 
 a great deal from grown-ups. 
 
 "Why, don t you know?" said Paul pa 
 tiently. :< You put your hand on it, and hold 
 the other hand up, and then you thay I 
 muth n t tell you what you thay, becauthe 
 you re not a member; and, anyway" this 
 was added with a far-away look "I gueth 
 I ve forgotten what it wath." 
 
 "So you re a member? What is it? A 
 club?" 
 
 "A thothiety, the D. L. S." 
 
 "What does that mean?" 
 
 "That th a thecret. It th a thecret tho 
 thiety." 
 
 "Oh, I see. And what do you do? Is that a 
 secret too?" 
 
 "Oh, we have meetingth we don t do 
 very much thept when there th thome- 
 body to nithate." 
 
CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 33 
 
 "And that happens rather often, I sup 
 pose," I suggested. 
 
 "Ye-e-th," doubtfully. "They nithated 
 me latht week." 
 
 "And who else is in the society?" 
 
 "Willie and Kate. They have two other 
 thothietieth, but I m only in thith one." 
 
 While I was still brooding over this con 
 versation, I picked up a slip of paper in a 
 friend s house, and, without realizing that I 
 was intruding on mysteries, read as follows: ; 
 
 DEAR LILLIE 
 
 I am going to get up another club Its 
 called the S T S If you come over after school 
 I will tell you what it means You can join it 
 and Billy is in it Then we can conect up with 
 the other clubs, and have an afilliation 
 Yours truly 
 
 JAMES BURTON 
 
 I was deeply impressed with this document, 
 especially with the "afilliation" idea, and I 
 inquired into the ages of the persons involved 
 in the scheme. James is nine years old, Lillie 
 is seven, Billy is eight. Evidently we are in 
 
34 CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 
 
 an organizing age, and the new generation is 
 not going to be left behind. 
 
 Lately, with the desire of finding out some 
 thing about these matters from another set of 
 witnesses, I have been sounding various par 
 ents on the subject. As soon as I mention the 
 word "clubs," I am sure to see some sort of 
 vivid expression flash up in the face of my 
 interlocutor. Sometimes it is amusement, 
 and there follows a funny story about some 
 of the school societies; sometimes it is sarcas 
 tic; sometimes it is rather desperate. One 
 mother confesses that she has forbidden her 
 little daughter to belong to any school club 
 whatever; one father has sent his boy away 
 to boarding-school to escape the problems and 
 dangers of high-school secret societies. Ob 
 viously, I have stumbled on a live issue, and 
 one that is puzzling wiser heads than mine. 
 
 Puzzled I surely am. In "my day" there 
 were baseball clubs for the boys, and sewing 
 or cooking clubs for the girls, and there an 
 end, with no secret societies at all. Moreover, 
 the baseball clubs really played baseball, and 
 the sewing and cooking clubs really sewed 
 and cooked, or tried to. But that was long 
 
CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 35 
 
 ago. In those days, too, the club life of the 
 grown-ups was correspondingly simple; a 
 charitable sewing society for the ladies, where 
 they met to sew and talk; a club for the men, 
 where they smoked and talked politics or 
 science or whatever interested them; and for 
 men and women together, a euchre club, and 
 perhaps a "literary" club. 
 
 But the plot has thickened. We are beset 
 by clubs on all sides, and one of the chief 
 problems of life, if I can trust my observa 
 tion, seems to be how to keep out of the wrong 
 ones and get into the right ones, while, with 
 regard to the officering of them, the predica 
 ment of the martyr Jack may be taken as 
 typical. I have even been assured, by a very 
 high authority indeed, that most clubs are 
 started by people who have a craving to be 
 president of something, and who therefore 
 get up a club to meet this "long-felt want." 
 Moreover, it is apparently a widespread de 
 sire, this wish to "conect up" with other 
 clubs and make an "afilliation." If, then, the 
 old cocks and hens are crowing and 
 cackling after this fashion, what else is to be 
 expected of the young ones? 
 
36 CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 
 
 But I have no intention of drifting into an 
 argument. I am merely observing, and won 
 dering how it is all going to come out. Being, 
 in general, no friend to repressive measures, 
 I have a feeling that it will do little good to 
 prohibit clubs and secret societies among the 
 children. I should rather favor letting them 
 go on, if they must, but giving them some 
 thing really to do. Societies that chiefly 
 "hold meetings," and "initiate," seem to my 
 plain mind to be in need, not so much of re 
 pressing, as of being given a job. And mean 
 while, I confess that I am sorry for Jack, I 
 admire James, and I am proud that I know 
 Paul and Lillie. 
 
The Cult of the Second-Best 
 
 All that I know 
 
 Of a certain star 
 Is, it can throw 
 
 (Like the angled spar) 
 Now a dart of red, 
 
 Now a dart of blue; 
 Till my friends have said 
 
 They would fain see, too, 
 My star that dartles the red and the blue! 
 Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled. 
 
 They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. 
 What matter to me that their star is a world? 
 Mine opens its soul to me; therefore I love it. 
 
 WERE I asked to choose the short poem 
 which most suggestively expressed the atti 
 tude of our age, I believe I should pause long 
 before rejecting this one of Browning s. If 
 there is one trait more characteristic than 
 another of our spiritual attitude, it is our 
 proneness to challenge the Accepted. "Down 
 with the Obvious" is our intellectual war- 
 cry. It is more than a principle with us; it is 
 a habit. We are growing temperamentally 
 incapable of taking things for granted; we 
 are the sworn enemies of conventional stand 
 ards, both in taste and in morals; we are the 
 
38 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 
 
 champions of individual judgment. In the 
 realm of morals this is bringing about conse 
 quences so vast that I must back away from 
 even the mention of them. In the realm of 
 taste it is producing conditions, to one aspect 
 of which I should like to call attention. 
 
 Which brings us back to our poem. May I 
 be pardoned for laying unhallowed hands on 
 a thing so exquisite! It is like dissecting a 
 butterfly. But perhaps we need not hurt him, 
 and we can set him free again in a moment. 
 
 In plain English, then, the poem means, 
 that I love a certain star because of qualities 
 in it appreciated, I find, in a peculiar way, by 
 me. I do not share this appreciation with 
 others. When they press in upon me, to par 
 take of my vision, "it stops like a bird, like a 
 flower hangs furled." But when I, its dis 
 coverer and owner, look at it, it "opens its 
 soul to me," and note well the phrase 
 " therefore I love it." As for the others the 
 crowd let them have Saturn and welcome 
 Saturn, whose wonders any one can see 
 with half an eye. I admit that Saturn is in a 
 sense greater, but I am happy with my own 
 lesser thing, because it is mine. 
 
THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 39 
 
 There we have it! A turning away from 
 accepted greatness, greatness in the appreci 
 ation of which all can take part, to the minor 
 beauty whose enjoyment can be ours alone. 
 It is not purely a love of beauty, then, that 
 dominates us, but a glory in discovery, a 
 pride of ownership, and, perhaps, an instinct 
 of withdrawal from the crowd. 
 
 And now we may let our butterfly go again 
 praying that we have not brushed the 
 least mote of bloom from his wings. 
 
 It is this attitude, I think, which is pecu 
 liarly characteristic of the age we live in. It 
 is not, of course, the exclusive possession of 
 our own time. Touchstone betrayed it, when, 
 in his best court tones, he introduced Audrey 
 as "A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, 
 sir, but mine own." And we can go back even 
 further if we care to inquire curiously. Prob 
 ably the man who black-balled Aristides be 
 cause he was tired of hearing him called "The 
 Just" had the same feeling which is only 
 another illustration of the modernness of the 
 Greeks. He was expressing a dislike of the 
 Obvious, a rebellion against the Accepted, 
 which we can all understand. He was tired of 
 
40 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 
 
 Saturn. Probably he had some small star of 
 his own that, for the reasons we have just 
 been considering, he liked better. 
 
 It is, in fact, a trait of human nature, which 
 just now is getting the upper hand a little 
 more than usual. For the worship of the gods 
 has always been encroached upon by the cults 
 of the demigods. There is something cloying 
 about the continual contemplation of unques 
 tioned greatness, especially if the experience 
 has to be shared with the crowd. This is, of 
 course, the real reason why the orthodox con 
 ceptions of Heaven are so unattractive. And, 
 equally of course, this was what was the mat 
 ter with Lucifer ah, here at last we are at 
 the very beginning of the whole trouble! He 
 began it ! Not Browning, nor Touchstone, nor 
 the Greek mugwump, but Lucifer. He was 
 the first to set up an individual judgment, to 
 rebel against the domination of the Obvious. 
 
 There is nobody to blame, then, but a per 
 son who is so in the habit of taking blame that 
 he can take a little more without turning a 
 hair. Upon his broad shoulders we may load 
 the restlessness of all the uneasy spirits since 
 the time of the First One. 
 
THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 41 
 
 There is something to be said for them. 
 The Great of the world do get a good deal of 
 handling. They show it a little. The grass is 
 trodden down all around them, their toes are 
 worn blunt by being kissed, and they are 
 bestarred and be-photographed out of all 
 whooping. One can hardly think of them 
 apart from an atmosphere of perfunctory 
 admiration of the tourist sort, to which there 
 clings an aroma of lunch-boxes and note 
 books and cameras and picture post-cards. 
 We cannot approach them without feeling 
 ourselves one of a rabble. "Ugh!" we growl, 
 "let s get out of this! Come along over to 
 my Little-Great-One, that nobody else is pay 
 ing any attention to. Here we are, no 
 crowd, no noise, the place is ours!" 
 
 Ah, yes, there is indeed something in it. 
 There is a good deal in it. And so the cult of 
 the Little Great supplants the worship of the 
 Great Great. 
 
 There is no special harm in this so long as 
 we remember that there is a difference be 
 tween the Great Great and the Little Great. 
 So long as we do not forget that, with one day 
 of such treatment as the Great Great are 
 
42 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 
 
 imperturbably submitting to through the 
 ages, the Little Great would be reduced to 
 pulp. And so long as we do not blink the 
 fact that in pursuing our cult we are yielding 
 to our love for exclusiveness. 
 
 And though there is something to be said 
 for these uneasy spirits, there is also some 
 thing to be said against them, certainly when 
 we are concerned with the things of the 
 spirit. For there is a difference between the 
 material and the immaterial Great Great. 
 Take the Matterhorn it is a Great Great 
 in its own line, no doubt, but perhaps just 
 perhaps we might be excused for prefer 
 ring a lower peak with solitudes around it, 
 to the Matterhorn with a foreground of hard- 
 boiled-egg shells and oiled-paper sandwich- 
 wrappers. I am not accusing the Matterhorn 
 of such a foreground. The Touristland Im 
 provement Society probably keeps it cleared 
 up. I am only suggesting a hypothetical case, 
 in which a material Great Great might lose 
 some of its shall we call it bloom? 
 
 But with the immaterial Great Great the 
 case is somewhat altered. Its audience-rooms 
 may be always thronged, yet we do not have 
 
THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 43 
 
 to dodge the elbows of the crowd, or peer 
 under their hats in order to get a view. We 
 can, in a sense, forget them. Only in a sense, 
 to be sure. For the throng, though invisible, 
 has left its traces. The Bible, for instance, 
 has suffered from too much handling. No one 
 who has been "properly" brought up, can, I 
 fancy, ever read any of its great writings and 
 get a perfectly pure and fresh vision of their 
 greatness. There are no egg-shells and sand 
 wich-papers, indeed, but the fore-ground and 
 the back-ground and the middle-ground are 
 littered with altar-cloths and stained glass, 
 with snatches of hymns and illuminated texts 
 and the debris of sermons. Not with the most 
 intense detachment of spirit can we escape 
 them entirely. If on this account we leave 
 the Bible and betake ourselves say, to the 
 Apocrypha, we shall be free from all this. 
 We can be quite by ourselves, and we shall 
 find many wonderful and beautiful things, 
 but in the end we shall be making a mistake 
 if we do not go back to our Bible again, 
 hymns and texts and sermons and all. 
 
 The next greatest sufferer among the Great 
 Great is Shakespeare. It is hard to read 
 
44 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 
 
 Shakespeare with an undivided mind, be 
 cause one keeps running up against so many 
 "familiar quotations." Moreover, some of us 
 have "prepared" Shakespeare for the class 
 room, for college-entrance examinations, for 
 B.A. and M.A. and Ph.D. examinations, and 
 the air of the study hangs heavy about him. 
 I knew a young woman once who felt this so 
 keenly that in selecting four plays to be 
 studied by her class she proposed four of the 
 poorest one of them not surely authentic 
 because, as she said, the great plays were so 
 "hackneyed." It seemed to me that though 
 her plight was hard, she had not chosen the 
 best way out. It still seems so. And if we do 
 not find the better way of escape it is partly 
 our own fault. 
 
 Can we not walk free with Shakespeare 
 and enjoy his companionship because of this 
 network of trappings glossaries and notes 
 and quotations and essays in which we are 
 involved? Do our steps drag? Are our feet 
 clogged? Do we slip harness and escape to 
 some companion whose charm, perhaps, is 
 less, but with whom we can race along un- 
 trammeled? The loss is ours. If we were just 
 
THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 45 
 
 a little cleverer, we could do something still 
 better: we could give Shakespeare the wink 
 
 he would be ready and both together 
 we would duck, plunge, twist, and there 
 we are! Free! and off together up the wind, 
 with none to follow. And then what a day we 
 should have! 
 
 From the brightness and the wonder of 
 such a day does it, perhaps, detract some 
 thing, the consciousness that we are not the 
 first? Perhaps it does, because we are, as we 
 have admitted, human. There is a joy in dis 
 covery quite apart from the quality of the 
 thing discovered. The first man to conquer a 
 peak gets something that those who follow 
 never find. But this the bead on the cup 
 
 is not for us, we come too late. Unless, 
 indeed, we may find it in the discovery of 
 some new Great Great among our contempo 
 raries. Some of us may have had intoxicating 
 moments when we have at least thought we 
 had done this. 
 
 But for the most part, the peaks have been 
 climbed. Shakespeare and Sophocles and the 
 rest have been read and read. When we say 
 "Wonderful, wonderful, and most wonder- 
 
46 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 
 
 fill!" we must be content to know that mil 
 lions have said it before us, and millions will 
 say it after us. And if we are not content, 
 if our pride is humiliated and our love of 
 exclusiveness is outraged by this knowledge, 
 what then? Shall we allow ourselves to be 
 driven by our own weakness eternally to the 
 society of the Little Great? Perhaps, better 
 than rebellion against the Obvious, would be 
 an endeavor to reconquer the Obvious. Per 
 haps the thing that would pay best of all 
 would be to strive for freshness of mind, 
 freshness of attack, in the appreciation of 
 these same old Great Great. 
 
 For the greatness of the Great, though 
 obvious in one way, in another way is not 
 obvious at all, and when we turn aside from 
 them, we are perhaps moved not merely by 
 intellectual priggishness, but also by intel 
 lectual indolence. The dainty musical trifle 
 rests us when the great symphony tires us. 
 It is easier to appreciate the little things, the 
 pretty sketches, the rare bits, exquisite but 
 slight, whose beauty we can in a sense see all 
 around. Easy, and also perfectly defensible 
 if we do it only as a part of our aesthetic expe- 
 
THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 47 
 
 rience. But if it becomes the whole of it, we 
 are in danger of falling into a sterile round of 
 easy enjoyment which leaves us where it 
 found us. We shall never grow spiritually 
 keen and muscular in this way. It is as if a 
 man were to spend his leisure all his life in 
 playing jack-straws when he might be play 
 ing chess. If we spend all our time on the 
 second-best we shall lose something out of 
 our intellectual and aesthetic equipment, 
 something of virility, something of largeness 
 and breadth, something of the power and the 
 willingness to expend energy in the under 
 standing and appreciation of the greatest 
 things. And this ought not to be lightly 
 given up. 
 
 A fresh vision of the Great Great is worth 
 achieving. It is worth waiting for. I had 
 read "King Lear" many times, but once I 
 read it, and suddenly it took hold of me in a 
 new way, and carried me along breathless, 
 overwhelmed, to the end, I had read the 
 "Antigone" over and over, but once when 
 I came to it, it swept me up into its own clear 
 air: I saw it steadily and saw it whole. Expe 
 riences like these, incommunicable as they 
 
48 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 
 
 are, are to be above all desired, above all 
 prized. When one has had them it is hard to 
 see how one could for long be content with 
 less. 
 
An Appendix to Bacon 
 
 I HAVE often thought that Lord Bacon might 
 have known even more about revenge than 
 he did, if he had observed it in children. For, 
 being a kind of "wild justice," its features 
 are clearest before they have been blurred 
 by the conventions of a society wherein jus 
 tice is supposed to have been tamed, if not 
 actually domesticated. 
 
 Instances of the juvenile type have at 
 tracted my notice from time to time, and I 
 am moved to record three of them, for the 
 use of some future philosopher. 
 
 One was a scheme planned by a practical- 
 minded little boy, to take effect against his 
 mother. He spent one entire afternoon, and 
 enlisted the services of his friends, in making 
 what he called "dirt-traps" along the garden 
 walk, a system of simple levers so arranged 
 that any person who passed would strike the 
 foot against one end of a stick, making the 
 other end fly up and fling a little bunch of 
 earth into his face. Of course the person 
 
50 AN APPENDIX TO BACON 
 
 passing was to be the unnatural mother; after 
 so much industry on his part, Providence 
 would surely take care of that. I forget 
 whether Providence did, but as I look back, I 
 like the boy s attitude of mind. He has since 
 become a scientist, with a good grasp of the 
 concrete. 
 
 Of quite another type was the revenge car 
 ried out by a little girl I knew. She had a 
 big brother who teased, and a bigger brother 
 who did n t, because he was too big. Now and 
 then she could pay back some of her scores, 
 but the accumulation of those unpaid touched 
 her soul with gloom. At last the children 
 gave a play, wherein she, as the Princess Ariel, 
 rejected Prince Percival (big brother) and 
 eloped with a poor suitor (bigger brother). 
 At a certain point in the play Percival was 
 repulsed with the words, "I spurn thee, vil 
 lain! hence! away!" During the rehearsals it 
 was suggested by the coach that the princess 
 might accentuate her scorn by touching the 
 kneeling youth with the toe of her slipper. 
 She did so, gently, tasting the pleasure of this 
 new kind of revenge. But on the night of the 
 performance, excitement unseated such pow- 
 
AN APPENDIX TO BACON 51 
 
 ers of restraint as a short life had furnished 
 her with; the wild justice burst forth, and 
 the gilt-slippered little foot did not gently 
 spurn, it hotly kicked. The princely lover, 
 unprepared, tumbled over on his side and 
 rolled beautifully "down center." The audi 
 ence applauded such spirited acting, and per 
 haps only one of those present guessed how in 
 that moment the wrongs of years had been 
 wiped out by a vengeance that was satisfy 
 ing because at once public, concrete, and 
 symbolic. 
 
 But that which I admire most of all was 
 planned by a little country boy he became 
 a successful city man whose heart was 
 filled with bitterness toward his school 
 teacher. Not for him were the crass forms of 
 immediate retaliation, but at recess, as he 
 ate his apple, he thought, and the gray eyes 
 grew dark and intent. The apple was eaten, 
 but the seeds ah, they were shut tight in 
 the small fist until an unmolested moment 
 came. Then each little brown speck was care 
 fully pushed under the edge of the school- 
 house and jammed down, by black-nailed 
 fingers, into the earth. The boy went back 
 
52 AN APPENDIX TO BACON 
 
 to his books, but the poet s brain behind the 
 gray eyes saw into the years to come, saw 
 the unrighteous teacher still at her desk, the 
 hateful little schoolhouse still standing, while, 
 outside, those little seeds were bursting, root 
 ing downward, and stretching upward; saw 
 the young shoots gaining strength, brac 
 ing and straining at the house timbers, till 
 they stirred and cracked; saw the house 
 wrenched and tottering, the teacher grasping 
 her reeling desk, and then ruins, with 
 blooming apple trees rising in triumph over 
 them ! 
 
 And meantime, the gray eyes were bent 
 on the book, content to wait until the future 
 should right the past. Magnificent! 
 
The Embarrassment of Finality 
 
 "Live as if each moment were your last." 
 How often I used to come across such advice 
 in the books that I read! At least it seemed 
 often to me too often. For while I ac 
 cepted it as being probably good advice if 
 one could follow it, yet follow it I could n t. 
 
 For one thing, I could never bring myself 
 to feel this "last "-ness of each moment. I 
 tried and failed. I was good at make-believe, 
 too, but this was out of all reason. 
 
 I still fail. The probability that each mo 
 ment is really my last is, I suppose, growing 
 theoretically greater as the clock ticks, yet I 
 am no more able to realize it than I used to 
 be. I no longer try to; and, what is more, I 
 hope I never shall. I hope that when my last 
 moment really comes, it may slip by unrecog 
 nized. If it does n t, I am sure I don t know 
 what I shall do. 
 
 For I find that this sense of finality is not 
 a spur, but an embarrassment. Only con 
 sider: suppose this moment, or let us say the 
 
54 THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 
 
 next five minutes, is really my last what 
 shall I do? Bless me, I can t think! I really 
 cannot hit upon anything important enough 
 to do at such a time. Clearly, it ought to be 
 important, something having about it this 
 peculiar quality of finality. It should have 
 finish, it should in some way be expressive of 
 something I wonder what? It should leave 
 a good taste in one s mouth. If I consulted 
 my own savage instincts I should probably 
 pick up a child and kiss it; that would at all 
 events leave a good taste. But, suppose there 
 were no child about, or suppose the child 
 kicked because he was playing and did n t 
 want to be interrupted what a fiasco ! 
 
 Moreover, one must consider the matter 
 from the child s standpoint: he, of course, 
 ought also to be acting as if each moment 
 were his last. And in that case, ought he to 
 spend it in being kissed by me? Not neces 
 sarily. At any rate, I should be selfish to 
 assume this. Perhaps he ought to wash his 
 hands, or tell his little sister that he is sorry he 
 slapped her. Perhaps I ought to tell my little 
 sister something of that sort if it was n t 
 slapping, it was probably something else. 
 
THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 55 
 
 But no, five minutes are precious. If they 
 are my last, she will forgive me anyway 
 de mortuis, etc.; it would be much more neces 
 sary to do this if I were sure of going on living 
 and meeting her at meals; then, indeed 
 
 Yet there must be something that one 
 ought to do in these five minutes. There is 
 enough that needs doing, at least there 
 would be if they were not my last. There is 
 the dusting, and the marketing, and letter- 
 writing, and sewing, and reading, and seeing 
 one s friends. But under the peculiar circum 
 stances, none of these things seems suitable. 
 I give it up. The fact must be that very early 
 in life before I can remember I formed 
 a habit of going on living, and of expecting 
 to go on, which became incorrigible. And 
 the contrary assumption produces hopeless 
 paralysis. As to these last five minutes that 
 I have been trying to plan for, I think I will 
 cut them out, and stop right here. It will do 
 as well as anywhere. Though I still have a 
 hankering to kiss that baby! 
 
 I might think the trouble entirely with 
 myself, but that I have noticed indications 
 of the same thing in others. Have you ever 
 
56 THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 
 
 been met by an old friend at a railroad sta 
 tion where one can stop only a few moments? 
 I have. She comes down for a glimpse of me; 
 good of her, too ! We have not met for years, 
 and it will be years before we can meet again. 
 It is almost like those fatal last moments of 
 life. I stand on the car-platform and wave, 
 and she dashes out of the crowd. "Oh, there 
 you are! Well how are you? Come over 
 here where we can talk. Why, you re 
 looking well yes, I am, too, only I ve been 
 having a horrid time with the dentist." 
 (Pause.) "Are you having a pleasant jour 
 ney? Yes, of course, those vestibule trains 
 are always hideously close. I ve been in a 
 hot car, too. I thought I d never get here, 
 the cars were blocked you know they re 
 tearing up the streets again they always 
 are." (Pause.) "How s Alice? That s nice. 
 
 And how s Egbert? Yes, you wrote me 
 about his eyes. WTiat a good-looking hat 
 you have! I hated to come down in this old 
 thing, but my new one did n t come home 
 she promised, too and I just had to see you. 
 
 Do look at those two over there ! How can 
 people do such things on a public platform, 
 
THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 57 
 
 do you see? I 11 move round so you can look. 
 Why, it isn t time yet, is it? Oh, dear! 
 And we have n t really begun to talk. Well, 
 stand on the step and then you won t get 
 left. Yes, I ll write. So glad to have seen 
 you. Going to be gone all winter? Oh, 
 yes, I remember, you wrote me. Well, good 
 bye, good-bye!" 
 The train pulls out a few feet, then pauses 
 
 one more precious moment for epochal 
 conversation we laugh. "Why, I thought 
 it had started Well, give my love to Alice 
 
 and I hope Bert s eyes will be better I 
 said, I hoped his eyes Egbert s eyes will 
 be better will improve." 
 
 The train starts again. "Good-bye once 
 more!" I stand clutching the car door, hold 
 ing my breath lest the train change its mind 
 a second time. But it moves smoothly out, 
 I give a last wave, and reenter my car, trying 
 to erase the fatuous smile of farewell from my 
 features, that I may not feel too foolish before 
 my fellow passengers. I sink into my seat, 
 feeling rather worn and frazzled. No more 
 five-minute meetings for me if I can help it! 
 Give me a leisurely letter, or my own 
 
58 THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 
 
 thoughts and memories, until I can spend 
 with my friend at least a half day. Then, 
 perhaps, when we are not oppressed by the 
 importance of the speeding moments, we may 
 be able to talk together with the unconscious 
 nonchalance that makes talk precious. 
 
 I have never heard a death-bed conversa 
 tion, but I fancy it must be something like 
 this, only worse, and my suspicions are so far 
 corroborated by what I am able to glean from 
 those who have witnessed such scenes in 
 hospitals, for instance. Friends come to visit 
 the dying man; they sit down, hug one knee, 
 make an embarrassed remark, drop that knee 
 and pick up the other ankle. They rise, 
 walk to the foot of the bed, then tiptoe back 
 uneasily. Hang it, what is there to say! If 
 he was n t dying there would be plenty, but 
 that sort of talk does n t seem appropriate. 
 What is appropriate except hymns? 
 
 When my time comes, defend me from this ! 
 I shall not repine at going, but if my friends 
 can t talk to me just as they always have, I 
 shall be really exasperated. And if they 
 offer me hymns ! 
 
 No last minutes, or hours, for me might 
 
THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 59 
 
 better be discounted at once dropped out. 
 I have a friend who thinks otherwise, at least 
 about visits. She says that it makes no differ 
 ence how you behave on a visit, so long as 
 you act prettily during the last day or two. 
 People will remember that, and forget the 
 rest. Perhaps; but I doubt it. I think we are 
 much more apt to remember the middles of 
 things, and their beginnings, than their end 
 ings. Almost all the great pieces of music 
 have commonplace endings; well enough, of 
 course, but what one remembers are bits here 
 and there in the middle, or some wonderful 
 beginning. > If one is saying good-bye to a 
 beloved spot, and goes for a last glimpse, 
 does one really take that away to cherish? 
 No, I venture to say, one forgets that, and 
 remembers the place as one saw it on some 
 other day, some time when one had no 
 thought of finality, and was not consciously 
 storing up its beauty to be kept against the 
 time of famine. 
 
 One makes a last visit to a friend, and all 
 one remembers about it is its painful "last"- 
 ness. The friend herself one recalls rather as 
 one has known her in other, happy, thought- 
 
60 THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 
 
 less moments, which were neither last nor 
 first, and therefore most rich because most 
 unconscious. 
 
 Live as if each moment were my last? Not 
 at all! I know better now. I choose to live 
 as if each moment were my first, as if life had 
 just come to me fresh. Or perhaps, better 
 yet, to live as if each moment were, not last, 
 for that gives up the future, nor first, for that 
 would relinquish the past, but in the midst 
 of things, enriched by memory, lighted by 
 anticipation, aware of no trivialities, because 
 acknowledging no finality. 
 
The Wine of Anonymity 
 
 LET me not be misunderstood. I am not now 
 thinking of the pleasures connected with the 
 anonymous letter the letter which, in dis 
 guised hand, warns Benedick not to trust 
 Beatrice too far, or advises Beatrice to follow 
 up Benedick and find out what he does be 
 tween eight and nine of a summer evening. 
 In the fashioning of such epistles there may 
 be* there must be a certain gratification, 
 but it has never come my way. I have never 
 experienced either the thrill of writing such a 
 letter or the pang of receiving one. 
 
 Nor do I mean the fierce but coward joy 
 of asserting, in an open letter, unsigned, that 
 lago is a liar and a villain, and escaping the 
 annoyance of a libel suit in consequence. This 
 pleasure also I have never tasted, though I 
 really have strong opinions about lago, while 
 disliking libel suits. 
 
 No. The wine of which I speak is milder 
 than this and has no bitter after-taste. With 
 out having either officious warnings or malig- 
 
62 THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 
 
 nantf vituperation to utter, I yet find a certain 
 gentle exhilaration in being able to express 
 my thoughts without a signature. 
 
 I am, I believe, not the only one to feel 
 this. The other writers in the Contributors 
 Club, 1 entering its doors, which close softly 
 behind them and tell no tales, and approach 
 ing its social hearth in the cozy club-room 
 whose walls have ears, perhaps, but no 
 tongues, they, too, I notice, carry them 
 selves with a more buoyant and jaunty bear 
 ing than the Olympians who sit enthroned in 
 the Body of the Magazine. There is a glare 
 of publicity about Olympus that even the 
 Gods felt witness the way they slipped 
 into human disguise or drew on the tarn-helm 
 when they wanted to be really at ease. Often, 
 indeed, this was when they were up to mis 
 chief, but not always. The Club members are 
 never up to mischief, and yet we like to be 
 nameless. We are not saying anything that 
 we are ashamed of, and yet and yet it is 
 such fun to use the tarn-helm! 
 
 For there is a certain relaxation that comes 
 when we know that we are not going to be 
 held up to what we have said, that we shall 
 
 1 This paper originally appeared in the Atlantic s Contributors Club. 
 
THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 63 
 
 escape the annoyance of being expected to be 
 the kind of person who said it, whatever it 
 may be. When we meet a man who has writ 
 ten things, we expect him to live up to his 
 signature. Usually he does n t, and then we 
 
 grumble, "Is n t he the man who wrote 
 
 ? I thought so. Well, he doesn t look 
 
 it, does he?" Probably he is tired of being 
 expected to "look it," and does n t mean to, 
 and is glad he does n t. 
 
 In spite of Emerson, consistency is a hob 
 goblin. Most of us cannot help feeling that 
 what we have said one day we are expected 
 to abide by the next, and this makes us 
 careful. We are brought up from youth to 
 think before we speak, and so we do. We 
 think, perhaps, three or four times, and when 
 we have done our thinking we have begun to 
 suspect that we are poor creatures anyway 
 and might better not speak at all; which 
 may be the case or it may not. Now the joy 
 of anonymity is that we speak twice before 
 we think. Perhaps oh, mad and forbidden 
 pleasure! we never think at all, we simply 
 speak. The result is that we are absolutely 
 spontaneous and happy. The wine of ano- 
 
64 THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 
 
 nymity has loosened our tongues, and we 
 prattle on in unchecked and artless fashion, 
 and often more pleasantly than when sobered 
 by the cold gray dawn of responsibility. 
 
 It is probably the same thing at bottom 
 that makes people so much better company 
 at a masquerade than under any other cir 
 cumstances. In the circle of the black mask 
 and the domino we have no name, no past, 
 no future, no self to live up to or down to, 
 and the mood that is uppermost need never 
 impose itself upon a later mood. We can be 
 spontaneous and genuine. No wonder we are 
 good company! For on the whole our spon 
 taneous impulses are kindly and gay. We 
 are almost always ready to love our fellow- 
 men for an hour, if we are not thereby com 
 mitting ourselves to loving them for a life 
 time. 
 
 It all seems to come back to the same thing 
 a reluctance to commit ourselves. It is 
 easy enough to be advised, "Let him say 
 what he thinks in hard words to-day, and 
 to-morrow let him say what to-morrow thinks 
 in hard words again." To the visionary and 
 recluse this may be easy; but those of us who 
 
THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 65 
 
 live close to our kind, who take color from 
 them, who can never do anything without 
 being conscious of an effect upon them which 
 reacts in turn upon us such vacillating and 
 feeble chameleon-folk as these love to run to 
 the cover of the anonymous, they wrap them 
 selves snugly in its mantle and mask, and 
 then ah, then they step out at ease, they 
 hold the head high, they begin to say, "I 
 think," instead of "it is sometimes thought," 
 and "I doubt," instead of "it appears doubt 
 ful." Ideas come to them with a rush. They 
 have so much to say, now that the saying 
 does not commit them to anything in particu 
 lar. They can confess their souls without 
 being taken too seriously, or, indeed, being 
 "taken" at all. They can berate the news 
 papers, and then settle down peacefully to 
 the perusal of the latest murder news, and no 
 one will taunt, " I thought you said you never 
 read the papers." They can write an enco 
 mium on Milton, and then take down Sher 
 lock Holmes unchallenged by any one. They 
 can hurl a philippic against magenta, and 
 then choose a winter suit or the dining-room 
 wall-paper of that color, without fear of 
 
66 THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 
 
 reproach. Will any one say that this is not 
 as wine to one who falters? 
 
 Perhaps the fear of consequences keeps us 
 from a few bad acts, but I am convinced that 
 it also deters us from many good ones. It 
 keeps us from being as disagreeable to people 
 as we should sometimes like to be, but it also 
 prevents us from being as nice to them as we 
 now and then have the impulse to be. 
 
 I often think of this as I stand beside the 
 track in the country and watch a train rush 
 past. The engineer is usually leaning out of 
 his window, I wave to him, he waves back, 
 we smile in most friendly fashion, and the 
 train flashes by. I am the better for the 
 greeting, and I hope he is. Once I stood on a 
 bridge and watched a slow freight creep along 
 under me. The train men stood or lay on the 
 top of the cars, and as they passed they tossed 
 salutations up to me. I caught them all. It 
 was great fun. But afterwards I reflected, 
 what would have happened if that freight 
 had suddenly stopped under the bridge, as 
 freights sometimes do, or if the engine had 
 blown out a cylinder or something, so that 
 the intercourse of the moment threatened to 
 
THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 67 
 
 be prolonged for an hour or two? I fancy all 
 those genial men would have suddenly stif 
 fened into stolid automata, and I should have 
 had a pressing engagement elsewhere. 
 
 This is what keeps happening to us all the 
 time in life. Our human intercourse is con 
 stantly being thwarted by our consciousness 
 of consequences. It is especially the case when 
 we are young. Young people feel that they 
 can hardly have an intimate conversation 
 without its ending in a promise to correspond 
 or an invitation to visit. If we keep this atti 
 tude as we grow older, the consciousness that 
 a moment s intimacy may entail so much 
 makes us pause before taking the fateful 
 plunge. How often do we draw back in a 
 moment of expansion because we reflect, 
 "Shall we feel the same way to-morrow, or 
 next month?" How many friendly impulses 
 do we restrain because we are afraid the 
 freight train may stop, and something more 
 may be expected of us! 
 
 But sometimes as we grow older we come 
 to realize that we have made in part our own 
 burdens, and missed some rare pleasures. We 
 discover that if we are honest and natural, 
 
68 THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 
 
 intimate moments may prove to de not mill 
 stones but stars. Among my treasures of 
 memory are those flashes of communion with 
 others which have apparently lighted no 
 lamp of friendship needing daily tending. It 
 may have been with an acquaintance who 
 ever afterward remained, as before, an ac 
 quaintance merely it may have been with 
 a stranger, standing beside us for a moment 
 in a crowded shop; or a seat-fellow in a rail 
 road train. The moment has come, we have 
 recognized it, enjoyed it, and it has passed, 
 but it is none the less prized. 
 
 Perhaps if we had more courage we should 
 shake off the tyranny of our own words and 
 acts, and not need the mask and mantle to 
 set us free. But so long as we are what we 
 are, I cannot but think we should be happier, 
 gayer, and no less good, if now and then we 
 dropped our names and spoke without a 
 thought of our own identity, if now and then 
 we donned our mask and cloak and fared forth 
 among our fellows, freed from the restraints 
 of our own personality. 
 
The House and the Hill 
 
 IT is an old New England hillside. I say 
 "old" because it usually feels old to me. Its 
 patches of low huckleberry bushes, to be sure, 
 bear every year new and shiny berries, the 
 wild roses straying over its rocks bloom as 
 fresh and sweet as if the whole hillside had 
 been late-created, as though God had only 
 thought of it last May. But those same berry 
 patches have been here for generations, and 
 the gnarled little rose-bushes which bear the 
 tender blossoming shoots are, perhaps, as old 
 as the giant chestnuts near them. The chest 
 nuts themselves are more obviously old, 
 though they toss their creamy plumes of 
 blossom each July afresh, and the rocks 
 the hillside, being truly of New England, is 
 almost all rock are older still. 
 
 Now and then, walking slowly up one of 
 the faint cow-paths that wind among huckle 
 berry and sumach, I have picked up an Indian 
 arrow-head lying under a ledge as though 
 dropped there but yesterday. It is as if a 
 
70 THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 
 
 wave of the retreating past had swept up and 
 licked about my feet, and I am set wondering 
 about the past yet more remote so remote 
 that its waves can never stir me with even 
 the tiniest left-over wave of reminiscence. 
 
 I have always loved the hill. I felt that I 
 knew it well, and through knowledge and 
 affection had, in a sense, earned the right to 
 call it mine. One day, I set up a little canvas 
 house upon it one room only, with win 
 dows on all sides. And when I entered it and 
 looked out upon my hill I found that some 
 thing had happened. The hillside had become 
 "outdoors." It had become this in a new 
 way because I had created, in its midst, "in 
 doors." Hitherto, as I wandered here, or sat 
 on its rocks, or lay on its thinly grassed sides, 
 I had thought little about its aspects, I had 
 never really held it from me to think about it 
 at all; I had been a part of it, like the wasps 
 among the berries or the bees among the 
 roses. But now suddenly I found that I was 
 holding it away from me. 
 
 Perhaps I had lost something; certainly I 
 had gained something. For, as I looked out 
 through the wide, low windows, I found it 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 71 
 
 more beautiful than it had ever been before 
 more vivid, more thrilling. There was the 
 western outlook the hillside falling steeply 
 away toward the gay green of the swamp 
 meadow below, the lane winding at its foot 
 up the opposite hill toward the huddle of 
 gray roofs under dark maples. I had never 
 noticed how the lane "composed" with roofs 
 and maples and swamp. There was the 
 southern sloping in a tenderer curve, past 
 wood-edges pushing in on both sides, toward 
 the distance where a deep green hill rose into 
 the sky. There was the eastern a level 
 pasture full of rocks and huckleberries and 
 bounded by woods whose shadows baffled 
 the eye. There was the northern the rock 
 ledges of silver-gray, rising rough against the 
 blue, with deep-green cedars set stiffly about, 
 and clumped thorn-bushes which in the au 
 tumn would be gay with berries. It seemed as 
 if I had never really seen cedars until I saw 
 them framed by the window of my house: 
 delightful New England trees that they are, 
 prim and uncompromising, rough and yet 
 conventional, a little scratchy even to the 
 eye, yet full of a real distinction in the com- 
 
72 THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 
 
 pleteness of their individuality. And sensi 
 tive! Responsive in their color to every 
 change of the sky or season, responsive in 
 their delicate sea-weed-like tips to each 
 breath of wind, and swaying to the bigger 
 gusts with their whole stiff, spiring height. 
 
 It is not the first time I have had this 
 experience. Often, as I have walked along 
 a country road, idly pleased with the world 
 about me, I have passed an old barn, with 
 great doors flung wide, front and back, so that 
 one could look through them to the meadows 
 behind. It is the same country I have been 
 passing, fields, bushes, fence-lines, a bit 
 of hill and sky, but the great doorways 
 framing it in timbers and shadow create 
 thereby a certain enhancement of its values, 
 so that invariably, looking through, one gets 
 one s impression with something added a 
 heightening of perception that is strangely 
 arresting. 
 
 What is it that the big barn doors do? They 
 limit, of course, they cut a little piece out 
 from the wholeness of things, they say to us, 
 "Nevermind the rest, take just this, look at 
 it in just this way and now see how beauti- 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 73 
 
 ful it is!" They play the artist to us for a 
 moment, forcing upon us our point of view, 
 selecting our subject, adjusting the lights, 
 and perhaps greatest service of all sug 
 gesting to us, or rather, imposing upon us, 
 that sense of distance that is so necessary a 
 part of the aesthetic experience. 
 
 This, too, is done for me by the broad, low 
 windows of my little hillside house this 
 and something more. For the house gives 
 zest to the hillside, as the hillside to the house, 
 by its contrast of within and without. Out 
 doors means more to me by reason of having 
 indoors too. 
 
 These things have set me pondering pon 
 dering upon the virtues of limitation and the 
 powers that inhere in bonds. Parallels are 
 dangerous things to play with, yet I am 
 tempted to play with one now. We are in a 
 generation that jeers at dogma and is impa 
 tient of creeds, yet may it not be that these 
 have done for races what the open barn door 
 does for the passer-by? Engulfed in the cos 
 mos, infinitesimal part of the great whole, we 
 have no real awareness of it. But frame it in 
 dogma, confine it in a creed, and it becomes 
 
74 THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 
 
 ours in a certain vividness of apprehension 
 born of the artificial limits we have set up. 
 True, the race pays a price; it gives up all but 
 the small moiety that can be viewed through 
 that special creed. But the traveler, also, 
 would not linger forever before the same barn 
 door. He passes on, enriched. And so the 
 races have passed on from creed to creed, and 
 in each have found, in some sort, both riches 
 and poverty, enlightenment and ignorance. 
 
 It is true with all thought, all feeling, the 
 entire circle of experience. As soon as we 
 define, as soon as we express, we gain some 
 thing, though we perhaps also give up some 
 thing. In order to achieve, we must forego. 
 No one, I fancy, ever wrote a poem or painted 
 a picture without being aware, at least dimly, 
 of a vast something that he was giving up. 
 When artists feel this very keenly, struggling 
 against it, striving for the gain without the 
 loss, we sometimes perceive it and call them 
 symbolists. But for us there is no loss, only 
 great gain. For us, all great poems, all pic 
 tures, all works of art, are as great doors 
 flung wide, as windows looking north or east 
 or south or west, framing some part of the 
 
THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 75 
 
 beauty of the world which without them we 
 should never so deeply perceive. 
 
 But there is a further parallel which I 
 would fain play with. My little house, giving 
 me my center of indoors from which, or even 
 because of which, to enjoy the widening 
 circles of outdoors it is a symbol to me 
 of my own individuality. The supreme joy, 
 some say, is to lose one s self in the infinite. 
 Perhaps, but let us not forget that there 
 would be no point to this if we had not first 
 a self to lose. It is a joy to me to gaze out of 
 my windows, to go out of my door and enter 
 into the great sea of outdoors that surges up 
 even to the canvas walls of my little house. 
 But these walls are what give its own color to 
 my joy. So it is, too, with the barriers of my 
 self. I should be loath to let them down, 
 slight though they seem, and poor though that 
 within may prove when scanned for its own 
 static values. For how can we appreciate 
 anything save through difference? And what 
 can the infinite be to me unless I can approach 
 it from something that is not infinite? 
 
 It is idle to reason about such things, yet 
 still I play with my childish symbols. I even 
 
76 THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 
 
 picture myself, a tiny house, flying through 
 the Cosmos so small, so unimportant, yet 
 so persistently and joyously finite, so inalien 
 ably and joyously possessed of its own in- 
 doorness, in the midst of that wide outdoors. 
 It is a presumptuous fancy, yet when I frown 
 upon it, it only smiles back at me the 
 fancy that without this element even the 
 hillsides of Nirvana might lack piquancy, 
 that even upon their limitless reaches I must 
 needs maintain the walls, frail but valiant, of 
 my own self. 
 
Humor and the Heroine 
 
 I HAVE of late been mingling afresh with the 
 heroines of our greater English fiction, hold 
 ing converse with this lady, sitting a while 
 beside that, sending a word or a smile to 
 another and another, renewing old intimacies 
 with many. They are a fair and gallant com 
 pany, and it is good to be with them. They 
 are wise and sweet, passionate, strong and 
 brave, beautiful almost always, good on the 
 whole, and, without fail, interesting. Yet I 
 felt the lack of one last grace a sense of 
 humor. Their families often have it, their 
 servants sometimes, their authors almost al 
 ways have it, but the ladies themselves, they 
 have it not. 
 
 There was Maggie Tulliver: in the heart 
 of a richly humorous society, wherein her 
 own father and mother and aunts were the 
 shining luminaries, she saw none of the hu 
 mor, she only felt the pain for it is the light 
 touch that tickles, the heavy impact hurts or 
 stuns. And so, where another nature might 
 
78 HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 
 
 have smiled at the narrowness and the ig 
 norance and the intolerance, her spirit was 
 crushed by it, or driven to desperate rebel 
 lion. 
 
 And Dorothea! If her grave gray eyes 
 could have been lighted by a gleam of humor, 
 in how different an aspect would the world 
 around her have presented itself to her; she 
 might have regarded Sir James with less im 
 patience and Casaubon with less veneration, 
 she would probably have been saved from 
 being his wife, and would have missed the 
 wisdom and the pain which that experience 
 brought to her. She would have forfeited the 
 joy of cherishing certain ideals, but would 
 have been spared the pain of seeing them 
 shattered. Possibly, too, she would have lost 
 her power of appealing to some natures, as 
 well as her desire to do so for Mr. Cad- 
 wallader, it will be remembered, who was 
 richly endowed with the humorous sense, felt 
 no call to reform the world. Surely, even the 
 faintest light of humor on her face would have 
 repelled Rosamond Vincy in a critical mo 
 ment, and checked her impulse of confidence. 
 But she would have been happier, perhaps 
 
HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 79 
 
 saner, and, who knows, she might even have 
 built better houses for the poor. 
 
 Thackeray s ladies are of another sort, yet 
 humor sits not upon their brows. From Bea 
 trix Esmond there dart now and then flash 
 ing sword-blades of cynicism, murderous 
 rather than lambent. Becky s is Mephisto- 
 phelian wit that blasts, while poor little 
 Amelia has no wit of any sort, barely head 
 enough to carry her through the plainer is 
 sues of life, and that not without bungling. 
 Ethel Newcome, indeed, might under better 
 nurture have sent out a light of humor, but it 
 was turned to flashes of sardonic wit aimed at 
 a social order that she scorned yet bowed to. 
 
 Scott s damsels have not even these latent 
 powers. Gay or stately, serene or passionate, 
 they are at one in this. As Chaucer s nun 
 rides demure and undiscerning in the road 
 side company whose humorous aspects Chau 
 cer himself so keenly enjoyed, so these ladies 
 move in a world of chivalry and of jollity, 
 touched by emotions of pity and of prudery, 
 of love and of alarm, but never touched by 
 humor. 
 
 The Bronte novels are without even mod- 
 
80 HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 
 
 erately cheerful accessories not an expan 
 sive butler, a relaxed monk, or a jesting 
 grave-digger to mitigate the nightmare de 
 pression of their down-trodden though fitfully 
 remonstrant heroines, bullied along by their 
 fierce or sullen heroes. 
 
 In contemporary fiction there is no better 
 tale to tell. Mrs. Ward has sent out, one after 
 another, a series of strenuous dames, from the 
 Katharine of "Robert Elsmere," with her 
 austere and chilling virtue, to Lady Rose s 
 daughter, with less virtue and more charm, 
 who, if she had been endowed with humorous 
 insight, could better have endured her servi 
 tude to so splendid a mark for the comic spirit 
 as Lady Henry. Miss Wilkins s young wo 
 men pass before us, a pathetic company, with 
 faces worn though sweet, and spirits repressed 
 though brave. The brilliant ladies of our 
 myriad "historical" romances are content to 
 be brilliant merely in face and robing and in 
 the deeds of their lovers ; they are not so much 
 great in themselves as the occasion of great 
 ness in others. 
 
 Scanning the fair company of heroines, I 
 have indeed found a few upon whose faces 
 
HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 81 
 
 plays a light of real humor, but these excep 
 tions may be counted on one s fingers. There 
 is Meredith s Diana, there is his Clara Mid- 
 dleton, perplexed, ensnared, yet with eyes in 
 whose depths lurk the dancing imps that her 
 creator himself invoked to his aid. They 
 helped her to her final escape from the Mon 
 ster, goading her and jeering at her by turns 
 as she fluttered under his hand, but always, 
 though with flickering lights, exhibiting to her 
 humorous sense the comic aspects of that 
 same Monster. Stevenson, who made few 
 women, made one, Barbara Graham, in whose 
 eyes gleams the delicious mockery that is both 
 wise and kind. Jane Austen, herself endowed 
 with an exquisite perception of the humor in 
 the society about her, vouchsafed the same 
 gift of vision to the most charming of her 
 heroines, Elizabeth Bennett. With dancing 
 eyes Elizabeth observes them all, her 
 family, her neighbors, her suitor the unpar 
 alleled Mr. Collins, her lover the formidable 
 Mr. Darcy, and his aunt the overpowering 
 Lady de Burgh. She girds at them with her 
 nimble tongue, whose wit, a trifle too sharp- 
 edged at first, is softened by sorrow and fail- 
 
82 HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 
 
 ure until its gayety is only kind. Sweet girl! 
 If Maggie Tulliver could but have looked on 
 her world as Elizabeth regarded hers ! A few 
 flicks from Elizabeth s tongue, the sort that 
 proved so beneficial to the high-and-mighty 
 Darcy, would have done Tom Tulliver 
 worlds of good. But Maggie s weapons were 
 of a different fashion, and their shafts always 
 rebounded to wound the sender. Curious, is 
 it not, that with George Eliot s own strong 
 sense for the humor of life, her heroines or 
 heroes either, for that matter (consider 
 Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt and Adam 
 Bede !) should have been so utterly devoid 
 of it. One exception there is, in Esther Lyon, 
 the dainty and difficult, who, but for a touch 
 of querulousness, belongs rather in Miss 
 Austen s circle and might have been a more 
 satisfying friend to Elizabeth Bennett than 
 any she possessed. 
 
 Yet if woleave the novelists and turn to the 
 master playwright, we find gayety enough. 
 There is Rosalind, the brave and merry- 
 hearted, taking her life s misfortunes in both 
 hands and turning them first to jest and then 
 to joy. There is Viola, breathing a delicate 
 
HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 83 
 
 fragrance of humor where she passes. There 
 is Portia, with a gleam in her eye as she enters 
 in her legal vestments, the gleam kindling in 
 to a humorous justice toward the Jew and a 
 humorous jest toward the Christian. There is 
 Beatrice the royal-hearted, with her sound, 
 true laughter and her sound, true scorn, a 
 queenly heroine, tragedy draws back before 
 her tread, she masters it in its beginning. 
 
 Yes, from Rosalind, from Beatrice tragedy 
 falls away. And is this the reason why our 
 heroines for the most part know not humor? 
 Is it that its possession gives one a kind of 
 armor against adversity, an immunity from 
 attack, a mastery of the world in place of sub 
 jection to it? Perhaps. There are those who 
 have not this mastery, who are born to be 
 hurt, to be flung down, to be conquered or to 
 conquer only through panting struggle; and 
 these are they the artist seeks, on the watch 
 always for the shock of conflict, the clash of 
 nerves and hearts. The "interesting" tem 
 perament is the passionate, the impetuous, 
 not the temperate and controlled. Humor 
 implies a certain remoteness, aloofness, which 
 quenches the ardor of the adventure. It im- 
 
84 HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 
 
 plies balance, sense of proportion, of values, 
 and this brings the poise and control not 
 shared by those who struggle for life in mid 
 stream. Yet it is the struggle for life that the 
 artist seeks to depict and his public yearns to 
 witness. 
 
 Must it be so? Would there not be some 
 thing yet more poignant in struggle and suffer 
 ing, if it were accompanied, illuminated by a 
 humorous sense, turned inward to accent the 
 folly of it all? Lear s fool seems to some of us 
 more pathetic than his master by virtue of this 
 very consciousness, and the appeal of Cyr 
 ano de Bergerac is accentuated by the lurk 
 ing smile of the sufferer as he regards him 
 self. But who will create for us such a figure? 
 From the novelists there is, as we have seen, 
 little to expect. Among the poet-dramatists, 
 whether we accept the leadership of Ibsen 
 or Maeterlinck or D Annunzio or Sardou or 
 Phillips, there is scarcely a rift in the cloud 
 of conscious and conscientious seriousness. 
 Obviously, we must wait. 
 
The Humor-Fetish 
 
 IN every period and every land people have 
 had their pet virtues. The Athenians adored 
 wit, and the Spartans health; the Hebrews, 
 at least retrospectively, honored the gift of 
 prophecy; the Romans the virtue of self- 
 control, the Quakers the virtue of peace- 
 ableness. Pioneers, the world over, worship 
 bravery and resourcefulness the virtues of 
 aggression; settled societies appreciate fair- 
 mindedness and rectitude the virtues of 
 restraint; aristocracies affect the virtues of 
 conformity. 
 
 All virtues are good, though perhaps none 
 of them so superlatively and exclusively good 
 as each has at some time been deemed. But 
 just now it would seem that in the general 
 estimation they are all about to yield preced 
 ence to one which is, comparatively speaking, 
 a new-comer, usually known as the Sense of 
 Humor. 
 
 Not but that men have always laughed. 
 But their laughter was grounded in brutality, 
 
86 THE HUMOR-FETISH 
 
 and it was long before it took on any signifi 
 cance that we should now call humorous. The 
 Athenians, to be sure, had attained humor, 
 but later Europeans, in this respect as in 
 many others, did not climb from their shoul 
 ders; they had to begin at the bottom, just 
 as if Aristophanes had never made the very 
 heavens rock with laughter. And it was a 
 long way up from the half-Latinized Goth 
 and Celt to Shakespeare and Moliere and 
 Lamb and Meredith. 
 
 No wonder that we should be dazzled by a 
 virtue for all practical purposes only a few 
 centuries old, and still growing. But we ought 
 not to be dazzled too long, and it really seems 
 as if this new virtue were becoming some 
 thing of a fetish. A young man said gravely 
 the other day, " One can t get to heaven with 
 out a sense of humor, you know." A gentle 
 man writes from England to the editors of an 
 American school paper to inquire into the 
 status of the sense of humor among American 
 boys, as compared with English. The word 
 "humor" is on every one s lips. Humor is the 
 one thing needful. We are warned against 
 choosing friends who lack it; and as for mar- 
 
THE HUMOR-FETISH 87 
 
 riage, if both parties do not possess it the 
 altar is but a prelude to the divorce court, if 
 not to suicide. If any man fail of success in 
 any way, we are told that it is because he 
 lacks humor; if he is dissatisfied with existing 
 conditions, this accounts for it. Nearly every 
 human vagary, from eccentricities in dress to 
 curious tastes in the naming of children, is 
 ascribed to the absence or inadequacy of this 
 one virtue. Everything, from dinner-parties 
 to matrimony, must be ordered with a view to 
 this test. 
 
 Now, humor is a pleasant thing, and a good 
 thing; but perhaps it is being a little overdone, 
 and overdone with a touch of priggery and 
 a touch of stupidity. The priggery lies in 
 the assumption, always apparent, that we, 
 the speaker and his companions, possess this 
 jewel, this last gift, and we are filled with a 
 self-congratulatory glow as we consider those 
 poor unfortunates who are not thus endowed. 
 It is the Pharisee hugging himself for his own 
 virtues, though the particular virtue chosen 
 is one which was probably not valued by the 
 original Pharisee. I know of nothing more 
 complete than the arrogance of the man who 
 
88 THE HUMOR-FETISH 
 
 laughs at a joke towards the man who does 
 not an arrogance so absolute, indeed, that 
 its only manifestation is often a tolerant and 
 amused pity. As a people, we Americans 
 have assumed for ourselves the position of 
 those who laugh, with the other nations of 
 the world falling into line behind us, according 
 to their respective capacity in this one matter. 
 But some of us who have chanced to encoun 
 ter the jocular American abroad must have 
 wished that other virtues than humor had 
 been a little more emphasized in his home 
 circle. 
 
 The touch of stupidity lies in the assump 
 tion that the sense of humor is a simple char 
 acteristic, like blueness of eyes, or a defin 
 ite possession, like pennies, that people may 
 have or not have, in varying and ascertain- 
 able quantities. Indeed, whenever we begin 
 to sort people out into classes according to 
 their characteristics, we usually get into 
 trouble. And of all unhelpful classifications, 
 the worst is this one based on the possession 
 of a sense of humor. It is almost as unman 
 ageable as the one based on goodness and 
 badness, so called, which has at least the 
 
THE HUMOR-FETISH 89 
 
 sanction of tradition, though it has led to lit 
 tle but bewilderment. We all know Aucassin s 
 frank comments on the personnel of Heaven, 
 as thus determined; and many before and 
 since his time have felt as he did. But if the 
 sense of humor, instead of goodness, is to 
 be made the condition of entrance, the society 
 there will be different indeed, but perhaps 
 even queerer. Thersites and Henry VIII will 
 get in, but Milton and Seneca will not. Lin 
 coln will be safe, to be sure, and Hawthorne 
 may slip past the gate unchallenged, but 
 hardly Emerson. For Cromwell and Napo 
 leon, for Coleridge and John Stuart Mill, 
 there will be no hope. And as for those others 
 whom we know even better than these Ros 
 alind and Hamlet and Beatrice and Mercu- 
 tio it will be well with them ; but Perdita 
 and Isabella and Miranda must remain out 
 side with Malvolio and Polonius, although it 
 may comfort them to find Hector and Achilles 
 and Prospero and Horatio in their company. 
 The trouble all comes from trying to base 
 any classification at all on so elusive a quality 
 as this so-called sense of humor. For it is not 
 all one thing, or even degrees of one thing. It 
 
90 THE HUMOR-FETISH 
 
 is so protean a quality, so dependent for its 
 value upon a vast number of delicate adjust 
 ments among other qualities of a person s na 
 ture, that while it continually invites analy 
 sis, it continually eludes definition. 
 
 There are as many kinds of humor as there 
 are kinds of people, and the important ques 
 tion is, not whether any one possesses it, but 
 what kind he possesses. Better none at all 
 than a sort that does not chance to harmon 
 ize with our own. George Eliot points out 
 somewhere that one of the hardest tests of 
 friendship is a difference of taste in jokes. 
 Why, then, are people thus reckless in invok 
 ing a quality so little understood and so apt 
 to lead to difficulties? Every .one knows that 
 there is nothing more dangerous than an es 
 caped virtue, but if we are not careful this one 
 will have given us the slip and, in common 
 phrase, "be all over the shop." Indeed, it 
 sometimes seems as if this had already hap 
 pened, if one may judge from our newspapers, 
 our magazines, our conversation, and the de 
 meanor of our countrymen abroad. Humor is 
 considered the one thing needful, and few 
 pause to ask, What sort of humor? Yet the 
 
THE HUMOR-FETISH 91 
 
 time may come when we shall be so cloyed 
 with it that we may beg to be spared any sort. 
 Already it is a relief now and then to find a 
 person who is habitually serious, whose con 
 versation is not continually "lighted up" by 
 the humorous point of view. Such people, we 
 hear, are not good to live with. What a curi 
 ous blunder! I know such a person, one of the 
 loveliest I have ever had the good fortune to 
 meet, and of humor humor of any sort 
 she has not a shadow or shall we say a 
 flicker? She smiles often, but from pure kind 
 ness, not from amusement. She laughs when 
 her friends laugh, but only through sym 
 pathy with them. She has sweet, grave eyes, 
 and a mouth gentle and firm and motherly, 
 and her voice is like the touch of a quiet hand. 
 She has dignity without condescension, and 
 a love for all things, both great and small, 
 that is never found wanting. Not good to 
 live with? Those whose household she blesses 
 give thanks every hour of the day, though 
 not always consciously, for the boon of her 
 presence. 
 
 Not get to Heaven without a sense of hu 
 mor? Like Aucassin, we are puzzled. But we 
 
92 THE HUMOR-FETISH 
 
 will not be so defiant as he, and choose to 
 stay out. We will rather hope that there is 
 some mistake. Perhaps this ruling is not final. 
 Perhaps Heaven will reconsider. 
 
In the Matter of "Faith 
 
 READERS of the July "Atlantic" must have 
 found excellent entertainment in Mr. Root s 
 little essay on "The Age of Faith." His sub 
 ject is one that we are always interested in 
 the question of the real resemblances between 
 seemingly contrasted periods of human his 
 tory. By a series of ingenious comparisons, 
 he leaves us with the impression that in spite 
 of superficial differences of language, of 
 manners, of interests one age is not so very 
 different from another. The "Age of Reason" 
 was not very reasonable after all, the French 
 Revolution differed "only in externals" from 
 the Crusades of old, and the "Ages of Faith," 
 far from being past, find their counterpart in 
 the age to which we now belong. It is very 
 ingenious, very amusing, and almost convinc 
 ing. 
 
 Almost, but not quite. Perhaps, where we 
 have been so well amused, we ought not to 
 ask to be convinced. Yet there is a serious 
 aspect to this question so serious that we 
 
94 IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 
 
 cannot bring ourselves to set it aside. For the 
 very essence of human history is here at issue, 
 the essence of human life. And there are 
 some of us, perhaps many, to whom Bergson 
 comes as spokesman for all our deepest in 
 stincts when he insists that life is essentially 
 change, that for conscious life, duration 
 means unfolding, that each experience in 
 volves the total of preceding experience, and 
 that therefore life, bearing along with it the 
 cumulative values of its own past, can never, 
 in any real sense, repeat itself. 
 
 It is this that makes us restive, even while 
 we smile in genuine pleasure at Mr. Root s 
 cleverness. .There must, we feel, be some 
 thing wrong with his argument. 
 
 If there is, it lies in his use of a few key 
 words words like Faith, Evidence, and the 
 Unseen. 
 
 We live, he says, as truly in an age of faith 
 as did our ancestors of Mediaeval Europe. 
 Only, whereas their faith fastened itself upon 
 God, and the angels, and the holy relics of the 
 saints, ours concerns itself with other things 
 equally unseen, in whose truth we believe, 
 just as the truth of those was once believed 
 
IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 95 
 
 in, on the authority of others, on the most 
 incomplete evidence, or on no evidence at all. 
 He instances our "faith" in the doctrine of 
 evolution, in the revolution of the earth upon 
 its axis, and in the existence of specific bac 
 teria of disease. 
 
 Now it is true that the word "faith" may 
 be used to denote men s belief in these things, 
 and it is also true that the same word has been 
 used to denote men s belief in God and the 
 angels and the saints relics. But is it true 
 that "faith" is really the same word in both 
 sets of cases? To be sure, in both the word 
 implies belief in something not immediately 
 obvious to the senses; in both it implies a 
 certain confidence in the authority of some 
 one else. But at this point the parallel ends. 
 Indeed, before this point. For the phrase 
 "confidence in authority" may be used to 
 cover many different things, and in this case 
 it is so used. The confidence that men once 
 felt in the authority of their priests is still 
 to some extent paralleled in the confidence 
 which we now feel in our spiritual leaders, 
 whether we call them priests or not; but the 
 confidence which we feel in the testimony of 
 
96 IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 
 
 men like Darwin is something different - 
 neither more nor less valuable, it may be, 
 neither more nor less sure, but resting on a 
 different basis. That it is possible to speak of 
 both things under one name is merely an in 
 stance of the inaccuracy of language. A word 
 is not a bullet, that will split a hair and leave 
 the hair beside it untouched. It is more like a 
 charge of fine shot, that hits scatteringly over 
 the whole barn door. 
 
 Similarly, as he uses it, the w r ord "faith" 
 covers many different states of feeling, which 
 might be somewhat more particularly dis 
 criminated in the words certitude, faith, 
 confidence, and credulity. Moreover, these 
 states are not completely different. They are 
 not marked off from one another by stiff 
 fencing; they overlap, they merge into one 
 another. 
 
 If then we agree to let "faith" stand for all 
 these mental states,? we may very truly say 
 that our own age, as well as other preceding 
 ones, is an age of faith. But thus understood, 
 this means very little. It goes without saying. 
 For the real question is, what in different 
 ages has been the relative importance, or 
 
IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 97 
 
 prevalence, of these various states of mind. 
 Can we check off our certitude against their 
 certitude, our credulity against their cre 
 dulity, and so on? If so, the two ages are 
 so far really alike. Or will an uncanceled 
 residue remain, on one side or the other? If 
 so, the two ages differ in this respect by just 
 so much. 
 
 Now, of course, no such canceling process 
 can be really applied, though some rough 
 appraisals might be made if one went to 
 work in the right way. But still less can the 
 canceling process be carried out between un 
 like states; we cannot check off faith against 
 credulity, certitude against confidence. Yet 
 this is exactly what Mr. Root does: for ex 
 ample, he parallels our belief in disease- 
 germs with the mediaeval belief in foul fiends. 
 Yet the belief in fiends is clearly a case of 
 credulity, the belief in disease-producing bac 
 teria is, in spite of errors and exaggerations 
 and all manner of mistakes in its details, 
 well on the road toward certitude. The fact 
 that the germs are, for most of us, unseen, 
 and the fiends were also unseen, is a mere ac 
 cidental parallelism of phrasing. 
 
98 IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 
 
 The logical error here is plain enough. Dis- 
 similars cannot be thus compared. But per 
 haps even similars are not really such. Per 
 haps our certitude is not their certitude, our 
 doubt their doubt. 
 
 For example: it may be said, that to the 
 mind of the Middle Ages nothing appeared 
 impossible. The modern thinker, we some 
 times hear it remarked, is beginning also to 
 say, "Nothing is impossible." But does this 
 mean that we have swung back to the earlier 
 attitude? Not at all. To assume that the 
 tolerance of the modern thinker for "the im 
 possible," springing from knowledge, even 
 knowledge of his own vast ignorance, is 
 the same thing as the tolerance of the Middle 
 Ages for the impossible, springing from sheer 
 ignorance and poor method to do this would 
 be to confuse things as unlike as the " sleep " of 
 a spinning top and the stillness of a dead one. 
 
 And if our attitude toward the great realm 
 of the uncertain and the unknown is a differ 
 ent thing from the state of mind in former 
 times, though it may be described in similar 
 terms, so also is our knowledge of the certain 
 and the known a different thing from the 
 
IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 99 
 
 knowledge of earlier men. The thirteenth- 
 century man felt certain, because of the evi 
 dence of his senses, that the sun revolved 
 round the earth. We feel certain, in spite of 
 this evidence of the senses, but on account of 
 other evidence, also coming to us ultimately 
 through the senses, that the earth moves 
 round the sun. But no one will seriously main 
 tain that our certitude and his certitude are 
 the same in quality. There have been, par 
 ticularly since Bacon s time, changes in the 
 manner of our thinking, both in basis and 
 method, which are gradually changing the 
 quality of belief of every kind. The attitude 
 of mind which made it possible for really good 
 thinkers to say, "I doubt, therefore I believe," 
 is obsolescent, if not obsolete. And if faith 
 is, perhaps, changing, religion is certainly 
 changing still more. If there really is, as Mr. 
 Root suggests, a "religion of evolution," 
 and the phrase seems a very doubtful one, 
 this means, not that religion is still the same 
 only with its lingo altered, but that men are 
 making for themselves a new religion to meet 
 their new needs. Whether it does or does not 
 meet these needs is beside the question. 
 
100 IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 
 
 As usual, it comes down to a question of 
 the meaning of terms. All through Mr. 
 Root s article he seems to be indulging in a 
 kind of tournament of language, in which 
 the game is to see how many different ideas 
 you can spear with the same word. The 
 word "unseen" is a wonder in this sort of con 
 test. Bacteria are unseen, angels are unseen, 
 demons are unseen, phagocytes are unseen, 
 the ice age is unseen, God is unseen. There 
 fore they are all of a piece, bacteria, angels, 
 demons, phagocytes, the ice age and God, 
 spitted on the same lance and brandished be 
 fore our somewhat astonished eyes. 
 
 And his best lance of all is Faith. Thrusting 
 to right and left, he impales upon its shaft all 
 manner of things faith in scientists, faith 
 in God, faith in doctors and health officers, 
 faith in witches, faith in priests and in astrol 
 ogers and medicine-men, faith in astronomi 
 cal laws. 
 
 Success to such tilting! It is fun to watch, 
 and does no harm so long as we remember 
 that it is only a game. But suppose we forgot 
 this, suppose we began to think that these 
 strange spear-mates of the tilting were really 
 
IN THE MATTEL QF FAmi 101 
 
 mates? That would, perhaps, be something 
 of a pity, because it would mean the throwing 
 away of such precision of thinking as we have 
 yet attained, which is little enough. 
 
 It is just this lack of precise thinking, 
 this habit of comfortable believing that 
 things on the whole are pretty much as they 
 have always been, and will continue pretty 
 much the same forever, that is at the root 
 of a good many of our troubles. It is, for ex 
 ample, what helps some of us to believe that 
 there is no church problem, and no marriage 
 problem, that in these realms no real 
 changes have occurred, and therefore no new 
 adjustments are required. 
 
 This is the only excuse for any protest 
 against so delightful a bit of entertainment 
 as is furnished us in the little article in ques 
 tion. Perhaps, however, we have a private 
 and particular grievance, in the fact that the 
 treatment of "faith" seems to spoil the word 
 for us. We have always thought of it as "the 
 substance of things hoped for, the evidence of 
 things not seen." And it has often appeared 
 to us that "faith" in this sense is growing 
 stronger and keener because more fully aware 
 
10* IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 
 
 of its own realm and its own power. We 
 know, as never before, the difference between 
 the things hoped for and the things possessed. 
 We know, as never before, the difference be 
 tween the things that are seen whether 
 with the mind s eye or the body s is imma 
 terial and the things that are not seen. 
 For this reason, and not at all for those given 
 by Mr. Root, we might be willing to call our 
 own age an age of faith. But if faith must be 
 allowed to mean belief in bacteria and in 
 gravity and in evolution very well. We 
 must give up the word to these uses and find 
 another to mean what we have thus far 
 meant by faith faith in the power of love, 
 faith in all the things of the spirit. 
 
 And yet St. Paul s English translators 
 have held the field a long time. Would it not 
 be courteous to let them keep their word, and 
 find another for bacteria and phagocytes? 
 
"In Their Season 91 
 
 THERE is a scene in Marlowe s "Doctor 
 Faustus" in which the great doctor, wishing 
 to show his power, asks a duchess what 
 dainty she most desires. It being then mid 
 winter, she considerately chooses "a dish of 
 ripe grapes." Nothing daunted, Faustus pro 
 duces the grapes, and the duke exclaims," Be 
 lieve me, Master Doctor, this makes me to 
 wonder above the rest, that being in the dead 
 time of winter, and in the month of January, 
 how you should come by these grapes," while 
 the delighted duchess chimes in, "Believe 
 me, Master Doctor, they be the best grapes 
 that e er I tasted in my life before." 
 
 The passage often comes to my mind as I 
 glance at the show windows of some "high- 
 class" grocery, and realize that if the play 
 were rewritten strictly up to date Faustus 
 would have to produce something much more 
 spectacular than grapes in January in order 
 to rouse even a passing comment. 
 
 I wish it were not so. Not that I begrudge 
 
104 IN THEIR SEASON 
 
 the duchess her grapes, or Faustus his chance 
 to show off. They meant no harm. But 
 against the tendency that they represent I 
 protest. "That they should bring forth their 
 fruits in due season." This embodies an older 
 idea, and to my mind a better one. I am not 
 prepared to defend everything in the original 
 plan of the world many things have been 
 and many things can be improved. But this 
 part of the arrangement always seemed to 
 me, in its main outlines, very good. 
 
 "In their season." That, to my mind, 
 means strawberries in June and blueberries 
 in July and huckleberries in August. And 
 when I encounter strawberries in January, 
 blueberries in March, and raspberries in De 
 cember I feel deeply irritated. I do not want 
 all my seasons jogging my elbow at once. 
 It makes me think of a certain sort of board 
 ing-house table, under "liberal" manage 
 ment, where every day one is given six differ 
 ent vegetables, and mostly the same six. Far 
 better one each day for; six days, and a chance 
 between to forget it. 
 
 I like my spring mud in March, my roses 
 in June, my apples in September, my sleet 
 
IN THEIR SEASON 105 
 
 and snow in January all things in their own 
 place. The time for winter seems to me to 
 be the winter-time, and spring-time, I am 
 profoundly convinced, is the time for spring. 
 For one of the most joyous things about 
 spring is that it comes after winter. Cayenne 
 on the tongue, it is said, gives zest to cham 
 pagne. Reversing the temperatures, winter 
 gives zest to spring. What can it mean, I 
 wonder, to countries who do not have to 
 tussle through a New England winter? And, 
 conversely, should we enjoy the coziness and 
 intimacy of winter if we had not had the great, 
 wide summer to play in first? 
 
 Children understand these matters. Look 
 how they take their sports! When the winds 
 of March bluster round our house-corners, it 
 is the time for kites kites they must have. 
 The cloud-swept skies are full of them 
 green diamond kites, red and yellow Japan 
 ese kites, big modern box kites, old-fashioned 
 brown paper kites with long waggling tails, 
 sensitively responsive to every stimulus. For 
 a brief season they live overhead, riding still 
 and calm, or performing wild antics, accord 
 ing to the wind or their own inherent nature. 
 
106 IN THEIR SEASON 
 
 Then their time is past, leaving its traces only 
 in the sorry remnants that nest in the tree- 
 tops or dangle forlornly from the telegraph 
 wires. And after them comes marbles or 
 is it jack-stones? and then tops, and then 
 roller-skates, and then ? but this is no 
 child s almanac; I may have the series all 
 wrong, but I have digested the principle, and 
 I should never expect to find a well-regulated 
 child using jack-stones in the top season, or 
 spinning tops in kite time. 
 
 It is not so with us older people. And I 
 have been as bad as any. There was a time 
 when I thought it a rather clever thing to 
 take spring by violence. I brought out pussy 
 willows in December it is a common enough 
 offense. And when they had gone through 
 all their stages, from silver kitten-paws to 
 pink kitten-noses, then to fluffy yellow or 
 green caterpillars, and finally had shed all 
 these and sent out long pale shoots and 
 masses of white roots, I was embarrassed 
 to know what to do with them. I could 
 not throw live green things like that out in 
 January snowdrifts. I could not plant them, 
 I did not want to keep them in a jar until 
 
IN THEIR SEASON 107 
 
 April. Finally I threw them in the fire and 
 left the room quickly. 
 
 I tried again with dogwood. I picked it in 
 January, and by the end of February it was 
 in blossom. It was beautiful, of course, and 
 I was rather proud I don t know whether 
 my enjoyment of the results came more from 
 love of beauty or from pride. But after the 
 blossoms had shriveled, there were still 
 March and April. Whenever I passed a dog 
 wood tree, I felt, somehow, uncomfortable. I 
 had had my dogwood. These little dabs at 
 spring simply took the edge off, like a nap 
 just before bedtime. 
 
 This, I fancy, is almost always true. There 
 is no greater pleasure than that of watching 
 the seasons any season, whether of vege 
 tables or of people observe their own times 
 and develop their own qualities. Moreover, 
 in the opposite habit, the habit that Faustus 
 exemplified and most of our modern institu 
 tions encourage, there lurks a real danger. It 
 is the danger that things will be valued, not 
 in proportion to their real goodness or charm, 
 but in proportion to the difficulty of obtain 
 ing them. Faustus s grapes had a certain 
 
108 IN THEIR SEASON 
 
 natural value as grapes, but they had also an 
 artificial value as grapes in January. In his 
 case this meant, the Devil. In our more mod 
 ern situation, it means a hothouse or a cold- 
 storage plant, and the establishment that 
 goes with it; or it means the equivalent of this 
 in money which we may or may not call 
 the Devil, according to the way we happen to 
 look at such matters. 
 
 Faustus was proud of his Devil, and we are 
 proud of our hothouses or their equivalent, 
 and in the meantime the goodness of grapes 
 as grapes is apt to become a secondary matter 
 not, perhaps, to the duchess, who merely 
 ate the grapes, but to Faustus. He was not 
 above showing off, neither was the Devil, 
 neither are any of us, though we are usually 
 above seeming to show off, having lost the 
 naivete of the old doctor and his Mephisto; 
 and this desire blurs our appreciation of 
 grapes as grapes, and of other things. It may, 
 indeed, carry us so far that we shall find 
 ourselves cherishing and exhibiting ugliness, 
 because it is hard to get, and growing in 
 different to any beauty that is not rare. 
 
 It is not only the fruits and vegetables that 
 
IN THEIR SEASON 109 
 
 are getting mixed up. The seasons in people s 
 lives seem to be losing some of their individ 
 ual character, so that we never know just 
 what we are going to get. In some ways this 
 is a gain. For example, the definite putting 
 away of childish things was not an un 
 alloyed good. The complete shutting-off of 
 the child from the confidence of the adult, the 
 complete alienation of the adult from the in 
 terests of the youth, these are not habits to 
 cling to. And yet it is a fact that life ought to 
 bring us its various experiences with a certain 
 regard to their seasonableness, and when we 
 see little children going to "problem-plays," 
 and grown-ups spending their mornings over 
 cards and their evenings over picture-puzzles, 
 one is tempted to think that something is 
 wrong. Jaques would have to revise his sum 
 mary of the seven ages of man, and still more 
 of woman, rather thoroughly to make it pass 
 muster now. There seems to be very little 
 springtime in the lives of to-day; it is mostly 
 summer and Indian summer, while winter 
 quiet, hospitable, intimate, stay-at-home win 
 ter is getting left out entirely. 
 
 If we don t look out, we shall infect Nature. 
 
110 IN THEIR SEASON 
 
 She is a sensitive creature, highly "suggest 
 ible," as the psychologists put it. Some one 
 has maintained that it was purely at the sug 
 gestion of the impressionists that she perpe 
 trated London fogs and purple cabbages. She 
 may do other things. There is no telling what 
 she may not do. In imagination I look out 
 upon a world where babes in tailor-made suits 
 play bridge through snow-bound July eve 
 nings, where old ladies in pinafores skip about 
 picking daisies in December. But let us not 
 too wildly anticipate! Let us bring ourselves 
 up sharply before it is too late. Let us con 
 sider whether we do not, after all, get the 
 most out of things, whether they be grapes or 
 kites or snowstorms or enthusiasm, by taking 
 them in their season. 
 
Manners and the Puritan 
 
 MR. ELL WOOD HENDRICK S article, "We Are 
 so Young," which appeared in the May 
 "Atlantic," will bring satisfaction and re 
 freshment to many of us, who have long felt 
 as he does on the subject of American man 
 ners. 
 
 The question, as he raises it, is not whether 
 American manners are bad, but whether, if 
 they are bad, we can allow the "older" na 
 tions to excuse us on the ground of our 
 "youth." 
 
 Many of us must agree heartily with Mr. 
 Hendrick in his protest against the accept 
 ance of this excuse. We may go even further, 
 and maintain that we cannot afford to claim 
 or accept exemption from world-standards of 
 manners on any ground whatever. If, how 
 ever, we are seeking, not excuses but reasons, 
 I am inclined to think that, at least as far as 
 New England, and those sections of the coun 
 try which derive from New England, are con 
 cerned, we have paid too little attention to 
 
MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 
 
 the possible effect on manners of a Puritan 
 tradition. 
 
 The Puritan conscience and other things 
 about the Puritans have, perhaps, been a 
 little overemphasized, but it is, I hope, not 
 altogether fanciful to suggest that the habits 
 of mind which fostered the Puritan reaction 
 and which were in turn fostered by it, are not 
 of a sort which would blossom and bear fruit 
 in comeliness of manner and of phrase. 
 
 For this was a reaction from what? From 
 what seemed to them empty ritualism, with 
 its attendant evils of worldliness, vanity, sub 
 servience, easy-going acceptance of authority, 
 shirking of individual responsibility. These 
 things were embodied in the court and the 
 cavalier, in the papacy and hardly less in the 
 episcopacy. They wore, it was admitted, a 
 pleasing shape, but the heart of them was 
 rotten. 
 
 But reactions always swing too far, and 
 the Puritans proved no exception to the rule. 
 In casting off worldliness, they cast off, also, 
 some of the courtesies of life. In condemn 
 ing subservience and easy-going, they con 
 demned also deference and tolerance. In put- 
 
MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 113 
 
 ting aside vanity and untruth, they gave up 
 a certain daintiness and comeliness in the or 
 dering of life. Not necessarily all at once, and 
 certainly not with any intention. It is con 
 ceivable that the effect of this attitude might 
 not be apparent at first. I do not know what 
 were the manners of my ancestors; they may 
 have been as finished as any courtier s; but I 
 know the manners of some of their descend 
 ants, and I am sure no court would find 
 them appropriate. 
 
 The old world, and the older religion, 
 stood for the efficacy of ritual. "Never 
 mind about thinking," it said in effect, "there 
 are those who will do that for you, in govern 
 ment, in learning, in religion. All you need to 
 do is to perform the rites as they are laid 
 down for you. This way lies salvation." 
 
 The Puritan responded, "This way lurks 
 damnation. Ritual is nothing; nay, it is 
 worse than nothing if it comes between you 
 and the truth. See to it first of all that your 
 heart is right. Examine yourself sternly and 
 cast out hypocrisy. All else matters little. No 
 authority can do a man s thinking for him. 
 Each for himself, men must face God. Ob- 
 
114 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 
 
 servances, ceremonies, are Popish abomina 
 tions. What does it matter if the outer man 
 be altogether pleasing, so long as the soul of 
 him is damned?" 
 
 Now, whatever might be the first effect of 
 such an attitude, the ultimate effect could 
 hardly help being a minimizing of the impor 
 tance of all the externals of life. The theory 
 might actually justify a good deal of this, and 
 practice might tend to go even further than 
 theory. For when once you have said that if 
 the heart is right externals are unimportant, 
 it is easy, by a confusion of thought very 
 common, to assume that externals are not 
 merely subordinate to the things of the heart, 
 but are actually at war with them. The 
 phrases "empty form," "hollow sham," 
 "rough honesty," "rugged virtue," indicate 
 a tendency to regard the inner and the outer 
 virtues as antagonistic. Has a man pleasing 
 manners and courteous address? His heart 
 may nevertheless be black. This does not, in 
 deed, warrant us in assuming that because he 
 has pleasing manners his heart is therefore 
 black, yet the passage from one conviction to 
 the other is curiously easy. 
 
MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 115 
 
 The quality that New Englanders worship 
 is sincerity, but they can with difficulty con 
 ceive a sincerity that is not also a little rough 
 and blunt. Polish rouses their suspicion. 
 They can appraise a rough diamond more 
 easily than a finished one. I suppose we all 
 know the New England mother who says, 
 "Manners are all very well, but what I care 
 about in my children is their morals. I would 
 rather have my children truthful and good 
 than have them learn to bow gracefully and 
 say, Pardon me." 
 
 If one suggests in answer that these things 
 are not mutually exclusive, that not all rude 
 children are truthful nor all well-mannered 
 ones hypocrites, she looks at one a little 
 askance. She is of those who traditionally and 
 sincerely believe that the French are vicious 
 in proportion as they are polite, since honesty 
 must of necessity be "rugged." 
 
 Such people have no sympathy with the 
 theory that the way you behave reacts upon 
 the way you feel. They will, perhaps, admit 
 that if you do a definite service for some one, 
 you are more apt to feel kindly toward him, 
 but it has never occurred to them to go 
 
116 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 
 
 further and admit that if you behave courte 
 ously, it makes you feel more courteous inside; 
 that if you go to meet a person as if you were 
 glad to see him, it makes you actually feel 
 more glad; that if you kneel, it may make you 
 actually feel more reverent. If it did occur to 
 them, they would repudiate it as sanctioning 
 hypocrisy. Why it should be more hypocriti 
 cal to speak pleasantly and with deference to 
 people whom you do not care for than it is 
 to give soup or coal to other people whom 
 you do not care for, they could not, perhaps, 
 fully explain. 
 
 Perhaps this attitude is not quite as un 
 reasonable and unlovely as I am making it 
 appear. I am stating it a little perversely, to 
 make my point clearer. As a matter of fact, 
 New England is not alone in admiring blunt 
 honesty and rugged virtue, and in distrusting 
 a smooth exterior. It was not a Puritan who 
 said that a man might smile and smile and be 
 a villain. Yet, when New Englanders quote 
 this, they forget that the particular villain 
 in question was the only smiling one the 
 master created. Did he realize, instinctively, 
 perhaps, that to smile and smile and still 
 
MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 117 
 
 be a villain a man must be an arch- villain 
 indeed? 
 
 At all events, these traditions have found 
 in New England a soil of peculiar richness, 
 and they have flourished exceptionally well. 
 Without any explicit assertion that to bow 
 is vice and to smile is villainy, there has often 
 seemed to be an instinctive feeling that the 
 truly honest and high-minded will not stoop 
 to garnish their lives with such trumpery 
 trimmings. 
 
 Now it should of course be remembered 
 that people s principles never have quite the 
 influence that we might expect them to have. 
 Human nature is an imperfectly unified con 
 glomerate, shot through here and there by a 
 ray of principle if one may use the word 
 "ray" of that which seems so often to darken 
 rather than illumine. Principles are nothing 
 in themselves. They have to be held by par 
 ticular persons, and they are held in all sorts 
 of ways. Some carry their principles as cer 
 tain folk do horse-chestnuts, in their pock 
 ets, as a specific against disease, and then 
 go along much as if they were not there. 
 Others wear them like a garment; but there 
 
118 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 
 
 were, proverbially, many ways of wearing 
 the toga. Others again give their principles a 
 more intimate reception. But in such inti 
 macy the influences are reciprocal: often, by 
 the time a principle has penetrated through 
 a temperament it would not know its own 
 countenance. 
 
 So with the New Englander. It is not in 
 every individual that the New England tradi 
 tion has had its perfect work. I know many 
 in whom it has not. I know some in whom it 
 has people of unflinching honesty, of clear 
 integrity, of real benevolence, whose manners 
 are distinctly grim, and whose feelings of 
 affection and devotion, deep and strong as 
 they are, find no habitual expression in ways 
 of pleasantness. On the other hand, there is 
 in New England a body of people, equally be 
 longing to it, who have not shared this dis 
 tinctively Puritan tradition. 
 
 In almost every New England town, while 
 there are many Noncomformist churches, 
 Presbyterian and Congregational and Baptist 
 and Methodist, there is usually also one 
 Episcopal church. It is often the littlest one, 
 it is almost always the prettiest. The others 
 
MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 119 
 
 are stern and uncompromising four walls 
 and a roof, windows and a door, and perhaps 
 a steeple for the bell. The best of them have, 
 in their own way, a very real distinction. But 
 the little Episcopal church has something 
 different. Shall we venture to call it charm? 
 It nestles beside the village street with a cozy 
 air, it encourages vines to grow over it. It is 
 pleasant and propitiatory and adaptable in 
 every line. And within, the congregation and 
 those who lead in the service, have usually 
 something of this same quality. Voices are a 
 little less strident, manners are a little more 
 gracious, than in the other churches. 
 
 I knew a young man who claimed that he 
 could tell an Episcopalian by her hats. This, 
 I think, is going too far. I should dislike to 
 predicate of any denomination the eccentrici 
 ties patent in most women s hats. But, taken 
 in moderation, there is something in it. Of 
 course, there are exceptions: not all Episco 
 palians have pleasant voices, nor all Presby 
 terians nasal ones. Especially in the cities, 
 where the church influence is but a tiny strand 
 among a multitude woven into each life, all 
 such differences tend to disappear. And even 
 
120 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 
 
 in villages, I have seen Episcopal churches as 
 ugly as the worst of the Nonconformist, and 
 I have seen Presbyterian churches that were 
 well, they were by strangers persistently 
 mistaken for the Episcopal. 
 
 Yet it seems to me not unnatural that this 
 difference, typically, should exist. For the 
 Nonconformists deliberately broke with a tra 
 dition that had its own ripe beauty. They 
 distrusted charm. They saw an antagonism 
 between beauty and truth. They avoided the 
 ways of pleasantness. They felt that con 
 ventions and convictions could not dwell to 
 gether. In all this there was gain and there 
 was loss. And when, as all rebels against con 
 vention inevitably do, they erected their own 
 conventions, these were relatively stern and 
 barren, and a little ungracious. 
 
 All this while I have spoken of New 
 England, which is a small part of the United 
 States. But the West, so far as it is not for 
 eign, was settled from New England or from 
 the South, and its pioneer past is nearer by 
 many generations than our own, so that other 
 elements enter into the question of manners. 
 The South, again, is preponderantly Episco- 
 
MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 
 
 pal at least the South that we usually 
 think of. And this South has, so far as I know, 
 not had its manners often called in ques 
 tion. Whether this is a mere coincidence, or 
 whether its Episcopacy has really been a con 
 tributing cause, I cannot say. 
 
 In any case, this is not a defense of Episco 
 pacy nor an arraignment of Nonconformity. 
 It is a study of possible tendencies involved 
 in two rather different attitudes toward life. 
 Each is beset by dangers, each achieves its 
 characteristic victories. The sins of Non 
 conformity are the sins of presumption and 
 intolerance, the sins of ritualism are the sins 
 of formalism and indifference and superfi 
 ciality. The virtues of the one are those of 
 independence and honesty and devotion; the 
 virtues of the other are those of tolerance and 
 deference and kindness. It is, to some extent, 
 the individual virtues contrasted with the 
 social virtues. 
 
 But all of these are good, all are necessary 
 to society, and the pity is that they have not 
 always been able to live together companion- 
 ably; that one set should drive out the other. 
 Perhaps it does no harm to remind ourselves 
 
122 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 
 
 that these two attitudes are not the only 
 possible ones. As interpretations of life, Non 
 conformity and Episcopacy can learn from 
 each other, and the outcome may conceivably 
 be something better than either. 
 
A Matter of Planes 
 
 "MY sister and I get along beautifully to 
 gether: she cares only about the big things of 
 life, and I care only about the little ones." 
 This remark, made to me once by a friend 
 of mine, comes into my mind every now and 
 then, and I am increasingly amused by its 
 astuteness. For nothing seems more capri 
 cious than the basis of our harmonious inter 
 course one with another. We constantly see 
 people whom we would aver to be incompati 
 ble, living serenely at peace, while others, 
 whose cordial agreement we would as con 
 fidently predict, are quarreling scandalously. 
 I believe my friend s remark may throw some 
 light on the matter. It amounts to this: 
 people on the same plane may clash, people 
 on different ones cannot. It is the grade- 
 crossings that make trouble. 
 
 Let us see how it works. Here are Bene 
 dick and I living happily together, although 
 our acquaintances would "never have ex 
 pected it." We are both of us possessed of 
 
134 A MATTER OF PLANES 
 
 strong convictions, but they happen not to 
 concern the same things. For example, I put 
 sugar in my coffee. I think that is the way to 
 take coffee, and of course I always put it in 
 Benedick s cup too. Now Benedick does n t 
 care, he would scarcely notice if I dropped 
 an onion in, because he is thinking about 
 civil-service reform and other large matters. 
 As he drinks his coffee he talks to me of these 
 things, which I regard as unquestionably of 
 vital importance, but unquestionably not of 
 vital interest. Yet Benedick talks well, and it 
 is very becoming to him to be deeply in earn 
 est, and so I like to listen to him. Thus we 
 get along together very happily. He accepts 
 my little habits, and I accept his big princi 
 ples. The adjustment is perfect. 
 
 On the other hand, there is a certain lady 
 who sometimes visits us. She drinks her 
 coffee without sugar, and she never sits at 
 breakfast with us that she does not evince 
 real uneasiness as she watches the white 
 cubes being dropped into our steaming cups. 
 Benedick has never even noticed that she is 
 uneasy, but I have, because, well, because 
 I am living on her plane; for I myself am al- 
 
A MATTER OF PLANES 125 
 
 ways conscious of a distinct feeling of annoy 
 ance when I see any one put sugar on lettuce. 
 Nor is this the only ground of discord between 
 us. She has the habit of rising at half-past 
 six every morning, and taking a cold bath 
 before breakfast. She is never late. I often 
 am, and I loathe cold baths, except in the 
 ocean. Accordingly, when I come down, I 
 find her awaiting me, covered with meritori- 
 ousness as with a garment, and I feel myself 
 her inferior, a feeling which I resent but can 
 not escape. I find no refuge in philosophy, 
 for I have no more philosophy than she has. 
 No, we are on the same plane, and we are 
 always colliding. 
 
 On the other hand, Benedick likes her very 
 well, but for his part cannot get through a 
 meal comfortably with his uncle, because 
 they disagree about trusts and the tariff. Yet 
 his uncle and I always enjoy each other s 
 society. He takes three lumps of sugar in 
 his coffee and none at all on his lettuce; he 
 regularly oversleeps the breakfast hour and 
 apologizes handsomely for it afterwards. He 
 has, in fact, what I consider a comfortable set 
 of habits, and his theories do not disturb me. 
 
126 A MATTEE OF PLANES 
 
 Personally, I find it pleasant to live with 
 people who will let me arrange the unimpor 
 tant features of life, while I am quite ready to 
 let them settle what one of my teachers used to 
 call its "cosmic principles." I can understand 
 one s enduring martyrdom for the sake of de 
 tails of taste, but not for such large matters 
 as Truth or the Hereafter, which seem to me 
 abundantly able to take care of themselves. 
 
 I wonder if this explains why men are less 
 apt to quarrel with women than with other 
 men, and women less apt to quarrel with men 
 than with other women. For the lives of men 
 and women are doubtless on quite different 
 planes; they are not apt to feel strongly about 
 the same things, and thus each is indulgent 
 toward the other s convictions, not being 
 deeply touched by them. Have you ever 
 noticed at a dinner-party, when one of the 
 men is telling a good story, the difference be 
 tween the attitudes of the other men and of 
 the women? The women except perhaps 
 the wife of the speaker listen easily, re 
 ceptively; the men listen restlessly, each alert 
 for a chance to follow up the tale with one of 
 his own. For it is perfectly well understood 
 
A MATTER OF PLANES 127 
 
 that women are not required to tell good 
 stories at dinner, and so a woman can enjoy 
 them all irresponsibly, while a man feels in 
 each one something very like a challenge. 
 
 On the other hand, when either sex invades 
 the other s sphere, there is apt to be trouble. 
 We all know how a woman, the ordinary, 
 normal woman, feels when the man attempts 
 to "interfere" in the household; and a man, 
 the ordinary, normal man, has a similar ob 
 jection to women s invading his province. In 
 Germany, at a university function some years 
 ago, an old professor in conversation with a 
 young American woman expressed himself 
 rather positively on some economic question. 
 She, being fairly well grounded in economics, 
 ventured to differ, and began to give her 
 reasons for so doing, when he interrupted her 
 with a gesture of surprise and irritation, and 
 the remark, "I am not accustomed to hear 
 myself contradicted by young women." 
 
 But I suppose some one may object, "Why 
 must people on the same plane inevitably 
 collide? Why cannot they run companion- 
 ably parallel?" And indeed this has an at 
 tractive sound; but people s lives do not run 
 
128 A MATTER OF PLANES 
 
 on artificial tracks. They may move along 
 easily side by side for a while, but then 
 crash! The collision comes. 
 
 If you still doubt, try two experiments. 
 Find two people deeply interested in 
 theological theory, and apparently in agree 
 ment, and set them discussing the matter 
 with each other in a really exhaustive way. 
 See if they do not separate with some little 
 mutual disapproval, if not distrust. "Ah! 
 
 Mr. is not so sound as I had supposed." 
 
 Then, to make the test on the little things 
 of life, take two people the most harmonious 
 possible, find them in an amiable mood, I 
 will even allow you to give them a good din 
 ner first, and then set them the task of 
 choosing wall-papers for their country home. 
 Need I describe the outcome? 
 
 Ah, no ! Our only safety lies in non-conflict 
 ing levels. You who are entering on a matri 
 monial or otherwise friendly compact, put 
 not your trust in a harmony based on positive 
 agreement: it is shifting sand beneath your 
 feet. Ground your happiness in a nice dove 
 tailing of eager conviction with tolerant in 
 difference, and you are safe for a lifetime. 
 
A Meditation Concerning Forms 
 
 IT was years ago, in Heidelberg. A group of 
 young Americans, strolling down one of the 
 quaint old streets of the town, approached 
 the office of the American Consul, before 
 which hung an American flag. As they passed 
 the house one of the young men took off his 
 hat. The man beside him looked at him, then 
 glanced quickly about, as men do, to locate 
 the person he was greeting. Another of the 
 party fell back and said to him, "Did you see 
 a friend?" When one is abroad, chance meet 
 ings gain in importance. The young man 
 smiled. " Why yes a friend of mine 
 and of yours too, I suppose." He pointed 
 back toward the flag, which they had now 
 passed. "Oh!" said the other, feeling a little 
 flat. 
 
 "You see," went on the young man, a 
 little sheepishly, an American man is al 
 ways sheepish when detected in what may 
 seem a bit of sentiment, "I served in the 
 militia a good while, and I got in the habit of 
 
130 A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 
 
 saluting the colors; and over here some 
 how" 
 
 "Is he apologizing because he saluted his 
 flag?" broke in one of the young women. "I 
 think it s the rest^of us that ought to apolo- 
 gize." 
 
 The party moved on, and the incident was 
 forgotten until, years afterward, one of the 
 group learned that it had borne fruit: it had 
 set a fashion, established a tradition. For 
 since that time Americans in Heidelberg have 
 always saluted their flag where it hangs before 
 the office of their consul. 
 
 All this came into my mind last winter 
 while I watched another little scene, this 
 time in our own country, in a New England 
 city. The President of the United States had 
 been a guest in a house where some of us had 
 been asked to meet him. The President was 
 taking leave, and I made one of a group at 
 a window watching the Chief Executive and 
 his escort take their places in the automobiles. 
 Groups of men and boys, who had in some 
 way discovered what was happening, were 
 lounging about on the street corners, gazing 
 curiously at the Presidential party. The 
 
A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 131 
 
 honorable guests and the honored host ex 
 changed salutes, and the motor-cars moved 
 off, while the crowd watched, with its hands 
 in its pockets. 
 
 As the group in the window looked out at 
 the scene one of them exclaimed: "Well! if 
 that isn t the limit!" 
 
 "What? "I asked. 
 
 "Why, did n t you see? Not a man of them 
 saluted. They just rubbered !" 
 
 Every one laughed, then we grew grave. 
 "What an example for those small boys!" 
 said some one. And we fell into a discussion 
 of American manners compared with Euro 
 pean. 
 
 Again, last summer, I was one of a huge 
 audience witnessing an outdoor pageant. It 
 was evening, band music filled the air, spec 
 tacular performances were going on in a bril 
 liant electric illumination. All open spaces 
 were thronged and bleachers were full. Sud 
 denly a few people among those on the 
 bleachers rose to their feet. "Down! Down 
 in front! Sit down, can t you?" was vari 
 ously shouted by those behind, and there 
 were growling comments about people who 
 
132 A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 
 
 stood up when, if everybody sat down, every 
 body could see. The offenders remained 
 standing. The growling comments went on, 
 until suddenly some one muttered, "Shut up! 
 It s The Star-Spangled Banner !" Where 
 upon the comments died away, and before 
 the band had ended the bleacher crowd was 
 all on its feet, half ashamed, half amused. 
 
 Now, I find that these three scenes group 
 themselves persistently in my mind, and per 
 sistently recur, producing an undercurrent 
 of speculation and perhaps even of moral 
 izing. "Ought these things so to be?" I 
 wonder. We Americans are often congrat 
 ulated, we often congratulate ourselves, on 
 our emancipation from conventions, from 
 forms, from traditions. But are we, I won 
 der, altogether to be congratulated? Is it 
 entirely to our credit that we are able to 
 stand on street corners with our hats on our 
 heads and our hands in our pockets while 
 our Country, embodied in its Chief Execu 
 tive, passes by? Shall we unreservedly felici 
 tate ourselves that we can stroll past our 
 country s flag without an impulse to salute 
 it? that we can hear one of our national 
 
A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 133 
 
 hymns without an impulse to rise? Is this 
 emancipation, or is it something else? 
 
 Certainly, informality and unconvention- 
 ality are good things within limits, [but are 
 we perhaps passing these limits? For, as 
 psychologists tell us that we cannot think 
 long without words, so perhaps it is also true 
 that we cannot feel long without acts and 
 acts are forms. Unquestionably the spirit of 
 loyalty may exist while one s hat is on. But 
 I wonder if taking off one s hat may not 
 perhaps give it a bit of encouragement like 
 a friendly pat on the shoulder of a boy who 
 is doing well. 
 
 Moreover, among the young people who 
 are growing up among us, who "know not 
 Joseph," who think of war as something in 
 a textbook, and loyalty as something men 
 tioned in poetry and history among these, 
 would it not give some suggestion and stimu 
 lus to the spirit of patriotism, innate in all 
 of us, if they saw those around them giving 
 some tangible evidences of the feeling? It is 
 undoubtedly true that in some cases a feeling 
 grows through being repressed, but it is much 
 more often true that it grows through being 
 
134 A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 
 
 expressed. To throw stones at a cat tends to 
 make a boy cruel, while to feed it and pet it 
 and care for it tends to make him tender 
 hearted. The feeling causes the action, but 
 the action reacts on the feeling. This is the 
 vital circuit. 
 
 So it is with the feelings of loyalty and 
 patriotism. From the ages of savagery down 
 ward, kings and priests, whether they formu 
 lated the theory or not, acted in accordance 
 with sound psychology when they instituted 
 elaborate ceremonials by which the people 
 might give expression to their feeling of rever 
 ence. We do not wish to return to barbarism. 
 We do not even wish to wrap ourselves about 
 in all the forms and ceremonies of modern 
 European life, as they appear in some of its 
 phases. But I wonder whether, in throw 
 ing off these cumbrous vestments, we have not 
 got rid of a little too much. Might there not 
 be something midway between the full regalia 
 of a coronation procession and let us say 
 a bathing suit? I wonder, to change the fig 
 ure, whether, in our reaction from all formal 
 ity, we are not in danger, as the Germans say, 
 of "throwing out the child with the bath." 
 
The Tyranny of Things 
 
 Two fifteen-year-old girls stood eyeing one 
 another on first acquaintance. Finally one 
 little girl said, "Which do you like best, 
 people or things?" The other little girl said, 
 "Things." They were friends at once. 
 
 I suppose we all go through a phase when 
 we like things best; and not only like them, 
 but want to possess them under our hand. 
 The passion for accumulation is upon us. We 
 make "collections," we fill our rooms, our 
 walls, our tables, our desks, with things, 
 things, things. 
 
 Many people never pass out of this phase. 
 They never see a flower without wanting to 
 pick it and put it in a vase, they never enjoy 
 a book without wanting to own it, nor a pic 
 ture without wanting to hang it on their walls. 
 They keep photographs of all their friends and 
 kodak albums of all the places they visit, they 
 save all their theater programmes and dinner 
 cards, they bring home all their alpenstocks. 
 Their houses are filled with an undigested 
 
136 THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 
 
 mass of things, like the terminal moraine 
 where a glacier dumps at length everything it 
 has picked up during its progress through 
 the lands. 
 
 But to some of us a day comes when we 
 begin to grow weary of things. We realize 
 that we do not possess them; they possess us. 
 Our books are a burden to us, our pictures 
 have destroyed every restful wall-space, our 
 china is a care, our photographs drive us mad, 
 our programmes and alpenstocks fill us with 
 loathing. We feel stifled with the sense of 
 things, and our problem becomes, not how 
 much we can accumulate, but how much we 
 can do without. We send our books to the 
 village library, and our pictures to the col 
 lege settlement. Such things as we cannot 
 give away, and have not the courage to de 
 stroy, we stack in the garret, where they lie 
 huddled in dim and dusty heaps, removed 
 from our sight, to be sure, yet still faintly im 
 portunate. 
 
 Then, as we breathe rhore freely in the clear 
 space that we have made for ourselves, we 
 grow aware that we must not relax our vigi 
 lance, or we shall be once more overwhelmed. 
 
THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 137 
 
 For it is an age of things. As I walk through 
 the shops at Christmas time and survey their 
 contents, I find it a most depressing spectacle. 
 All of us have too many things already, and 
 here are more! And everybody is going to 
 send some of them to everybody else ! I sym 
 pathize with one of my friends, who, at the 
 end of the Christmas festivities, said, "If I 
 see another bit of tissue paper and red ribbon, 
 I shall scream." 
 
 It extends to all our doings. For every 
 event there is a "souvenir." We cannot go to 
 luncheon and meet our friends but we must 
 receive a token to carry away. Even our 
 children cannot have a birthday party, and 
 play games, and eat good things, and be 
 happy. The host must receive gifts from 
 every little guest, and provide in return some 
 little remembrance for each to take home. 
 Truly, on all sides we are beset, and we go 
 lumbering along through life like a ship en 
 crusted with barnacles, which can never cut 
 the waves clean and sure and swift until she 
 has been scraped bare again. And there seems 
 little hope for us this side our last port. 
 
 And to think that there was a time when 
 
138 THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 
 
 folk had not even that hope! When a man s 
 possessions were burned with him, so that he 
 might, forsooth, have them all about him in 
 the next world! Suffocating thought! To 
 think one could not even then be clear of 
 things, and make at least a fresh start! That 
 must, indeed, have been in the childhood of 
 the race. 
 
 Once upon a time, when I was very tired, 
 I chanced to go away to a little house by 
 the sea. "It is empty," they said, "but you 
 can easily furnish it." Empty! Yes, thank 
 Heaven! Furnish it? Heaven forbid! Its 
 floors were bare, its walls were bare, its 
 tables there were only two in the house 
 were bare. There was nothing in the closets 
 but books; nothing in the bureau drawers but 
 the smell of clean, fresh wood; nothing in the 
 kitchen but an oil stove, and a few a very 
 few dishes; nothing in the attic but rafters 
 and sunshine, and a view of the sea. After I 
 had been there an hour there descended upon 
 me a great peace, a sense of freedom, of in 
 finite leisure. In the twilight I sat before the 
 flickering embers of the open fire, and looked 
 out through the open door to the sea, and 
 
THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 139 
 
 asked myself, "Why?" Then the answer 
 came: I was emancipated from things. There 
 was nothing in the house to demand care, to 
 claim attention, to cumber my consciousness 
 with its insistent, unchanging companionship. 
 There was nothing but a shelter, and outside, 
 the fields and marshes, the shore and the sea. 
 These did not have to be taken down and put 
 up and arranged and dusted and cared for. 
 They were not things at all, they were pow 
 ers, presences. 
 
 And so I rested. While the spell was still 
 unbroken, I came away. For broken it would 
 have been, I know, had I not fled first. Even 
 in this refuge the enemy would have pursued 
 me, found me out, encompassed me. 
 
 If we could but free ourselves once for all, 
 how simple life might become ! One of my 
 friends, who, with six young children and 
 only one servant, keeps a spotless house and 
 a soul serene, told me once how she did it. 
 "My dear, once a month I give away every 
 single thing in the house that we do not im 
 peratively need. It sounds wasteful, but I 
 don t believe it really is. Sometimes Jere 
 miah mourns over missing old clothes, or back 
 
140 THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 
 
 numbers of the magazines, but I tell him if 
 he does n t want to be mated to a gibbering 
 maniac he will let me do as I like." 
 
 The old monks knew all this very well. 
 One wonders sometimes how they got their 
 power; but go up to Fiesole, and sit a while in 
 one of those little, bare, white-walled cells, 
 and you will begin to understand. If there 
 were any spiritual force in one, it would have 
 to come out there. 
 
 I have not their courage, and I win no such 
 freedom. I allow myself to be overwhelmed 
 by the invading host of things, making fitful 
 resistance, but without any real steadiness of 
 purpose. Yet never do I wholly give up the 
 struggle, and in my heart I cherish an ideal, 
 remotely typified by that empty little house 
 beside the sea. 
 
The Tyranny of Facts 
 
 ONCE upon a time, very long, ago, when I was 
 young, I used to dream of all the things I 
 would some day possess. As time went on, 
 the nature of the things I coveted changed, 
 but not the dream of possession. Then, as 
 some of these dreams found their fulfillment, 
 a fundamental reconstruction of ideals took 
 place. I dreamed no longer of possession, but 
 of enfranchisement; I no longer wished for 
 more things, but only for the power to cope 
 with the things I already had or that had 
 me. And at last my strongest desire was to 
 possess nothing but friends. 
 
 Of late, I notice, the same thing that hap 
 pened in my house has happened in my head. 
 There was a time when I loved to collect in 
 formation. Facts all facts were precious 
 to me, and I loved to feel them making piles 
 and stacks and rows in my brain. Every 
 thing was welcome, from the names of the 
 stars to the prepositions that governed the 
 Latin ablative, from the dynasties of Egypt 
 
142 THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 
 
 to the geography lists of "state products" 
 "corn, wheat, and potatoes," "rice, sugar, 
 cotton, and tobacco." While this mania was 
 upon me, dictionaries allured me, cyclo 
 paedias held me spellbound. I was even able 
 to read with interest the annals of the "Swiss 
 Family Robinson," a book which presents 
 more facts per page than any other volume 
 in that great and unclassified mob called 
 "fiction." 
 
 What were the causes and processes of 
 change I cannot say. Possibly an overdose of 
 facts produced reaction. At all events, the 
 change took place, and the time has now 
 come when, just as I deprecate the arrival of 
 new possessions in my house, even thus do 
 I deplore the stream of information whose 
 constant, relentless flow into my unwilling 
 consciousness I am powerless to prevent. For 
 I find that whereas during my years of en 
 thusiasm for accumulation everything com 
 bined to help me, now that my endeavors are 
 reversed the powers arrayed against me are 
 mighty. The Sunday newspaper, which is the 
 embodiment of information invading the last 
 stronghold of peace, this I can and do bar 
 
THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 143 
 
 out of my house; but on week-days the news 
 papers have things their own way. They 
 invade my morning quiet, they disturb my 
 evening calm, they render the male section of 
 my family indifferent to morning coffee and 
 dilatory before evening soup. Nor am I my 
 self exempt from the baleful influence. Vari 
 ous digests of the "world s news" lie con 
 stantly upon my table, and I am occasionally 
 weak enough to think it my duty to read 
 them, "so as to be a little intelligent, you 
 know," as a firm-minded aunt of mine is in 
 the habit of saying. In this unwilling en 
 deavor to acquire intelligence I stultify what 
 little of that faculty I may have been origin 
 ally endowed with, I stuff my brain with 
 cotton, in the form of "science brevities," 
 "literary jottings," "religious notes," "po 
 litical news," and so on. And then for a time 
 a violent reaction sets in, and I eschew all 
 informing books and hie me to Lamb, to 
 Shelley, to Malory, to Homer. These are my 
 joy, my recreation, my tonic. 
 
 Nor is it only the newspapers and their 
 kind with which I have to contend. My 
 dearest friends are traitors and my foes are 
 
144 THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 
 
 they of my own household. For they cling to 
 the possessions of their brains, they are busy 
 amassing more, they survey them with satis 
 faction and exhibit them with pride, so that I 
 am driven to question, which of us is right? 
 Is the change in me due to growing wisdom 
 or to oncoming senility? 
 
 In my outdoor life the same issue is con 
 stantly presenting itself. I love birds and 
 flowers. In fact, I believe that I honestly love 
 that grand and joyous conglomerate usually 
 called "Nature." There was a time, more 
 over, during that remote period of which I 
 have spoken, when I possessed a respectable 
 amount of information about these matters. 
 Just as, in my lust for physical possessions, 
 I collected butterflies and eggs and flowers, 
 even so in my lust for intellectual possessions 
 I accumulated knowledge I learned all 
 their names, I knew all about their wings and 
 their spots and their petals and their seeds 
 and their roots and whatever else apper 
 tained to them. It amazes me now when I 
 occasionally stumble upon some record of my 
 former knowledge. I feel like saying, with the 
 old woman in Mother Goose, 
 
THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 145 
 
 " Lawk a massy on me! 
 This is none of I!" 
 
 But following my feeling of amazement there 
 usually comes one of relief how glad I am 
 that I don t know all that now! I still love 
 "Nature," but when I have found the lovely 
 flower in the meadow or the deep wood, I do 
 not hasten to pick it and bring it home and 
 analyze it and press it. I am content to lie 
 down beside it a while and enjoy its compan 
 ionship, its beauty, its fragrance, whatever it 
 has of charm and comeliness, and then I leave 
 it and pass on. When I hear a sweet bird- 
 note, I pause and listen as it comes again and 
 yet again. But I do not pursue the bird with 
 an opera-glass to count its feathers and esti 
 mate its dimensions, and then hurry home to 
 my "bird books" to "look it up" and make 
 a marginal note of the date. When I see 
 butterflies fluttering about the lilacs and the 
 syringas and the phlox, I stand quiet and 
 watch them those huge pale yellow ones 
 banded with black that love to hang about 
 lavender flowers do they know what a 
 lovely chord of color they strike? those dark 
 ones with blues and greens splashed on their 
 
146 THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 
 
 wing-edges, those rich rusty-red ones, with 
 pure silver flashes on their under sides, those 
 little jagged- winged beauties with all the 
 colors of an Oriental rug old reds, old 
 blues, old yellows all mottled together. 
 Ah, they are all delightful, and as I watch 
 this favorite and that, holding my breath lest 
 I scare him into flight, I find myself smiling 
 to think, I knew his name once ! 
 
 But most of my friends still know their 
 names. They have opera-glasses and note 
 books, and a prodigious amount of informa 
 tion. They keep tally of the number of birds 
 they see in a day or on a walk or on a drive, 
 of the number of new birds or flowers they 
 recognize in a season. They call me up by 
 telephone to tell me that the beautiful crea 
 ture we had seen in a certain tree was, after 
 all, not the Apteryx Americanus, but the 
 Apteryx Warrensis, a much rarer variety of 
 the same species, with longer tail feathers 
 and two more white feathers in the wing than 
 his commonplace cousin. 
 
 Amid such whirlpools of information I feel 
 that I am unable to hold my own, and so I 
 try to drift out, but now and again I am 
 
THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 147 
 
 drawn in, and I find myself growing stupid as 
 I bend over my friends bird books. I give 
 myself headaches looking at their butterfly 
 cabinets real butterflies on the phlox and 
 the lilacs never seem to give me headaches. 
 
 I have said that I do not regret the change 
 in myself, that I would not, if I could, gather 
 up the stores of information I once possessed 
 and refurnish my brain with them, no, not 
 even if I could arrange them all in order, 
 cleaned and dusted and sorted ready to be 
 used or admired. Let them go! Some of them 
 have already gone altogether, thrown away, 
 dropped into cracks, burned up, ground into 
 powder, dissolved into nothing. Some lie, 
 perhaps, piled up in the dusty garrets of my 
 brain, huddled together in formless heaps, or 
 stowed close in the old chests of memory that 
 are never opened. If I searched I might find 
 them, and drag them out, and perhaps among 
 them I might discover some treasures, but I 
 shall never search. I shall let them all lie to 
 gether in the quiet, dusty twilight, not to be 
 disturbed until the whole mansion, from dim 
 attic to sunlit living-rooms, shall perish to be 
 known no more. 
 
Travelers Letters 
 
 I AM not a traveling person, but many of my 
 friends are, and as the season of the year 
 arrives when they are saying good-bye and 
 departing to the ends of the earth, I am de 
 pressed. Let no one misunderstand me. I am 
 not depressed because of the good-byes. I 
 love my friends, and it gives me a pang to see 
 the gangplank pulled in, but after they are 
 gone and I have taken up my placid way 
 again, I am well content in a realization of 
 their existence and their welfare. Nor is it 
 the outward ceremonies, the pomp and cir 
 cumstance of departure that I envy them. 
 My small contributions to it boxes of 
 candy, baskets of oranges, modest pints of 
 champagne these I send cheerfully, nothing 
 grudging, though I confess to regret when they 
 miss fire, or are absorbed by the steward on 
 the way. 
 
 Nor, lastly, do I envy them their travels. 
 The ends of the earth to which they wend are, 
 no doubt, pleasant; but my end is pleasant, 
 
TRAVELERS LETTERS 149 
 
 too, and I do not repine that my summer 
 paths are the quiet, homely ones of old New 
 England. 
 
 No, my depression arises from none of 
 these things. It comes I hesitate to con 
 fess the brutal truth from the thought of 
 the letters my Summer-in-Europe friends will 
 write me. There! It is told! 
 
 And yet, I insist, I am really not a brute. 
 I love my friends dearly, and when they go 
 away to certain places Maine, or the 
 White Mountains, or Cape Cod I love to get 
 letters from them. But not when they go to 
 Europe. There is something about Europe 
 and, I may add, California and all World s 
 Fairs that works mortal havoc with the 
 friendly letter. I might almost say that so 
 far as I am concerned a real, genuine friendly 
 letter from Europe does not exist, unless the 
 writer has settled down and lived in Europe 
 until it has become home. Perhaps this is the 
 real trouble. My friends galloping about the 
 map are not at home. They are alert, beset 
 with outward experiences to which they are 
 giving continuous, restless response, and their 
 letters are correspondingly rapid, restless, ex- 
 
150 TRAVELERS LETTERS 
 
 ternal, full of places and things and people, 
 viewed rapidly and superficially; and all, no 
 matter from whom, bear a strong family re 
 semblance they are travelers letters. They 
 reek of hotels and trains, they suggest monu 
 ments, museums in a word "sights." 
 
 Now, I have no objection to "sights" as 
 such, nor to hotels and trains and museums. 
 Monuments, indeed, of all sorts, except the 
 Pyramids, I do hold in execration, but I 
 try not to be unpleasant about them, and it 
 is only when these things are offered me as 
 a substitute for friends that I protest. 
 
 I am not unreasonable. I do not expect all 
 my friends to be brilliant letter writers. A 
 dull letter from a dear friend is one of the com 
 monest and pleasantest things in life. 
 But I want to feel my friend, not Europe, at 
 the other end of the letter. If she is at home, 
 in her habitual courses, she writes me little, 
 pleasant humdrum things about her life, gives 
 me a glimpse of her moods, of her real welfare. 
 She does this even, as I have said, if she is at 
 Cape Cod, or down in Maine. But abroad she 
 cannot do it instead she tries to serve up 
 Europe to me ! And Europe I can do without, 
 
TRAVELERS LETTERS 151 
 
 at least Europe in just this form. Parts of it 
 I, even I, have seen. And for the rest I am 
 content to wait, or if, meanwhile, I grow im 
 patient, and wish to learn more about Venice 
 or Paris or the Tyrol, about this picture or 
 that cathedral, I know several ways of find 
 ing out. From my friends abroad, all I ask is 
 a friendly letter now and then, but, ah me! 
 this is the very thing I never get! Why, it 
 passes me to say. Is European travel a uni 
 versal leveler, blotting out all individuality, 
 an encouragement of the commonplace and 
 the external? Is every one uninteresting 
 away from home? I have sometimes thought 
 so, as I have surveyed a steamerful of people 
 or an automobile-load of tourists. And yet 
 this does not seem wholly probable. At all 
 events, though I cannot account for them, 
 I am sure of my facts. Already I feel in an 
 ticipation the dreariness of those first letters 
 that will come traveling back to me letters 
 written usually in pale ink or in pencil, on 
 very thin paper, and usually cross-lined. 
 Perhaps, now I think of it, this adds a last 
 touch of exasperation to my feelings this 
 thin paper and bad ink. If they would only 
 
152 TRAVELERS* LETTERS 
 
 use a good, thick, cream-white sheet and 
 write half the amount, I should take it kindly, 
 but I find it doubly irritating to spend an 
 hour, in a good light, deciphering things that 
 are entirely indifferent to me when read. It 
 tries me, when I want to know from Beatrice 
 whether Hero s hair is growing in curly or 
 straight after her fever, to work painfully 
 among cross-hatchings, only to discover that 
 "we took the train at 5 P.M. and arrived at 
 7, in time for supper on the summit the 
 view was magnificent wish you were with 
 us!" 
 
 There are, of course, exceptions. One of 
 my friends once spent a long summer in a 
 tiny village in the Black Forest. She wrote 
 comfortable, homey letters about nothing in 
 particular, and I treasured them. But this 
 exception only proves my point she did 
 not write traveling letters because she did not 
 travel. Again, another friend once sent me a 
 letter from Florence that was a gem. Pictures? 
 Monasteries? Olive groves? No, none of 
 these were remotely mentioned thank for 
 tune! Her letter was one long tirade against 
 the habits of a certain group of foreigners 
 
TRAVELERS LETTERS 153 
 
 I will not say of what nation in regard to 
 their use of the toothpick! She was in such a 
 state of exasperation when she wrote it that 
 she was absolutely herself. I felt as if she had 
 sat beside me, temper and all, and I had 
 heard and seen her talk. I did not care in the 
 least about foreign manners, but oh, that was 
 a good letter! Which again, I think, proves 
 my point. 
 
 Yes, my summer letters are dreary affairs. 
 And of late years my troubles are aggravated 
 by that last insult to friendship, the "sou 
 venir" post-card. At this point language fails 
 me. I have no words in which to speak of this 
 abomination. It symbolizes the triumph of 
 the commonplace, of the cheap-and-easy, the 
 utter capitulation of individuality. And they 
 will pour in upon me post-cards in black 
 and white, post-cards in colors, post-cards of 
 all the famous pictures, of all the cathedrals, 
 views, mountains, hotels, donkeys, peasants, 
 in all tourist-Europe, and occasionally, horror 
 of horrors, comic post-cards! On their edges 
 will be scrawled flying words, and some ini 
 tials, and as I decipher them I can see the 
 counter where the things were purchased 
 
154 TRAVELERS LETTERS 
 
 the crowd of tourists choosing "sets," some 
 for collections, some for poor absent friends 
 like me; I can see them scribbling their mes 
 sages, with ink and pen furnished by the 
 provident shopkeeper, and then hurrying on 
 to their trains or their boats or their trams. 
 Souvenir post-cards indeed! To me who 
 loathe the very name of souvenir! To me 
 who so dearly love a quiet letter from a friend, 
 written infrequently, perhaps, but in peace of 
 spirit ! 
 
 There seems to be no hope ahead. As the 
 summers pass my trials of this sort grow 
 greater rather than less. The letters grow 
 more and more rapid, more and more rest 
 less, more and more external, and the post 
 cards pile up ad nauseam ! I have never pro 
 tested before, except in spirit. I can do so 
 now only under the shelter of anonymity. If 
 I criticize my friends it will pain them, and, I 
 persist, I love my friends dearly. And so as 
 the season comes round, I am depressed. 
 Some summer I may even be driven to go to 
 Europe myself I 
 
The Novelist s Choice 
 
 FOR a number of years, in my desultory novel- 
 reading, I have found myself occasionally 
 dropping into a particular line of speculation. 
 As I re-read "The Mill on the Floss," for in 
 stance, I fall to wondering what kind of story 
 it would have made if George Eliot had 
 allowed Tom to tell it. He would have done 
 it bluntly, honestly, without condoning his 
 own faults and mistakes, we may be sure; but 
 also, we may be equally sure, without con 
 doning Maggie s. We should probably have 
 been left in the dark as to the motiving of her 
 acts. Stephen Guest would have fared rather 
 badly, Philip Wakem even worse, and Mrs. 
 Tulliver and Sister Glegg and Sister Pullet 
 would hardly have come in as characters at 
 all, since Tom had none of the special sort of 
 humorous sense to which they appeal. Very 
 likely Tom would have failed as signally to 
 do justice to his own character as to Maggie s 
 - his powers were not in the line of conscious 
 self-portrayal. 
 
156 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 The more I speculate about this, the more 
 amused and interested I am. And when, 
 after it, I come back to the real story, as it 
 was actually written, I find myself keener 
 to appreciate the things which I discover 
 there the embodied result of the novelist s 
 choice to tell her story as she did. and not 
 otherwise. 
 
 I have sometimes tried "Henry Esmond" 
 in the same way. I fancy it told, for example, 
 through the letters or the diary of Beatrix. 
 What a stormy recital it would be! Frag 
 mentary, capricious, concealing more than it 
 revealed, for Beatrix would never have been 
 what is called simply honest, even with her 
 self. And yet, whatever she wrote, however 
 she posed, whatever tricks of the spirit she 
 perpetrated, I fancy we could have guessed at 
 her story and her nature in spite of herself. 
 The more one thinks of it, the more one longs 
 for a chance to try, anyhow to have at 
 those letters or that diary. And then one 
 remembers, to be sure! there are no letters, 
 there is no diary; we were only supposing. 
 What a pity! Yet could we, for their sakes, 
 give up the story as it is? 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 157 
 
 Or, again, imagine the story told in the 
 modern, dramatic way: not by any character 
 acting as narrator, not by the author as 
 author, not by anybody self-confessed, but 
 allowed to enact itself upon the pages of the 
 book as upon a stage a few stage-directions 
 supplied in place of scenery and real action, 
 each participant speaking in turn, and the 
 reader left to orient himself as he can. Fancy 
 the beginning: 
 
 " My name is Henry Esmond." 
 
 " His name is Henry Esmond, sure enough," 
 said Mrs. Worksop. 
 
 " So this is the little priest," said Lord 
 Castlewood. " Welcome, kinsman." 
 
 "He is saying his prayers to Mamma!" 
 said little Beatrix. 
 
 But no, don t fancy it! Let us stop right 
 here, and go back to those leisurely and delib 
 erate first chapters as they now stand. Al 
 ready one feels a little ashamed of having 
 allowed one s self to lay such unhallowed 
 hands upon the tale, and one determines to 
 cease experimenting, at least upon Henry 
 Esmond, and leave him to the undisputed 
 possession of his grave, decorous, and alto- 
 
158 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 gether delightful narrative. And yet, this 
 habit of speculation once formed, one is 
 tempted ever afresh to its indulgence 
 tempted often at the most unexpected point: 
 as I read over the pretty drama of "Romeo 
 and Juliet," I am by some freak of the mind 
 led to wonder what their story would sound 
 like, told by Juliet s nurse. 
 
 It seems curious that writers themselves 
 have not experimented in this way with their 
 own material. Browning, indeed, the king of 
 experimenters, did it once. But, except "The 
 Ring and the Book," I do not think of any 
 thing of the kind. And "The Ring and the 
 Book" is so much more than a study in story 
 telling that it is as well to leave it with this 
 passing mention. 
 
 Obviously, it makes a difference, this choice 
 of the novelist. It is, of course, only one of 
 the things that go to determining what a 
 novel will be like, but it is surely one. Thack 
 eray is always Thackeray, whether he chooses 
 to tell his tale through the mouth of one of his 
 characters or to step forward in his own per 
 son and talk frankly about his people as they 
 pass before him. He is still Thackeray, yet 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 159 
 
 there is a vast difference between the at 
 mosphere of "Esmond," which gives us the 
 peaceful and deliberate reminiscences of an 
 old man, and the atmosphere of "Vanity 
 Fair," where the author is avowedly himself, 
 like a showman with his puppets. Perhaps it 
 was the choice of the novelist that produced 
 the difference, perhaps it was something in 
 herent in the two tales, as he regarded them, 
 that led to the choice. At all events, the 
 choice itself is worth thinking of. 
 
 The expedient of putting a story into the 
 mouth of one of the actors in it that is, the 
 autobiographical method has great anti 
 quity, being at least as old as the Odyssey. 
 Vernon Lee, in an interesting if whimsical 
 essay of hers on " Literary Construction," 
 maintains that it is essentially an expedient 
 of immaturity. "I have no doubt," she says, 
 "that most of the stories which we have all 
 written between the ages of fif teen and twenty 
 were either in the autobiographical or the 
 epistolary form . . . and altogether repro 
 duced, in their immaturity, the forms of an 
 immature period of novel-writing, just as 
 Darwinism tells us that the feet and legs of 
 
160 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 babies reproduce the feet and legs of mon 
 keys. For, difficult as it is to realize, the 
 apparently simplest form of construction is 
 by far the most difficult; and the straight 
 forward narrative of men and women s feel 
 ings and passions, of anything save their 
 merest outward acts the narrative which 
 makes the thing pass naturally before the 
 reader s mind is by far the most difficult, 
 as it is the most perfect." 
 
 Stevenson, whose powers as a story-teller 
 can hardly be called immature, yet averred 
 that it was the easiest way. He writes to 
 Edmund Gosse, " Yes, honestly, fiction is very 
 difficult. . . . And the difficulty of according 
 the narrative and the dialogue (in a work in 
 the third person) is extreme. That is one 
 reason out of half a dozen why I so often 
 prefer the first." 
 
 Evidently here he was thinking more of 
 style than of construction, and one would like 
 to know the rest of the half dozen reasons 
 why he preferred the first person for his sto 
 ries. Perhaps we can guess at some of them. 
 For the autobiographical form seems to settle 
 a good many other matters besides this one 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 161 
 
 of literary pitch. It prescribes in many ways 
 the point of view. The general attitude of the 
 actor-narrator toward the chain of events 
 which he relates, is predetermined by his own 
 part in those events. 
 
 But probably the strongest justification for 
 the form is that it carries with it a certain 
 air of genuineness. A man s own story has 
 a value as such, as the newspaper interview 
 testifies every day. It imposes upon us, in 
 spite of ourselves, a prepossession in favor of 
 its truth. Now, whatever else the novelist 
 may wish to do, he always, first of all, wishes 
 to create in his readers this illusion of reality. 
 He wants to have his story seem true. He 
 knows, indeed, that it is not true. We know 
 it is not true. He knows that we know. And 
 yet, he will spend months in dull research for 
 the sake of supplying his tale with certain 
 small earmarks of veracity that may, per 
 chance, trick the public into a moment of 
 doubt. He will furnish forth his story with 
 elaborate introductions and appendices, ac 
 counting for his own share, and the pub 
 lisher s share, in it, with the hope that he may 
 be able to persuade us, at least for half an 
 
162 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 hour, that he, the author, is really and truly 
 only the "interested friend" to whom the 
 papers were left; that he has really been only 
 the recipient of a dying confession, only the 
 discoverer of a long-hidden diary. And if he 
 succeeds, what triumph! Is there any one 
 who would be proof against the flattery im 
 plied in such inquiries as were aroused by 
 "Nancy Stair" as to the real genealogy of 
 the Stair family? 
 
 To this endeavor to make his story seem 
 like the narrative of actual occurrences the 
 novelist has been partly driven by the atti 
 tude of his readers. "Convincing" is the 
 critic s word now a novel must be " con 
 vincing." The word is modern, the attitude 
 which it connotes is modern. Not that read 
 ers of old did not find pleasure in giving them 
 selves up to the story-teller. But they gave 
 themselves up more easily than readers do 
 now. The old story-teller began his tale 
 smoothly enough: "There was once a beauti 
 ful girl, who had a cruel step-mother and two 
 wicked step-sisters." Very good. His listen 
 ers, with a habit of acquiescence, accepted at 
 once the beauty of the heroine, the cruelty 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 163 
 
 and wickedness of the others. For them the 
 tale was sufficiently convincing. Even the 
 fairy godmother passed unchallenged. Who 
 knew that fairy godmothers might not exist 
 somewhere? 
 
 But we have lost the habit of acquiescence. 
 We are proving all things, and we hold fast 
 to very little. We challenge, we scrutinize, 
 we dissect. We have opinions about the lim 
 its of the possible, the probable, and the inev 
 itable. And nothing really satisfies us but the 
 inevitable. 
 
 To make his tale seem inevitable, then, is 
 the author s ambition, and he is aware that 
 if he is to do this he cannot get to work in the 
 old manner. If he begins, "There was once a 
 beautiful girl, with a cruel step-mother and 
 two wicked " "Ah, wait!" says his reader, 
 "this will never do. Cruelty and wickedness 
 are easy words to say, but the things them 
 selves are not to be thus lightly denominated. 
 One must discriminate. How about the step 
 mother s point of view? In just what way 
 was she cruel? How did she become so? How 
 do you know she existed at all? She does not 
 seem to us a very real person. She is not con- 
 
164 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 vincing. I don t think I care to finish this 
 story." 
 
 The modern story-teller cannot help being 
 conscious of this attitude on the part of his 
 readers. Probably he has it himself, to some 
 extent, toward his own material. What won 
 der, then, if, aware of the effectiveness of the 
 expedient, he passes his story over to one of 
 his characters, and loads upon his shoulders 
 the burden of making it "convincing." 
 
 This seems, on the face of it, an easy way 
 out. It shifts responsibility from the author 
 to the hero, or whoever it is who is telling the 
 story. "How do I know? I know because I 
 was there. She was my step-mother." It is 
 the old reply of JSneas to Dido: "Quorum 
 pars magna fui." 
 
 And not merely an easy way out, but often 
 an excellent way. We have only to run over 
 a few titles, to realize the possibilities of the 
 autobiography as a literary form: "Henry 
 Esmond," " Robinson Crusoe," " Lorna 
 Doone," "Jane Eyre," " Kidnapped," " David 
 Balfour," "Peter Ibbetson," "Harry Rich 
 mond," "Joseph Vance," good books, 
 indeed ! 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 165 
 
 With such a list before us, it may seem 
 presumptuous to hint that the autobiogra 
 phical form has its limitations and its draw 
 backs. Yet I believe it has. For, first, there is 
 a danger in it arising from a fact inherent in 
 human nature: the fact that heroes and min 
 strels are not usually made of the same stuff. 
 One does things, the other tells about them. 
 The person whom adventures befall is not 
 necessarily the one who is best able to relate 
 them. It is not always so, of course. There 
 are rare beings who are born with the hero 
 and the minstrel soul bound together within 
 them the Odysseus and the JSneas souls. 
 For them it is very well. It was well for 
 Odysseus, in the hall of the Phseacians, and 
 for ^Eneas, in the court of Dido, to tell their 
 adventures. They were doubly gifted, for 
 action and for expression. But what if Achilles 
 had tried to tell his story? Or A j ax his? Poor, 
 inarticulate Ajax! There was plenty to tell, 
 but what a botch he would have made of it! 
 He is better off, he and Achilles too, in the 
 hands of Homer. 
 
 The race of the inarticulate has not yet 
 died out. It never will. But we would not 
 
166 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 wish to miss the telling of their stories because 
 it must be done by other lips than theirs. The 
 story of Quasimodo, the story of Tess, the 
 story of Dorothea Brooke, the story of Clara 
 Middleton, the story of Isabel Archer, these 
 are all, for various reasons, stories which could 
 never have come from the characters them 
 selves. Some of them, perhaps, could have 
 told, but never would have done so. Others 
 would, perhaps, but never could. Most of 
 them probably neither would nor could. And 
 we are glad, when we think about them, that 
 their authors did not force them to the con 
 fessional against their natures. 
 
 Authors are not always so considerate. I 
 have read autobiographical novels where the 
 pleasure of the story was continually clouded 
 by a feeling of protest that it should have 
 been told thus. David Balfour, in certain 
 parts of it, gives me this feeling. When he is 
 telling his adventures it is well enough, though 
 even there I should sometimes be glad if the 
 story could have been told quite directly and 
 simply by the author. I should like to know 
 how David looked now and then, as well as 
 what he did. And, of course, David was not 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 167 
 
 the kind of fellow who would ever know how 
 he looked; still less could he ever have written 
 it down as part of an account of his life. But 
 when it comes to his love affairs, and I find 
 him writing these down in some detail, I must 
 protest, "Oh, David! You know you never 
 would have told that!" And then I find my 
 self suddenly regarding David with suspicion. 
 I long to step into the story and pull his hair 
 and see if it is not, after all, only a wig to 
 pull his nose, and see if the mask does n t 
 come off, disclosing, not David at all, but 
 David s author, Stevenson. 
 
 Ah, there is the danger! The story must 
 be told, the secrets must be laid bare 
 secrets guarded not by big keys and heavy 
 boulders of rock, but by the walls of impene 
 trable reserve in our own human nature. If 
 they are not told, we are baffled and disap 
 pointed. If they are told, we are critical. It is 
 a dilemma. 
 
 Sometimes, indeed, the problem is success 
 fully met. In "Lorna Doone," for example, 
 John Ridd, plain John Ridd, telling his 
 own love story, manages to steer along the 
 narrow channel between too much reserve 
 
168 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 and too little. He loves Lorna, he is not 
 ashamed to confess that to all the world, but 
 as to what he says to Lorna about it, or what 
 she says to him, this is a matter which in 
 his opinion is nobody s business but his and 
 hers. And one can almost see the shy, yet 
 humorous half-smile and heightened color 
 with which he backs away from a love scene 
 and cannily edges round it, to take up the 
 narrative again further on. One could wish 
 that David Balfour had learned a lesson of 
 John. 
 
 Moreover, as I have already suggested in 
 the case of David, the autobiographical form 
 is unsatisfactory in another way. If, on the 
 one hand, it gives us too much of the hero- 
 autobiographer s private soul, so that we pray 
 for a little decent reserve, on the other hand, 
 it often gives us too little of his public face, 
 too little of the commonplace externals of his 
 personality. And here again the trouble arises 
 from certain universal facts of human experi 
 ence. For we are accustomed to get at people 
 from the outside. We look at their faces, we 
 watch them walk, we listen to their voices, 
 we notice what clothes they wear and how 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 169 
 
 they wear them, we regard them in their 
 goings-out and their comings-in, and after a 
 while we arrive, or think we arrive, at a cer 
 tain intimacy with what we call their souls. 
 We say we know them. Perhaps we do, and 
 perhaps we don t, but at any rate, such knowl 
 edge as we have is reached in this way. It is 
 the way we are accustomed to; we know how 
 to value and allow for its data, how to dis 
 count its deceptions perhaps we even like 
 its baffling reserves. 
 
 Now, in the autobiographical novel, all this 
 is reversed: instead of approaching the hero 
 from the outside, we approach him from the 
 inside. Instead of looking into his eyes, we 
 look out of them. In a sense, doubtless, we 
 know him better than if we had approached 
 him through the ordinary channels, but in 
 another sense we do not know him so well. 
 It is too much like the way we know or 
 rather the way we fail to know ourselves. 
 And so, in the autobiographical novel one 
 sometimes grows a little tired of looking from 
 within, out. One longs to stand off and get a 
 good plain view of the hero s nose, and his 
 eyes. One wants to see him walk down the 
 
170 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 street, instead of walking down the street in 
 side him. 
 
 Authors realize this, at least by flashes, and 
 they try to gratify us, sometimes in very 
 amusing ways., Here is Marcelle Tinayre, for 
 example, in "Helle," which is the autobiog 
 raphy of a young girl. She is beautiful, 
 she manages to imply that without involving 
 herself in any breach of decorum, but she 
 must in some way be described more fully. 
 So the author makes her stand before a mirror 
 in her ball-gown and set down what she sees 
 there. The ruse is obvious. The action, which 
 would have been natural indeed inevitable 
 for a person like Marie Bashkirtseff, is for 
 Helle entirely out of character. But what 
 would you have? The reader must be told 
 what she looked like. 
 
 On the other hand, such an expedient is 
 sometimes entirely successful. There is a 
 scene in "Jane Eyre," where Jane, in a frenzy 
 of mingled jealousy and self-martyrdom, sets 
 herself down before her mirror and paints 
 with remorseless fidelity her own plain face, 
 then paints from memory a portrait of the 
 beautiful lady whom she imagines to be her 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 171 
 
 rival in the affections of Rochester. The 
 action is perfectly natural. I believe Jane 
 was always looking in the glass, not because 
 she admired herself, but because she did not. 
 And this pricking consciousness of her own 
 appearance pervades the whole narrative, so 
 that one has in its perusal very little of this 
 sense that I have been speaking of, of viewing 
 the hero entirely from within. 
 
 This could be achieved in the fictitious 
 autobiography of Jane, just as it was in the 
 real autobiography of Marie Bashkirtseff ; but 
 there are types of women with whom it could 
 not be done women like Dorothea Brooke 
 or Clara Middleton. Clara, struggling hope 
 less in the net of circumstance, yet flashing 
 keen lights on the people about her, could 
 never turn such light on herself. She was 
 unaware of her own physical loveliness, 
 her walk, her hair as it curled about her ears 
 and neck. Call such things trifling and exter 
 nal if you will, yet it is through such trifling 
 externals that some of our deepest and most 
 instinctive impressions arise. 
 
 But if self -portraiture is not natural to all 
 women, still less is it so to most men. In 
 
172 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 Locke s "Simon the Jester," for example, we 
 find our hero writing thus: "I looked at him 
 and smiled, perhaps a little wearily. One can 
 always command one s eyes, but one s lips get 
 sometimes out of control. He could not have 
 noticed my lips, however." Instantly we de 
 tect the note of falseness here. Such a man 
 would not have carefully written down the 
 fact that he smiled wearily, and that his friend 
 did not notice his lips. Oscar Wilde would 
 have been aware of such a fact about himself, 
 and when in "Dorian Grey" he makes his 
 hero run to the mirror to catch his own ex 
 pression before it fades, we do not challenge 
 it, though we may perhaps question whether 
 Dorian Grey was worth writing about at all. 
 But we do not expect such things from Simon 
 de Gex we do not expect such things from 
 most men. Of course the fact was, that the 
 author of Simon wanted us to know that 
 Simon s smile was a weary one, and no way 
 of making this clear occurred to him, except 
 that of having Simon himself admit that he 
 smiled wearily. This little passage is not a 
 momentary slip. It is typical of the whole 
 book, which might be used as an illustration 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 173 
 
 of the way in which an unfortunate method of 
 telling the story acts as a handicap from be 
 ginning to end. With a rather unusual and 
 very interesting situation to set forth, the 
 author has thrown away his chance of making 
 it seem " inevitable " by setting up at the 
 start a postulate in which we can never ac 
 quiesce the postulate of Simon de Gex 
 writing himself up. 
 
 Clearly, description of the hero by himself 
 is dangerous tactics. Yet, where it is not 
 attempted, we miss it. The weakness of the 
 latter part of De Morgan s "Joseph Vance" 
 is, I believe, due not entirely to the fact that 
 his father died out of the story, but also, 
 among other things, to the fact that Joseph 
 himself, being grown-up, could no longer 
 regard himself impersonally enough to make 
 his personality vivid to us. And readers of 
 the book, if they are at all like me, carry 
 away from it a vivid picture of Joseph Vance 
 the boy, but a very pale picture of Joseph 
 Vance the man. 
 
 It is, perhaps, the endeavor to escape from 
 some of these pitfalls that beset the auto 
 biographical form, and yet to profit by its 
 
174 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 opportunities, which leads writers to try 
 another expedient that is, to let the story 
 be told, not by the hero, but by the hero s 
 friend. "The Beloved Vagabond" is done in 
 this way, and very cleverly done. Clearly, it 
 could never have been told by the Vagabond 
 himself. An outside view of him was indis 
 pensable. He could never, without stepping 
 entirely out of his own character, have set 
 forth, or even dimly suggested, the portrait 
 of himself, of his whole whimsical, lovable 
 personality, as it is set forth by his young 
 friend and protege, the street waif, little 
 Asticot. 
 
 The objection to this method is, that the 
 teller of the story, not having the hero s deci 
 sive influence on the action, is apt to fade into 
 a nonentity, a shadowy person, so that one 
 scarcely remembers him. In "The Beloved 
 Vagabond" this is not true of the first part of 
 the book. There, as in "Joseph Vance," the 
 narrator is looking back upon his own child- 
 self. But as little Asticot grows up, and be 
 comes the narrator of his patron s story, he 
 himself recedes, we have no clear picture of 
 him. 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 175 
 
 Similarly in "The Newcomcs," the nar 
 rator-friend keeps himself so entirely in the 
 background that I fancy many of us have not 
 realized at all that the story is actually told 
 by one of the characters, and not by Thack 
 eray himself. And I think we may all admit 
 that in this volume Pendennis, considered 
 simply as the narrator of the Newcornes his 
 tory, is very close to a nonentity. 
 
 But if a nonentity, why there at all? If 
 the actor-narrator pales to a mere literary 
 convention, what is there to gain by keeping 
 him? 
 
 Very little to gain, and something to lose. 
 For, whether hero or hero s friend, the teller 
 of the story, once committed to his task of 
 accounting for himself, and for his possession 
 of all the facts of the narrative, cannot lay 
 it down. He must keep on accounting for 
 himself. Every time he narrates an event of 
 which he was not himself an eye-witness, he 
 must explain how he found out about it. If 
 he fails to do this satisfactorily, the entire 
 fabric of probability so carefully built up by 
 the author topples and falls. How does little 
 Asticot know that the English lady is his 
 
176 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 master s old love? How does he know there 
 was an old love at all? He must account for it 
 and does. He saw some old letters, some 
 verses, he put two and two together. We 
 are satisfied this time, but the question may 
 arise again, and we shall need to be satisfied 
 again. 
 
 Pendennis, conscious of this necessity of 
 accounting for his information, was not so 
 inclined to meet it in this way. He was aware 
 that he could never follow the rules of the 
 game if he interpreted them too strictly, and 
 so made a sort of general confession, a blanket 
 apology, which is worth quoting at length 
 because it so clearly sets forth the difficulties 
 which beset the actor-narrator: 
 
 "In the present volumes, where dialogues 
 are written down which the reporter could by 
 no possibility have heard, and where motives 
 are detected which the persons actuated by 
 them certainly never confided to the writer, 
 the public must, once for all, be warned that 
 the author s individual fancy very likely sup 
 plies much of the narrative; and that he 
 forms it as best he may, out of stray papers, 
 conversations reported to him, and his knowl- 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 177 
 
 edge, right or wrong, of the characters of the 
 persons engaged. And, as is the case with the 
 most orthodox histories, the writer s own 
 guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly 
 the same type as the most ascertained patent 
 facts. I fancy, for my part, that the speeches 
 attributed to Clive, the Colonel, and the rest 
 are as authentic as the orations in Sallust or 
 Livy, and only implore the truth-loving pub 
 lic to believe that incidents here told, and 
 which passed very probably without wit 
 nesses, were either confided to me subse 
 quently as compiler of this biography, or are 
 of such a nature that they must have hap 
 pened from what we know happened after. 
 For example, when you read such words as 
 4 que Romanus on a battered Roman stone, 
 your profound antiquarian knowledge enables 
 you to assert that Senatus Populus was 
 also inscribed there at some time or other. 
 . . . You tell your tales as you can, and state 
 the facts as you think they must have been. 
 In this manner Mr. James, Titus Livius, 
 Sheriff Alison, Robinson Crusoe, and all 
 historians proceeded. Blunders there must 
 be in the best of these narratives, and more 
 
178 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 asserted than they can possibly know or 
 vouch for." 
 
 There are very few heroes, or hero s friends, 
 who have taken such liberties, but then few 
 have told so good a story as "The Newcomes." 
 I fancy we are ready to grant Mr. Pendennis 
 all the privileges he demands, yet I cannot 
 help feeling that Thackeray set him rather 
 too hard a task a task which, indeed, he 
 might better have assumed himself. In fact, 
 I have this feeling about many of the novels 
 cast in the autobiographical form. They may 
 be good stories as they are, but they might, I 
 suspect, have been just a little better if the 
 author had not limited his own powers by 
 bundling himself up in the clothes and the 
 mask and the wig of one of the characters. 
 I do not feel this about all such novels. Some 
 of them seem to me just right as they are, 
 and after any number of experiments with 
 them fancying them re- written in this way 
 and that I come back to the author s 
 choice as the best. This is the case with 
 "Lorna Doone" and "Henry Esmond" and 
 "Jane Eyre " and "Kidnapped" and "Treas 
 ure Island" and "Joseph Vance." 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 179 
 
 It seems like a curious company of books 
 to be named in one sentence. Yet, after all, 
 they are of only two kinds: stories of inner 
 experience, told by an introspective hero; and 
 stories of adventure, told by a hero of naive 
 temperament with a clear grip on the prac 
 tical in life. That is, in each case, the hero is 
 fitted to his task. John Ridd could not have 
 written Esmond s story nor Esmond John 
 Ridd s, but John Ridd was perfectly capable 
 of writing his own, and Esmond his. Jane 
 Eyre s story, told by any one but herself, 
 would lose something of its value. Told by 
 herself, it is wonderfully impressive as a hu 
 man document. The life she portrays could 
 not, perhaps, have been what she saw it, but 
 this is how she actually did see it. There never 
 was a man like Mr. Rochester, perhaps. But 
 nobody cares about that. What we are con 
 cerned with is her idea of Mr. Rochester. And 
 we are convinced that there was a woman 
 who felt about a man what she felt about 
 Mr. Rochester. The whole book is, in fact, 
 lyric. 
 
 It is the record of a temperament buffeted 
 about by the impact of people and circum- 
 
180 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 stance, which are viewed only as they affect 
 this temperament. Whether you like that 
 kind of temperament or not is another mat 
 ter. Given the subject, the book rings true, 
 and the lyric form was undoubtedly the best 
 for it. 
 
 In his search for the "inevitable," then, 
 the writer has, after all, nothing to gain by 
 resorting to the expedient of the actor-narra 
 tor, unless this actor-narrator is himself inev 
 itable, unless his part as teller of the story 
 fits him so perfectly as to require no apology. 
 This will hardly be the case except with a 
 very limited class of adventure stories, and 
 with a larger class of stories which are the 
 records of an introspective nature. With 
 these exceptions, he usually does better if he 
 works with free hands, if, taking as his own 
 the apology of Pendennis, he quietly supplies 
 the missing words of the inscription, tells his 
 tales as he can, and states the facts as he 
 thinks they must have been. And if his under 
 standing of life be deep enough, he will create 
 in us the illusion of reality just as surely as if 
 he had sought to establish it by letters and 
 diaries. 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 181 
 
 Even when freed from a certain kind of 
 accountability, he need not necessarily take 
 any more liberties with his characters than 
 the hero would have done. "Pride and Preju 
 dice," for example, is told almost as Elizabeth 
 would have told it herself if she had written 
 it. Hardly any information is given but what 
 she knew, and Darcy s character is not fully 
 cleared up until it is cleared in her eyes. In 
 the "Three Musketeers" the story is told as 
 D Artagnan might have told it. What is a 
 mystery to him remains a mystery to the 
 reader. His estimate of the other characters 
 dominates the story. Yet, not being told by 
 him, but by an irresponsible author, the tale 
 is carried on with a lightness and freedom 
 that D Artagnan himself, writing in charac 
 ter, could hardly have achieved. Ho wells, in 
 "The Rise of Silas Lapham," tells the story 
 from the standpoint of Mr. Lapham, or, 
 now and then, from that of Mrs. Lapham. 
 We are allowed to follow, to some extent, 
 the workings of their minds, but their two 
 daughters are treated externally. As we 
 follow their fortunes and try to predict the 
 outcome, we have little more to go upon 
 
182 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 than their parents had. This is Howells s 
 usual method, and it is the method of much 
 modern writing. 
 
 Mr. James, in "The Other House," carries 
 the external point of view to such an extreme 
 that at the end of the book, when the evidence 
 is all in, there is still room for question, among 
 intelligent people, as to what really happened ; 
 and even more room for disagreement as to 
 what the motives of the characters were. 
 Mr. James also furnishes us the best example 
 I can think of, of the other extreme, where the 
 treatment is exclusively internal. In a curi 
 ous piece of writing, "In the Cage," which I 
 cannot help thinking was a bit of pure experi 
 menting, he attempts to set forth the spiritual 
 states of a girl telegrapher states of which 
 she herself was only dimly aware, impulses 
 which never reached consciousness, feelings 
 which she never more than half confessed, 
 even to herself. 
 
 Between these two extremes most of the 
 best story-telling is done. Authors do not 
 often openly assume omniscience: they treat 
 their material from the standpoint of an 
 impartial witness. Yet, when omniscience is 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 183 
 
 needed to explain character and interpret 
 motive, 
 
 " All that the world s coarse thumb 
 And finger failed to plumb, " 
 
 it is assumed without apology, and the reader 
 grants it without demur. If we think of parts 
 of "Vanity Fair" and "Middlemarch" and 
 "The Mill on the Floss," of "Richard 
 Feverel" and "The Portrait of a Lady," of 
 "Somehow Good" and "Tess," and many 
 others, we realize what we should be giving 
 up if writers had tied themselves down to the 
 autobiographical form. The more one thinks 
 of it, the more one feels sure that, tempting 
 as it is, its restrictions outweigh its oppor 
 tunities. 
 
 And yet one comes back to "Henry Es 
 mond," and one remembers "Joseph Vance," 
 and one cannot be satisfied to end the matter 
 in a hard judgment like that. For there is a 
 certain quality in these stories which endears 
 them to us in a peculiar way, and which, I 
 believe, is specially fostered by the autobio 
 graphical form in which they are cast. There 
 is a certain type of story with this quality 
 
184 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 potentially inherent in it, which no other 
 manner of telling could so well bring out. It 
 is a story like "Henry Esmond/ the story of 
 a long life, told as by one who has lived it, 
 while he rests, near its end, and looks back. 
 
 The love of reminiscence is deep-rooted in 
 us. We do not need to have length of years in 
 order to possess it. All we need to have is a 
 consciousness of the past as past. Some years 
 ago, a little friend of mine, then four years 
 old, attained a new phrase: "Don t you re 
 member?" I say "attained," because it was 
 evident that she had not only enlarged her 
 field of expression by a new word, but that 
 she had enlarged her field of experience by 
 a new sensation, the sensation of reminis 
 cence. For the phrase, "Don t you remem 
 ber?" always ushered in a story out of her 
 small past, some event of the preceding win 
 ter or summer, some glimpse of history in 
 which she had been actor or witness. It was 
 always uttered with shining eyes and a flush 
 of delight, which deepened if I was able to 
 catch her reminiscence and recognize and en 
 joy it with her. Yet the things remembered 
 were very simple, a drive, a walk, a kitten, 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 185 
 
 a child watering his garden or falling down. 
 The pleasure came, clearly, not from the orig 
 inal quality of the experience, but from the 
 very act of remembering. She was tasting the 
 pure pleasure of reminiscence. Watching her, 
 I fell to wondering what was the precious 
 quality of this pleasure whose flavor she was 
 beginning to taste. 
 
 The charm of memory lies, I think, in the 
 quality which it gives things, at once of inti 
 macy and remoteness. The fascination to us 
 of recalling our past selves, our former sur 
 roundings, lies in our sense that they are ab 
 solutely known to us, yet absolutely out of our 
 reach. We can recall places, houses, rooms, 
 until every detail lives again. We can turn 
 from one thing to another and, as we look at 
 each, lo, it is there! It has a reality more 
 poignant than the hand that we touch or the 
 flower that we smell. Sometimes, it is true, 
 present experiences, even as they occur, have 
 something of this quality. They do not need 
 to recede into the past to gain this glamour. 
 Certain places have it: cathedrals sometimes, 
 and still lakes. Certain things foster it: fire 
 light, and silence, and the steady fall of rain. 
 
186 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 Certain moments give birth to it: the lumin 
 ous pause between sundown and dusk, after 
 noon with its slant of light through deep grass 
 or across a quiet river. This, I fancy, was what 
 Tennyson was thinking of when he called the 
 lotus land the land "wherein it seemed al 
 ways afternoon." In that land these magic 
 moments were prolonged, and thus it became 
 the land of reminiscence. 
 
 My little friend was a thought too young, 
 perhaps, to have entered into this land. It is 
 a place where we do not expect to meet many 
 children. Girls in their twenties sometimes 
 slip in, when they have time, and boys in their 
 teens, and then again, well, perhaps, boys 
 in their fifties. Indeed the forties and fifties 
 are the usual time for a first real sojourn in 
 these pleasant meadows. One looks over the 
 hedge, or slips through a gap, half by acci 
 dent, and finding it fair within, one comes 
 back. And again one comes back, and each 
 time one stays longer and wanders farther. 
 And as one grows to know it better, one dis 
 covers that there is more than a meadow be 
 yond the hedge. There are many meadows, 
 and great woods and rivers and cities. And 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 187 
 
 the delight of it is, that everything there is 
 like something one has seen before, only love 
 lier. For, just as still water interprets and 
 recreates the life it reflects, so in the land of 
 memory life is rendered again with a tender 
 ness that is a most precious kind of truth. 
 
 It is not to every one, nor to any one at all 
 times, that the mood of reminiscence comes 
 in its perfection. Often its rarer pleasures are 
 obscured by a pain that is no necessary part 
 of its quality, of tener they are never given the 
 chance to reveal themselves. They require for 
 their enjoyment a contemplative spirit, a soul 
 at leisure, that the waters of memory may be 
 still and clear, mirroring the images of things 
 now plainly, line for line, now blurred and 
 softened by light winds of oblivion that make 
 the vision all the more lovely. 
 
 But this is not a contemplative age, nor is 
 leisure of spirit its chief characteristic. There 
 is little encouragement given to the reminis 
 cent mood, either in literature or in life. Lit 
 erary endeavor is in the direction of concise 
 ness and swiftness. Its motto is Stevenson s : 
 "War to the adjective! Death to the optic 
 nerve ! " 
 
188 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 This is very good. But there is another 
 kind of thing that is good, too: the kind of 
 thing that comes with the brooding vision, 
 with the remoteness that permits a broader 
 focus and a greater deliberateness of treat 
 ment, that finds expression in abundance of 
 delicately-wrought detail. This it is which, for 
 lack of a better name, I am calling the rem 
 iniscent manner. One meets it in some poetry, 
 and now and then in such prose as Richard 
 Jefferies s. Its most complete and exquisite 
 embodiment is surely in that rare and perfect 
 prose lyric, Walter Pater s "Child in the 
 House." One might expect to find it most of 
 all in the real autobiography, since this is the 
 avowed form of reminiscence. But they are 
 disappointing, these genuine autobiographers. 
 For one thing, they are hampered by their 
 facts. Stevenson was quite right when he said 
 that a finished biography was " not nearly so 
 finished as quite a rotten novel"; and not only 
 in finish but in other ways it is at a disadvan 
 tage compared with fiction. Sometimes its 
 writers may have mistaken notions of their 
 obligation to suppress their own personali 
 ties; they must always have instincts of re- 
 
THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 189 
 
 serve which we cannot fail to understand. At 
 all events, they do not wander in the fields of 
 reminiscence with the free step and the joyous 
 abandon that we could desire. Yet, even so, 
 the rule holds that we have noticed with re 
 gard to novels : the chapters dealing with their 
 "early years" often possess a charm that is 
 lacking in the rest of the narrative. For there 
 is a power in the long backward look that 
 inevitably transfigures. 
 
 And so it is often to the make-believe auto 
 biographies that we turn for something that 
 is in its essence not make-believe at all, but 
 a reality of experience. The satisfaction that 
 they give is not of a kind to be justified or 
 made clear by reading sample passages. It is 
 born of the writer s attitude, which through 
 intimacy with him we come to share. Merely 
 to think of "Henry Esmond" is often enough 
 to throw one into a mood of contemplative 
 reminiscence. A lover of "Joseph Vance" has 
 but to open the book anywhere for a moment 
 and the color of his thought is changed he 
 is captured by this charm of the long back 
 ward look and the brooding vision. And if 
 through the magic of the mood we are floated 
 
190 THE NOVELIST S CHOICE 
 
 a little aside from the remorseless current of 
 immediate living, yet the realities which we 
 thus come to feel are indeed realities, whose 
 recognition we deeply crave, and to whose 
 expression in literature we give eager and 
 loving welcome. , 
 
The Literary Uses of Experience 
 
 "DiD you enjoy it very much?" asked a lady 
 of a little girl whom she met coming away 
 from an entertainment. "Yes," answered the 
 child, but there was a note of reservation in 
 her voice. Then she threw back her head half 
 defiantly and added, "But don t you think 
 it s hard that I can never go to anything with 
 out having to go home and write an account of 
 it afterwards? " Hard, indeed! And yet harder 
 that the tyrant who imposed the requirement 
 happened to be the child s mother one 
 of those overtrained and overanxious people 
 who continue to bring the higher educa 
 tion of women into disrepute. Of course, our 
 sympathies are all with the little girl. We 
 recognize that her protest was a sign, not of 
 naughtiness, but of health. There was some 
 thing wrong about this continual exploiting of 
 immediate experience, and she knew it and 
 rebelled against it. The little incident has 
 lain in my mind for years, serving as a nucleus 
 round which ruminating thoughts have gath- 
 
192 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 ered regarding the whole subject of the lit 
 erary uses of experience. 
 
 The writer of fiction, if he is at once sensi 
 tive and conscientious, must often find him 
 self in a dilemma. He is urged to "write out 
 of his own experience," since otherwise his 
 work will not ring true. Look at Jane Austen, 
 he is told, sitting quiet and feminine under her 
 lamp and writing her tales of the little every 
 day doings of little everyday folk! Behold her, 
 even refusing to undertake the great histori 
 cal romance urged upon her by Royalty itself, 
 because it "fell outside her experience." Here 
 is a model for all young writers. Very well. 
 The obedient artist turns him to the Me about 
 him, and, sure enough, there is indeed plenty 
 of material. Here is an aunt who, considered 
 as a "character," is ripe to be picked and set 
 in a book. Here is a sister-in-law, whose ex 
 periences with her servants, literally set down, 
 would make a most readable and instructive 
 set of papers for some woman s journal. Or, 
 in sterner vein, here is a brother or a friend 
 whose business experience or whose love- 
 affair offers a tempting subject. Finally, the 
 writer realizes that in his own life he has only 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 193 
 
 to put forth his hand and take what he needs. 
 Yes, for once the general voice is speaking 
 the truth: his material does, indeed, lie close 
 about him. 
 
 Suppose, then, he takes it, uses it. We 
 know very well what happens: "Have you 
 read that last thing by young Bellerophon? 
 The one about the Lady and the Cook? Of 
 course we all know who it is he means she 
 simply can t keep a cook it s the scandal 
 of the street, the number she has in a month. 
 But I don t think that gives him any right 
 you know what I mean? " If it is his own ex 
 perience he has used, the results are different, 
 but no better: "You saw that story of his? 
 Yes it is interesting. I suppose you knew 
 it was his own experience yes, he went all 
 through that a few years ago oh, he s all 
 right now, but his family felt terribly at the 
 time, and I could n t help wondering how 
 they d like to see it all sort of spread out 
 in print this way." 
 
 Has it then always been so? Did Eurip- 
 ides s contemporaries look askance at him 
 because, under the thin disguise of Clytem- 
 nestra, he had written up a sister-in-law? Did 
 
194 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 those who listened to Sappho s lyrics shudder 
 a little and murmur, "Beautiful, of course, 
 but how could she?" Did Horace s ac 
 quaintance raise their eyebrows over some of 
 the personalities in the odes? And did Ca 
 tullus s pretty little lady wish he had not 
 coined her and her pet bird into verse? We 
 cannot tell. Time has wiped out the original 
 material, whatever it was, and left only the 
 artistic rendering. 
 
 About our contemporaries, however, one 
 hears persistent rumors : here is one composing 
 a poem on his son s death even before the 
 burial, and handing it to a friend for possible 
 publication. Here is another using the love- 
 affairs of his friends quite recognizably 
 to make his plots. Here is another setting one 
 of our centers of social service aflame with 
 indignation because she had, in their opinion, 
 written them up. Here is a New England 
 town boiling over with resentment because 
 one to whom they had shown hospitality 
 had rewarded them by "putting them into a 
 book." I saw recently a newspaper notice of 
 a suit brought by a man against his wife be 
 cause, as he alleged, her latest novel made use 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 195 
 
 of their life together in such a way as to re 
 flect unpleasantly on his character. 
 
 Whether in these and other cases the com 
 plainants are justified, it is neither possible 
 nor necessary to consider. The moral ques 
 tion involved in the use of real life is so com 
 plex that each instance would have to be 
 handled separately. It was once, they say, 
 decided that a man might sniff the odors of 
 another man s dinner without having to pay 
 for it, but whether he may bottle the aroma of 
 another man s life while it is yet hot, for the 
 purpose of serving it again, perhaps cold or 
 lukewarm, to the general public, is quite an 
 other matter. It is at least clear that the use 
 of experience may be fraught with perplexity 
 for the writer. There is a curiously frank ac 
 knowledgment of this in a short story by Mrs. 
 Wharton, called "Copy." It represents two 
 authors, a man and a woman, who had once 
 been in love with each other, meeting after 
 the lapse of years. Each has the other s old 
 love-letters, and each suddenly realizes what 
 wonderful "copy" these would make. There 
 is much skillful and intricate fencing between 
 them, but at last, moved by a scarcely ac- 
 
196 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 knowledged reverence for the past, by some 
 obscure impulse of loyalty to it, they burn all 
 the letters. The story may serve as a reminder 
 that, whereas we are apt to know the cases 
 where writers have yielded to temptation, 
 if temptation it be, we do not know the 
 cases where they have resisted. 
 
 But such recognition by authors themselves 
 of the moral problems involved seems to be 
 rather rare. In general, though readers may 
 question or condemn, the writer himself is 
 likely to be unconscious of offense. I met an 
 instance of this once when I was thrown for a 
 short time with a writer of stories. She had 
 told me a good deal about her life at a certain 
 period several years before, and among other 
 matters had mentioned a teapot of delicate 
 workmanship, and how it happened to get 
 broken. Later, reading her newest book, I 
 came upon the incident of the teapot. As I 
 went on, I noticed other correspondences with 
 what I knew to be fact. I was interested, and 
 one day I brought the thing up. "It gives a 
 good deal of your life in Rouen that winter, 
 does n t it?" I said, innocent of offense. In 
 stantly her color flamed and her eyes showed 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 197 
 
 deep annoyance. She took me up quickly: 
 "It has nothing whatever to do with my life 
 there. How could you have supposed that?" 
 Naturally, I dropped the matter, but, that 
 being my first close encounter with the artis 
 tic temperament, I was very much puzzled. 
 There was no doubting her sincerity, but 
 there was also no doubting the fact that her 
 life of that winter had got into her book. 
 
 Again, a young girl, just out of college, 
 wrote her first novel. Her college friends read 
 it with consternation. " But," they exclaimed, 
 "this is Anna herself! This is Anna s step 
 mother! This is just what did happen that 
 time when her father died! This is not a 
 novel, it is a diary! Anna is going too far." 
 But two years later Anna wrote another novel, 
 containing more shocks for her friends. Here, 
 they claimed, was Anna s engagement and 
 marriage. Here was Anna s husband. Here 
 were her experiences at the birth of her child. 
 They approached her about it. What satis 
 faction did they get? Just as little as I got in 
 the teapot incident. Anna absolutely denied 
 any connection between her novel and her 
 own life, and Anna was truth itself. At the 
 
198 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 same time, Anna, speaking as an artist, ex 
 cathedra, said firmly, that if anything in her 
 life should be needed for the artistic com 
 pleteness of her literary work, she would not 
 hesitate to use it, art being in a realm so much 
 higher than one s personal feelings. 
 
 From all this, it is obvious enough that 
 something happens to the artist, while he is 
 artist, which imposes on him standards dif 
 ferent from ours different even from his 
 own when he is not in the artistic mood. So 
 that although as ordinary man in ordinary 
 intercourse he may, for example, be a most 
 reserved person, who would find it easier to 
 cut out his own heart and slice it up for his 
 friends than to cull out bits of his deepest life 
 and serve them up in conversation, yet on the 
 printed page we may find him doing something 
 very much like this exploiting in luminous 
 paragraphs moods and feelings which to most 
 of us seem too deep-lying to be touched upon, 
 save by allusive implication, even with our 
 most beloved friends. I have read articles in 
 the magazines that made me uncomfortable, 
 not because they were shocking on the few 
 lines along which one is conventionally sup- 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 199 
 
 posed to be shocked, but because they seemed 
 to me to involve such crude exposure of the 
 soul as nothing but hysteria could excuse. A 
 friend of mine, trying to read a certain essay 
 if one may apply the term to a ten-page 
 prose lyric expressing the author s personal 
 mood suddenly threw it down, exclaiming, 
 "This is too painful it s raw! It s bleed 
 ing!" At first glance, one is inclined to put 
 such writers in the class with a certain little 
 girl I knew, who climbed up into her mother s 
 lap and said, with more than a suggestion of 
 gloating anticipation, "Now, mother, let s 
 talk about my faults!" But is it perhaps we 
 who are wrong? Is our vaunted New Eng 
 land reserve, after all, at fault? Are these 
 writers showing us the way, and is there in the 
 future to be no reserve in life as there is, 
 apparently, for them, none in art? Or are we 
 trying to reconcile two different worlds when 
 we allow ourselves to be troubled by the art 
 ist s intimacy of revelation? Are we shrink 
 ing from the spiritual nude in art as some peo 
 ple still shrink from the physical nude, merely 
 because our artistic perceptions have been 
 incompletely developed? 
 
200 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 These are questions which I am better pre 
 pared to ask than to answer, yet a sidelight 
 on them has seemed to corrie through my 
 meditations on memory. For years it has 
 beset me, this thought of the magic possessed 
 by memory. Where it touches it transforms. 
 Nearly everybody s memory is artistic, or at 
 any rate more nearly artistic than his im 
 mediate perceptions. Children are following 
 a true instinct when they beg for a story 
 "about something you remember, that hap 
 pened a long time ago," for the things that 
 we thus remember have a way of gathering 
 into themselves any flavor of poetic feeling 
 that may be in our nature. What is it, then, 
 that memory does? 
 
 For one thing, it selects. In our immedi 
 ate perceptions we often cannot see the 
 woods for the trees. Memory knows no such 
 trouble. Its trees are often blurred, but its 
 woods stretch far and blue, dark-shadowed 
 and full of meanings. For another, it dis 
 tances. Through it we escape from the im 
 portunity of practical issues. Memory knows 
 no practical issues; things are clear but we 
 cannot alter them, they are real but we can 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 201 
 
 neither seize nor avoid them. The light of 
 memory is a light that never was on sea or 
 land mellow and soft, full of tender inter 
 pretations, of delicate emphases, of exquisite 
 withdrawals. 
 
 If memory, then, is a kind of art, art is a 
 kind of memory. Like memory it selects, like 
 memory it interprets. It, too, has its emphases 
 and its withdrawals, and like memory it cre 
 ates its own remoteness. For to see beauty, 
 or, more broadly, to see the world with our 
 perceptions alert to its aesthetic significance, 
 we must withdraw from it, we must hold it 
 away from us. While we are seeing the beauty 
 of the lion who crouches in the jungle grass, 
 we do, in that instant of perception, ignore 
 the necessity for killing him, the danger of his 
 killing us. Wandering in a white sea-fog over 
 the marshes, we may, in a realization of its 
 weird loveliness, entirely lose our sense of the 
 menace it holds for us. These things take 
 upon themselves, for the moment, something 
 of the quality of memories. Was it, as Gil 
 bert Murray suggests, an acknowledgment of 
 this kinship between memory and art, that 
 the Greeks wove into the fiber of their philo- 
 
202 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 sophic myth, when they made Memory the 
 mother of the Muses? 
 
 But the relation is one of kinship only, not 
 of identity. For whereas the remoteness of 
 memory is unalterable and eternal, the re 
 moteness of our art-perceptions is apt to be 
 momentary, and in part at least a matter of 
 our own choice. While memory gently but 
 insistently urges us into something much like 
 the aesthetic attitude toward the treasures it 
 offers us, real life, with its lions, and its fog, 
 makes a more complex appeal. There is only 
 one way to take memory, but there are two 
 ways of taking life, the aesthetic and the prac 
 tical. Between these two there is a plenteous 
 lack of understanding. "What right," says 
 the practical man, "have you to stand around 
 just looking at lions and fog, when there is so 
 much that is really important to be done 
 about them?" He views everything in one of 
 two aspects: it is either a thing that he can do 
 something to, or it is a thing that can do 
 something to him. He thinks of things, not as 
 they are, but with reference to what he would 
 like to do with them or to them. Perception 
 for its own sake, expression for its own sake, 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 203 
 
 makes no appeal to him. Even memory he 
 forces into practical service, and allows its 
 other powers to atrophy. 
 
 At the other extreme is the aesthete, who 
 lives to taste the flavors of his perceptions and 
 to express them. "Lions and fog are so won 
 derful," he cries, "Look at them! Only look!" 
 And while the practical man calls him a 
 dreamer and a trifler and a shirk, he calls the 
 practical man a barbarian and a prude, who 
 is afraid to look at life as it really is. He 
 undergoes experience as all men must, but 
 almost in the moment of its occurrence it be 
 comes something apart from him, delicately 
 valued in the withdrawal of the aesthetic 
 mood. Thus life for him is continually under 
 going such a transmutation as for most of us 
 only the magic of memory can bring about. 
 While he is yet white with indignation, he 
 may say to himself, "This is anger." While 
 he loves, he realizes, "This is indeed passion." 
 Probably the two moods, of emotion and ap 
 preciation, are not really simultaneous, they 
 may alternate with lightning-like interplay. 
 But they seem to the observer, and even, 
 perhaps, to the possessor, like two streams 
 
204 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 flowing on together, like two runners racing 
 abreast, one oblivious of all but the mad mo 
 tion, the other with eyes, not on the goal, not 
 blind with the rush of it, but turned, deeply 
 observant, on the face of his companion. 
 
 It is, then, this capacity for immediate 
 aloofness from experience, this power of with 
 drawal into a realm closely resembling that of 
 memory, which makes possible for the artist 
 some of the things that shock us. But though 
 it may to some extent explain his state of 
 mind, it does not perhaps make us approve of 
 it any more heartily. For there is something 
 repellent to us in the ability thus to distance 
 experience, either one s own or another s. It 
 seems not quite warmly human. When 
 memory, through its distancing power, grad 
 ually and gently loosens the bonds of reserve, 
 we permit it, we even love it, because it is a 
 universal experience. But when the aesthetic 
 mood loosens these bonds, not gradually but 
 at once, by merely, as it were, taking a step 
 to one side, we shrink a little. An old man, we 
 feel, may say things of his youth that his 
 youth could not have said of itself even if it 
 had known them. 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 205 
 
 What we probably do not realize is that 
 people differ enormously in their rate of re 
 action to life. An experience which in one 
 person may after its occurrence not come to 
 full fruition in consciousness for months or 
 years, may in another pass through the same 
 phases in a few hours or even minutes. Yet 
 the lower rate is so much commoner that 
 there is a presumption against the immediate 
 coining of experience into artistic expression. 
 If, after a great bereavement, a man sits 
 down at once and embodies it in a poem, if, 
 when an overwhelming passion has barely 
 burned itself out, he proceeds to set it forth 
 in a novel, we find ourselves suspecting, even 
 before we examine the case, that either the 
 bereavement and the passion will prove to 
 have been not so overwhelming after all, or 
 else that their artistic rendering will prove 
 not really artistic. 
 
 This last point is one which needs some at 
 tention. So far I have been considering the 
 use of experience chiefly in its ethical aspects. 
 It is clear that the use of other people as ma 
 terial for art often exposes writers to sharp 
 and persistent criticism. I have suggested 
 
206 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 that there are reasons grounded in the proc 
 esses of the artistic temperament, why this 
 criticism is often not in the least understood 
 by the writers themselves. But, aside from 
 this question of the moral right of an artist to 
 make use of another s life, there is a second 
 question, namely, what is the effect of the 
 immediate use of experience on the art-prod 
 uct itself? Morals aside, does it tend to pro 
 duce good art? In the case of one s own life, 
 for instance, where it may be argued that one 
 has the moral right to use whatever one likes, 
 it might be of interest to inquire whether, 
 purely from the effect on the art-product, it 
 is not often a mistake to hurry forward into 
 expression. The continual tasting and label 
 ing of sensation tends to make sensation itself 
 a little thin, or at least not quite true. And 
 it is conceivable that lions and fog can never 
 be completely grasped, even aesthetically, 
 save by one who has first, in complete aban 
 donment to practical needs, fought the lions 
 and groped through the fog. Experience, 
 entered upon with a conscious aesthetic pur 
 pose, may be thus deprived of its last, keenest 
 quality, and even when not thus taken, it 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 207 
 
 may, if too hastily garnered into expression, 
 never reach, even as pure expression, the 
 mellowness of maturity that might otherwise 
 have been attained. 
 
 The pressure upon the artist urging him to 
 serve green fruit instead of waiting for it to 
 ripen, has, of course, never been so great as 
 now. But there is, I believe, pressure of an 
 other sort, far stronger and far more respect 
 able, arising naturally and inevitably out of 
 our present habits of thought. With the 
 enormous growth of scientific interest in 
 terest in facts, and faith in what they may 
 lead us to we have developed a reverence 
 for accuracy, patience, thoroughness, and dis 
 crimination. "Study your own thumb-nail 
 enough," Agassiz used to say, "and you will 
 find enough to occupy you for a lifetime." And 
 he was fond of testing young students by giv 
 ing them a cross-section of a broom-handle 
 and seeing what they made of it. This was 
 excellent. Applied to coral islands and earth 
 worms and infusoria and sea-urchins, it is 
 producing stupendous results. And now at 
 tention is being turned inward upon the hu 
 man spirit itself not, indeed, for the first 
 
208 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 time, but for the first time with just these 
 methods. Man himself, as Walter Bagehot 
 pointed out a generation ago, has become an 
 antiquity that is, a subject for scientific 
 investigation. And the artist as well as the 
 scientist has caught the habit of thumb-nail 
 study and inspection of broom-handle sec 
 tions. This too is excellent. It is compelling 
 writers to an honesty of aim, a meticulous pre 
 cision in technique, of a kind that has never 
 been equaled. The scientist who would sit 
 in his study and write about the processes of 
 nature "out of his head" is now in disrepute. 
 Similarly, the journalist who would write 
 about the poor without first having "done 
 the slums" would be very much behind the 
 times. We may swing back again to a love 
 for the fantastic and fanciful, but at present 
 we are lost in admiration of the obviously 
 truthful. 
 
 These things go by waves. For there is al 
 ways a tendency, when we have become im 
 pressed with the excellence of some quality, to 
 see that quality everywhere, to the exclusion 
 of all others. If we love blue, we see blue in 
 everything. If we have been deeply moved by 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 209 
 
 the excellence of courage, or of honesty, or of 
 kindness, we translate all the moral virtues 
 into terms of sincerity or honesty or kindness. 
 There are reasons, in the underlying unity of 
 the world, why this can rather easily be done, 
 both with colors and with moral qualities, 
 but it has to be done carefully. 
 
 So with theories of art. Sometimes it is 
 attempted to state all the aesthetic virtues in 
 terms of morality. Ruskin did this very ap- 
 pealingly but not quite satisfyingly. Often 
 they have been stated in terms of beauty, and 
 this also has its pitfalls. Just now, in the flush 
 of our enthusiasm for the ideals which science 
 seems to have set up, we are stating them in 
 terms of sincerity. This disposes of certain 
 problems, for instance, the problem of ugli 
 ness; but it leads to other difficulties. For 
 even in the scientific observation of fact there 
 is such a thing as losing the significance of 
 detail through absorption in its immediate 
 aspects, and this is yet more easily possible in 
 the realm of art. There may have been a time 
 when artists needed to be called sharply to ac 
 count for the sincerity of their intention and 
 the accuracy of their work, but at present they 
 
210 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 are much more apt to offer us these in place 
 of something else that would be of still greater 
 value. We are all of us in danger of falling into 
 two fallacies : first, of assuming that accuracy 
 of detail in the art-product is the most neces 
 sary condition of its high quality as art, and 
 second granting that such accuracy is very 
 desirable the fallacy of assuming that it 
 will necessarily be attained in the highest de 
 gree through sincere study and immediately 
 faithful rendering of detail. If our theory 
 makes these two assumptions, it becomes very 
 difficult to explain why a monument of honest 
 and masterly self-analysis like AmiePs "Jour 
 nal" is not, as a work of art, greater than 
 "Hamlet." The truth of art has never, per 
 haps, been successfully defined; but we must 
 see, when we really face the question, that it 
 is something different from sincerity in the 
 artist or accuracy in his product. For we have 
 to cover the truth of Shakespeare with half 
 his detail wrong, the truth of Conrad, with 
 all his detail right, the truth of Euripides, 
 with whose detail we have now simply noth 
 ing to do, the truth of Rodin, who never 
 works from a single pose but expresses an un- 
 
LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 211 
 
 derstanding born of fused impressions. It 
 must be clear that this truth can never be 
 expressed, either objectively in terms of ac 
 curacy, or subjectively in terms of sincerity, 
 except by wrenching these terms away from 
 all their usual connotations. It must rather 
 be conceived as a kind of vision that requires, 
 indeed, an atmosphere of sincerity and is fed 
 by experience any experience, it hardly 
 matters what, but which requires also a 
 certain remoteness and detachment of spirit. 
 I sometimes wonder whether we should not 
 be gainers if our writers, like the Greeks, did 
 a life-work first a good chunk of hard, 
 practically serviceable living as farmers or 
 manufacturers or administrators or teachers, 
 and only after this were permitted to fall upon 
 their task as artists. De Morgan and Conrad 
 among the moderns are shining examples of 
 the possibilities of this programme; and with 
 them we might class the literary men who 
 have most of their lives swung a definite busi 
 ness, carrying on their artistic labors, as it 
 were, "with their left hand" Matthew 
 Arnold and Lamb, for example. It is, indeed, 
 only rather recently that writing has become 
 
212 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 lucrative enough to permit of its being chosen 
 early as a profession. 
 
 Probably we should lose something. Doubt 
 less we should gain something. Doubtless we 
 should be spared much of the hasty monger- 
 ing of experience to which I have been re 
 ferring. In thinking of this, one is tempted to 
 use the neat phrase of that prince of dreamers 
 who was also in his lighter moments the prince 
 of teases: "You cannot, sir, take from me 
 anything that I will more willingly part 
 withal." 
 
 THE END 
 
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