"But the music?" he was urged.

"Oh, the music," said he, "—the music didn't bother me."

But the new poetry does bother me, because I strive to remember not the mere mood or picture of the poem, but the actual words which created them, and I cannot. I want to compel again, at will, the actual poetic experience, and I cannot, without carrying a library in my pocket. The words hover, sometimes, just beyond the threshold of my brain, like a forgotten name ("If you hadn't asked me, I could have told you"—you know the sensation); but they never come. I have no comfort of them in the still hours of the day when I would be whispering them to myself. Instead, I have to fall back upon the old-fashioned Golden Treasury. I cannot remember a single line that Amy Lowell has written about her Roxbury garden, but I shall never forget what Wordsworth said about that field of gold he passed; I repeat his lines, and then my heart, too, with pleasure fills and dances with his daffodils.

It is an immemorial delight, this pleasure in the lingering line, in the haunting couplet, in the quatrain that will not let you forget. By sacrificing it, the new poetry has sacrificed something precious, something that a common instinct of mankind demands of the minstrel. It will not suffice for the new poets to deny that they are minstrels, to assert that they write for the eye, not speak for the ear, that it is not their mission to emit pretty sounds but so to present their vision of the world that it shall etch itself on men's minds with the bite of reality. Such a creed is admirable, but defective. It is defective because, in the first place, if the new poets did not write for the ear quite as much as the old poets, there would be no excuse even for rhythm. Any reader who is sensitive enough to care to read poetry is sensitive enough to hear it with his inward ear even as he sees it with his outward eye, and his after-pleasure, as it were, his lingering delight, will be in proportion as his ear retains the echo of the song. All poets are minstrels, still. Such a creed is defective, in the second place, because it has always been the mission of genuine poets to impress their vision of the world vividly on mankind, though their vision included more, sometimes, than what the realists choose to consider reality. There is nothing new in such an effort. In slack ages of poetic inspiration, however, the versifiers have no vision of the world, but only of its pale mirrored reflections in visions dead and gone, and some jolt is needed to bring the poets back to first-hand observation. Such a jolt are the new poets. Spoon River is a medicine, a splendid tonic. But the form of Spoon River is not conditioned by eternal needs, only by temporary ones. Its complete absence of loveliness, of lines that linger, will be its greatest handicap to immortality—for poetic immortality to-day as much as ever is not in the pages of a book on a library shelf, but on the lips of men and women. A poem from which nobody ever quotes is a poem forgotten.

Tennyson was something of an Imagist at times, presenting his mood or picture with a Flaubertian precision of epithet that even Amy Lowell could not criticise. Consider, for example, his famous Fragment on the eagle:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands Close to the sun in distant lands, Ringed with the azure world he stands.

Beneath, the wrinkled ocean crawls, He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The precision of wording here, the tremendousness of scene evoked with stark economy of means, the triumphant vividness of the adjective "wrinkled," transporting the reader at once to a great height above the plain of the sea, the complete absence of any touch of the "poetic" (surely the beautiful word azure may be admitted in modern company), make this poem a masterpiece without date or time. It is as "new" as the latest Imagist anthology. And, be it noted, I have quoted it correctly, I feel confident, from memory. My copy of Tennyson is in storage, and I have not read the fragment probably in ten or a dozen years. Yet whenever I wish to relive its mood, to see again its incomparable picture, I have only to move my lips, even only to repeat the lines inwardly, in silence, and the poem is mine again.

But I have just been reading the latest Imagist anthology, especially the Lacquer Prints by Amy Lowell, not ten years, but hardly ten minutes ago—and I cannot repeat one of them. I could learn them, of course, by an effort. But that is not the way man desires to remember music and poetry. It must come singing into his head and heart—and remain there without his effort. Here is a "Lacquer Print" called Sunshine. It is indeed vivid, though (quite properly, of course) a little garden pool to Tennyson's vast ocean.

The pool is edged with blade-like leaves of irises. If I throw a stone into the placid water It suddenly stiffens Into rings and rings Of sharp gold wire.

Here is a vivid picture, here is economy and scrupulous selection of epithet, here is no "poetic" diction of the despised sort. But something is lacking, none the less. It does not haunt you, it does not ingratiate itself with your ear, you do not find yourself repeating it days and months later. Close the book—and the poem perishes, even as those rings subside on the pool.

It would be only too easy to find much more striking examples in the new verse. Take, for instance, the opening stanza of Ezra Pound's poem, The Return:

See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!

It is doubtful if any reader will fail to see the trouble in the pace of these lines! No doubt it was exactly the effect the poet desired, but it will forever effectually prevent the repetition of his poem by anybody without the book. When a woman once boasted that she could repeat anything on a single hearing, Theodore Hook rattled off the immortal nonsense, beginning, "She went into the garden patch to get a cabbage head to make an apple pie, and a great she bear coming up the road thrust her head into the shop and cried 'What, no soap?' and so he died—" and the woman was floored. Such a poem as The Return would have floored her quite as completely. I find, after reading carefully all the twenty pages assigned to Ezra Pound in The New Poetry Anthology, edited by Miss Monroe (a greater space, I believe, than was awarded to any other poet), that I can now repeat just one line—or, rather, two lines, such is Mr. Pound's odd way of phrasing his rhythms. Here they are:

Dawn enters with little feet Like a gilded Pavlova.

There is a certain humorous charm of epithet here, and a rhythmic suggestion of metrical beat to follow. That, no doubt, is why the line has stuck in my memory. But the metrical beat did not follow, and the rest of the stanza has gone from me. I am sure even a gilded Pavlova would be at some difficulty to dance to Mr. Pound's rhythms.

But Miss Monroe is catholic in her choice of new poets. She includes, for instance, Walter de la Mare, if in less than two pages. She selects his wonderful poem The Listeners, and the quaint, haunting, Epitaph. It is a little hard to see just why The Listeners is new poetry, except chronologically. Its odd, apparently simple but really intricate and triumphantly fluid metrical structure, so unified that there is no break from the first syllable to the last; its lyric romanticism of subject; its obvious delight in tune; even its occasional lapses into the ancient "poetic" vocabulary (the traveler "smote" the door, the listeners "hearkened," and so on), are all a part of the nineteenth-century tradition of English verse. It is no more modern than La Belle Dame Sans Merci—which, to be sure, is quite modern indeed to some of us. And it has lyric beauty, it has lines of unforgettable musical loveliness, it creeps in through the ear and echoes in the memory. You surely remember the close:

Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the stillness surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Is there really any loss of sharpness in the imagery here because of the rhyme and metre? Could any phrase, of any rhythm, however free, render any better and more economically the peculiar noise of a horse turning on a hard drive and starting away in the night, than "the sound of iron on stone"? The last two lines, surely, are close to perfection. A genuine new poet would probably have hunted long for a less hackneyed word than "plunging," but though it would possibly have sharpened his final image, it would, at the same time, in all probability, have robbed it of that very vagueness sought and captured. No, the passage pictorially and emotionally is as near perfection as it is often permitted mortals to approach, and it lingers and echoes in the memory, it will not be forgotten. It has the lilt of music, the chime of tune, the immemorial loveliness of song. If the precise image, the desired emotional effect, the intellectual content can be imparted in fettered verse, and, in addition, the ancient loveliness can be retained, which the new verse lacks, can it be possible that the world will long endure to read vers libre when vers libre has done its work of bringing poets back to first-hand reality for their subjects, relating the minstrels to the spirit of their age? I cannot think so. I cannot but believe that any poetry long to endure must be memorable, in the literal sense, and that is just what the new poetry is not. Already, it seems to me from my acquaintance with under-graduates and the just-graduated, vers libre is a little the cult of the middle-aged, while youth, the future, is swinging back gladly to the fetters of metre and rhyme, and probably forgetful that the public which awaits their effort has been prepared anew for poetry by this revolt from what was stale in tradition. I believe that memorable poetry always has been, and always must be, irradiated by

The light that never was on sea or land,

which is but another way of saying that it must have elevation and the haunting mystery of beauty. The trouble is, of course, to catch this authentic radiation, instead of some pale reflection from Patmore or Rossetti. It was against the sham of second-hand mood and subject, rather than the great truth of music and loveliness, that the new poets broke into unmetrical protest. They have done a brave and needed work,—but they have produced astonishingly little quotable poetry, they have sung their way not far into the hearts of their listeners. The lingering, lovely line is not for them. No, for still,

The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.





The Lies We Learn in Our Youth

The world for a great many years has accepted the dictum of the poet, that—

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: It might have been.

Even those people who refused to accept the rhyme have accepted the reason. But the fact is that the reason of this copybook couplet is as bad as the rhyme. It would be much nearer the truth to say that of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: He's succeeded again. Here, too, the rhyme may be questioned, but the reason is sound. An entirely successful man is the most pitiful object in the universe. Not only has he nothing to look forward to, but he has nothing to look back upon. Having no regrets, no shadows, in his life, he has no chiaroscuro, no depth, no solidity in his picture. It is painted in the flat. "Regret," says George Moore, to change the figure a little, "is like a mountain top from which we survey our dead life, a mountain top on which we pause and ponder." He has no point of view, then, either. So after all the words, "It might have been," do bear a sadness about them in his case; his life might have been a success if it had only been a failure. "It might have been" thus becomes sad when it reflects back upon itself, when it means there might have been a might have been but there was only a was. So life whirls into paradox!

Let any man in honesty retire into the solitude of his soul and reflect on his joys that might have been and those that were, and let him then answer whether any of his realizations were the equal of his anticipations. Therefore, if he had achieved the anticipated but lost delights which form the burden of his "Might have been," they, too, would have been as ashes in the mouth. The truth is that the essence of delight is in the anticipation, the best of life is the vision, not the reality. It is pathetic not to have entertained the vision, but more pathetic, perhaps, to have attained it. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said that there is only one thing more tragic than failure—success?

Did our regretful poet dream at twenty-one of being the perfect lover? In his dreams he was the perfect lover, then. Yet actually what was he? What was she? What was their courtship, their marriage? You, prosy, contented, forty and forgetful, by your prosy hearth or shaking down the furnace fire, while the children are being put to bed, you dare to call "It might have been" the saddest words of tongue or pen? Those now almost forgotten dreams of what might have been are the best you ever were. Remember them as often as you can, as bitterly, as happily, for your soul's salvation. Without them you are the lowest of God's creatures, a mere married man.

Or take the case of Maud Muller herself, and her judge. We learn that the judge—

Wedded a wife of richest dower, Who lived for fashion, as he for power.

Maud, on the other hand,—

Wedded a man unlearned and poor, And many children played round her door.

Probably in both cases this was for the best. Only the wildest sentimentalist could in seriousness urge that Maud would have made a good wife for the judge. Being a man who "lived for power," the probable unpresentableness of Maud in a town house would have been a constant thorn in his flesh. She could not appear barefooted at his receptions, and the feet that have gone bare through an agricultural girlhood do not readily adapt themselves to the size of shoe which urban fashion dictates. Moreover, the vague yearnings of a young girl for an alliance with a handsome stranger above her station, do not fit her to speak the speech and think the thoughts and meet the social demands of that station. No, Maud would have been a constant thorn in the judge's side. Summer sunshine, the smell of hay, a drink of cold water, a pretty, barefoot girl—the mood is compounded. An uneducated farmer's daughter for a wife—the reality is accomplished.

And as for Maud, who will say for certain that she would not eventually have eloped with the coachman because he praised her pies instead of criticising her grammar?

So to each of them—barefoot girl and bald-headed judge (he probably was bald-headed, though the poem omits to say so) did what was best, and the school children for several generations have been taught to waste unnecessary sympathy over their fate, have been inculcated with a false view of the whole matter. Both of them found far more happiness in dreaming of what might have been than ever they could have found in the realization; for each of them this dream brought undoubted sadness, but the sadness which is really pleasure, the sadness, that is, which comes over all of us when "we realize that though we have missed certain ideals in our lives we are still able to recall those ideals, we are still not like all the dead, forgetful clods around us, our wives and husbands and neighbors and friends. We live with these people as one of them, of course, but we might have been so much better than they! Such reflections as these are a great comfort. They bring a sadness which makes us mournfully happy. They reconcile us with the scheme of things. They are the outcroppings of that secret vanity which the best and the worst of us nourish, and of which is born our self-respect, our happiness, our heroism."

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a town called Abdera. The good people of the town were so much upset at seeing a performance of the Andromeda of Euripides that they caught a sort of tragic fever. This began with bleeding and perspiration and was followed in about a week's time, according to the course of the disease, by an uncontrollable desire to recite. The effect upon Abdera was surprising. The people walked about in the streets day and night reciting pages of Euripides until the epidemic was cured by a return of the cold weather. Well, Tolstoy would have us believe that the European and English-speaking world to-day is about in this condition regarding Shakespeare, and that there is little hope of a cold spell. A second-rate fellow, this Bard of Avon, according to Tolstoy, whom by a gigantic process of hypnotic suggestion we have been taught to think great, till we go about quoting him as the law and the prophet, while he fills some hundred and seventeen pages of Bartlett.

There is undoubtedly something in this view of the matter. Without holding a brief either for the alleged immortal William or the author of What Is Art?, it may safely be hazarded that at least fifty per cent of the "familiar quotations" we children laboriously copied into ruled blank books in our school days and have ever since regarded as nuggets of truth and gems of poetry are neither true nor, beyond the fact of rhyme, poetic. Something as a wave of suggestion passed over Europe and sent thousands of little ones down to their deaths in the Children's Crusades, thousands of youngsters in our schools to-day are hypnotized into a lasting belief in the poetic value of numberless couplets of second-rate verse, and never come to know real poetry at all. Having been forced to swallow rhymed platitudes in the belief that they are poetry, a permanent and perfectly natural repulsion for the very name of poetry is too often the children's only acquisition. In fact, it is a pretty question if the decline of poetic appreciation cannot be directly traced to the rise of the memory-gem book.

How well I remember my own sense of weariness and repulsion when I was compelled at the tender age of ten to copy out the whole of The Psalm of Life, unconsciously committing it to memory as I did so.

Life is real, life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.—

My infant lips muttered the meaningless words while my poor little brain and imagination tried to find some joy, some picture, some tangible delight, some inspiration in the mournful, oppressive poem. If I had then been assigned intelligible verses to copy, an Elizabethan lyric, a song that sang because it had to, a bit of imagery, my childish fancy would have been fired, and I should not have had to wait till I was eighteen years old before I read a single poem voluntarily. And I should not have detested The Psalm of Life all the rest of my days—at least I don't think I should. Longfellow when I was a child was a particularly prolific mine of memory gems, running as high as three thousand quotations to the ton. I never had a teacher who didn't know her Longfellow with an intimacy almost as great as her ignorance of Keats, Shelley, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Herbert, Campion, Coleridge, Burns and the rest of the kings who lived before Agamemnon. Longfellow was a lovely soul, and, within his limits, a very true poet. But I was fed on his platitudes. I was daily informed that—

The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight.—

Just as if I cared, at ten, whether they were or not. I was told in tripping measures of the village chestnut tree, to the total exclusion of the linden and ilex; and as for the land where the citrons bloom, and golden oranges are in the gloom, and the long silences of laurel rise—"Kennst du das Land?" Not I! The spreading chestnut tree alone cast its oppressive shadow across my childish fancy.

Another memory gem that I remember with a lasting grudge was—

Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.

This I knew was false, and to be forced glibly to chatter the words before the class shamed and angered me. Had not a maiden aunt of mine, after many trips to the library of the New England Genealogical Society, traced back our line to William the Conqueror? Was there another boy or girl in the school who had descended from William the Conqueror? No, sir! Several of them had kind hearts, and doubtless simple faith—whatever that was—but side of my Norman blood this counted for nothing. It is a vastly superior thing to have Norman blood, and as for coronets—well, it may be that the new age will wipe them literally out in a surge of Democracy—some of us hope so—but to the romantic heart of childhood they are a symbol not of caste and oppression but of dignity and beauty and the heroic. Certainly they are not to be eliminated by throwing at the child's head such adult platitudes in rhyme as these, and telling him it is poetry. Alas! he believes you, and that is why he hates the very word poetry all the rest of his days.

My memory-gem book lies before me as I write, saved I know not how out of the wreck of boyhood. I have searched it in vain for a single quotation of lyric song, a single scrap of verse that paints the world in rosy colors and lets moral platitudes go hang, a single strain of "Celtic magic." Instead, I learn that as a boy I was taught that—

We are living, we are dwelling In a grand and awful time.

I find that at eleven years of age—

I held it truth with him who sings To one clear harp of divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.

Indeed, I must have been a very remarkable child, how remarkable I had not hitherto suspected! Evidently, too, I displayed an early tendency to melancholia, for I find I was admonished in the following words, with their incontestable statement of fact:

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining, Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.

Whether my sadness was caused by too much reflection on the fact that life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal, or on the fact that Bill Carter's air-gun cost more than mine, I cannot now recall. Either cause would have been sufficient. At any rate I apparently braced up and smiled once more, for the next page is blank. That means I went fishing!

Poor kiddies! Shall we grown-ups never learn that their minds don't work as ours do, and what may be poetry for some of us is cod-liver oil for them? Why must we be forever nagging them at home with "Don't do this" and "Don't do that," and forever preaching at them in school with ponderous prose platitudes cut up into lengths? How much wiser than we they are, who know that life is free and pleasant and full of melody and beautiful things, and dreams more real than reality, and reality born of the dream! Yet we try our best to convince them that they are wrong. We see to it that Longfellow lies about them in their infancy.

But perhaps all this is changed since my day, and the nightmare this battered memory-gem book recalls to my mind is no longer a load on the children of the present. I profoundly hope so. Can it be that the present revival of poetry is due to the passing of the memory-gem book? At least, no teacher would have the courage to set her class the task of copying Amy Lowell or The Spoon River Anthology!





The Bad Manners of Polite People

All my life I have suffered from politeness—not my own, but the politeness of other people. So far as I know, nobody has ever accused me of being polite. I suspect that I must be, however, for hitherto I have borne the politeness of other people without a protest. But I must protest now, if only to vindicate my lack of politeness; in other words, to prove my good manners.

For what I object to in polite people is their bad manners. It is this I have suffered from, as, I suspect, have many thousands of my fellows, to whom life is real and earnest, and gabble not its goal. As a rule, the politer the person the worse are his (or more often, perhaps, her) manners. The limit is reached when the amateur is sunk entirely in the professional, and that curious product of "Society" is developed, the professional hostess. I cannot better illustrate my theme than with a description of the professional hostess.

I call her professional because all the joy of entertaining for its own sake has gone out of her work. She does not invite people to her parties because she is glad to see them, because she is interested in them, or wishes to give them pleasure. She invites them because to entertain them is a part of her day's work—whether her work be to get into a certain social stronghold, to keep that stronghold against assault, or merely to kill time, her arch-enemy. And, in performing this task of hers, she has developed a technique of politeness which is to the amateur's technique what the professional golf-player's style is to the form of the mere bumblepuppy. Her politeness is astonishingly brilliant, flexible, resourceful. It is aspired to by the lowly and aped on the stage. And yet her manners are the worst in the world.

Let us suppose her about to give a dinner. She is trimmed down to the fashionable slenderness (perhaps), and brilliant with jewels. Cannel coal snaps pleasantly in the drawing-room grate, and the lights are gratefully shaded. A guest or two arrive, whom she greets with affable handshake. The man moves over to the fire, warming his back; his wife talks to the hostess rapidly, in the way women have when they seem to think it better to say anything than not to speak at all. But the hostess is quite at her ease. Her politeness is triumphant. Presently she turns to the man, who is, perhaps, an author.

"Your new book," she begins, as if she had been waiting all day to ask that question, "—what is it going to be about? I'm tremendously eager to know."

Already the genial fire has warmed the noted author after his chilling ride in a street car to this mansion of luxury. The kindly question positively expands him. He launches eagerly into his answer.

"You see," he begins, "the great modern question is—"

But suddenly he is aware that he has no listener. His hostess has gone toward the door with outstretched hand, and his own wife is gazing at the gowns of the women entering. The author turns and prods the grate with his toe. Perhaps, if he is new at being "entertained," he fancies that his hostess will presently return to hear his answer. He holds it in readiness. Poor man!

The newcomers are brought into the circle. When introductions are necessary, they are made with studied informality. And then the author hears the hostess say to a big, energetic woman, who is among the arrivals, "Oh, dear Miss Jones, I have heard so much about your perfectly splendid work down there among the horrid poor! I did so want to hear you talk about it at the Colonial Club, this afternoon, but I simply couldn't get there. Won't you tell me just a bit of what you said?"

The tone of entreaty betrays the utmost interest. The big, energetic woman smiles, and begins, "Well," she says, "I was just trying to get the members interested in our new health-tenement for consumptives. You see, we need—"

Then she, too, becomes aware that her audience has departed toward the door. She turns about to see if anybody else was listening, but nobody was. The other women are engaged in inspecting the newcomers. The men are looking uncomfortable, or chatting with one another. Only the author's sympathetic gaze meets hers.

The guests have all gathered by now, but dinner is not yet announced. The hostess moves easily among them, stopping by each with a winning smile, to ask some carefully chosen personal question. Each as politely replies, only to find himself talking to the empty air.

There is soon a confused babble of voices, a whir of windy words—and no one hears.

The author watches her, still curious to know whether she will remember that she has not yet heard his answer. But she has quite forgotten. She moves, the incarnate spirit of politeness, about the room, rousing trains of eager ideas in her guests, and as speedily leaving them to run down a side-track into a bumper.

She has no real interest in any of them, probably she has no real understanding of them. She thinks her manners are above reproach, that she is treating her guests in the most exemplary fashion. In reality, nothing could be worse than her manners, and she is treating her guests most shabbily. By being polite, she ends by being rude. For nothing is so rude in this world as to ask a man a question about some subject close to his heart when you have no intention of listening to his answer, nor any interest in it. The hostess thinks to feed his vanity; she ends by wounding it. She thinks to make her guests comfortable; she ends by making them uncomfortable.

The best manners I have ever seen were possessed by the most impolite man I have ever known. As a result, nobody that he ever invited to his house felt uncomfortable there. He was interested in all kinds and conditions of people, all kinds and conditions of activities. If he asked you a question, it was because he wanted to hear your answer. He paid you the compliment of assuming that it was worth listening to, and other people waited till you were through. At his table you weren't supposed to confine your talk to the sweet young thing on your left, who was more interested in the gay young blade on her left, nor to the sedate, elderly female person on your right, who was more interested in the bishop on her right. Talk was largely for the whole table; and if you hadn't some definite contribution to make, you were usually glad to keep still.

I say nobody ever felt uncomfortable in his house. That is not quite true. Occasionally the person who expressed an opinion on a subject he knew nothing about must have felt uncomfortable. For, though he was listened to gravely while speaking, conversation was at once resumed as if nothing whatever had been said.

Nothing could have been more conventionally impolite. And yet the act was so utterly free from sham that it seemed the only decorous and decent thing to do. Thus was the dignity of conversation maintained; thus was each man and woman made to feel his or her worth along personal lines of endeavor; thus was a true democratic spirit preserved, which is the real essence of good manners. True democracy consists in bringing each man out, not in reducing him to a common level of inanity. Good manners consist in showing him respect for what is worthy of respect in him, treating him as a rational human being, not as a mere social unit who deposits his hard-won opinions, along with his hat and stick, in the care of the butler when he enters the house.

That is why men have, as a rule, better manners than women, though they are far less polite. A man respects the judgment of a specialist on any given subject, and he is rather intolerant of the snap judgments of the dabbler or the dilettante. He listens, if forced to, with unconcealed impatience to the babbling of his pretty neighbor at table about art, perhaps, or engineering, or some other topic concerning which her ignorance is as profound as her cocksureness is lofty. But, after all, to be polite to her is to insult a whole race of engineers or artists! Put one of them beside him, and see how readily he will listen.

Politeness too often consists of shamming. Good manners are the absence of sham. It is not the gentleman's place, certainly, to insult the lady. Good manners seldom go quite so far as that. But even politeness cannot expect him to endure the torture for more than a limited time, especially if the topic chosen chances to be his own specialty. It is his place to lead the conversation, as gently as possible, back upon more neutral ground, where he may find what consolation he can in sprightly personalities—while praying for the coffee.

I enjoy the privilege of acquaintance with a very charming person, who has never paid a compliment to her sex except by being a woman. Some of her sex say that she is a delightful hostess and very beautiful. Others say that she is atrociously rude, and they "can't see what it is people admire in her." Most men adore her. She herself says that the only people she cares to entertain are those who have earned their own living. Her reasons are, I believe, interesting and significant.

She earns her own living, I may state, and a very considerable one, for she is famous and highly successful in her branch of artistic endeavor. Socially, one may say of her, in that atrocious phrase which implies a queer jumble of values, that she is "very much in demand." But, though a man in livery opens her front door, the street-cars bring quite as many guests to her house as do expensively purring motor-cars.

"For," as she puts it, "I can stand the talk of the average woman in 'Society' just about fifteen minutes, and then I have to scream. I don't know how the fiction arose that American women of the leisure classes are so superior mentally to the women of other nations. The fact is, they are not. The fact is, that they are so superficial that a person who has really done something—I don't mean who has played at it, but who has really under the spur of necessity got to the bottom of some one subject—can hardly endure their conversation. They chatter, chatter, chatter, about everything under heaven, and if you happen to know anything about any of the subjects, it is simply torture to listen.

"Life is too short, and too interesting, and the world too full of real people, to bother with the folks who don't know their business. The man or woman who has had to be self-supporting has got to the bottom of some branch of activity, however small, and learned humility. To learn that mastery of even a tiny subject requires effort and concentration and skill, is to learn respect for other subjects; and it is to learn, too, how to listen.

"Nobody can listen who isn't truly interested, and who hasn't the grasp of mind to appreciate the complexities of a craft not his own, who doesn't know enough to know when he doesn't know anything. If I'm going to talk my shop, I want to talk it with folks who've been in it. If I'm going to hear some other shop discussed, it must be by someone who is familiar with that, not by directoired dabblers who, you feel after three minutes have elapsed, don't know a thing about the subject. If politeness consists in letting them suppose that I take any stock in what they say, then I plead guilty to being a boor."

Probably no one who has experienced the awful ordeal of listening to some female chatter about his chosen subject, or who has undergone the even worse ordeal of dropping great thoughts of his own into the deep, deep pools of her incomprehension, will fail of sympathy with my friend.

"But I tire you," said an incessant gabbler one day to the great Duc de Broglie.

"No, no," replied the duke; "I wasn't listening."





On Giving up Golf Forever

Last season I gave up golf forever two days before our course opened in May, on the evenings of June 17th and July 4th, at noon on July 27th, on the evenings of August 2nd, 9th, 15th, and 21st, at 11:15 A.M. on Labor Day, again Labor Day evening, on September 19th, 23rd, 30th, and October 3rd, 11th and 18th. I am writing this in mid-January, when the drifts are piled five feet deep over our bunkers, and the water-carries are frozen solid. I have played my last game of golf. The coming season I shall devote to the intensive cultivation of my garden. The links have no allure for me.

"And if," says my wife, "I could believe that, I should be happier than ever before in the long years of my golf widowhood."

"But you can," I answer, with grieved surprise.

She looks at me, with that superior and tolerant smile women know so well how to assume.

"You men are all such children!" is her, it seems to me, somewhat irrelevant retort.

I fell to musing on my friend, the noted war correspondent (now a Major in the United States Army in France). All things considered, he was the most consistent, or perhaps I should say persistent, quitter the game of golf has ever known. He used to quit forever on an average of three times a week, and I have known him to abandon the game twice during a round, which is something of a record. He played every summer on our beautiful Berkshire course, which crosses and recrosses the winding Housatonic, not to mention sundry swamps, and boasts the most luxuriant fairway, and by the same token the rankest rough, in all America. It is the course Owen Johnson once immortalized in his story, Even Threes.

How well I remember that peaceful, happy May, back in 1914! Our course had emerged from its annual spring flood, newly top-dressed with rich river silt, and a few warm days brought the turf through the scars and made the whole glorious expanse of fairway, winding through the silver willows, a velvet carpet. I had given my orders to the greens-keepers, and gone to New York for a day or two—reluctantly, of course—and there met the famous war correspondent, in those peaceful times out of a regular job and turned novelist pro tem. He had just relieved himself of his final chapter, and readily yielded to my persuasions to return with me to the velvet field and the whistling drive. We "entrained," as he would say in one of his military dispatches.

As far as the Massachusetts-Connecticut state-line he talked of Mexican revolutions, Theodore Roosevelt, Japanese art, vers libre, mushrooms, and such other topics as were of interest in the spring of 1914. But at the state-line, chancing a look out of the window, he saw the doming billow of blue mountains which marks the entrance to our Berkshire intervales, and a strange gleam came into his eyes. His square jaws set. His whole countenance was transformed. Turning back to me, he half hissed, grimly,—

"I am not going to press this season!"

I knew he was fairly on his way to giving up golf forever.

Of course, when a man hasn't played all winter, but has been engaged in the mild and harmless exercise of writing a novel, his hands become soft. Then, when he suddenly begins to play thirty-six holes a day, and takes a lock-grip on his clubs as tightly as if he supposed somebody was trying to snatch them away from him, he is apt to develop certain blisters. To a war correspondent and traveler over the Dawson Trail, such blisters are nothing. To a golf player they are of profound importance. The next day, in our foursome, they affected the war correspondent's game. He became softly querulous.

"I wish you wouldn't talk when I am about to drive," he complained to a caddie.

"This mashie is too heavy for me," he muttered to himself.

"Every time I make a stroke, that crack on the third finger of my left hand, above the top joint, opens and pains me," he declared to anybody who would listen.

His drive from the eighteenth tee went kerplunk into the mud, and buried itself like a startled woodchuck. He said nothing, but took a left-handed club from his bag—for he began the game left-handed, and had switched over the year before, upon hearing our professional say that no left-handed player could ever become a great golfer. With this fresh implement, he began to dig. He finished the hole left-handed, with three perfect shots! We tried to cheer him up, but he was not to be cheered.

"What's the use!" he wailed. "Here I've spent a year and a fortune unlearning how to play left-handed. I'm never going to play the confounded game again!"

And, by way of token, he began to talk about Theodore Roosevelt.

That was his first renunciation for 1914. The next few days the game went well, and so did work on a new novel he had commenced, fired by his success in getting off seventeen perfect tee-shots. But he reached his fourth chapter and an off afternoon on the same fair Saturday. What a lovely day it was!—you know, one of those early June days that invariably causes some woman to quote Lowell. But the famous war correspondent saw no charm in the leafy luxury around him, in the blue sky, the lush grass. He heard no pipe of birds nor whisper of the breeze. His driver wasn't working right. Then his over-worked mashie went back on him. By the fourth green he was taking three putts, and by the eighth he was picking up. His face was a thundercloud; his vocabulary disclosed a richness gleaned from camp and field which was a revelation even to our caddies; and that is no insignificant accomplishment.

Our tenth hole in those days was close to the club-house, and the tee was but 195 yards away—a good iron to the green. By the time we reached this tee, the war correspondent had very nearly exhausted even the stock of expletives he had acquired on the Dawson Trail, and had declared seven times that he was through, yes, forever!

"Oh, come on and play just this hole—keep going to the club-house anyway," we pleaded.

"Well," he said, "I'll take one more shot—it's my last—positively. I'm going back to New York to-morrow."

He tossed a scarred, cut, battered ball on the turf, scorning to make a tee. Yanking a cleek from his bag, he stepped up with the speed of Duncan and swung. To our amazement, the ball flew like a bullet to the mark and disappeared over the lip of the green, headed straight for the pin. But he never saw it. He wasn't watching.

"Good shot!" we cried, with real enthusiasm.

"I wasn't looking, where'd it go?" he asked, with an attempt at scorn, which, however, was manifestly weakening.

"Got a putt fer a two," said his caddie.

The noted man cast a withering look at this object of his previous invective. He still suspected something. We backed the caddie up, and he strode down the fairway with a certain reviving spring in his step.

There on the green, not six inches from the cup, reposed his battered ball!

"Been anybody else it would have gone in!" he muttered, as he sank it for a two.

That was his proud surrender. He said no more. He strode ahead to the next tee, and tore out a long, straight drive. Then he lit a cigarette and remarked that he had never seen the willows more beautiful, more silvery in the afternoon light.

Ah, well, poor chap, he did give up golf on the first of August, if not forever at least for the longest period of abstinence in his career on the links. On our last afternoon over the velvet together, before he left for the steamer that was to take him into the maelstrom, he paid little attention to his game, and a surprised and, I fancied, even a slightly disappointed caddie followed him. (He was always most generous to his caddie when he had most abused him, like the hero of Goldoni's comedy.)

"I sha'n't see nice, sweet, unscarred green sod again for a long time," he said, digging up a huge divot with unconscious irony. "I'm going to my last war, though."

"Gracious," said I, "are you going to give up War forever, too?"

"The world is going to give it up forever, after this one," he replied.

I have seen him twice since, once when he was still a correspondent, once more recently when he came back in the uniform of Uncle Sam. And each time his greeting has been the same:—

"Have you got rid of that hook yet?"

Then he smiled—a wistful, tragic smile, and asked where all the new traps and bunkers are, how we contrived to lengthen the course, whether the new sixth green is in play yet, all the pathetically unimportant little gossip of our eighty acres of green meadow.

"Ah," he said the last time we parted, "some day I'm coming back and make that 79 at last! Anybody can go over the top, but to break 80 at Stockbridge—!"

Then he left for the trenches of France.

I have another good friend who, unlike the Major, has never given up golf forever. This, as he himself admits (or I should not dare offer the explanation), is because he has never yet really played it. He, too, is rather well known at his avocation of play-writing; but golf is his real business in life when the season once gets under way. He has enabled several professionals to buy motor-cars, he has sent numerous fore-caddies through the high school, he has practised by the hour with individual clubs, but still, after almost a quarter of a century, he has never broken 90 on a first-class course. From my superior position (I have on three never-to-be-forgotten occasions broken 80, one of them at Manchester!), I sometimes wonder what keeps him at the game. Then I play with him, and realize. He has the divine, inexplicable faculty, once or twice in a round, of tearing off an astounding drive of 300 yards, by some subtle miracle of timing, which after hours of rolling finally comes to rest far out beyond any other ball in the foursome, or even the professional's drive. What does it matter if he scruffs his approach? What does it matter if he takes three putts? He has the memory of that drive, the unexpected, thrilling feel of it in arms and body, the tingling vision of the day when he will find out how he did it, and be able to repeat at will! That keeps him going—that, and a trophy he once achieved by winning the beaten eight division of the sixth sixteen. It was a little pocket match-safe, but it is more precious in his eyes than pearls, aye, than much fine gold or his reputation as perhaps the deftest writer of dialogue on the American stage. It represents definite achievement in the game of Golf.

You may suppose, dear Reader, if by some miracle you are not a golfer, that I have been pressing the essayist's privilege and indulging in an attempt at whimsicality. Nothing, I assure you, could be farther from the fact. I am, in this chapter, a realist. All I have here set down is a record of actuality. Nay, I have erred on the other side. I have said nothing whatever about my own reasons for giving up golf forever. Nor have I told the story of the elderly gentlemen at a course near Boston, whom I once observed in an exhibition of renunciation that perhaps deserved recording.

This course was of nine holes (it is now the site of several apartment houses), and the last hole called for a carry over a little pond, to a green immediately in front of the club-house. The somewhat elderly and irascible gentleman in question, playing in a foursome, had reached this ninth tee on the shore of the pond, and even from the club veranda it was evident that his temper was not of the best. Things had not been going right for him. His three companions carried the pond. Then he teed up, and drove—splash!—into the water. A remark was wafted through the still air. He teed again—another splash. Then followed an exhibition which I fear my wife would describe as childish. First this elderly gentleman spoke, in a loud, vexed voice. Then he hurled his driver into the pond. Then he snatched his bag of clubs from the caddie's shoulder, seized a stone from the pond side, stuffed it into the bag, grasped the strap as a hammer-thrower the handle of his weight, swung the bag three times around his head, and let it fly far out over the water. It hit with a great splash, and sank from sight. His three companions, respecting his mood, discreetly continued their game, while he came up to the club-house, sought a far corner of the veranda, and with a face closely resembling a Greek mask of Tragedy, sank down huddled into a chair.

On the veranda, too, his grief was respected. No one spoke to him. In fact, I think no one dared. We were careful that even our mirth did not reach his ears. He was alone with his thoughts. The afternoon waned. His three companions again reached the ninth tee, drove the pond, and came into the club-house to dress. The caddies were about to depart. Then a strange thing happened; at its first intimation we tiptoed to a window to observe. He roused himself, leaned over the rail, and called a caddie.

"Boy," we heard him say, in a deep, tragic voice, "can you swim?"

"Yes, sir," the caddie replied.

"All right. About thirty feet out in front of the ninth tee there's a bag at the bottom of the pond. Go get it for me, and I'll give you five dollars."

The caddie ran, peeling his garments as he went. Modestly retaining his tattered underclothes, he splashed in from the tee, while the somewhat elderly golf player gesticulated directions on the bank. Presently the boy's toes detected something, and he did a pretty surface dive, emerging with the bag strap in his right hand. He also rescued the floating driver, and we saw the promised bill passed to him, and watched him drag on his clothes over his wet undergarments. Slowly, even tenderly, the somewhat elderly gentleman emptied the water and the stone from his bag, and wiped the clubs on his handkerchief. With the wet, dripping burden over his shoulder he came across the foot-bridge and into the locker room, while we hastened to remove our faces from the door and windows, and attempted to appear casual.

He entered in silence, and strode to his locker. The silence grew painful. Somebody simply had to speak, or laugh. Finally somebody did speak, which was probably the safer alternative.

"Decided to try again, eh?"

The somewhat elderly gentleman wheeled upon the assemblage, his dripping bag still hanging from his shoulder.

"Yes, damn it!" he thundered.

Well, I have never thrown my clubs into a pond, and I am sure you have never done anything so childish, either. But how many times have you and I both given up golf forever, and then returned to links the following day—"damn it"! We do not play for the exercise, we do not play because it "keeps us out in the open air." Neither motive would hold a man for a week to the tantalizing, costly, soul-racking, nerve- and temper-destroying game. We play it because there is some diabolical—or celestial—fascination about the thing; some will-o'-the-wisp of hope lures us over swamp and swale, through pit and pasture, toward the smooth haven of the putting green; some subtle, mysterious power every now and then coordinates our muscles and lets us achieve perfection for a single stroke, whereafter we tingle with remembrance and thrill with anticipation. Golf is the quest of the unattainable, it is a manifestation of the Divine Unrest, it spreads before us the soft green pathway down which we follow the Gleam. That is why you and I shall be giving it up forever on our eightieth birthday.





"Grape-Vine" Erudition

You may recall that Mr. Ezra Barkley acquired a great reputation for learning by imparting to the spinsters of Old Chester such astonishing facts as the approximate number of roe contained in a shad. His sister-in-law, in her ignorance, supposed there were only two hundred! Ezra also knew who first kept bees, and many other important things, usually of a statistical nature. I cannot recall that Mrs. Deland has told us where Ezra acquired his erudition, and I used at one time to wonder. But now I know. He read the "grape-vine" in the first editions of our daily papers.

Perhaps you don't know what "grape-vine" is? I rejoice in my ability to tell you. It is the name given by newspaper men to the jokes and squibs and bits of information clipped by the busy exchange reader, and put into type, making short paragraphs of varying lengths, which are dropped in at the bottom of a column to fill up the vacant space when the need arises. This need most often arises in preparing the first edition, the one which catches the early trains for the country. By the time the city edition goes to press sufficient news of battles, carnage, and sudden death, of politics and stock exchanges, has been prepared to fill every inch of available space. The city reader, therefore, sees little of this "grape-vine." Thus we have a new argument for country life.

I am now a resident of the country, one hundred and fifty miles removed from New York and as far from Boston; and I am by way of becoming nearly as erudite as Ezra Barkley. I am, indeed, almost bewildered with the mass of information I am acquiring. This morning I read a column about the European war, all of which I have now forgotten. But how can I ever forget the two lines of "grape-vine" at the very bottom which filled out an otherwise vacant quarter inch? I am permanently a wiser man.

"Many Filipino women catch and sell fish for a living."

Amid a world at war, too, how peaceful and soothing is this tabloid idyl of piscatorial toil!

After the acquisition of this morsel of learning I set diligently to work on the day's papers, both the morning editions and those "evening" editions which come to us here by a train leaving the city early in the afternoon, to see how much erudition I could accumulate in one sun's span. I think you of the cities will be astonished. I was myself. In a few weeks I shall read the encyclopaedia advertisements with scorn instead of longing. For instance, I have learned that "A new tooth-brush is cylindrical and is revolved against the teeth by a plunger working through its spirally grooved handle." Obviously, just the implement for boys interested in motor-cars (as all boys are). They will play they are grinding valves and run joyously to brush their teeth.

I have learned that "In the last five years our national and state lawmaking bodies have passed 62,550 laws." The surprising thing about this information is that the number is so small!

I have learned that "Russia has ten thousand lepers, taken care of by twenty-one institutions."

I have acquired these valuable bits of ornithological lore: "The frigate-bird is capable of getting up a speed of ninety-six miles an hour with hardly a movement of its wings. The greater part of its life is spent in the air." "The swallow has a larger mouth in proportion to its size than any other bird."

I have, from the bottom of a single column, gleaned these three items of incalculable value: "By harnessing a fly to a tiny wagon an English scientist found it could draw one hundred and seventy times its own weight over smooth surfaces."

"Missouri last year produced 195,634 tons of lead, a fairly heavy output."

"The United States has five hundred and seventeen button-factories."

The New York Times staggers me with this statistical line: "One Paris motion-picture plant produces an average of three million feet of films weekly." (This strikes me as a kind of "French frightfulness.")

The New York Evening Post contributes to my welfare and domestic comfort this item: "Both an electric range and a refrigerator are included in a new kitchen cabinet, but are hidden from view by doors when not in use."

I am certainly a wiser man for knowing that "The Mexican seacoast on the Pacific and the Gulf of California is 4,575 miles." And I am at least interested in the fact that "An Englishman has invented a cover for hatchways on vessels that operates on the principle of a roll-top desk." If this hatchway operates on the principle of the only roll-top desk I ever possessed, God help the poor sailors when the storm breaks!

Such items as these disclose to me the extent of my previous ignorance:—

"Bolivia is producing about one-third of the world's output of tin."

"Records disclose that for several centuries an infusion of nutgalls treated with sulphate of iron composed the only known ink."

"The first job held by William G. McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury, was that of a newsboy selling the Macon Morning Telegraph. His next job was that of a farm laborer."

"There are 2,500,000 freight-cars in the country, and their average life is somewhere about twenty years."

"Since gold was discovered in the Auckland province, in 1852, there has been exported from that district gold to the value of $116,796,000."

I should, to be sure, be more completely educated if I could find somewhere, under the sporting news, or at the base of the obituaries, a statement of where Auckland is. But perhaps that information will come to-morrow.

Well, I have presented here only a tithe of the knowledge I have to-day gleaned from the daily press, that hitherto (by me, at least) underestimated institution. I haven't stated that I now know who first used anthracite coal as a fuel, and when. You don't know that, I am sure. Neither do you know how many acres of corn were planted in England and Wales in 1915 and 1916, nor how many government employees there were in France before the war, nor that "A bundle of fine glass threads forms a new ink-eraser."

However, I must share with you my choicest acquisition. It seems little less than a crime to keep such knowledge from the world at large, to bury it at the bottom of a column on the ninth page of the first edition of the Springfield Republican. So I rewrite it here. For oral delivery, I shall save it till some caller comes whom I particularly desire to impress. Then, with all the Old-World courtesy of Mr. Ezra Barkley, I shall offer this guest a chair, and as I do so I shall remark, with the careless casualness of the truly erudite: "Guatemala has only one furniture factory. It employs a hundred and fifty men."







Business Before Grammar

We have just been perusing a copy of a certain magazine which proclaims on its cover that it has doubled its circulation in twenty months. Within, the editor sets forth what he believes to be the reasons for this gratifying growth. "The magazine accepts man as he is—and helps him," says the editor. "The magazine is edited to answer the questions that keep rising and rising in the average man's head. It is not edited with the idea of trying to force into the average man's head a lot of information which he does not hanker for and cannot make use of."

Having always considered ourself an average man, we turned the pages hopefully, only to find a considerable amount of information we had never "hankered" for, and could not make use of, as, for instance, how to become the biggest "buyer" in the universe, or how a certain theatrical manager wants you to think he thinks he got on in the world (there is, to be sure, a quite unintentional psychological interest here), or how to remember the names of a hundred thousand people—dreadful thought! So we decided we were not, after all, an average man, and shifted to the fiction.

There were four short stories and a serial in this issue, and not one of them concerned itself with people who could speak correct English. Some of the stories confined their assaults upon our mother tongue to the dialogue, one was told by a dog (which, of course, excuses much, in prose as well as verse), and one was entirely written in what we presume to be a sort of literary Bowery dialect, which we have since been informed by friends more extensively read than ourself is now the necessary dialect of American magazine humor, as essential, almost, as the bathing-girl on the August cover.

"'I think we got about everything. I'll see that the things is packed in them wardrobe trunks an' sent to your hotel to-morrow morning. An' believe me, it's been some afternoon, Mr. Bentley!'"

—This, at random, from one of the two stories which dealt with the "business woman," whose motto seems to be, "Business Before Grammar," even as it is the motto of the editor. The other "business woman" was not quite so lax. She tried as hard to speak correctly as the author could let her, and won a certain amount of sympathy for her efforts.

But the gem, of course, was the story told all in the literary Boweryese. A lack of acquaintance with past performances by our author prevented us from feeling quite sure who the supposed narrator might be, without reading the entire story, but we gathered from early paragraphs and from the illustrations that the guy was a pug. (You see, it's contagious.) At any rate, this is how the story began:—

"The average guy's opinion of himself reaches its highest level about five minutes after the most wonderful girl in the world gasps 'Yes!' He always thought he was a little better than the other voters, but now he knows it! Of course, he figures, the girl couldn't very well help fallin' for a handsome brute like him, who'd have more money than Rockefeller if he only knew somethin' about oil. He kids himself along like that, thinkin' that it was his curly hair or his clever chatter that turned the trick. Them guys gimme a laugh!

"When Mamie Mahoney or Gladys Van de Vere decides to love, honor and annoy one of these birds, she's got some little thing in view besides light house-keepin'. Some dames marry for spite, some because they prefer limousines to the subway, and others want to make Joe stop playin' the races or the rye. But there's always somethin' there—just like they have to put alloy in gold to hold it together. Yes, gentle reader, there's a reason!

"But if you're engaged, son, don't let this disturb you. I've seen some dames that, believe me, I wouldn't care what they married me for, as long as they did!"

Having proceeded thus far, we turned back to the table of contents for affirmation of what we vaguely remembered to have read there. Yes, we had read it! The tale was labeled by the editor, "A funny story."

So this is fiction for "the average man," and on this spiritual fare his cravings for literature are fed! So this is the sort of thing which doubles the circulation of a popular magazine in twenty months! Such melancholy reflections crossed our mind, coupled with the thought that with no speech at all in the movies, and such speech as this in his magazines, the "average man" will either have to read his Bible every day or soon forget that there was once such a thing as the beautiful English language. And alas, the circulation of the Bible hasn't doubled in the past twenty months! "This magazine accepts man as he is—and helps him"—so reads the editor's self-puffery. What an indictment of man—and what an idea of help! We would hate to go to bed with his conscience,—if editors have such old-fashioned impediments.

But suddenly we caught a ray of light amid the encircling gloom. The editor hadn't stated what his circulation was twenty months ago! We recalled how Irvin Cobb once told us that the attendance at his musical comedy had doubled the previous evening—the usher had brought his sister. Doubtless the new circulation isn't more than a million,—and what is a mere million nowadays?





Wood Ashes and Progress

"Once man defended his home and hearth; now he defends his home and radiator." The words stared out of the bulk of print on the page with startling vividness, a gem of philosophy, a "criticism of life," in the waste of jokes which the comic-paper editor had read and doubtless paid for, and which the public was doubtless expected to enjoy. The Man Above the Square laid aside the paper, leaned toward his fire, took up the poker (an old ebony cane adorned with a heavy silver knob which bore the name of an actor once loved and admired) and rolled the top log over slowly and meditatively. The end of the cane was scarred and burned from many a contest with stubborn logs, and the Man Above the Square looked at the marks of service with a smile before he stood the heavy stick again in its place by the fireside.

"It isn't every walking-stick which comes to such a good end," he said aloud.

Then either because he was cold or in penitence for the pun, he walked over to the windows to pull down the shades. But before he did so he looked out into the night, his breath making a frosty vapor on the pane. Below him the Square gleamed in white patches under the arc-lamps, and across these white patches here and there a belated pedestrian, coat collar turned up, hurried, a black shadow. The cross on the Memorial Church gleamed like a cluster of stars, and deep in the cold sky the moon rode silently. A chill wind was complaining in the bare treetops beneath him and found its way to his face and body through the window chinks. He drew down the shades quickly and pulled the heavy draperies together with a rattle of rings on the rods. Then he turned and faced his room.

A scarf of Oriental silk veiled the light of the single lamp, set low on his desk, and the fire had its own way with the illumination. It sent dancing shadows over the olive walls, it made points of light of the picture-frames and a glowing coal of the polished coffee-urn in the corner; it pointed pleasantly out the numberless books, but told nothing of their contents; it made dark the spaces where the alcoves were, but suffused the little radius of the hearth that was bounded by an easy chair and a pipe-stand with a glow and warmth and comfort which were irresistible. The Man Above the Square came quickly into this charmed radius and sank again into the chair. "And some people insist on steam heat!" he said.

Then he looked into the rosy pit of wallowing, good-natured flames, and fancied he was meditating. But in reality he was going to sleep. When he woke up the fire was out and he was cramped and cold. He stumbled to a corner, turned on the steam in a radiator, that the room might be warm in the morning, and returned to his chamber.

"After all, you have to build a fire; but the steam just comes," he growled, as he crawled sleepily into bed.

Toward morning the steam did come, but some hours before he was ready to rise. It came at intervals, forcing the water up ahead and thumping it against the top of the radiator with the force of a trip-hammer and the noise of a cannon. The Man Above the Square woke up and cursed. The intervals between thumps he employed in wondering how soon the next report would come, which effectively prevented his going to sleep again. Presently the thumping ceased, and he dozed off, to awake later in ugly temper. He went out into the sitting room and found it cold as an ice-box.

"Where in blazes is all that steam which woke me up at daylight?" he shouted down the speaking-tube to the janitor. The answer, as usual, admitted of no reply, even as it offered no satisfactory explanation. He dug into the wood-box and on the heap of feathery white ashes which topped the pile in the fireplace like snow—"the fall of last night" he called it—he laid a fire of pine and maple. In three minutes he was toasting his toes in front of the blaze, and good nature was spreading up his person like the tide up a bay.

"Modern conveniences would be all right," he chuckled, looking from the merry fire to the ugly radiator, "if they were ever convenient!"

Then he swung Indian clubs for a quarter of an hour, jumped into a cold plunge, and went rosy to his breakfast and the day's work, with the cheeriness of the fire in his heart.

But while he was gone there entered the chambermaid, and sad desecration was wrought. Chambermaids are another modern inconvenience. The Pilgrim Fathers got along without chambermaids; and even at a much later period chambermaids worked at least under the supervision of a mistress of the household. But nowadays they have their own way, even in abodes where there is one who could be a mistress if she would, or time from social duties and the improvement of her mind permitted. Of course, in the abode of a bachelor the chambermaid is supreme, for bachelors, at least in New York, have of necessity to live in apartments, not private boarding houses presided over by a careful mistress. Probably most of them prefer to; but that does not prove progress, none the less. But the Man Above the Square was not of this class. He had a sharp elbow bone, in the first place, which is to signify that he was a "good house-keeper," as they say in New England. And in the second place, he knew the value to the aesthetic and moral sense of personality in living rooms, of an orderly, tasteful arrangement of inanimate objects, carpets, pictures, furniture, which, through weeks of comparative changelessness, takes on the human aspect of a friend and silently welcomes you when you return at night, saying comfortably, "I am here, as you left me; I am home."

So when he entered his room again that evening and turned up the gas, his immediate utterance was not strictly the subject for reproduction. To begin with, the chambermaid had, in disobedience to his strict orders, taken up the centre rug and sent it up on the roof for the porter to beat. Being an expensive rug, the Man Above the Square did not particularly relish having it frequently beaten. But still less did he relish the way it had been replaced. It was not in the centre of the room, so that two legs of the library desk in the middle stood on the border and two on the diamond centre. One end was too near the piano, the other consequently too far from the hearth. And in trying to tug it into position the maid had managed to pull every edge out of plumb with the lines of the floor. Of course, the photographs on the piano had smooches on the margins, where the maid's thumb had pressed as she held them up to dust beneath. Pudd'n-Head Wilson would alone have prized them in their present state. On the mantel each object was just far enough out of its proper place to throw the whole decorative scheme into a line of Puritanic primness. And the chairs, silent friends that are so companionable when an understanding hand places them in position, were now facing at stiff angles of armed neutrality, as if mutually suspicious. Not one of them said, "Sit in me."

But the worst was yet to come. Walking over to the fireplace, the Man Above the Square looked in and groaned.

"She's done it again!" he cried. "I'd move out of this flat to-night if I wasn't sure that any other would be as bad, this side of the middle of last century."

It was, indeed, a sorry piece of work. The splendid pile of gray and white wood ashes which that morning had been heaped high over the arms of the firedogs, and which drifted high into each corner and out upon the hearth, was no more. A little pile remained, carefully swept into the rear of the fireplace, but the bulk of the ashes had been removed and the arms of the firedogs stood inches above what was left.

"I told her not to do it; confound it! I told her not to do it!" he muttered aloud, storming about the room. "Here I've been since Christmas collecting that pile of ashes, and it had just reached the point where I could kindle a fire with three sticks of kindling and burn only one log if I wished. And then that confounded chambermaid disobeys me—distinctly disobeys me—and shovels it all out!"

He rang angrily for the chambermaid, whose name was Eliza, and who was tall and angular.

"Didn't I tell you under no consideration to take away any of my ashes?" he demanded.

"But I swept the room into them, and they got all dirty," she protested.

"Then don't sweep the room again!" he interposed. "I want the ashes left hereafter."

"But the fire will burn better without so many ashes; they chokes it," said Eliza. "Most people like 'em cleaned out every week."

"Most people are fools," said the Man Above the Square. "You may go now."

The loss of his ashes had so irritated him that it was a long time before he could yield himself to the influence of the blaze, which leapt merrily enough, in spite of the too clear hearth. He filled his pipe and smoked it out and filled it again; he tried the latest autobiography and Heine's prose and the current magazines; and still his mind would not settle to restfulness and content. Then suddenly he remembered the date, the 20th of January. He took down his Keats. The owl, for all his feathers, might well have been a-cold on that night, too, for a shrill wind was up without. He glanced at his fire. Already the kindlings were settling into glowing heaps beneath the logs, a good start on a fresh pile of ashes. He snuggled more comfortably into his chair and began once more the deathless poem.

The clock ticked steadily; the wind sent crashing down the limb of an elm tree outside and shrieked exultingly; a log settled into the fire with a hiss and crackle of sparks. But he heard nothing. Presently he laid the book aside, for the poem was finished, and looked into the fire. It was sometimes a favorite question of his to inquire who ate Madeline's feast, a point which Keats leaves in doubt; but he did not ask it to-night.

"Yes, it was ages long ago," he said at length. "Ages long ago!"

Then he leaned forward, poking the fire meditatively, and added: "Steam heat in Madeline's chamber? Impossible! But there might have been just such another fire as this!"

And was it a sudden thought, "like a full-blown rose," making "purple riot" in his breast, too, or was it simply the leap of the firelight, which caused his face to flush?

"I wonder where they are now?" he whispered. "'They are together in the arms of death,' a later poet says. But surely the world has not so far 'progressed' that they do not live somewhere still."

Then he recalled a visit he once made to a young doctor in a fine old New-England village. The doctor was not long out of college, and he had brought his bride to this little town, to an old house rich in tiny window panes, uneven floors and memories. Great fireplaces supplied the heat for the doctor and his wife, as it had done for the occupants who looked forth from the windows to see the soldiery go by on their way to join Washington at the siege of Boston. And when the Man Above the Square came on his visit he found in the fireplace which warmed the low-studded living room, that was library and drawing room as well, a heap of ashes more than a foot high, on which the great cordwood sticks roared merrily.

The doctor and his wife, sitting down before the blaze, pointed proudly to this heap of ashes, and the doctor said, "I brought Alice to this house a year ago, on the day of our wedding, and we kindled a fire here, on the bare hearth. Since then not a speck of ashes has been removed, except little bits from the front when the carpet was invaded. That pile of ashes is the witness to our year-long honeymoon."

Then Alice smiled fondly into the rosy glow, herself more rosy, and they kissed each other quite unaffectedly.

The Man Above the Square, when his memory reached this point, let the ebony poker slide from his grasp. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "her name was really Madeline!"

Again he looked into the fire. "Could the ashes have been preserved if Madeline had not given the matter her personal attention, but had trusted to a housemaid?" he thought. What further reflections this question inspired must be left to conjecture. He did not speak again.

But presently he got up, went to his desk, and wrote a letter. He was a long time about it, consulting frequently with the fire and smiling now and then. When it was done he took it at once to the elevator to be mailed. Perhaps he thought it unsafe to wait the turning of the mood.





The Vacant Room in Drama

I am content to let Mr. John Corbin sing the praises of the stage without scenery; I prefer to sing the praises of the stage without actors. Ever since I was a little boy, nothing in the world has been for me so full of charm and suggestiveness as an empty room. I remember as vividly as though it were week before last being brought home from a visit somewhere, when I was four years old, and arriving after dark. My mother had difficulty in finding the latch-key in her bag (I have since noted that this is a common trait of women), and while the search was going on I ran around the corner of the house and peered in one of the low windows of the library. The moonlight lay in two oblong patches on the floor; and as I pressed my nose against the pane and gazed, the familiar objects within gradually emerged from the gloom, as if a faint, invisible light were being turned slowly up by an invisible hand. Nothing seemed, however, as it did by day, but everything took on a new and mysterious significance that bewildered me. I think it must also have terrified me, for I recall my father's carrying me suddenly into the glare of the hall, and saying, "What's the matter with the boy?" And to-day I cannot enter a theatre, even at the prosaic hour of ten in the morning, when the chairs are covered with cloths and maids are dusting, when the house looks very small and the unlit and unadorned stage very like a barn, without a thrill of imaginative pleasure. I have even mounted the stage of an empty theatre and addressed with impassioned, soundless words the deeply stirred, invisible, great audience, rising row on row to the roof. At such moments I have experienced the creative joy of a mighty orator or a sublime actor; I have actually felt my pulses leap. And then the entrance of a stage-hand or a scrub-woman would shatter the illusion!

But it is when I am one of a real audience, and the stage is disclosed set with scenery but barren of players, that I derive, perhaps, the keenest pleasure. A few playwrights have recognized the power of the vacant room in drama, but on the whole the opportunities for such enjoyment are far too rare. This is odd, too, with such convincing examples at hand. There is, for instance, the close of the second act of Die Meistersinger, when the watchman passes through the sleepy town after the street brawl is over, and then the empty, moon-bathed street lies quiet for a time, before the curtain closes. Of course, here there is music to aid in creating the poetic charm and soothing repose of that moment. But at the end of Shore Acres there was no such aid. Who that saw it, however, can forget that final picture? After Nat Berry—played by Mr. Herne, the author—had scratched a bit of frost off the window-pane to peer out into the night, locked the door, and banked the fire, he climbed with slow, aged footsteps up the stairs to bed. At the landing he turned to survey the old kitchen below, that lay so cozy and warm under the benediction of his eye. Then he disappeared with his candle, and the stage grew quite dim, save for the red glow from the fire. Yet the curtain did not fall; and through a mist of tears, tears it cleansed one's soul to shed, the audience looked for a long, hushed moment on the scene, on the now familiar room where so much of joy and grief had happened,—deserted, tranquil, but suddenly, in this new light of emptiness, realized to be how vital a part of the lives of those people who had made the play! It used to seem, indeed, as if the drama had not achieved full reality until the old kitchen had thus had its say, thus spoken the epilogue.

It is strange to me that more playwrights have not profited by such examples. The cry of the average playgoer is for "action," to be sure; but even "action" may be heightened by contrast, by peace and serenity. Certainly the vitality, the illusion, of a scenic background on the stage can be enhanced by drawing a certain amount of attention to it alone; and something as Mr. Hardy, in The Return of the Native, paints Egdon Heath—"Haggard Egdon"—in its shifting moods before he introduces a single human being upon the scene of their coming tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern playwright, with an artist to aid him, to show the audience the scene of his drama, to let its suggestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm or fire their fancies before the speech and action begin. So also, as Wagner and Mr. Herne have demonstrated, there can be a climax of the vacant stage. I look to the new stage-craft to develop such possibilities.





On Giving an Author a Plot

There are two people who annoy an author more than any others—the person who calmly supposes that everything he writes is biographical, or even autobiographical, and the person who declares, "I've got a dandy plot for you"—and proceeds to tell it.

The first person, of course, is annoying, because an author's stories always are either biographical or autobiographical, and he never cares to admit, even to himself, how true this is. To be sure, his characters are composites, and his self-revelations are rather possibilities (or even, alas, Freudian wishes!) than records of actuality. But fancy trying to explain that to a gushing female who has developed a sudden passion for calling on your wife, and is heard to remark, "Oh, is that where he writes?" as you flee by a back door, down the garden!

The second person is annoying not so much because most of the "dandy plots" that he or she tells are hoary with age, or even because most writers don't start with a 'plot' at all, and couldn't define a plot if they had to; but rather because a writer, however humble, has to feel the idea for a story come glowing up over the horizon of his brain out of the east of his own subconsciousness, or it is never his, it never acquires the necessary warmth to interest him, the color and light to make it real. This is a curious fact, and one which your modest writer shrinks from trying to explain to his well-meaning friend, lest he seem egotistical. Only the blessed publicity of print could draw him out. Yet the psychology involved perhaps deserves some attention.

Suppose it is my common method, in writing a story, to start from some social situation which illumines a strata of life; suppose, let us assume, that I am present at a dinner party where a radical has got in by mistake and says something which profoundly shocks some capitalistic pirate who honestly feels himself a pillar of law and order, and in this situation I see an irony which gradually demands fictional expression, as imagined characters and more extensive clashes begin to shape in my brain. There you have a not at all impossible evolution of a story. But now suppose that instead of my being present at this party, a friend had been present, quite as alive as I to the ironies of the situation, and suppose my friend later repeated the incident to me—why should it not serve me just as well, why should it not start the fictional urge, the gestation of character and incident?

Generalizing is dangerous work. Of course, there may be authors in whom it would start the process. But I have never known one. Even in so exceptional a case as this—of course, the usual friendly suggestion has no real meat of fiction in it at all—something is lacking to fire the imagination. It is exactly as if your nose were called upon to sense, or your retina to image, an odor or a scene described to you and not directly experienced. Your brain accepts the description, but there is no warmth in the reaction, no tingle of life. Just so, it would almost seem, the conception for a story, a poem, no doubt for a picture, too, or a strain of music, is something less, or more, than merely mental; it is in some subtle way sensory, as if the brain had fingers which must themselves touch the thing directly to get the feel of it. Is it not, perhaps, this fact which has caused so many artists, consciously or unconsciously, to believe in "inspiration"?

The singing line walks from nowhere into the poet's head, the perfect situation comes to the writer of fiction when he is least expecting it. To take a humble example, I was once sitting in an editor's office, listening while he expounded to me a grand "plot" for a series of stories. I looked across the street from his window to avoid his eyes, lest I should show my lack of appreciation, and there beheld a slight incident which I instantly knew was a starting-point. It turned out to be worth a year's income to me. Yet, to a merely impersonal judgment, the editor's idea was more interesting and worth while than mine. Only it wasn't mine; that's the point. It was foreign born, and could never become a citizen of my mental commonwealth. I have not quite reached the pitch of calling my ideas inspirations, but I long ago recognized that unless they were my ideas from the dim days before their birth they could never be mine, and it was only a waste of time to wrestle with them. So when a friend declares he has a dandy plot for me, I summon what patience I may and pretend to listen, while planning a better succession of perennials for next year's garden, or mentally reviewing the prospect of cutting three strokes off my golf score.





The Twilight Veil

New York! How few of us call it home! We have been sucked into it, as into a whirlpool, and as we spin round and round on its mighty unrest our hearts and fancies find repose in memory—the memory of an old New England village, or a corn field and a split-rail fence and then the level prairie, or cotton fields and the red handkerchiefs of the negroes, or the vineyard slopes of Sicily, or the great white surf beating up the cliffs of Connemara. It may be that the second and third generations of immigrants, born on the East Side, are true New Yorkers, just as a vanishing generation of elderly men and women on Murray Hill and the Avenue are true New Yorkers. But the great majority of New York's five millions cherish in their hearts either the memory or the hope of some spot far away to which they give the allegiance of home love. Ours is a curious city in that respect. Perhaps, indeed, it is a fortunate one. Without such memory or such hope, the flat-dwelling imposed on most New Yorkers by economic necessity would be a deadly thing—or shall we say, a more deadly thing?

If you desire a curious experience, go into a New York club like the Yale or Harvard or Players' club, and collect a dozen men at random, asking each for a little word-sketch of his childhood home. Seldom enough will the scene of that sketch be in New York City, and you will probably be surprised to find how infrequently it will be in any city. A kind of urban consciousness gets complete possession of us after we have lived long on Manhattan Island, and we are prone to forget what a geographically tiny spot it is. We forget the country. It comes as a surprise when we discover how many of our fellows were, like us, country bred. We are still a nation, at bottom, of little white dwelling houses, if not any longer of little white school houses. (I know the phrase is little red school houses, only they never were red, but white!) This is probably one reason why our aesthetic sense is not adjusted to find more beauties than we do in the physical aspects of New York City. Deep in our consciousness, if not rather our subconsciousness, lies the ache for green vistas and gardens, for low sky lines and quiet streets. When we speak of the picturesque in New York, we most often refer (aside from the obviously striking aspect of the lower city from the harbor) to the old brick houses on Washington Square or the quaint streets of Greenwich Village. Yet we do both the city and ourselves an injustice by this more or less unconscious attitude. Let us consider picturesque to mean what is shaped by chance and the play of light into a beautiful picture, and, if we but walk the town with eyes upraised and open, we shall see the picturesque on every side.

There is the Plaza Hotel, for example. Every New Yorker and every visitor to New York knows it,—a great, white, naked sky-scraper, with a green hip-roof, rising close to the Park and St. Gaudens' golden bronze of General Sherman. But how many know that it is probably the one sky-scraper in the world which can gaze at its own reflection in still water, and that to the spectator looking at it over this water-mirror it becomes a gigantic but ethereal Japanese design, even to the pine limb flung across the upper corner?

They say there is an hour at twilight when all men appear noble, and all women beautiful. Certainly there is such a twilight hour when New York City is veiled, oftimes, in loveliness; and most lovely at this hour is the Plaza mirrored in the pool. The view is not easy to find, unless you are one of those who know your Central Park. But a little searching will uncover it. You will see in the southeast corner of the Park a lake, and just beyond this lake you will find a path turning west. That path leads to a stone bridge over a northward-stretching inlet of the pond. Cross the bridge a few paces and turn your face to the south. At your feet the bank goes down sharply to the still, dark water. Across the pond the bank rises steep and rocky, covered with thick shrubbery and trees. Shooting up apparently out of these trees is the white wall of the Plaza, three hundred feet into the air, and down into the water sinks its still reflection, to an equal depth. It rises alone, open sky to left and right, and there is just room in the lake for its replica. The picture is impressive by day, but as twilight begins to steal over the scene, as the sky takes on a pearly softness, and the shadows creep through the trees in the Park, and the lights in half the windows up that white cliff wall begin to gleam in golden squares, the great building becomes curiously ethereal, the pine limb flung into the foreground of the design catches the eye, the reflection in the water is as real as the reality. The Plaza, monstrous tons of steel and stone, floats between two elements. Then darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water grow more golden, and suddenly, perhaps, a duck swims across a tenth story window and sets it dancing in golden ripples. You may fare far among the ancient and "picturesque" cities of the earth without finding a rival for this strange bit of beauty in New York, an ethereal sky-scraper in white and gold gazing at its own reflection in the forest pool!

Twilight in the Park, indeed, converts more than one building into a thing of beauty, and the Plaza into a thing of beauty from more than one view. For instance, as you pass into the Park, seeking the spot we have described, turn back before you have advanced far, and see the great cliff wall going up beyond the slender tracery of young trees, with the street lights, just turned on, making a level strip of golden shimmer at its base, curiously suggestive of crowds and gaiety. There is at all hours a certain charm to be found in the long line of high hotels and apartment houses which line the Park to the west, when you view them over treetops, rock ledges, and running brooks, or over white fields of snow. It is as if the city had crested in a great wave along the green shore of the country, ready to curl and fall and dash onward, but had been suddenly arrested by some more potent King Canute. Loveliness, however, is hardly a word you would apply till twilight steals across the scene. Down side streets into the west the golden sunset glows for a time, and the shadows on the snow are amethyst. Then the glow fades. The arc lamps come on with a splutter, and they, too, at first are amethyst. But in the gathering dark they change to blue. The sky changes to the deep blue of approaching night. The dim bulks of the buildings change to blue. The shadows about you are but a deeper blue. Even the snow at your feet is blue. In the great apartments and hotels the golden window squares appear, and the looming procession of blue shadow bulks might be a fleet of giant liners going by you in the night.

There is always a mystery and poignant charm about our parks in New York, if you let them have their way with your imagination, which you do not find in other parks intrinsically, perhaps, more beautiful. No doubt this comes from violent contrast between our city and the hush and peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless, and our great heave of masonry comes up to the very edge of our green oases. Even the smaller parks which fill but a block or two, when twilight enfolds them, blurring the harsher outlines and conjuring out the shadows, can captivate the senses. If you chance to wander in Brooklyn—which no self-respecting inhabitant of Manhattan permits himself to do except under compulsing!—you may come upon Fort Greene Park when the evening shadows are stealing down the streets to meet you, and the Martyrs' Monument strangely converted into a pagan altar, silhouetted against the sky amid its guardian druid grove wherein the lamps glow and twinkle and dark figures move mysteriously.

But it is not even necessary to enter the parks of New York to find the picturesque and lovely. Such open areas as Washington and Madison Squares hold varying aspects of beauty and imaginative suggestion, from sunrise to moonset. Large enough to admit the play of light and to blur a bit the building lines at their further side, these squares reward the seeing eye with many an unguessed delight.