it THE VIEW VERTICAL AND OTHER ESSAYS KIRBXAND Class JiS-^^^i. COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. THE VIEW VERTICAL AND OTHER ESSAYS THE VIEW VERTICAL AND OTHER ESSAYS BY - ^' WINIFRED KIRKLAND Author oj " The Joys of Being a fFoman," etc. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1920 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY WINIFRED KIRKLAND ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Zoo OCT -9 1920 g)C!,A597702 CONTENTS The View Vertical 3 Confessions of a Scene-Maker 15 With the Why-nots 23 Stylish Stouts 28 The Friends of our Friends 33 An Argument for Absence 38 On Being and Letting Alone 43 A Soliloquy on Sorting 48 Drudgery as a Fine Art 55 The Perils of Telepathy 62 Family Phrases 69 Hold Izzy! 84 On Adopting One's Parents 90 In Defense of Worry 97 Courtesies and Calories 103 Back-Street Philosophy 108 April Burial 116 Grace before Books 129 Some Reasons for Being Rejected 134 The Story in the Making 139 The Wizard Word 146 The Pleasures of the Preposition 153 Faces in Fiction 159 V CONTENTS Background Past and Present 179 A Portrait for the Contemporary 186 Victuals and Drink in Jane Austen 191 The Man in the Dictionary 198 Robinson Crusoe Re-Read 211 Shakespeare on the Servant Problem 217 A Boy in a Book 227 Americanization and Walt Whitman 236 Poetry by the Pennyworth 244 A Little Excursion in a Hymn-Book 252 Print and Pulpit 260 Gift-Books and Book-Gifts 265 THE VIEW VERTICAL AND OTHER ESSAYS THE VIEW VERTICAL THE chief result of the war is that it has left everybody's nerves jumpy. Nations and individuals give too much evidence that they have been lying awake at night, Hstening to burglars stealthily trying the cellar win- dows. Our jangled nerves seem unable to re- spond to the simple fact that for some time now our jewel cases and our watches and our dining silver have been obstinately reappear- ing each morning in familiar security. Despite this reassuring circumstance, sleeplessness dominates the intercourse of mind with mind, which, whether expressed in art or literature, in newsprint or conversation, is made up of wan-eyed recountings of the new things each of us has found to be afraid of the night before. At a time when a holocaust has left the nerves of humanity raw and quivering, it is well we should stoutly take ourselves in hand to con- quer a universal neurasthenia. The best nerve treatment seems to be to convince the patient of what is the matter with him, and then to trust to his own com- mon sense to restore his equilibrium. A little examination into the nature of all sleepless- 3 THE VIEW VERTICAL ness may suggest a wider application of its cure, and a readier caution in accepting as reliable any verdicts reached in the night- watches. It is strange that we choose night-time to solve all the puzzles of the cosmos, that sturdy old cosmos which by day we are inclined to leave to its own doing or undoing. How many solutions reached at 3 a.m. have ever proved valid upon arising.'* What more worthless than the conclusions of an insomniac.^ Who knows this fact so well as the insomniac himself.^ The truth is, we are so helplessly irrational in the small hours that it even appears rational to lie awake. At night we are mastered by the fallacy that we are doing useful thinking, a fallacy immediately recognized when in the morning we resume the vertical. Why do we not oftener summon some of our daylight reason to counteract the unreason of the night? The newer psychological methods seek by argument to prove to the subconscious self the futility of insomnia in the hope that this obdurate subconscious self may thus at last be sufficiently convinced to grant us slumber. It is the horizontal attitude of the body combined with enveloping darkness that is the natural condition of physical impotence and of mental obscurity. For their power over us 4 THE VIEW VERTICAL the horrors of the horizontal reach back into the prehistoric. It has taken us aeons to cHmb to the perpendicular. When we revert to the horizontal, we revert in some degree to our helplessness in the primordial ooze. We no longer front the stars with a brain that tops a vertical spinal column, but, lying down, incur once more the nameless perils of those days when we were mere hysterical amoebae, shud- dering and changing shape with every ripple of circumstance. The primal slime ever pulls us down, while the ultimate stars ever pull us upright; between the two lies our long evolu- tion toward the attainments accruing to the vertical: first we floated in the ooze, ourselves possessing neither top nor bottom; then we progressed to dominate a little our slimy sur- roundings, either swimming in or crawling upon them, but slowly advancing to the amphibian's distinction of a brain situated nearer to the sky than was his stomach; then, gradually, by some celestial attraction, we were hauled up and up and up until we passed into the stage when four feet lifted us above the mud, but still held our head parallel to it, therefore still horizontal, still palpitant to the perils awash in the near-by water, to the dan- gers stalking in the grass adjacent to our ears. By degrees, the emerging ape rose higher, 5 THE VIEW VERTICAL arriving at such meager intuitions of his future powers as were possible to a brain no longer parallel with earth, but aslant at times toward heaven. The monkey man was never faithful to the perpendicular, frequently flopping back from two feet to four, or subjecting himself to the mental instability — naturally attractive to a prehensile character — of hanging from his support head down! When we lie supine in the dark our pre- historic impotence dominates both our intel- lect and our emotions. The sleepless man can- not attain to clear thinking in an atmosphere reminiscent of a period when he was eyeless against the obscuration of surrounding mud and mist, nor can he aspire to courage in a position that pulls him back to a time when he could not even strike at hostile circumstance. The horizontal heart slips back to its reptilian sluggishness. By force of primeval habit the insomniac on his back upon his bed can be neither clear-headed nor brave-hearted. Note how, even among the lowest orders of attain- ment, the fish or the snake, to lie upon the native element belly upward is always evi- dence of the supreme surrender. The sleepless man usually lies upon his back, and so much the v/orse for him, for even in lying down there is a differing degree of 6 THE VIEW VERTICAL weakness between prone and supine. The sol- dier when forced to be horizontal never lies supine, but prone, in position for pulling trig- ger upon an approaching enemy. Even in our moments of bitterest rebellion against circum- stance, when we own our powerlessness but do not acquiesce, we may cast ourselves down; but in these conditions we manage to fall face under, still possessing spirit enough to bite the enemy earth or pound it. It is only when we have utterly given up that we turn over upon our backs. Even when we indulge in the supine under happiest conditions — as be- neath the sun and shade of a summer tree, watching the lazy wanderings of the clouds — our attitude, while freed from terrors of the horizontal, still partakes of its helplessness, its inconsequent thinking, its relaxed resolu- tion. The brave sick are, indeed, to be com- mended, for they fight not only pain and weakness, but all the nameless debility of mind and soul growing out of our evolution from the horizontal to the vertical. Both our vocabulary and our experience prove to us our respect for the perpendicular position. We have scorn for the invertebrate, especially when human, because the creature is incapable of standing up. Our slang ex- presses contempt for any one who takes his 7 THE VIEW VERTICAL luck "lying down," and equally exalts the man who "stands up" to his fate. For each of us the perpendicular is always the attitude of resolution, of sanity, of serenity. Lives there anywhere an insomniac who does not know that nothing he thinks when lying awake is true, that nothing he feels is so? Does not sanity return to us even as we plant foot upon the floor in the morning? Does not humor begin to warm our chilly fears even while we brush our hair for breakfast? Erect, we are proof against the panics of the remote amoeba within us; vertical, we cannot slide back to the unstable mentality of the monkey in our make-up. Only when we stand up are we secure in our full inheritance as men. Only as our heads approach the sun do we share his vigor and lucidity. A further examination into the nature of insomniac thinking reveals the fact that the humor that visits us when upon our backs is as unreliable as is the terror. When we are lying down, both our fun and our fear are grotesquely alien to reality. To both alike, "the fly upon the pane May seem the great ox of the distant plain." The horizontal fastens its blight upon our comic sense whether we dream our jokes in THE VIEW VERTICAL actual slumber, or conceive them as we toss in wakefulness. So long as we lie abed our fun is fallacious. We have all had the experience of dreaming dreams that appeared to our sleeping mind exquisitely ludicrous. When we got up in the morning we remembered the night vision perfectly, but the comic element had become so banal as to make us feel shaky for our reason. The supine position infects equally any humor that may visit us when we lie not dreaming, but awake. The sleepless man's merriment Is either sardonic or hyster- ical. It Is tainted by all that nameless in- security that belongs to the small black hours of the night-watches. The humor of insomnia harks back to the cave-man's bravado, to the monkey's antic efforts to divert the boa con- strictor. The ape may grin, in order to conceal either fatuousness or perturbation, but he cannot twinkle, he cannot chuckle, and neither can the human being when sleepless. Instead, the treacherous view horizontal transports him instantly back to the primitive, and be- yond that to the primordial. If you want either to iight well, or to laugh well, you must stand up to do it. Now, nobody can help be- ing afraid when alone in the dark with in- somnia; the tendency is atavistic and ines- capable; but the best way of going to sleep is 9 THE VIEW VERTICAL to remember how surely vigor will return with the vertical the moment our feet grip the floor in the morning. To the devil with the ape and the amoeba that rule our vigils In the darkness! In the morning the sun winks a genial eye at us across the eternal mountains, and wags his great red head in mirth at our night-time fidgets. When we scrutinize all the aspects of sleep- lessness, and investigate the treacheries of the view horizontal, as we are each as individuals betrayed by it, we cannot doubt that this poor old world as a whole is to-day suffering an acute attack of insomnia. Where but in the ravings of sleepless nights could it have con- jured up the fears that have occasioned the convulsive legislation, the crazed actions, the frantic news columns, of these last years? Poor old nerve-shattered world, it needs to go and lie under a tree and take a nap. Unless all civilization is to slip back to a monkey- madness, unless our sanity is to flop down on all fours, we need to stand up and perceive by the means of the view vertical that really nobody wants to eat us. If our civilization is worth making such a fuss about, why should it not have a little more confidence in its own indestructibility.'' The morning sunshine is the best germicide for the sleepless sickness, ID THE VIEW VERTICAL and both we and the sun have been rising pretty regularly every morning for a good many generations, and since human evolu- tion appears as yet far short of finality, we shall probably continue so to rise for a good many generations to come. Gazing back into the abysses of the view horizontal from which evolution has been persistently fishing us out, as if some patient rod and line were ever tugging us up to the view vertical, we can rightly appraise our constant tendency to revert to panic, and no longer deem a mere atavistic instinct worthy of consideration. As when we look back at our past development, it is possible for us to ex- perience over again the tremors of that far-oflF amoeba within us, so it is also possible, when we look ahead at the upward climb still be- fore us, for us to taste in advance the exulta- tion of the emergent angel. It may be our future destiny ever to be drawn sunward, always erect, always head uppermost. The patiently evolved view vertical may thus be extended into an ever surer perspective which shall reveal to us all earth-doings as truly proportioned as is the living map spread be- neath a soaring airship. Gazing from that height we may behold all the woven roads of past history, and watch, as if they were busy II THE VIEW VERTICAL ants, the tiny men and women moving there, still going briskly about their deathless con- cerns. Shaken as we are to-day by ephemeral volcanoes, by evanescent cataclysms, we sometimes forget that the past is inalienably ours, all its merry people, all its happy by- paths. Still may we offer thanks to Heaven for our heritage of immortal books: Robinson Crusoe still wakes from shipwreck upon a desert shore; the big voice of great-heart Johnson still rumbles from the pages of Bozzy, and Hetty Thrale, and Hannah More; the twinkling pen of Jane Austen still paints a cosmos framed in a village window; beneath all transient class struggles Shakespeare still depicts the democracy of the human soul. From that windy high perspective to which our future shall lift us, we shall look down not only on the past, but on the present, and laugh at the night-fears that conjured up any menace to its safety. We shall see as we stand secure in air, gazing down, that eternal ram- parts forever protect the tender sanctities of family life, and all the busy comedy of human relations. Whatever forces may seem to rock our present world, human character some- how persists endlessly whimsical, and still presents an inexhaustible fund for observa- tion and for the gossip of chatty pens. Look- 12 THE VIEW VERTICAL ing down at contemporary life from some cloudbank we shall see that while earth- quakes are rattling the locks of the front doors, there are even at this moment plenty of people to be discovered cultivating pure fun like a bed of hardy perennials in the backyard. From that sun-swept altitude, to which our ever-developing view vertical will some day lift us, we shall behold not only the past and the present, but also the future as a rolling map below us. We shall be high above the mists, and the jolly sun twinkling down over our shoulder will in a flash dispel our vapor- ous imaginings of the night, reveahng those dragon shapes we tried to fight as being mere clouds assembled with the harmless intention of watering the earth. We shall perceive, per- haps, that the rivers of unrest are merely fol- lowing the commendable ancient practice of all rivers to wriggle to the sea. Even though we are yet too earth-bound to soar except in fancy, we may even now benefit by the tonic air belonging to that windy vantage-point-to-be. If we can main- tain the view vertical — feet to the sturdy green earth, head to the jocund sun — we shall be able to laugh the poor old world out, of its insomniac terrors. Even though we may 13 THE VIEW VERTICAL be a bit wan with sleeplessness, if we stand straight, we shall recognize our panics as being mere figments of the night, and spring- ing up at sunrise to our heritage of the per- pendicular, we shall bid each other the top of the morning. CONFESSIONS OF A SCENE=MAKER I WAS lucky enough to be born to a quick temper. It Is my only heirloom, but a priceless one, coming to me through un- broken generations who appreciated its pos- sibilities and kept it free from tarnish by active use. We have had duels and daggers in our family and feuds so sizzling hot that even quite ancient limbs of the family tree still emit a distinct odor of scorching. In every generation my ancestors prance and dance through our archives in superb vitality of inexhaustible rage. I am possessed of a tropi- cal grandsire of British extraction who if the joint was underdone used to summon the cook to the dining-room in order that he might hurl the offending morsel in her face. Dear gamy old sport, how I should have loved that grandfather! What bouts royal we might have enjoyed! I should not have had to prick him on by patient and studied Insult as I do the lily-livered folk who form most of my acquaintance. A word, a glance merely, and he and I should have hurtled forth to combat. What glorious buffets we should have given and taken! We should have let blood In a IS CONFESSIONS OF A SCENE-MAKER dozen places, and having thoroughly purged ourselves of all superfluous spleen, and cleared the atmosphere of all accumulated thunder, how happily we should have sunk back upon repose — no pusillanimous apology, no ran- corous reconciliation, but the peace of perfect geniality and understanding! A forbear after my own heart, that. I wish I had such about me nowadays, but my present-day ancestors are of quite another color. In fact, my immediate family are such pa- cific folk that in my infancy they actually sought to restrain me in my demonstration of my natural talents, to such an extent, indeed, that my sense of the value of my most promi- nent characteristic was largely obscured. Children are rarely original thinkers; I own that for long I was hampered by conventional opinions on the subject of temper. Being daily instructed and energetically punished to this end, I did for a time actually believe that to cast myself upon the pavement in a frenzy at being invited to promenade in a direction contrary to my desires, or to attach myself tooth and nail to the person of a re- fractory playmate, was an exhibition un- worthy of myself. Again, my early training caused me frequently to squander much emo- tion in remorse. I have been known to pay i6 CONFESSIONS OF A SCENE-MAKER for five minutes of passion by five hours of penitence, a histrionic expenditure distinctly to be avoided, as one thus finds one's emo- tional resources depleted the next time that occasion imperatively demands a fresh outlay of choler. Nowadays I never waste myself in remorse, but thriftily save myself for my rages. In childhood's hour I was guilty of ideals — though I never sank so low as to attain them — as to the nobility of self-con- trol. In maturity I advocate the expediency of a temper judiciously uncontrolled. I was in my teens before any filtering of this new light began to penetrate my mind, for I now noticed a change of attitude in my relatives. Whereas they had before punished, now that I was too big to punish, they sought to pacify. Their conduct was per- fectly consistent; both courses had root In the same principle, namely, that the majority of mankind will do almost anything for the sake of peace. This it Is that makes the course of a firebrand so smooth and inviting. While yet in my salad days I discovered that I could get almost anything I wanted by making a scene about it. The success with which I have ever since acted in accordance with this knowledge is due simply to the fact that most people hate scenes. My kinsfolk 17 CONFESSIONS OF A SCENE-MAKER and friends, like humanity at large, generous in all else, are parsimonious in regard to emotion. They will lay down for me their money or their lives, but if they can help themselves they will not hand out to me their emotions. Spare them those, and they will let me have my way. Money is power, perhaps; I never had any, so I don't know; but that scene-making is power I know and have ex- perienced. Since all one wants in life, after all, is merely what one wants, why not get it by the most immediate method? Why take the trouble to be a millionaire when all the world will let you have what you want if you will only kick and scream for it.? When one's family or one's friends have all slunk like whipped curs from a red and riotous row, the manufacturer thereof is left master of the sit- uation to taste to the full the toothsomeness of having one's own way. Thus it is that I have come to regard my ability to make scenes as my most valuable asset, for I can make a scene out of almost anything. If need be, I can enter the most phlegmatic concourse, and my coming is as that of a terrier among tabby cats. I can descend upon the most placid of breakfast tables and leave it a perfect welter of emo- tions. There is a ridiculous old adage that it CONFESSIONS OF A SCENE-MAKER takes two to make a quarrel; fudge! I could quarrel with anybody about anything at any moment; I say it with all due humility, for my skill merely comes of having conscien- tiously kept myself in condition. Let no one imagine that I am so base as to employ my talents solely for my own advan- tage. Scene-making has altruistic possibil- ities. I frequently use it as a means of re- straint upon evil tendencies in others. I have a brother prone to cigarettes; presto, the merest whiff of tobacco throws me into spasms! He is a dear, domestic chap, worth making a bit of an effort for; I congratulate myself that I have saved him health and hap- piness by making home too hot to hold his cigarettes. Himself untainted by the odious perfume, he always finds me the coziest of household accessories. Then there Is my pale friend possessed of an unconquerable affection for red. It Is a color that in a wink's time wipes off all her loveliness, leaving only ashen pallor in its place. Now does this friend appear before me with but a vestige of the obnoxious color at- tached to her person — the music of those of Bashan is as nothing compared with my bel- lowing. She is the mildest of mortals, and, as a consequence of my aversion, she wears in 19 CONFESSIONS OF A SCENE-MAKER my presence those blues that do so easily be- deck her. Thus do I preserve her intact from the evil results of her own ill-taste. In blue she finds me ever the most genial and gentle of comrades.. Observe carefully, however, my treatment of both brother and friend, you who are seri- ously considering taking up scene-making for a profession as I have done. Pray do the thing artistically. Always become angry advisedly, coolly. I make it a rule never to rage except when I want something; otherwise I am so amiable that it 's worth anybody's while to keep me so. You can't make ill-temper val- uable to yourself except by making your good-temper valuable to your friends. You must have your glorious flashes of gentleness; nobody tries to buy peace of the perpet- ually cross-grained. Sunniness,with perpetual threatening of explosion if crossed, is the best policy. I have made myself pretty well under- stood on this point. My acquaintance know that they need never fear any cherishing of rancor on my part. I have practiced until I can control the most headlong rage in an in- stant. My friends know that smiles and sun- shine are at their disposal in that moment (but never the fraction of a second sooner) in which they cease to oppose me. 20 CONFESSIONS OF A SCENE-MAKER For those, and for those only, whom these confessions may fire to emulation, I here utter one modest aside. The most serious menace to my career has not been from with- out, but from within. It is easy enough to re- duce the multitude to the touch-not-the- bomb attitude of mind; it's the attitude of your own mind that you can't always con- trol. To be a thoroughgoing scene-maker you should be devoid of humor; otherwise your best-arranged scenic effects will be constantly threatened with descent from low tragedy to high comedy. I have a few friends who have been dastardly enough to discover my vulner- able point. They have dared even in my most empurpled and embattled moments to try to make me laugh, and in a few notable occa- sions they have even dared to succeed. As far as those friends are concerned, it is verily all up with me. I lie in their hands tame as a pre- exploded firecracker; but fortunately for my peaceful course of violence their number is few. On the other hand, the number of those who can be controlled by the menace of an outbreak is still the vast majority of my acquaintance. To those intending to put my confessions to proof I can freely say that you can count to almost any extent on the innate love of peace that exists in the heart of all 21 CONFESSIONS OF A SCENE-MAKER humanity. As for me, I now have my friends so pleasantly reduced in spirit, have estab- Hshed so genially my reputation for ungovern- able rage, that I merely have to look a little explosive and my desires are hurriedly mctcd out to me. I believe that I now see gleaming before me my ultimate goal, the purpose be- yond the purpose, for I believe that I have succeeded in becoming so notoriously violent that I can soon afford to give up my temper altogether and indulge my natural sweetness of disposition with impunity. WITH THE WHY-NOTS ONE intention in creating people so dif- ferent was that some of us might have the fun of classifying all the rest. The pleasure of pigeon-holes is their possibilities of rear- rangement. But there is one compartment whence those who enter never return; it is the little limbo of the Why-nots. Once a Why-not, always a Why-not; but there is no cruelty in the Why-not's creation or his classification; for his is the most comfortably padded char- acter of all humanity. If you seek to describe a Why-not you will find first that he is a per- son you never ask to play with you. Why- nots cannot play. True, they have their gam- bolings of elephantine mirth, but if you join, you are likely to be a little shoved or trampled ; for they have never learned either in jest or earnest that graceful veering away from im- pact which makes the aerial dance of genuine conversation. The Why-nots are always talk- ative, they are never conversational. One rea- son that the Why-nots always talk is that one always lets them; it is easier than argu- ment, especially when, by definition, the Why-nots possess a plane of intercourse where 23 WITH THE WHY-NOTS argument cannot enter. Their most dis- tinguishing characteristic is their panoply of logic. I find that my Why-nots, when women, are likely to be frumpy in costume. They are flat- heeled and fearless. They are capable of wearing a three-year-old suit, and yet walk- ing Fifth Avenue as if they owned New York — Why not.? What conceivable argument has our craven following of fashion to support it.'* I have even known Why-not women who practiced bare feet within their home pre- cincts, and were obviously healthier for it. Why not.? By what possible reason could one have asked them to sacrifice vigor to custom? I was once walking with a Why-not lady along a steep street surmounted by a tele- graph pole; my companion was a woman of sixty, silver-haired, comfortably bonneted, splendidly athletic. She gravely proposed to climb the pole for the view, and did, with agility. Why not.? Why should I have stood at the bottom, thanking Heaven for deserted windows and doorways and the remoteness of a policeman.? If the poHceman had appeared, I have no doubt she would have given him withering proof of her sanity, together with an alarming revelation of her knowledge of her civic rights. Yet why should he have 24 WITH THE WHY-NOTS thought her Insane? The view was glorious, and she could cHmb. Why not? The great trouble with the Why-nots is that they are so insanely sane. One's chief grievance against the band is that one's conscience is always cudgeling one to account for one's animosity, since the Why- nots are good folk. They pay their bills and keep the commandments, if not the conven- tions. Not all good people are Why-nots, but all Why-nots are good people. Our graceless levity sometimes prevents our seeing that it is the Why-nots who have made the world the orderly place it is, for the Why-not Is the stuff out of which our reformers are created. The Why-not follows the light that is within him, and rights the universe by means of its rays, never deviating from his course because of a curiosity to examine other persons' smoky little lamps. He marches straight to his mark because he never sees other people's toes in his path. He has the reformer's singleness of eye untroubled by the twofold vision of his natural enemy, the humorist. Obviously you can sweep away the dirt much better if you never see any golden motes in the dust heap. The Why-nots walk through life without moving out of the way of other people's angles, while the humorist rcllshet 25 WITH THE WHY-NOTS as an adventure the sinuous course resulting from a constant avoidance of others' elbows, while preserving intact his own idiosyncrasies. Convention is a great protection of individual- ity. To follow all the external dictates of cus- tom is a method of kicking a joyous, dance through space while appearing to walk the circumspect street in the very latest shoes. This is a saying no Why-not will understand. Only those will understand who have lived it. I do not know whether it is by accident or by necessity of temperament that there has never been an artist in my group of Why-nots. The artist's alternate exaltation and depres- sion would be impossible to the Why-not's equable complacency. Self-centered, self-opin- onated, the artist may be; but he must pos- sess the conception of another person's point of view, even if it is merely the view of some creature of his own imagination. No Why-not ever had an imagination. There are male Why-nots who have been great voyagers, and who tell long travel-tales of blood-curdling encounters and audacious achievements; but they tell them in a way to put one to sleep: for all the adventure in the world cannot make a Why-not anything but stodgy. The Why-nots may be adventurers by land or sea, but they are never adven- 26 WITH THE WHY-NOTS turers in other people's souls; for in that strange land you must learn the language be- fore you can go about safely, and a Why-not never speaks any language but his own. With all my study I come no nearer to exact definition. The Why-nots elude each ad- jective I clap upon them. Call them uncon- ventional, so are some of the most delicious people I know unconventional, and yet these retain a comradely consideration for other people's toes. After all what need of a defini- tion.'* For if you are not a Why-not you will always recognize the species, and if you are a Why-not you will never know it. STYLISH STOUTS THE title Is not my own; it is the comfort- ing caption that advertises a dress sale, comforting because it perhaps indicates an ep- ochal adjustment of fashion to fact. Is it pos- sible that the stout woman, poor dear, has at last become stylish ? May she at last be frankly fat, emancipated from frantic remodelings at the hands of corsetiere and couturiere? The burden of obesity is not in the carrying of its pounds, but in being forced to treat the obvi- ous as if it were surreptitious. What dizzy ela- tion for the fat woman to realize that hence- forth she is suffered to be not only frank but fashionable! Dame Fashion is as fertile in the unexpected as Dame Fortune. The fat woman has been so long accustomed to commiseration that it may be difficult for her to realize her new dignity; we have all pitied her, been sorry for the bursting glove- clasp, the exuberant girth, the sweets desired but denied, the chin whose apparent hauteur was so unjust to the kindly heart beneath it; and above all for that plump palm laid upon our arm with its accompanying tremulous whisper, "Am I as fat as she, or she, or she?" 28 STYLISH STOUTS But now all that evil time is forgotten. The anti-fat nostrum, the recipes for rolling, the panting mountain climb, all the many- doctored advice, all the beauty-parlor pum- meling — all this is obsolete, for obesity has come into its own. The corpulent dame now has dresses made to exhibit, not to conceal, her shapeliness; these throng authentic fash- ion-sheets. She has her own clothes, not the adapted "line" of the lean and lovely sylph. The fat woman is no longer done out of her inheritance by a cruel and carping world. She has become a "stylish stout." The "stout" is even entering story, not for farcical effect either. There is an increasing number of portly heroines in fiction. The male novelist still averts his eyes a little when he makes one. He leaves his outlines a bit vague, out of deference for past convention; for he knows he is an innovator. Fiction is always far in arrear of popular opinion, but there are a few romancers who are coming abreast of the times in portraiture. Alice of "Buried Alive" is a dumpy darling, and her charm is increased rather than diminished by the fact that she is fat. There is nothing neurasthenic about a well-padded person. The obese are always amiable. Older and wiser than we, the Ori- ental has incorporated this fact in his daily 29 STYLISH STOUTS philosophy. In the Orient stouts have always been stylish. Knowing that fat women are good to live with, the harem husband long ago persuaded both himself and the ladies that they are equally good to look at. The Westerner, on the contrary, is still at that cal- low stage of development when he tries to persuade himself that a woman, because she is good to look at, is also good to live with. Fortunate for the Occidental husband are our customs of liberty for ladies, permitting women whose nerves are but thinly clad with flesh to run freely about the streets, venting their irritability on the neighbors. Under Eastern seclusion a thin woman, closely con- fined, might keep the whole seraglio in a stew. It is for self-protection that Oriental conven- tion cultivates an Ideal of sleekness and opu- lence as the feminine standard. It is a curious fact that In neither East nor West has the stylishness of, stouts been ex- tended to the male sex. The norm for man is to be long and limber. As the hero of romance, a man may be brawny; but except in farce, he may not yet be fat. In America this ideal of masculine sllmness is explained by our fond- ness for thinking of our men as lean wrestlers with frontier conditions, for the fact of a frontier is still a pleasant figment of our fancy. 30 STYLISH STOUTS As a matter of brutal truth, both our men and our women have swelled perceptibly during a long period of plenty and of ease. Not all our Hooverlzing has notably reduced the ten- dency of both sexes toward an opulent ma- turity. The pitiful point is that our men are not yet allowed by fashion to grow fat with dignity. Of course, it has never been so hard for a man to be voluminous as for a woman, because he thinks only of how uncomfortable he feels, and not, concomitantly, of how un- gainly he looks. And yet the fat man has had pain enough in being the butt of the papers and of his pals; and from this anguish he can- not be relieved until fashion lifts its ban from his person as it has lifted it from that of the lady. No shop is as yet exhibiting styles for the stout man. He is still forced to squeeze himself into clothes designed for the stripling. But the emancipation of men will follow that of women. Women are not so selfish that they will permit themselves to expand into efflorescence without seeking to obtain equal liberty for the fat man. No chivalrous woman will be content with her privilege of obesity without wanting men to share it. In due time the fat man, like the fat woman, will be made heroic in fiction and in fashion-plate. The day of the fat lady was long in dawning, but at 31 STYLISH STOUTS last her freedom and her fashlonableness have arrived. Just as surely will a day come when tailors will announce to men patrons the happy era of stylish stouts. THE FRIENDS OF OUR FRIENDS ONE of the accepted disappointments that are the milestones of our adjust- ment to life is the lost hope of making our friends love each other. Honestly scrutinized, our wish to have two friends join hands in intimacy is not so clearly commendable that we are justified either in surprise or in sensi- tiveness when our efforts fail. One of two mo- tives is usually discernible in urging two friends upon each other — either pride in exhibiting a possession or pride in exercising philanthropy. Some of us can never keep des- tiny's best gift, a friend, to ourselves; we be- lieve that we have discovered a prize, we wish other people to applaud our discernment and to accept the treasure at our valuation. Our other motive, the pride of philanthropy, is even more deceptive. We decide that Charles and James will be good for each other, and forthwith we presume to become the little tin god who shall introduce them. Complacently we occupy the pedestal of Providence. But who can prophesy that Charles and James will be good for each other? It is a matter for their Maker only. 33 THE FRIENDS OF OUR FRIENDS It Is necessary to have a clear comprehen- sion of how friends are in the first place ac- quired before we can fully examine the meth- ods and the motives for mixing them. For precision we may employ algebraic symbols: Let A represent the original person who has attracted to himself out of all the universe Old Friend B and Newer Friend C. A Is not content to exchange heart hospitality with B and C separately; he must have them meet under the auspices of his introduction. Yet the infinite variety of reasons why B and C, D and E, and all the alphabet of friends down to Z, may be the friends of A are most unlikely to be the same reasons that should bind them to each other. A's Introduction of each to each is coercion and no hearts' bond. Friendship Is binding only as It is the fetter freely assumed by the free. It irks us If the chain is clamped by any third hand, however well loved. How often have we all gone through the ordeal of our friend's Introduction to his friend! How adroitly A elicits our best anec- dote, exhibits some endearing prejudice, goads on our enfeebled conversation! A's unwar- ranted attempt to show off B and C Is akin to the cruelty that sends our four-legged friends to a dog show. The blue ribbon Is scant com- fort to the unhappy kennel; It Is merely a 34 THE FRIENDS OF OUR FRIENDS prize for the owner's pride. One is not willing to be one's friend's pet poodle. Nor yet is one ready to be any man's parcel to be handed to another man to be opened without one's leave. To one's chosen friend one is willing to deliver one's self, his own package; but let him invite some one else to untie the strings, and, being human, one has all a parcel's emotions. The matter is still more deserving of pro- test when the delicate manipulation of A's introduction suggests hidden reformatory in- tentions. By his gingerly shoving each upon each, we — B and C — perceive that he thinks we need each other's services, that he wishes us to organize a tiny society for mutual im- provement. But Jn friendship we desire nei- ther to better nor be bettered; we desire to enjoy ourselves. As matter of theory, A's efforts to introduce his friends deserve never to succeed; but, as matter of fact, they do actually sometimes succeed completely, sometimes partly, as oftener they utterly fail. It is destructive to A's friendship with either to discover that B and C are more congenial with each other than either has ever been with him. It is as if on the day of introduction all three, A and B and C, were three atomic personalities sitting each on his point of a triangular acquaintance, 35 THE FRIENDS OF OUR FRIENDS but from the day of introduction B and C tended to approach nearer and nearer, until at last A perceives them completely fused and together withdrawing utterly from him out into space. Of all the original triangle there is left only A sitting on his desolate little dot. He deserved the dot, but it's lonesome, as all of us know, for we have all at some time sat upon it. Perhaps half success in making friends love each other is even more permanently awk- ward than complete success. Perhaps B and C make some insincere attempts at affection, wholly for A's sake, only to abandon these efforts later and to come sneaking back sepa- rately to his hospitality, making but airy refer- ence or none at all to each other's existence. Yet when B's name is dropped, or C's, it means thenceforth a closed door in conversa- tion, and when the essence of comradeship is the glad possession of the areas of another soul, then every locked gate is a loss. But there is a still sadder issue possible for the effort to force one friend upon another. The feeling of B and C for each other may not be passive endurance, but enmity so intense as in the end to include even A. B may argue that your affection for so depraved a person as C reveals depravity in you, and C may 36 THE FRIENDS OF OUR FRIENDS equally distrust you for your culpable fond- ness for B. You yourself may find it impossi- ble to forgive either for the failure to appreci- ate the other. The end of the matter may be that each little atom shall go stamping off in his own direction, all three with each step growing more hopelessly sundered. Yet you, Friend A, deserve the fate of any man who would put fetters on friendship. Only by free- dom of choice among atoms to combine with whom they will, can we feel our human dig- nity. To myself I am but a winking dust-mote, but to my friend a wandering star of his dis- covery. Let all friendship be free, for there is nothing so wind-tossed and weak as an atom that goes alone; there is nothing so lordly as two atoms, who, locking arms and prancing air, go forth to pass judgment on the universe together. AN ARGUMENT FOR ABSENCE PARTING is sometimes so sweet that one wonders why anybody should ever call it a sorrow. If the gentle mood and gentle man- ners incident to a departure might only be- come permanent, there would be no occasion to argue for absence as a means of mutual un- derstanding. Our guardian angels, saddened by the bickerings of intimacy, have a way sometimes of flying off with us when we have failed to keep step with our housemates, failed sometimes out of sheer impatience, sometimes out of sheer inability to maintain their stride. The mere prospect of removal has a benign influence; we never quarrel with people who are going away to-morrow. Occa- sionally one wonders whether it might not be possible to adopt for use in association some of the advantages of absence. It may be well to ascertain what these are, and why it is often easier to love people when we are away from them, or at least easier to be civil to them. One reason is a case of con- science. It is a good deal more instinctive to be one's brother's keeper than not to be, and it is equally instinctive for brother not to like 38 AN ARGUMENT FOR ABSENCE it, and to retaliate in kind. Mutual responsi- bility for daily conduct is a direct result of daily contact, and is a responsibility usually very vocally expressed. Relief from the duty of bringing up our intimates is the chief re- freshment of going away from them, but is it not a relief that might conceivably be attained even when staying at home? Is it positively necessary to put a thousand miles between them before brethren can dwell to- gether in unity? Yes, exactly such necessity is maintained by argument for absence. To understand, one must remember that the chief function of flesh is to conceal soul. The envelopes in which we are done up are often most misleading as to contents. The more we see of people, the more their bodies get in the way of clear comprehension. Little tricks of gesture weary our eyes; some ha- bitual snore or snuffle, some reiterated ex- pletive, teases our nerves, until the soul they obscure is hidden wholly by blundering body. All these small impacts are forgotten at a distance, and soul shines clear in our absent converse, and dominates inalienably the har- mony of our return. Not alone the intimacy that is wearing threadbare is best restored by periods of re- moteness; the most harmonious association 39 AN ARGUMENT FOR ABSENCE needs sometimes the tonic of separation, by which two people, each setting forth alone, can make discoveries and win trophies to bring back for sharing. People should part for a bit when they find their footsteps too smoothly fitted each to each, for just here comes in the danger that their sinews lose adaptability. For fluent adjustment of mind and muscle we had better sometimes try asso- ciation with people whose pace is provoca- tive. Friends everybody has with whom associa- tion must always mean a maximum of ab- sence and a minimum of presence. We can't take them too steadily because we take them too headily. Keeping up with them must al- ways make us glad but breathless. These are people over-subtle or over-stimulating. We have to run off by ourselves and ruminate their words and experiment with them by applying them to our lives, before we are ready to come back for more. As one thinks about the efficacy of absence one pauses to ponder the nature of the hole left in the household by the withdrawal of a member. For those left behind the resulting sensation is either of space or of a vacuum, and neither effect can be predicted in advance. The very people whom one expects most to 40 AN ARGUMENT FOR ABSENCE miss sometimes leave behind them a sense of room, freedom, exhilaration. People one ac- counts negligible when they are at hand some- times, by going away, create a vacancy to be filled only by their return. The truth is that personality is a matter of cubic feet. Persons, well loved, delightful, dominant, sometimes take up more room than anybody dreams. One expects to miss them intolerably, and instead one discovers that one's legs and arms and thoughts were all a little cramped, and it feels guiltily good to stretch them. There are, on the other hand, people quite different whose characters seem to make room rather than to take it. When they go away one is amazed to discover that it was in their pres- ence one's imagination flew farthest, one's interests stretched widest, one's ideas delved deepest. One discovers that these quiet ones were for their associates space-producing peo- ple. The gift of a dominance that takes room from others without their knowing it, and the gift of a sympathy that gives room to others without their knowing it, prove alike that personality is calculable by the metric system. No house is big enough to hold many personal- ities at once; that is why the guardian angels advocate absence now and then, discreetly applied. They have a way, these gentle guard- 41 AN ARGUMENT FOR ABSENCE ian angels, of so training the feet of the sun- dered that when at last they lead us back, we are surprised at the ease with which we fall into the step of true comradeship. ON BEING AND LETTING ALONE ONE may readily divide one's friends into those who crave solitude and those who crave a crowd. Any given individual of these classes may not be able to get what he wants, but he is to be classified by his desire, as to whether he Is always secretly wishing to be alone, or always secretly fearing to be. There are persons who sicken for solitude as a plant fades for light. They do not always know what is the matter with them, neither do their housemates; they are merely stifling for lack of stillness. It needs only an hour's, a day's, withdrawal to restore them to selfdom. People who like to be alone favor different varieties of solitude: one of them may wish to be alone with sun or stars or shining hills; another may desire shut-in seclusion with a book; another longs for isolation with a piano or a palette; a few women who make a science of domesticity like to be left alone with their houses. Whatever it is with which any of these people desire to be secluded, it is always found to' be something that has not a self. Out-of- doors, books, art, science, are enfranchising because they are spacious and impersonal; 43 ON BEING AND LETTING ALONE they do not impede the spirit by any personal clamor or criticism, either suspected or spoken. A desire for solitude is a desire often adroitly concealed, but we can always recognize among our friends those who love to be alone, when we find ourselves jealous of the subtle self- sufficiency of their retirement, not always perceiving that there is nothing that will make their eyes light with such appreciative com- radeship as being discreetly left alone. In sharp contrast are the people who never want to be by themselves. For some reason they are often as garrulous as they are gre- garious, while the solitary are always good listeners. The lovers of a crowd are reduced to tearful protest by a half-hour of "lonesome- ness," while the lovers of loneliness seem least lonely when most alone. The others find the most sociable woodland lonesome unless gay hotel guests swarm through it. They would not recognize a meadow if they met it out walking alone. They would perhaps not recog- nize themselves if separated from a throng of others of the same kind. There Is nothing they are so afraid of as of the spacious and imper- sonal; and yet, with all their preoccupation with the personal, they do not seem to achieve much personality. Not all lovers of crowds, however, are shal- 44 ON BEING AND LETTING ALONE low and silly. There are others, nobler, finer, the noblest and finest perhaps that one could discover. These are big, busy people to whom hurry and hubbub never bring any pressure of pain. They love a crowded existence be- cause it means ministry. They never seem to tire of incessant demands upon their time and sympathy, but rather to thrive upon them. Unless the sick and sad and sorry throng their path, they cannot find their own way upon it. They are people with brains, brains bent al- ways on the executive and immediate, not the kind of brains that require room to soar and dive and dig. Practical people these, unselfish, noble. Yet they are never people one could picture as alone with a mountain, a book, their own souls. They would endure such commun- ion with fortitude, but not with pleasure. By a curious anomaly those who flee soli- tude, and those who crave it, are not thereby to be classified as social and anti-social — lovers of their kind versus haters of it. The lovers of loneliness are often the warmest- hearted people in the world, and socially most gracious and considerate, taught by their own sensitiveness to contacts how to avoid bump- ing into the idiosyncrasies of their fellows. They so conscientiously support their ideal of sympathy that often those who most love soli- 45 ON BEING AND LETTING ALONE tude are exactly those who would be least sus- pected of such a yearning. So gracefully does a hostess bend a listening ear to her guests that no one would dream that what she in- wardly most desires is to be swinging at the heart of the farthest pine-tree, while a lonely moon rides overhead, and a lonely wind pipes at her ear. The group of the solitary-souled is often delightful in company, alluring by its very suggestion of retirement — of a humor- ous peering-forth at the world from recesses it vastly prefers. On the contrary, the lovers of crowds are by no means always socially successful. The superficial class is often banal, or caustic and gossipy and vacuous in conversation. As for the other nobler ones, busy and philanthropic, they are not — not always — so very inter- esting, however admirable. To be interesting one must have thoughts that wander up and down, to and fro. Such thoughts require space and silence and free- dom from impact. People who love to be alone are always people who think. Thoughts are invisible, but possibly not imponderable; pos- sibly they require room, room actual and ma- terial, where they can wheel and dart and dis- cover. Thinkers, therefore, instinctively avoid a crowd — a crowd, that is, of people who 46 ON BEING AND LETTING ALONE know the thinker familiarly, people whose conjectured attention and comment occasion that sense of repression precisely most op- posed to the free flights of individuality. A crowd of strangers, on the other hand, ab- sorbed, indifferent, often provides the most inspiring kind of solitude. Whether their se- clusion be found indoors or out, in the silent study or noisy street, people who love to be alone will always be found to be people whose thoughts, flying far and free from touch or taint of other people, are building for them that spacious possession called a personality. A SOLILOQUY ON SORTING AVE any of us forgotten those far-off springtimes when we, small eager peo- ple in pinafores or kilts, observed the adults of our household, as they hauled forth the winter's accumulation from the closets, and laboriously discarded, rearranged, retied, and returned it to the soapy-smelling shelves? In our memories the fragrance of soap mingles with the fragrance of violets, both connoting April. The call of spring is so subtly com- pounded of energy and enervation that it seems strange that it is always the energy that prevails, making April the date for house- cleaning. Perhaps we share with Nature her instinct to clear away the winter's clutter, retaining only so much as may be needed in the new life of spring, throwing aside all that might impede the pushing of fresh blade and blossom. There is in us more of vegetable im- pulse than we recognize, and they are sadly desiccated mortals whose spirits do not bur- geon immortally in every spring, and who do not, with the spirit's stirring, feel once more the need to sift and rearrange all the body's stored impedimenta, food supplies and furni- 48 A SOLILOQUY ON SORTING ture, books and clothes, fripperies and fineries. How eagerly, when we were tiny, we used to watch for those riches of rubbish, discarded by our elders, with which we might ourselves begin to store and sort and stow away! Comic and crude our childish standard of selection and arrangement, to which each little bud- ding personality held the clue. Industrious as baby beavers, we thrilled to our first sorting, instinctively aware that the classification of the treasures earth flings us is the sole endur- ing imprint the evanescent self can leave upon its surroundings. The zest of life is in its successive sortings as we travel from decade to decade, from place to place, from faith to faith. Life is an endless battle against clutter. No sooner do we get through one job of assortment than some unobserved, mounting heap of some- thing else challenges our sense of order and analysis. Most of us, at any given moment, are conscious of a pile of something some- where in our lives that needs sorting — it may be a mass of old books or old boots, or merely old motives. There is hardly any peace of mind so deep as that one experiences just after one has satisfactorily sorted some- thing. Yet always inexorably, insidiously, a fresh inchoate pile is mounting somewhere 49 A SOLILOQUY ON SORTING on our spirit's premises, demanding arrange- ment. True there are people who evade the burden by never pausing long enough on any expe- rience to discover where it belongs in the soul's store of noble and less noble. Such peo- ple move from apartment to apartment, all ready furnished, all without closets, all too public to afford any privacy for personal hoards. But somehow those others are more interesting whose spirits have cubby-holes containing bags and boxes, quaintly labeled, perhaps, but inviting. These never outgrow the childish ardor for examining the trinkets others throw aside, as being perhaps for their own humbler selves significant. These long for room enough and leisure enough to over- haul life's fleeting opinions, its flashing visions, and arrange them into ordered piles, for use- ful application. Some of us yearn for an old- fashioned garret, such as our fathers possessed both in their heads and in their houses, where crowding conglomerate impressions may be safely stored until we have time to arrange them, and where, after such selection, we may keep our neatly ticketed solutions for handy reference. By means of garrets the wisdom of our ancestors was preserved, mellow with experience, rich with romance. Like a child SO A SOLILOQUY ON SORTING bent on adventure one might steal "up attic" and live for a while in one's .. grandfather's soul, all quick with life beneath the dust and cobwebs. Perhaps those old garrets were musty, or perhaps, on the other hand, they held in- violate the aroma of tradition. Perhaps mod- ern homes and modern heads, empty of storage-room, are more sanitary, or perhaps they are more barren, than those of our fathers, but certain it is that in this present there is small provision for storing or for sorting. We fight for mere breathing space as events, piling up too fast for all our efforts to appraise them, encroach from every cor- ner upon our serenity. Shall we be utterly swamped while we struggle to formulate an ordered creed and conduct from out this chaos.'' Yet there is stimulus and sting in the effort to master whatever portion of con- temporary clutter to-day invades even the humblest home. After a long winter of dis- content social forces stir in some strange springtime of hope, and we must sift and sort and throw away all accumulation that would retard even the shyest blossom of as- piration, must retain whatever may give vitality to even the faintest blade of human progress. We must up, each one of us, and at 51 A SOLILOQUY ON SORTING our spring sorting. The effect may leave us beaten and breathless, but better that than not to have tried to understand. Perhaps life Is meant to be merely a lesson in sorting. Perhaps we are set down before our variegated experiences as children are put to a task of selecting colored threads from a heap. The threads are as worthless as our transient opinions, but the color perception gained Is an asset for all the child's life to come. Perhaps the pedagogical purpose that overwhelms us continually with new knowl- edge, new experience, new sensation, is to make our spirit's eyes sharp, our spirit's se- lection deft and sure, in order that we may recognize unerringly whatsoever things are lovely when we move hence to that new abode where is being stored all earth's evanescent loveliness for our eternal enjoyment. There are some who have conceived heaven as a supernal attic where we may forever delight in reviewing and revaluing all the garnered treasures of earth. He had but scant time for any mortal hoarding, that finely discrimi- nating young poet who wrote: "Still may time hold some golden space Where I'll unpack that scented store Of song and flower and sky and face, And count and touch and turn them o'er, 52 A SOLILOQUY ON SORTING Musing upon them; as a mother, who Has watched her children all the rich day through, Sits quiet-handed, in the fading light, When children sleep, ere night." There is homely wisdom in that phrase, "putting one's house in order" as euphemism of preparation for our final flitting. Putting our house in order means that we shall leave no clutter for others to sort; that for our suc- cessor our memory shall be an orderly place where he may enter and ponder our arrange- ment, that arrangement being the only en- during impress the human soul can make upon its transitory possessions. Perhaps we shall have traveled far from our babyhood's springtime when we watched the grown-ups sorting the winter's accumulation, our eager- ness all a-tiptoe to secure some rubbish to dominate with our own ownership and ar- rangement. On some quiet day securely stored in the future, we shall be called to do our last sorting; however faint our hands and dull our eyes, we shall rally once more to springtime energy, overhaul our cramped closets, dis- card the unessential, pack away, neatly labeled, the piles that we deem of abiding value. Yet even on that last day, we shall not know securely whether our standards of se- lection are the true ones. Have we not so many 53 A SOLILOQUY ON SORTING times thought we had discovered the final verities, only to recatalogue on another day, tossing past treasures on the trash-pile, or running to the ash-heap to reclaim some prize our earlier stupidity had repudiated? Yet we never lost the lifelong zest of rearrangement. Only those people outgrow the delight of sorting whose spirits have forgotten all April burgeoning. We know that even in our last spring sorting we shall be but fallible in our selection. Not even then shall we know what it were best to take with us. Mercifully, we need not decide, for the celestial escort, hav- ing gently blindfolded our eyes the more se- curely to lead us over, will look at our little piles with divine amusement at our crude baby valuations, and then will select, better than mortal wisdom could, those earthly treasures best fitted to keep a little child, in a strange new house, from being homesick. DRUDGERY AS A FINE ART IT has been my gracious luck to live for a little space of peace near to a woman who loves drudgery, tossed up to her from the nearly shipwreck of heavy sickness. I was sailing after storm in a wide still sea, on and on, up to an island with a high portal. The great gate swung ajar — and then, after all, they would not let me through. But I had looked within. Nor I nor Lazarus shall tell what we saw, but I have come back crippled with strangeness. Life seems to me shelterless. My friends seem strangely busy about curi- ous small matters. The sun is unfamiliar and I have forgotten the language of the rain. Mystery cries to me in the wind beyond the window. I perceive sun and rain, wind and snow. I see the long blue aisles, bleak with infinitude, where the white stars are swung, but I cannot feel at home. But as the gentle weeks flow by me here, do they perhaps bring healing? Still half in dream, I watch the ways of little things. I think there is no occupation in this home that is not touched and tricked into an art. Exalt dish-washing to the plane of ceremony and 55 DRUDGERY AS A FINE ART see what happens. Even the initial movement merits the dignity of argument — whether It Is better to scrape and stack in the dining- room or to transfer the clutter to the kitchen table before arrangement. The first method has the advantage of more Immediate con- ciseness, but the latter prevents the flirting of gravy or egg en the table linen, with all the resultant upheaval In the napery sequence of the week. There is health and healing In dish-washing when it moves to a cheery little ritual all Its own. Let the kitchen table be covered with oilcloth white as milk and satiny as a mirror. Arrange all first with symmetry — plates In a pyramid in which no several platter shall be out of plumb In the mounting structure, and match the silver, teaspoon to teaspoon, fork to fork, thus both before and after wash- ing. Put all the little pitchers in a company, and the glasses, and the cups. Have all dishes scraped and rinsed to the uttermost before the final rite of baptism, then leave them thus, for In the ethics of dish-washing the law is pans first. There Is deep wisdom In attacking griddle and frying-pan with your first soap- suds and your freshest energy, and keeping the tempting glassware and silver as the des- sert of your eff"orts. 56 DRUDGERY AS A FINE ART After the sturdy stress of cleansing the cook-pans, the mere dishes are a more ease- ful encounter. Gently my friend washes and wipes, polishes, and puts away cup and glass, pot and kettle; for are they not all her comrades, genial with service? Perhaps she is not overswift, this .kitchen poet amid her soapsuds. I surmise an objection, staccato- sharp: Why should she linger over dish- washing? Why does n't she get done? I fear the objector is some terrifying feminist, too logical for argument, whereas the housewife I picture is merely a woman looking sharp to see what is the ultimately worth while. That god Get-Done Is a terrible slave-driver. Why do you wish to get done, except to do nothing or to do something else? But why nothing? And the something else — are you quite sure it makes you or any one a whit happier than it does to make a cheerful suds of your dish- water and sing a song of joy to It? My friend might be a bed-maker to a king. There is no day when the deepest se- crets of mattresses and springs are not laid bare to air and sun. Pads and pillows can never grow lumpy when so deftly kneaded, nor sheets so tight-drawn crumple. The final result is a big white cake with pillows and bolster as embossments of frosting. But never 57 DRUDGERY AS A FINE ART tell her the bed is too beautiful to lie upon if you do not wish to merit her scorn. Here is not a home, she would have you know, where a bed Is better than its occupant; if her beds are daintily dealt with, it is to make them the gentler to feet that are tired and backs that are cricked. In her house things have not the mastery; it is as ministers that she loves them. She may delight in mending, but if her needle weaves'a fairy pattern on your stock- ing toe kindly remember that it is to make your steps the smoother. All things that hands can do she loves. I do not suppose that she would deliberately punch you in order afterwards to poultice, but if an icy pave- ment should rise up and batter you down she would take as deep comfort as you in her liniments and her rubbing; and if you should come to her snuffling and a-fevered she would have a masterful delight in drubbing all germs out of your system. Of all home-making arts, surely cooking should be the most enjoyable, and with my friend it is. Cooking affords such scope for invention, imagination, creation — in a word, for personality. A cook and her material are in direct and stimulating relation. You can imagine nothing more a revelation of person- ality than mashed potato, passing, as it may, 58 DRUDGERY AS A FINE ART all the way from a sodden indigestibility, gray and chill and salty, to a creamy fluff of succulence upon the palate. My friend casts herself into her cook-pot in an abandon of creation, and miracles result. Your tomato hardly recognizes himself for a mere vege- table, so delicately is he transformed into jelly and scallop and chutney. Her biscuits respond to her watching as if they were blos- soms that must expand. Her omelets, me- ringues, souffles, are light as foam. Her mar- malades have an amber beauty; and they should have, for has she not listened for the ripe gurgle from that syrupy mass a-boil as alertly as if it were the murmur from a cradle .f* It is in the study of flavoring that she chiefly excels. She is one who weighs the value of a hint, one of the rare women who may be trusted with garlic. In her house I pity those stupid people who keep a kitchen door shut, not recognizing a kitchen as a magician's workshop. What nose would shut a door on mustard pickle and currant gingerbread.'' In this kitchen I garner many a household hint tossed to me as my friend brews or bakes, scours or sews. Nothing goes to waste from her soup-kettle or bread-box or work-basket. I watch her make a glory of cleaning the re- frigerator, I observe all the useful devices she 59 DRUDGERY AS A FINE ART can compass with a clothespin, and I wonder which she more enjoys routing, the great devil Dirt or the great devil Waste. She has minutest methods of saving money, saving mess. I do not think she has one for saving time. To take more thought how you shall spend your time than how you shall save it implies a different sense of values in her science of home-making; this is a home with- out hurry. Here I am learning the loveliness of little- ness. Such small things delight this house- wife! A glass of currant jelly in the window; the god Sun deigns to look through it, and it's a great globed jewel. A tulip bed shaped by angel fingers to be a pulsing flame; seen from the kitchen doorstep it is a thing to make her clap her hands. The lid lifted from the kitchen range on some cloud-banked morning reveals such palpitant fire-sprites as quicken one's breath with wonder. Jelly and tulips and kitchen fire are mysteries turned tame and tender in her eyes, mysteries that help to make a home, and do not frighten. My friend's hands, busy with many devices seeming small, are they not achieving a shel- ter and a sanctuary in the midst of the en- gulfing strangeness of this big universe.'' I half guess she is manipulating me as deftly as if I 60 DRUDGERY AS A FINE ART were bread or blossom. I sip peace in her presence, and am as trustful in her hands as if I were a biscuit or a begonia. Setting me briskly to polishing her tea- spoons, has she perhaps succeeded in polish- ing a forgotten twinkle into my eyes ^ Gaz- ing through her sunny window-panes, I no longer see a world hostile with mystery. Look, is n't a friendly universe cheerily making a home for me, so that I may be cleaned and fed and warmed by the best sanitary methods ? See the busy brown fingers of the rain all sudsy with scouring out the gutters, and in the winter watch the tossing white brooms of the snow dusting oflF the air, and then in spring's big kitchen look at the sun, Phoebus Apollo in a chef's cap, doing my cherries to just the right turn. Rain, snow, and sun, do- ing the world's drudgery with the same high zest as that with which my friend does it, and with the same high purpose of welcome to the stranger, she and they have restored me from sickness; at last I feel at home. THE PERILS OF TELEPATHY THE present period Is marked by an in- creasing distrust of science. We are wak- ing up to the fact that some of the fairest provinces of uncertainty are threatened by the invasion of accurate knowledge. The en- croachments of scientific exactness upon guesswork are so insidious, that unless we strengthen our defenses In time, we may lose some of our trustiest strongholds. We have been used to view one spot as well-nigh im- pregnable to clear understanding, and that spot is our own self. For a good many aeons we have lived along comfortably, each in a sturdy tower, divining each other's interior only by fallible peepholes, and communicat- ing, when we care to communicate, by means of safe little subterfuges called words. We have been reasonably secure from approach by earth, air, or sea. The whole fabric of so- ciety Is built on the assumption that we can never get at each other, never really know what our next-door neighbor Is up to. It Is about time that some one noticed that science is plotting a descent upon this pleasant privacy. If we flatter ourselves that we are 62 THE PERILS OF TELEPATHY going to be allowed to think our own thoughts in isolation, it is high time that we Hstened to some of the threatening voices that go un- heeded. I quote one such, which advocates introducing to this mortal scene the chief inconvenience incident to post-mundane ex- istence. "One could communicate with extraor- dinary swiftness and ease by imagination alone. Talk soul to soul, as it were. It is a simple trick and can be practiced between human beings while on earth, and is indeed the best form of conversation." Do we actually fail to perceive the audac- ity of the menace implied.'' The mere in- decorousness of naked sincerity is the least of the evils that telepathy will let loose upon us. Courtesy could not exist in a world where people perfectly understood each other. Our manners are none too good as it is, but how the beast and the boor in all of us would break forth if never controlled by the effort to appear more polite than we feel! If the thoughts, for example, of guest and host were utterly undressed, the one before the other, how long would the gentle amenities of hos- pitality survive.'' Who would have the courage to go to a dinner if he had to endure the clatter of people's thoughts about him pound- 63 THE PERILS OF TELEPATHY ing their way into his brain? Yet in the passage just quoted telepathy is actually advocated as a practice to be encouraged! Fortunately most of us are still so clumsy at it that we are not ready to forego the use of the tongue when we wish to speak; yet at times we are so shortsighted as to deprecate the use of words. Let us, rather, cheerfully continue not to understand each other, mind- ful how much worse off we should be if we did understand. Although telepathy has not yet come into popular social usage, we occasionally meet people not ashamed to exhibit it as an ac- complishment. Such people are most dis- couraging to conversation. When a person knows what we are going to say before we say it, the effort of expression seems futile; the racy epithet, the felicitous phrase go un- spoken. There would presently be no hons- mots to be quoted ; life would not be enlivened by the twinkling passage of repartee, that light rebound of thought and word, striking against surfaces they cannot pierce. When there are no walls for talk to knock against, and no gates to be opened or shut to other people's penetration, the art of conversation will die, and social intercourse be reduced to a fatuous smirking at each other's faces — or 64 THE PERILS OF TELEPATHY perhaps to a fierce clawing of them, when the thoughts of all hearts shall be revealed. The universal employment of telepathic communication would do away with another prerogative of society, the right to gossip. In our present imperfect means of knowledge, everybody presents a different aspect to everybody else. To gossip is to bring forward for discussion all the data each observer has gathered ; it is a comparison of various angles of misunderstanding tending to diffuse un- enlightenment and thus to protect the person under examination from an intrusively ac- curate analysis. Now, if his soul were pre- sented in the same crystalline fidelity to each of us, he himself would neither enjoy privacy of spirit, nor we our game of guessing. If telepathy were once established as being what its advocates claim, "the best form of conversation," several established arts, sev- eral enjoyable diversions, would fall into im- mediate desuetude. Novels and plays would cease to be written. Romance and drama are constructed on the assumption that we can never really know one another's thoughts, combined with the illusion that we can if we try. We go to the play, we go to the book, because we delight to observe the infinite per- mutations and combinations of impact arising 65 THE PERILS OF TELEPATHY from the truth that people cannot read each other's purposes. If the puppets on the stage - — the playhouse stage and the world stage equally — all knew each other's intentions, there would immediately result, for the ac- tors, the paralysis of the plot, and for the audience, all the boredom of omniscience. It is because none of us can tell where other people want to go that we bump into them. Telepathy would introduce the possibility of precaution and thus deprive life of its chief stimulus, unforeseen contact. What we enjoy in a novel is seeing how the author is going to steer his characters to their goal when they are continually being shoved away from it by collisions. In a wretched Utopia, where every- body understood everybody else, there would be no fun in either reading or writing, and literature would languish and disappear. What keeps life going is that it keeps us guessing. Our pet vanity is our power to divine character. Human idiosyncrasies are a mystery forever alluring and forever elud- ing. Now telepathy proposes to come in and reform all this, proposes to teach us how to read souls as easily as spelling-books. Science has the effrontery to present the innovation as ushering in a millennium. I have no desire to go marching into a privacy that bewitches 66 THE PERILS OF TELEPATHY me with invitation so long as I merely peep. Suppose I should find only dust and emptiness in rooms now magic with surmise! I have shown how a system of telepathic communication would disrupt our social life and destroy the literature constructed to re- flect that life. There are, however, two darker and deeper dangers incident to letting every- body use the aerial apparatus. If the intro- duction of telepathy would undermine social intercourse, it would absolutely annul soli- tude. The wings of the dove could never out- distance the impudent wings of the wireless. Anybody who wished could send his thoughts forth to investigate anybody else's nest in the wilderness. Privacy would rapidly become a prehistoric privilege. Solitude is the chief support of the affections: it would be impos- sible to love your fellow man if you knew you could never get away from him. Last and most painful peril of all: it is not only my own and my neighbor's retirement that I would preserve impenetrable to mu- tual invasion: but there are other regions I do not wish to enter with any clear certainty, the skyward chambers of my own high tower of secrecy, where I sometimes entertain a mysterious visitor. If telepathy taught me the language of the spirit, I might inadvert- (^1 THE PERILS OF TELEPATHY ently learn to understand my own. Let not science be so sacrilegious. When I loaf and invite my own soul, I want the guest to come to me without any telepathic eavesdropping on the part of other people, and without any profaning analysis on my own part. Let no telepathy interrupt my communing with that august presence, my own soul. FAMILY PHRASES ALL lucky families own, cherished on some hidden closet shelf, a patchwork quilt. It is a homely possession, but a warm one. The old coverlid is never in constant use, but without it the catalogue of the household bedding would be incomplete; it is a reference quilt, as it were. It is brought forth only when more common and purchasable coverings are insufficient against the creeping cold and gusty draught pressing into firelit rooms from the bleak night beyond the home windows. Then one draws the old comfortable cozily about one's shoulders, its touch as trust- worthy as that of fond hands familiar to one's childhood. A patchwork quilt Is sacred to the family. We provide the guest-bed with such paddings against chill as may be had at any department store; yet if a guest is near and dear enough we may sometimes show him our family quilt. The appearance of the familiar patchwork is always occasion for reminiscence. Its colors grow brighter with age in contrast with the more perishable shades of the present, for the dyes are often of home manufacture, trans- 69 FAMILY PHRASES mitted in formulae not to be duplicated In any market. The fun of the time-worn coverlid is in the suggestion inherent in each garnered scrap. Every bit of cloth evolves some chapter of family chronicle, each is a snip from some member's biography as expressed in the clothes he wore. Some few pieces were cut from the garments of our ancestors, enduring in tints as vivid as were the characters of the grand- fathers and grandmothers who possessed those gay costumes of the long ago. Scraps of their debonair satins and brocades still star our pieced mosaic, bits of their homespun save it from flimsiness. Again some inch or two of flowered fabric may reproduce not only char- acter, but circumstance, the exact sensations belonging to Belle's eighth birthday; or a morsel of check may recall the roaring farce of Ben's first long trousers. A patchwork quilt is a domestic record where we can always read history that would otherwise slip away; the dove gray of the grandmother's bridal gown, the shimmering amethyst of Mary's first decollete, the sturdy blue of Tom's baby kilts — all these scraps restore to us the selves we had forgotten. An actual patchwork quilt In its cozy home- liness is closely comparable to another pos- 70 FAMILY PHRASES session to be found on the treasure shelves of every family with fun enough in its make-up to manufacture its own protection against life's wild weather. Every such family has its medley of phrases, richly colored and signifi- cant to the family ear, a patterned fabric al- ways ready for family reference, and some- times exhibited to friendship's discernment. Each true home has through its long years of association evolved its own design for com- bining its variegated personalities into a warm and whimsical barrier against a cold world beyond the windows. As the flashing scarlet or brave green of some snip of cloth can evoke all a forgotten costume, so in the pat- terned patchwork of a family's individuality will certain treasured remarks flash forth the whole character of some member, or repro- duce some delicious incident of our archives. We grow unfailingly merry when we review our motley web of family phrases. Gladly we share their subtleties with any guest who is close enough to understand, or, not infre- quently, borrow some striking quip from his Store, as in the good old patchwork days neighborly families used to dip into each other's piece-bags. Perhaps it is in a country rectory that a patchwork quilt has an especial value. In a 71 FAMILY PHRASES household frankly vowed to poverty there can be little recourse to the luxury of custom- made paddings against fate. Furthermore, we of a country rectory must keep our patch- work quilt in such constant use that we can never forget the peculiar pattern of our family coziness, and also we must stitch our cheer so firmly that both its color and its warmth shall endure against the wear and tear of itiner- ancy. If I point out a few significant patches in one such family quilt, if to a friendly ear I explain the connotation of some salient phrases, it should be remembered that the dyes of our humor are of a formula common in ministerial homes. I was some eight years old when I became familiar with a saying continually heard on the paternal lips. It was an expression that would be characterized by Latin grammars as a "condition contrary to fact," for the rector prefaced and concluded every dream of serviceability with seven words of iterated longing, " If I were a bag of beans ! " Lest such a metamorphosis might appear a bizarre req- uisite for a minister of God, let me explain that the meaning can best be apprehended if the reader will pinch his nostrils tightly and then try to say, "If I were a man of means," for it was in this more intelligible form that 72 FAMILY PHRASES my father's yearning was originally expressed. A severe cold in the head one day occasioned the accidental change of the consonants. That my father ever afterwards voluntarily adopted the alteration was characteristic of one capa- ble of whimsical appreciation of his own wist- fulness. Yet with what sincerity of impotent desire he would cry, "If I were a bag of beans!" "If I were a bag of beans!" — and then would follow the outline of some vision for his parish, some plan for its advancement, so Utopian as to leave his practical family aghast with unbreathed gratitude that he was not "a bag of beans!" With what kindly coercion of philanthropy he would have en- forced righteousness upon his flock! Conse- crated himself to penury, he still, like many another clergyman, believed that money might have mended sinful hearts if only he could have employed it in the holy wizardry of devotion. It is a common enough mistake to believe that, if only we had the material means, we could somehow force people to be good by some other method than that sole permitted one of example. The rector never became a man of means, he never realized his dreams of benefaction. That which he did accomplish he never knew. If to-day some- times he watches with the old imperishable 73 FAMILY PHRASES twinkle from some far place where the stars, too, twinkle with imperishable tenderness, does he see at last what deep harm he might have wrought where most he yearned to help, if he had ever been allowed to have his wish for riches ? "If I were a bag of beans " ; through some strange fusion of laughter and tears, that phrase gleams in the family vocabulary, as holy and as vivid as a tiny piece cut from a high priest's robe. Is it permitted at last to one who thought his life futile to perceive that it is perhaps because his soul was never ex- posed to that money-mastery over his fellows which is the subtle temptation, of the phi- lanthropist, that to-day, for all permitted to have been his people, his memory shines un- sullied as some richly illumined window on which is designed the figure of the Great Poor Man, his closest Friend? Out from childhood's far past there gazes the earnest little face of one who is her father's daughter. Benefaction was from the first as instinctive with her as with him. It was at the early age of five that she enriched our phrase collection with a sentence suggestive of one of the little ironies of philanthropic impulse. One penny was the amount allowed us for the purchase of candy, the meticulous sharing of which with each other was a primary moral 74 FAMILY PHRASES law. Now for one cent you could buy four large and succulent chocolate drops, one for mother, one for sister, one for brother, one for self. The father was strangely impervious to sweets, and besides he dwelt always in a mys- teriously sacred room called The Study, into which our frivolous family life dared not pene- trate except when the youngest, bold in baby prerogatives, pressed bravely in to demand a kiss. One day this youngest, a little Lady Bountiful with a penny in her palm, set forth, to return laden down with four precious bon- bons. Duly she distributed, one, two, three, but held on to her own portion, while re- flectively watching the consumption of the others. How much better her chocolate drop would taste to her own tongue, she was think- ing, if she offered it first to her father In his incarceration. Generous Impulse bore her Into The Study, only to emerge In a moment, the most crestfallen of curly-heads, with eyes In which her father's own twinkle struggled against tears, and lips that hesitated between a laugh and a sob, as she tragically announced, "But he put It in his mouth, and ate it all up!" The mere fact that when the mother's account broke in abruptly upon the rector's absorption, he Instantly Interrupted his ser- mon to escort a dancing sprite to the car^dy 75 FAMILY PHRASES emporium, whence she returned with a whole wanton pound of chocolates, is neither here nor there; that conclusion of the episode has nothing to do with the meaning we have ever since attached to the words, "He put it in his mouth, and ate it all up!" — for it is signifi- cant, is it not, of much proffered generosity? There is a glow in offering what we are con- fident will not be taken, and when perchance our gift is gulped down contrary to our ex- pectations, we do not all accept our just de- serts with the gallant humor with which my small sister took her discomfiture. I know a charming woman who confesses to a peculiar form of self-indulgence, to a species of phi- lanthropy in which she frankly enjoys her cake and eats it, too. Periodically she makes her will, giving generously to this and that poor relation, to this and that good cause. She spends many a happy hour in contempla- tion of the merry document; then she folds it up, and returns briskly to the business of her days — for she is in her prime, enjoying the best of life and of riches, neither of which she would sacrifice except in imagination. My friend, you observe, is cautious with her chocolate drop, but the rest of us are not all, or not always, so canny as she in protecting ourselves against our own kindly instincts. 76 FAMILY PHRASES How many times we press invitations, we offer services, we hold out gifts which we never ex- pect to materialize, but which warm our own hearts curiously! The best that we can ask for is to be good sports when, haply, he does "put it in his mouth, and eat it all up." To the patchwork of our phrase-quilt the same sister has contributed another scrap, equally revelatory of the little girl she used to be. On certain days, to us full of desolate bewilderment, the mother's door would be tight shut while she struggled with tonsillitis. Then a small watcher would crouch upon the sill, across which she once slipped a tiny note in loving and laborious print. "Dear Mam- ma," it read, "I am sorry you are sick. I wish everybody was always well." It is a little patch of tender blue, that childish wish, and one that each of us must many a time echo in the same impotent sympathy. What sud- den simplification of world sorrows, which we watch in puzzled distress, if only "every- body was always well!" Snips from another child character blend with the sister's. The brother was, however, a small person more chary of his idealism. From his infant years he faced the facts of human handicap and the realities of circum- stance with a clear-sighted detachment, as is 77 FAMILY PHRASES proved by his early acceptance of the relation between bricks and straw. Every human be- ing at some time in his history is exposed to the temptations of poultry-raising. My broth- er's attack came when he was twelve, and he has been immune ever since. His earliest obstacle was the lack of a chicken-pen. My mother met his difficulty with frank oppro- brium — "If you had any gumption you'd make a chicken-pen!" The youngster gazed at her with the same withering glance a bold He- brew might have employed toward an Egyp- tian overseer. "Gumption!" he exclaimed. "It's not gumption I need, it's boards!" Another characteristic protest dates from my brother's much earlier years. To him books — real books, the Britannica, Ma- caulay's History, Webster's Unabridged — were a kingdom reluctantly relinquished for the pettiness of primers, and his royal in- timacy with Arthur and Charlemagne was distinctly superior to the promiscuity of the unwashed primary school. Rural needs crowded a dozen small boys on a bench at a recitation. A harried teacher rebuked my brother for appropriating too much seat- room. He faced his accuser with calm honesty, announcing, "I prefer to leave a little space between." 78 FAMILY PHRASES Often enough that statement of prefer- ences occurs to our minds and to our Hps as we shiver involuntarily before the morning's headlines, for it Is explanatory of much that threatens our security to-day. Strange seat- mates shove upon us, and look darkly on our shrinking. In the public school of democracy we are still only in the primary room. During five tragic years we have read many a portent for ourselves In our efforts to maintain that "little space between." Like many another gentleman and scholar my brother has lately learned the profound lesson of soldier contact in a great and selfless cause. They have come back, our men, we know, careless of many old conventions, careful of many new convictions, not least of these, perhaps, since they have seen close by the courage and the beauty of men they once scorned as humble, that it will be their own loss if ever again they "pre- fer to leave a little space between." Among our varied phrases there are bits of a forgotten past, still bright with the per- sonality of the ancestor that first gave them utterance. Some of these bits date back to an alien economic era. To a visitor who hears our not infrequent rebuke to some grasping Im- pulse — "John, John, thee's had thy egg" — is due its origin. There was once a Quaker 79 FAMILY PHRASES grandsire who was, in his so different day, a steel magnate; that is, he was a master-maker of scythes. He had his apprentice, who shared the family table, but not, as he was made to understand, all its privileges. The grand- father was rich in fertile acres and in the fame of his scythes, and food was abundant, so that members of the household might in- dulge not alone in one egg, but in two, or even more — at least so runs the now un- believable legend of their plenty. It was not strange that the young prentice, seated there among the rest, should once have put forth his hand to take a second helping, only to be barred by the master's weighted words — "John, John, thee's had thy egg!" What strange reversal of position between our time and that distant decade when Capital and Labor still ate from the same dish, however disparate their allotted portions. To-day it is from outside the window that Labor thrusts in a grim hand, sternly rebuking the master- magnates with its "John, John, thee's had thy egg!" Patches have enriched our family quilt from other sources than mere kinship. On sundry occasions vigorous souls have shared our domicile and have contributed lasting im- pressions to the pattern of our domesticity. 80 FAMILY PHRASES Ebony Sarah was one of these. Cooks are often natural philosophers, especially black ones, but few cooks expend more reflection upon the cosmos than did Sarah. Unable as she was either to read or write, her words were worthy of attention. As good Anglicans, we are, of course, shy of any personal allu- sion to the Deity as somehow unseemly, but Sarah, as a sturdy African Methodist, has no such compunction. God Is none too haughty a personage to frequent her kitchen and her conversation, Sarah's religion is akin to that of the solon who lately abashed the Senate chamber by announcing that he did not "favor saddling the Almighty with all the sins of man." Various bits of Sarah's phi- losophy had from time to time arrested the smooth course of our more conventional creed and practice when one day she was In- spired to cram the very pith of her theology into a single sentence. The subject was the War, at that stage when we were still trying to explain it. "I'm not one," said Sarah, "that blames God for this war. It's not his fault. It's folks's"; and then abruptly she achieved genius — "Poor God gets every- thing blamed on Him!" To review the borrowed phrases which help to compose the motley of our household 8i FAMILY PHRASES patchwork would be perhaps to plagiarize. To each family its own phrases and the design into which they are stitched, but our own worn coverlid would lose some of its color if I did not point to a bright scrap recently added. Not many years ago a tiny fairy girl was blown into a friend's window from out the peopled Nowhere. Her merest prattle is pure poetry, her eyes are a sea-sprite's, and the little sandaled feet of her keep the tune of an elfin song. Her beauty dances, glances, through our dull rooms and ageing hearts. Life for her shall never stale to prose, for she has already vowed herself to beauty in ex- plicit words comprising a tiny bit of cloth of gold among our more somber pieces. Of course, since she is earth-born, people must teach her hands little tasks. They set her once to place the plates and spoons, but there ensued silence in the dining-room. "Are you setting the table .^" called her mother's voice. "I am going to," the sprite replied, "but I must make something pretty first." Perhaps for our own delight we may aff"ord always to let her "make something pretty first," seeing that possibly the angels, when commanded to manufacture yet another prose-paced human being, were beguiled to 82 FAMILY PHRASES evolve the gold hair and golden grace of her, pleading with the Master-Creator that they "must make something pretty first." There is many another scrap that might be pointed out in our family patchwork, but even this brief exhibit may serve the purpose of making others draw forth and examine their own precious coverlid, for, however deeply concealed from their conscious appre- ciation, most families possess a family quilt. A patterned family life may perhaps appear to have become obsolete, but on the hidden heirloom shelves is it not always to be found in any chill emergency? When the night turns suddenly sharp, we do not send to a neighbor's to borrow his type of warmth nor do we call upon a department store for any ready-made comfort — we go to the treasure closet, and bring out once again our dependable old coverlid, merry with blended personalities, warm with stored affection. The whimsical- ities of our garnered family phrases are sym- bols clipped from indestructible fabrics. The fused colors, the persistent pattern, the cozy, enduring padding make a warm protection against fate which is something to thank God for, that same God, Who, far from being praised for the priceless commonplace, too often "gets everything blamed on Him." HOLD IZZY! OST households have their private dictionary of terms rich in connota- tion for the family ear, but needing explana- tion to outsiders. The full flavor of such a term comes partly from the dramatic pun- gency of the circumstance that christened it, and partly from the symbolism with which the expression may be ever afterwards em- ployed to enliven and illuminate similar inci- dents. I know a home where the words "Hold Izzy " mean much when used to characterize some sudden responsibility. Explanation is appreciatively delivered by the lady of the house, -a woman as graphic in narrating ex- perience as she is intrepid in meeting it. An over-hurried morning once demanded her matching some silk at a village emporium personally conducted by its owner, a gentle- man of Jewish extraction. It was the custom, when business called him from the counter, that his wife should slip in from the rear quarters to take his place; correspondingly, when her affairs took her away, the husband became her kitchen or nursery substitute. It was on one of these latter occasions that my 84 HOLD IZZY! friend entered with her breathless demand. Shirt-sleeved and puffing a fat cigar, the pro- prietor gazed back at her across the counter, eager, obsequious, but helpless, for he carried in his arms his infant son, a large and lusty babe, too old not to roll if put down, too young to sit up. Utterly unconscious of obstructing trade, the child lay in his father's embrace, fat, unblinking, and engrossed in sucking his thumb, oblivious alike to his father's diffi- culty and the customer's inconvenience. The devoted parent cast despairing eyes at shelf and counter and floor, but saw no secure rest- ing-place for his burden. The moment was urgent, imperative; the father bent impul- sively forward, beaming relief: "Hold Izzy!" he said. In recounting her sensations of the next twenty minutes, my friend is always pe- culiarly analytic and circumstantial. Surprise was her first emotion — one moment bowl- ing along in her motor, unaware there was an "Izzy" in the world, the next moment called upon to be the sole depository for an armful of Hebrew baby, her entire mind, her entire muscle taut with the task of not spilling him! She notes particularly the instant absorption required of her to meet a responsibility totally alien to her training, her immediate circum- 85 HOLD IZZY! stances, her volition, but unescapable. She recalls dreamily and distractedly striving to match silks across the redundant and indif- ferent form of Izzy, and trancedly trying to attend to the duty for which she had entered the store, as being still necessary in spite of the duty for which she had not entered it, by mere instinct thus endeavoring to keep to the course of her own existence, though so abruptly entangled in Izzy's. She remembers also her boundless sym- pathy for Izzy's father, her sense of his utter impotence supposing she had not held Izzy, her responsive thrill to the faith with which, although he had never before laid eyes on her, he leaned over the counter and deposited in her automatically extended arms, his son and heir. She is too penetrating to take unction to herself for his confidence, she knows that there are moments when the most cynical of us are forced to trust others. Lastly she re- calls most vividly the serenity of Izzy him- self, impenetrable to any consciousness of being an inconvenience, his exquisite self-ab- sorption, his lofty unconcern as to who held him, so long as he was held, matching his faith that all his life he would be tended, while all he had to do was to lie and suck his thumb. We have all of us at some time held some- 86 HOLD IZZY! body's Izzy, we have all of us at some time had to have our Izzy held. The Izzy relation between any two people is an instance of the purely involuntary bearing of another's bur- den, or the equally involuntary dumping of our own. Five minutes before the occurrence we could not have prophesied either predica- ment, but there we are! We can all of us cite Illustration from experience. The essence of an Izzy emergency Is not its seriousness, but Its Intensity. As a humble instance, one is bound, say, on an errand only less momen- tous than life and death, which requires one's reaching the end of the trolley line in half an hour. Suddenly one discovers one's purse left at home! With what mendicant sharpness one studies the faces of one's fellow passengers! Yet it rarely happens that there is not some one to spring instant to meet a stranger's ex- igency signified by the small but supreme need of a nickel. Holding Izzy is an experience often more enjoyed in the teHIng than at the time. It is likely to be too engrossing for humor, but few of us would be cheated of the mirth that shines on it in retrospect. Travel Is particu- larly fruitful in Izzy incidents. For example, behold ourself seated in our chair, the light from the car window falling just right upon 87 HOLD IZZY! our novel, the footstool fixed to our liking, when in hurtles a breathless friend, gasping good-byes to a guest instantly pressed upon us to care for and comfort through all the long hours between departure and destination. Perhaps the stranger is a fidgety old lady continually popping forth frantic inquiries at the scurrying porter. Perhaps it is a garrulous old gentleman who genially thunders confi- dences in our unwilling ears, while neighbor- ing chairs twinkle behind newspapers. A mo- ment before, we were free as the wind on its wanderings; forthwith we are introduced to unheard-of intricacies of baggage for our po- lite disentangling, and must be prepared for all manner of emergency upon arrival, in the event of Impossible connections, and expected relatives who fail to appear with their wel- come. The problems of the chance acquaint- ance entrusted to our attention on a journey present a perplexity I have never known to befall any other class of travelers. Holding Izzy is often as complicated for the holder as it is simple for Izzy himself. Of course, according to strict definition and ex- planation, Izzy is not necessarily a person; only, according to the nature of humanity, Izzy is often very personal indeed. There are men and women created to be Izzies all their 88 HOLD IZZY! lives, and never to guess It. People hand them back and forth across the counter of social commerce, because they could not get any- thing done themselves if they did not thus take turns in holding Izzy. Other persons may be harried by Izzy's problems; Izzy himself sucks his thumb, blindly, beautifully, un- aware. Somebody always has taken care of him, somebody always will take care of him. He is created to call forth philanthropy in others, himself fatly cushioned in compla- cence. He does not know enough of what goes on about him to be either critical or grateful. He is merely himself, Izzy. Some people are foreordained to hold Izzy. Some people are foreordained to have their Izzy held. I have held Izzy, I have had my Izzy held for me: but, I am wondering: Have I ever been Izzy myself? ON ADOPTING ONE'S PARENTS IT is strange how persistently one is dogged and tracked down by one's dreams. A dream is the toughest of hving things. I my- self have been hounded through life by an ideal. As an infant I burned with a spirit of adoption, expansive, indiscriminate, imper- sonal; while I was still of years to be myself coddled and kissed, curled, cribbed, scoured, and spanked, I Imaged myself the mother of an orphan asylum. Still uncertain in speech, I lisped lullabies to armfuls of babies, of every size, sex, and condition. The babies were delivered at my door by packet, singly and by the dozen, in all degrees of filth, abuse, and emaciation. Vigorously I tubbed them, fed them, bedded them, patted them, or paddywhacked them, just as my maternal conscience demanded. Oh, it was a brave in- stitution, that orphan asylum of mine; it sol- aced my waking hours, and at night I fell asleep sucking the thumb of philanthropy. The orphan asylum lasted into my teens, and then it contracted, restricted itself in the sex and number to be admitted; but the spirit of things was much the same; for he was to be 90 ON ADOPTING ONE'S PARENTS lonely and abused, world-worn and weary, and twenty-nine or thirty, perhaps. Gladly would he seek refuge for his battered head on the wise and wifely bosom of sixteen. But he did n't. The brisk little years came trudging along, and they carried him and my six- teenth birthday far and far away, but still the world, for all of me, was unadopted. Then the orphan asylum came sneaking back again, but this time it was only one — one baby. Why could not I, I asked myself, when the days of my spinsterhood should be grown less busy, pick up a bit of a boy- or girl-thing, and run off with it, and have it for my own, somewhere in the house where Joy lives.'* Then, while I dreamed of these things, I heard a little noise outside, and there at my door sat two waifs and strays whom fate and fortune had tossed and buffeted until they were forespent. I lifted up the hat of the one, and I undid the blessed bonnet-strings of the other, and lo, it was my parents; and here was my orphan asylum at last, fallen on my very doorstep ! Only consider how much better fortune had done for me than I should have done for my- self! How much better than adopting an un- limited orphan asylum, a stray foundling, or a spouse "so outwearied, so foredone," as the 91 ON ADOPTING ONE'S PARENTS one previously" mentioned, was it to find my- self in a twinkling the proud possessor of a lusty brace of parents between whom and the world I stand as natural protector! Here is adoption enough for me. My orphan asy- lum, my foundling, my husband, might have been to me for shame and undoing. The asylum might have gone on a mutiny; the foundling might have broken out all over in hereditary tendencies; for the choice flowers of English speech in which I should have sought to instruct its infant tongue, the vicious suckling might have returned me profanity and spontaneous billingsgate; it might, too, have been vulgar, tending to sneak into corners and chew gum. These are not things I have reason to expect of my parents. As for a man — a living, eating, smoking man — I need not enlarge on the temerity of a woman who would voluntarily adopt into a well-regulated heart a totally unexplored husband. No; if a woman will adopt, parents are the best material for the purpose. They will not be insubordinate; from the days when from the vantage of my high chair I clamored sharply with my spoon for attention, and re- ceived it, have they not been carefully trained In the docility befitting all good American 92 ON ADOPTING ONE'S PARENTS parents? Nor, being In their safe and sober sixties, are they likely to blossom Into naugh- tinesses, large or small, so that the folk will shoot out their lorgnettes at me, sneering, "Pray Is this the best you can do In the way of Imparting a bringlng-up ? " — And how much better than an adopted husband are an adopted father and mother! They will not go about tapping cigar ashes over my maidenly prejudices; they will tread gingerly and not make a horrid mess of my very best emotions. Yes; to all ladles about to adopt, I recom- mend parents. I warn you, however, that you must go about your adopting pretty cautiously. It Is never the desire of the genuinely adoptive to inspire awe, still less gratitude. The parent becomes shy under adoption; at first he re- coiled from my fire that warmed him, and she held back from my board that fed her. They flagrantly declared that they wanted to go home — their own home, the home that was n't there. But I held on to them, affirm- ing that I had caught them, fair prey in a fair chase, and never, never would I let them escape into any little old den in a great waste world that they might have the bad taste to prefer. At this they sulked, courteously, re- signedly. Worst of all, they looked at me with 93 ON ADOPTING ONE'S PARENTS the strange eyes with which one regards that ahen to all men, a benefactor. The adopter must be patient — waiting, showing slowly how shabby it is of parents, when their chil- dren give them bread, to give them in return that stone, gratitude. Thus, after a while, the parents will find themselves growing warm and well-fed and cozy and comfortable, and they will begin to put forth little shoots of sprightliness and glee. Instead of concealing their shabby feet under petticoats and desks and tables, out will come the tattered seam and worn sole, and, "Shoe me, child!" the parent will cry. Or, when one goes tripping and comes home again, the parents will come swarming about one's pockets and one's portmanteau demand- ing, "What have you brought me, daughter?" These are the things the adopter was waiting "and watching for, and wanting. Thus my dreams have come true, my ideal has found me. In the streets and on the trol- leys of the world I am no longer a stranger. "Allow me, sir, my turn at the car-strap, none of your airs with me, if you please; de- spite petticoats, I, too, am a family man. I am none of your lonely ones; I, also, belong to a latch-key, have mouths to feed, have little ones at home." At the sound of my key 94 ON ADOPTING ONE'S PARENTS they will fly down the stairs, fall upon and welcome me in to my hearth and my slippers, and together in the fire-glow, the parents and I shall have our glorious topsy-turvy Chil- dren's Hour. You, sir, who elbow me going business- ward, are you plotting surprises for birthdays and Christmas Days and holidays and other days? So, too, I. Sometimes a pretty little check comes in, not too small nor yet so big as to be serious. Then I scamper over the house until I find him. The rascal knows what's coming. We regard the check right- side up first, then over I flip it on its face and write, " Pay to the order of ," and by that time down he is and deep he is, among those precious book-catalogues previously anno- tated, jotting wantonly, like the prodigal father Heaven made him. Do you, sir, in your pride and fatness, mar- shal your brood to the theater? So I, mine. And do the eyes of your brood, which is young, glow and brighten, twinkle or grow dim, as you watch, half so prettily as do those of my brood, which is old? Can you, you commonplace, sober-going fathers and moth- ers of families obtained by the ordinary con- ventions of nature, know the fine, aromatic flavor of my fun ? 95 ON ADOPTING ONE'S PARENTS What exhilaration have you known Hke my pride of saying, "Whist you, there, parents out in the cold world, in here quick, where it is warm, where I am! in, away from that bogey, Old Age, who will catch you if he can — and who will catch me, too, before the time, if I don't have you to be young for!" IN DEFENSE OF WORRY IN view of the unjust disrepute of anxiety as a form of mental exercise, an examina- tion of the many good reasons why we should worry is sharply pertinent. The best argument for worry Is the kind of people who tell you not to. Their smooth foreheads are likely to suggest a correspond- ing internal blankness. It seems as if even to themselves they must be savorless, these never-worriers. As to achievement, they can never reach the highest; they may jog com- placently either on a mediocre level of success or may, like Mr. Micawber, dance nimbly along the surface of flat failure, but to attain the sure foot that scales the heights one must possess a vivid sense of pitfalls. Poor dullards of optimism, they miss the zest of that suc- cess granted only to those who have worried out a course of conduct to meet the most pessimistic forecast of the future. As a friend the confirmed optimist is mo- notonous. You like a few ups and downs in a friend. The never-worrler offers the resilience of a punching-bag to the blows dealt him by his own life, and a corresponding indifference 97 IN DEFENSE OF WORRY to the blows dealt him by yours. In order to worry well over some one else one has to be thoroughly practiced in worrying over one's self. We all know that when we want sym- pathy we turn to the best worrier we can find, knowing that he will take our case right on and have a fit over it. When we are choosing a comrade, we find the fact that a person has denied himself the enriching luxuries of worry a positive deterrent. Another argument for worry is the kind of books that tell you not to. Apart from their character, their very popularity furnishes cause for profound regret that people desire to buy even joy at wholesale, that they may demand even cheerfulness in the terrible tins of the ready-made. Such cheerfulness is sadly attenuated by the absence of good, meaty truth. The only cheer that contains nutriment is the kind that you raise in your own garden and put up with your own hands. A work that can announce itself to the dry-goods counter as "The Happy Book" is a book promptly shunned by readers who read. Such a book is as true to life as a child's book of sketches — shapes whose conventional outlines make them pass for men and women and wheel- barrows, daubed in colors of unshaded radi- ance. 98 IN DEFENSE OF WORRY The manufacturers of the happy book and the happy ending are unhampered by such bagatelles as Hfe and truth and art, and thus perhaps their nursery pinks and blues may bring joy to all but two perverse classes, the writers who yearn to portray life, the readers who yearn to have it portrayed. These two classes belong, however, to the still larger one of worriers-by-conviction. They remember, perhaps, a certain passage of inimitable an- guish over the casting of a little silver image. Why should Cellini have worried over his Perseus? Merely because he was Cellini and an artist. They remember the sweatings and the blood-lettings with which certain books have come forth — books not happy, per- haps, but for all eternity great, because by painting truth they clear our eyes and strengthen our wills to manufacture our own happiness. The worriers-by-convictlon know that in no department of life is the maxim that con- science makes cowards of us all so true as in the aesthetic. Fear is the beginning of imag- ination, and the only kind possible to dull minds. It follows that fear is the first step in the evolution of appreciation, which finds its flower in the creative temperament. All along the advance, pessimism, pointing out the 99 IN DEFENSE OF WORRY shadows, prying Into the pitfalls, sharpens the sense for values of which true art must be composed. The imagination that is able to visualize any success worth achieving must necessarily be able to visualize failure and to quiver beneath the lash of its possibility. The artist who does not worry had better instantly spur himself to worry over that fact, for worry is a fundamental intellectual asset. The moral advantages of fever and fret are even greater than the mental. Our ancestors recognized this fact and provided for it, but our pusillanimous cheerfulness recoils before their robust recognition of muscle. Knowing the placidity resultant from being unable to stand up and fight a good husky Fear on his own ground, they created the Fear and the ground, calling the one the Devil and the other Hell. There used to be a most stimu- lating little signboard at the entrance of hell, "Who enters here leaves hope behind," but many moderns make the depressing amend- ment, "There isn't any such 'here' to enter." In like manner, unconsciously, we pine for the good old devil of our forefathers. He used to be always hanging around handy for you to test your heroism upon him. He was worry incarnate, providing the most muscular ex- ercise for anybody who wanted to wrestle. I GO IN DEFENSE OF WORRY The anti-worry campaign denies the useful- ness of bugaboos, whereas a really good buga- boo is a liberal education. Constant compan- ionship with him is a training in imagination, in sympathy, in self-dependence, and, last — an argument which knocks out from under him the strongest support of the optimist — in the joy of life. Can the non-worrier ever know the hero thrill of the hairbreadth rescues we did not make when the boat did not go down? Can he experience the pride of the economy we did not practice when the bank did not fail.^' Has he ever tested the quintessence of relief when the best-loved one did not die of the pneu- monia she did not have.'* How can the poor optimist ever discover that one actually runs faster toward one's desire when the dogs of worry are nipping one's heels.? Never the goal so alluring, never the pace so fleet, never the tingle of achievement so keen, as when one perceives the prize threatened. What does he know about success, the man who has never feared that he might fail.? What does he know about happiness, anyway, the man who believes in being happy all the time.? The truth is that worry puts a gilt edge of joy on everything. But worry, to be genuinely educative, lOI IN DEFENSE OF WORRY should be systematic and not slipshod. The worrier should have convictions to meet those of the good-cheer propagandist. But in this effort after analysis and argument your wor- rier must be mindful of one danger. Method with melancholy inclines to have the same result as the proverbial tear-bottle offered to the crying child. In other words, worry is an elusive visitor; welcomed and analyzed, she is as likely as not to go flying out of the window. COURTESIES AND CALORIES A WORD of newly acquired importance has a way of shoving us from compla- cency with an upstart's aggressiveness. Of late I have not been able to make or to re- ceive a call in comfort, nor to divert myself with the most innocuous magazine, without having my conscience bruised by the impact of the word calorie. A calorie is in itself merely the unit of measurement by which we reckon the nutritive value of the food we used to assimilate in happy unconcern, but in appli- cation the calorie has to me become a term symbolic of our new whirlwind campaign for efhcient eating. As I consider some of the methods em- ployed, I cannot refrain from pointing out some possible results to our manners. In all humility let me aver that it is no supercili- ous observation of other people's reactions, but a sudden and alarmed realization of my own, that has prompted these few words of caution. In childhood I remember being ad- monished always to leave some portion of my food untouched out of consideration for a mythical personage known as "Miss Man- 103 COURTESIES AND CALORIES ners." Has not the reader at some time been besought by nurse or parent to "leave some for Miss Manners"? When, in spite of being thus studiously trained from infancy to mid- dle life in table technique, I have lately experi- enced, in discovering a dime-sized circlet of abandoned gravy on my plate, a sudden over- powering impulse to lick it up, combined with an equally overpowering conviction that in so doing I should be both benefiting some Armenian baby and serving my country, it seems high time to consider the effect upon manners and upon mentality of a too close attention to calories. While the war on waste is one to which every creed may subscribe, my counteractive plea for business as usual in the matter of alimentation has evidence in its favor. An absorption in food values leaves us less energy to expend on activities of less material im- mediacy. That the popular confidence in the connection between low living and high think- ing is a fallacy may be proved by a glance at the course of human achievement. The peri- ods when people have written a great deal, discovered a great deal, painted a great deal, have also been periods when they ate a great deal. That matchless minstrel, Homer, stuffs his heroes with beef and mutton in prodigal 104 COURTESIES AND CALORIES abandon. The fire of Kit Marlowe had for fuel "those dainty pies Of venison. O generous food! Drest as though bold Robin Hood Would, with his Maid Marian, Sup and browse from horn and can." The eloquent appeal of the calorie would have been unheeded by some of our most ethereal of singers, would have been an appeal "dumb to Keats, him even"; for that young man, as great a lover as a poet, could write from heart-wrung conviction, "Love in a hut, with water and a crust, Is — Love forgive us! — cinders, ashes, dust!" Love and literature, most unfortunately for present-day arguments, have flourished best on an abundant diet. When we look about us we perceive that our artistic and literary acquaintance are above other men possessed by a zest for food, and are obviously more productive on a generous fare than on a rig- orous one. You may perhaps demonstrate the advantage to mentality of a meatless regimen by histology; you cannot demon- strate it by history; Chaucer and Shakespeare belonged to extremely carnivorous eras. To science all things are possible, and a generation exhaustively informed about cal- ories may in the future produce as notable 105 COURTESIES AND CALORIES poets as those of the past, but at present evi- dence is against this result. Calculating each mouthful and studying the course and con- duct in digestion is too engrossing to allow the free flights of genius. "Look into thy heart and write" is sound advice, but "look into thy stomach and write" is singularly sterile in literary output. The calorie is influencing our social rela- tions, infecting with its grossly material meth- ods the essentially spiritual intercourse be- tween friends. It is diflicult to be at ease as a guest when the table is too conscious of its calories. One feels a horrible hesitation in measuring one's appetite to a nicety before one helps one's self from a dish. When the visitor and the hostess are both familiar with those long placards of listed per cents by which a bean is proved bigger than a beef- steak, one is constrained in consuming either of these delicacies. When the weekly budget is reckoned in calories, any indulgence at a friend's table, once a compliment to the cui- sine, may nowadays be an unkind upsetting of a much-meditated ration. Matters are not improved when one becomes entertainer in- stead of entertained. The calorie is subtle symbol of much disintegration of courteous impulses. The spontaneity of an invitation io6 COURTESIES AND CALORIES Is threatened when hospitality halts before the possible depredation and devastation from a guest's appetite. There is for any po- tential hostess a temptation concisely stated by the famihar rhyme: "Cross-patch, draw the latch, Sit by the fire and spin, First make a cup And drink it up. Then call the neighbors in!" Weighing in all its possibilities the tyranny of H.C.L. over our generous impulses, I shud- der to think to what lengths of discourtesy the arrogant little calorie may force us. BACK-STREET PHILOSOPHY Y eastern windows open on a wide stretch of sky and a great glory of mountains that rise to the second sash. From pink dawn to misty purple twilight, all day- long the mountains display their shifting shades of magic. Between me and the moun- tains lies the busy, dirty back street. My house stands on a bit of a bluff from which I overlook the muddy, populous flat, but far more than a few rods of muddy road separates me from my rearward neighbors. For years I have watched their lives, but I do not know their names. We know each other by sight, of course. They must watch all the industry of our back yard — our weeding and watering of our garden, our provident garnering and canning, our coaxing of hens heedless of Mr. Hoover, all our activities with hoe and paint- brush. None of this duty-driven energy dis- turbs the care-free squalor of the folk down below on the mud flats; they merely observe. And we — I am afraid their squalor does not disturb us, either; we, also, merely observe. This is a vast and tragic world, offering us drama so pregnant with pity and fear that io8 BACK-STREET PHILOSOPHY I wonder if it is really wicked to turn aside sometimes from the play of world forces to the merry little side-shows still mercifully provided ? My neighbors below are natives of the Cumberland, mountain nomads who drift in and out from cotton mill and lumber camp for a few months' sojourn on the outskirts of the city. One humorous fact is that they belong to that same class with whom I frat- ernize intimately when I climb into the heart of these encircling blue heights for a summer vacation. Undoubtedly mountain people are more picturesque and engaging in their original habitat, tucked into log cabins hidden in romantic ravines — glistening rho- dodendron and pink foam of laurel framing their faces, swirl of white mountain water at their feet. One loves them off there as one loves the other natives of their wildwood, gray squirrel or cardinal or wheeling hawk, but here they are alien and unromantic — raw, dirty humanity, set down on raw, dirty clay, unsoftened by great brooding trees. Yet I remind myself these are the same folk whose mountain homes I frequent, gathering treas- ures of mountain lore. But here in the city I do not linger on dirty doorsteps for friendly chat. I am afraid of the after-intimacy which 109 BACK-STREET PHILOSOPHY might prove Irksome here. This is not excuse, but confession. I suspect that a good many people practice democracy when they are off on a hoHday, but at home follow a more per- manent policy of excluslveness. It is surprising how much one may know of persons with whom one never talks, whom one merely sees and hears. The sounds that rise to me from the hollow below have long been familiar. At night the lives they express seem close enough to touch. Both by night and by day emotions in the back street are starkly frank. All night long I have heard a girl wail for her dead baby, a rhythmic, recurrent cry, as ancient as the mountains. We seem much nearer each other by night than by day, the denizens of the back street and I, they be- neath their gaping roofs, and I on my cozy sleeping-porch. Often In the winter darkness I hear a door opened and the ring of an axe on the stillness, for the back street, taking no thought for to-morrow, takes no thought even for to-night — it chops its wood when the small-hour chill demands it, and no sooner. Sometimes, but this very rarely, the silence rings with drunken shouts and maudlin laughter and I know that a "bootlegger" has slipped into town from some covert still, and has boldly knocked at sleeping doors, no BACK-STREET PHILOSOPHY offering his welcome "moonshine." Again I sometimes wake on a frosty autumn night to a summons that resounds jovially from door to door, while hounds bay and boys hurrah as the hunters gather to go after 'possum. It is strange how little the city is conscious of these strangers clinging to its skirts. The strangers themselves live, so far as they may, exactly the same life they might live in some far little settlement in the heart of the moun- tains. Just as off there, they adjust their ex- istence to the will of the weather. I observe them thoughtfully as I watch them give themselves up to the sun. Pure basking is a privilege most of us have stupidly given over to the quadrupeds, but it is a pleasure my mountain neighbors still retain in all its sybarite perfection, that of "just setting." Why be harried by unwashed dishes, un- chopped wood, untended garden, when the sun is shining, somnolent and golden? It would be unfair to imply that the back street never works, for sometimes it does, when the stimulus of bright, tonic air is irre- sistible. I remember a spontaneous communal washing on one merry January morning, when the genial thermometer ran blithely up to a comfortable seventy, and bare arms twinkled at outdoor tubs, and great black cauldrons III BACK-STREET PHILOSOPHY bubbled over leaping flame, and greetings and gossip ran from fire to fire, while clothes- line and bushes leaped with wind-whipped garments of rainbow color — how is it that poor people all over the world have such a tendency to vivid underwear? From time to time clothes bundled themselves indoors to be ironed. Chimneys belched blue smoke, and a little girl went scurrying about with a scorched ironing-board that served home after home in turn. It was a merry wash-day, all the merrier for not coming oftener than once a two-month and for being socially per- formed. The back street has solved the weather riddle in a way to command atten- tion. It could never have responded so joy- ously to that happy day if it had not meekly bowed to the black weather preceding and sat patiently huddled to the hearth, impris- oned by long-continued sleet and sluggish chill. Why in the world should only bears hibernate ? In another respect the back street resem- bles the beasts of the field or the gypsies of the road; it has no household impedimenta. It lights its night-way with smoky little lamps; it draws its water from the hillside spring in a lard pail. A lard pail is about as efficient a method as a Danaid's sieve, but neither 112 BACK-STREET PHILOSOPHY time nor cleanliness is an importunate ele- ment in the back street's life as in ours. That path to the spring is often romantic, for one may be a Rebecca, comely and heart-shatter- ing, just as well with a lard pail as with a shapely ewer. Love-making down below there expresses itself in free-foot gamboling and sparkling flirt of water, and in shouts musical with mountain melody. Curious how much one may know of peo- ple whom one merely watches from a window. Of course one sometimes draws the wrong deduction. For two years I diagnosed a cer- tain active youngster as a girl, according to her petticoats. I am disconcerted by her re- cent blossoming into knickerbockers. Very rarely some individual from the muddy hollow climbs our hill, knocks at our door. One of these was a seedy, vacant-eyed gentleman presenting a penciled claim to our charity, averring, according to the soiled scrap of paper, that he was a widow with seven small children. We gently set him straight as to his gender, and he went his way, unoffended. But the back street rarely begs — that is, it asks us for nothing more substantial than flowers. Solemnly Im^portant little barefoot girls sometimes request blossoms for a funeral. They never ask anything for the many babies, 113 BACK-STREET PHILOSOPHY for the blowing-in of a little life out of the dark is too casual an occurrence for emphasis. Sometimes these little lives are quickly snuffed out, and then perhaps a rattling wagon is ob- tained and a rickety horse; a woman climbs in, and from below her husband hands up the little bare grocery box, which she holds tenderly on her knees, as they go jogging off — I do not know to what unrecorded burial. Although families drift in and out of hovels never painted, never shingled, back-street life remains ever the same In Its activities, and in its profound inactivity. Are they so badly off, the back-street neighbors.? Babies are chubby; young girls spring to beauty, straight and supple. True, epidemics scourge the muddy flat sometimes, but on the whole life runs merrily. The truant officer does lUot seem to bother the youngsters. Kites float up with jolly shouts on bright mornings when little boys better cleaned and clothed are chained to desks. Undoubtedly we leave the back street to go its irresponsible way without nagging It by city rules of sanitation or edu- cation. And what if one is low-souled enough to like to watch it just as it is? There is one comfort for one's conscience. Perhaps the back street also watches us: perhaps our per- 114 BACK-STREET PHILOSOPHY petual back-yard briskness gets on its nerves, as its indolence gets on mine. Perhaps it is every now and then shaken by qualms about its duty to its better-street neighbors. Perhaps it looks up to our thriving garden while the snuff-sticks wag and wonder and mutter, "Why coddle hens and water flower-beds and paint your steps, while you might so happily 'just set'.'*" Perhaps even back-street com- placency is prodded by a conscience that pricks, saying to itself, "We really ought to cross the road and climb the stone steps and teach those frenzied workers how to bask." APRIL BURIAL T is a gracious privilege, softening the anguish of our sorrow, when we may fold away the body of a loved one beneath the sod of spring. The April burgeoning eases all grief. The golden sun at the edges of the carriage curtains affirms a golden world beyond the black bar that for a few brief hours shuts us from life's sweet daylight. Above the stealthy, sable-clad movements that lower the casket, rings the love-call of a robin, and gay little winds, blown from some far shrine of tender mirth, scatter the grim words "dust to dust" among the green branches. In April it is im- possible to doubt the holiness of all seed-time. Privileged to stand by an open grave on some green and golden morning of the blossoming year, one is received into the communion of the trees, and in that moment knows beyond any peradventure that the loneliness to come is fraught with some mysterious fruitage. April is the month when it is easiest to be- lieve the resurrection, and yet all of us whose lives have been dedicated to understanding the experience that we name loss, know that this April reassurance holds true for every ii6 APRIL BURIAL day of the year. All grief that is deep enough has a generative power that constantly cre- ates in us faculties mysteriously buoyant, and releases within us unguessed capacities of human comradeship. We do not often enough examine those regions of our soul where it Is always April, where for every man and woman who is alive, something new is always blossoming into being. We always hesitate to visit graves, fearing to find those seed-places still raw from the planting, and thus fail to discover them already green with unexpected promise. We do not observe how often spring is ful- j&lled within our own life. We are heavy- witted with habit, and when once we have termed an experience hopeful or painful, lucky or sad, we do not perceive that since we labeled It, it has changed Its nature, and is actually producing fruits totally different from the name we give it. We bow above some spot where a hope lies buried, and do not note that already it has sprung up into beauty, and Is filling our life with fragrance. In no experience are we stupider in our ap- praisement than in that commonest and sad- dest of all, for always we say of the death of loved ones — mother, child, husband — that we have lost them. 117 APRIL BURIAL Not in those first broken and blinded months, but afterward, as the slow years round out to fulfillment, is it possible to re- trace and review the long path of our loneli- ness. Wherein are we different men and women from what we might have been had they never been lent to us, our beautiful dead ? Might it not be an April offering to stop for a little while and remember? Was it a child who died ? Which of the liv- ing daughters seems to-day so close to her mother as the little girl who is gone? Grown up and busy with their varied lives, it is not they, but the other, who comes to slip an arm through her mother's in the gloaming. A father, growing old, may read in his living son's eyes all the truth of his senility, but he knows that for the little lad who died at five he will always be a very prince of daddies. In the physical world love is always threatened with severance. We fear the many ways in which our children may draw apart from us, even while they are still close enough for our hands to touch. Sometimes we tremble with the apprehension, false or true, that our loved ones do not quite believe in us, but how clear of purpose and unafraid mothers and fathers walk who are conscious always of the un- sullied baby confidence of the toddlers taken Ii8 APRIL BURIAL from them before they had grown old enough for any secret distrust. They always under- stand us, our children who are dead, and they have a strange earthly continuance, due to the fact that all our life Is consecrated to their imagined approval, so that we ourselves give their personality a persistence that fate denied. In analogous manner a parent passed from us has sometimes a domination for good that cannot be overestimated. A dead mother sometimes absorbs into herself all the love- liness that we associate with that beautiful word, and out of a child's solitude and his hunger for an unknown presence is built a shrine of motherhood that is a secret refuge from all the cruelty of life. We all know men and women who speak with splendid pride and confidence of the mother they never saw. The children who have lost fathers in this war enter upon a holy heritage. Some actual children whom we know through the battle memoirs of their fathers are typical of many others. Surely Thomas Kettle's "daughter Betty" will have a womanhood sacred to understanding the immortal sonnet from the field, assuring her that 119 APRIL BURIAL "We fools, now with the foolish dead, Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed And for the secret Scripture of the poor." Surely there will be for the little Vally, son of the brilliant young dramatist, Harold Chapin, no more precious reading than the letter his father wrote to him from the Front. May it not be that the home from which a father has gone to a soldier's death becomes a holy place, a school of heroism for any child? Unconsciously the household conduct will refer constantly to the desires, the stand- ards, of the absent dead. Beautiful memories must haunt and hallow every room. All bud- ding dreams, all growing ideals, will focus in a child's thoughts of his father. No boy ever yet forgot a father that died for freedom — a living father he might sometimes forget or disregard — a father lifted to the perspective of heroic sacrifice Is a father to dominate every thought, every moment. The coming gener- ation will follow without faltering where the fathers shall forever lead. No mother's thoughts ever wander far from her dead child; no son is ever so pre- occupied that he Is not constantly referring his purposes to a dead father's sanction. Al- ways a confident understanding exists be- 120 APRIL BURIAL tween parents and children living and dead. But this clear comprehension is equally char- acteristic of all other forms of bereavement, for always we feel that we understand the dead better than the living. And always we are sure that our dead understand us. Two causes ex- plain this revelation of spirit to spirit, this mysterious April flowering of the grave. Grief alone gives us leisure to appreciate. Our dead are the only people we ever take time for. In our daily existence we are so hurried and harried by a hundred details, so duty-driven that mere loving seems a form of self-indulgence. At heart we loved our lost ones too well for any great cruelty, any deep neglect, but the little things we did not do haunt us piteously. Why did we think we were too busy for the tiny ways of tenderness .'' "A kiss would seem so simple, So slight a thing a smile." We never quite forgive ourselves that we did not speak "Such words as we deny them Only because they live." Not until they have passed beyond the hurly- burly of earth do we have time to ponder their little peculiarities, their quaint whimsies and quirked phrases, which, so small, were yet 121 APRIL BURIAL significant of a spacious kindliness of soul. Our petty blindnesses, our petty unkind- nesses, would break our hearts if we did not feel such vain regret disloyal to those who loved us as we loved them. They were once human, too; perhaps they, too, remember something they are sorry for. One of the keenest sensations of grief is that of their bright and blithe forgiveness. They seem to twinkle at us, and smile and say, "What dif- ference does all that nonsense make, now that we both understand?" If all earth is sacred to planting, if every April is the symbol of a sacrament, perhaps loneliness itself is a seed ordained to an un- guessed fruitage, not alone after our death, but here. Human comradeship would be an abortive growth If it were subject to the brev- ity of physical contact — for its perfecting it sometimes needs to be supplemented by the leisured evaluation of grief. If we think with full honesty of those who have gone from us, do we not see how much better we know them now than before they went away? The years of separation have been a gift to us, revealing not merely the immensity of our bereavement, but revealing also, as time alone could do, the beatitude of our present possession. 122 APRIL BURIAL Not only time, but also separation, affords us opportunity for surer sympathy. We can see souls more clearly when they are freed from the obscurations of the flesh, their flesh and ours. Only by means of removal are we able to look upon character cleansed of the immediate and lifted into the aspect of the eternal. We know that even earthly absence is sometimes salutary, the best restorative of exhausted intimacy. Despite affection, little tricks of gesture weary our eyes, obstinate little habits tease our nerves, until the soul they hide is wholly concealed by blundering body. All these small impacts are forgotten at a distance, and spirit shines clear in our ab- sent converse, and dominates inalienably the harmony of return. Not alone the contact that is wearing threadbare is restored by periods of remoteness; the most concordant association needs sometimes the tonic of absence, by which two people, each setting forth alone, can make discoveries and win trophies to bring back for sharing. The separations of life and the separations of death are alike curiously educative, not alone in new knowledge of those who leave us, but in new knowledge of ourselves. We did not realize how large a share those others had in shaping us. When they were here they 123 APRIL BURIAL seemed earth-bound and fallible like our- selves, but now we perceive with what high motive their every act was illumined, and we accord them the imitation that is one function of grief; when we make honest scrutiny of our- selves we find that there is no living person who exerts upon us such coercive influence as do our dead. It may be that we would not have heeded their advice so completely if it had been spoken, anxiously dinned into our ears, perhaps; now, unvoiced, it has grown significant with deathless wisdom. Are we not often blind to this April blossom of bereavement, the mystical high communion to which our lives are set.^* The full import of human intercourse is not yet declared to us, but the care with which comradeship is perfected, sometimes by association, sometimes by separation, should sting us to high surmise, as seeds in earth might tingle to the promise of spring. Even in heaviest sorrow we use of our dead no harsher word than lost, in itself a term instinct with hope. We say that we have lost them, but not that they have lost anything, for no matter what creed we hold, we never picture them as sad. What is lost is not de- stroyed, does not part with its identity, and may at any time be restored to us. That de- 124 APRIL BURIAL spair is black, indeed, which has no expecta- tion of reunion. We may utterly deny this hope even to ourselves, yet in the depth of each sorrowing soul there will be found a germinal perhaps. But strangely, stupidly, we postpone to some unknown future day this reunion with our loved ones. When we die we may rejoin them, we tell ourselves, as if the resurrection were a flower of sudden con- summation, instead of being, like every other human hope, already begun in our earth-ex- istence, and merely completed in the life be- yond death. Already at this very hour and moment we possess all the finest privileges of companionship. None of those qualities most valuable to human affection have we ever really lost. We do, indeed, miss many precious things sacred to earth and to the body: the twinkle in the eye, but what was that except as it expressed the quaint, merry spirit.'' the touch of the hand, but what was that except as it signified love.? the swift thudding of little feet on the gravel, but did our ears really prize that sound except as it said the child was so glad to come home to us after school.? Surely whatsoever things are loveliest in earthly intercourse we still possess inalien- ably: a mutual understanding, forever secure against estrangement, an hourly intimacy 125 APRIL BURIAL not subject to earthly distance, and best of all, the sharing of that aspiration which we lay bare to the soul of the dead, but hide from any nearer comrade, since, in our pitiful self- consciousness, we are afraid to tell any living being how hungry we are for God, how in- tensely we long just to be good. Of these priceless privileges of human comradeship no grave has ever robbed us, nor can ever rob. It is life that can sever. Life has many ways of separating us, but death has only one, and that one is merely apparent and superficial. The disintegration of the grave is a slight thing compared with the corroding estrange- ments of life. There are living people whom we once loved who now are so far removed from us that it seems as if all eternity could not restore them. Sometimes the fault was in our gross misunderstanding of them, some- times in theirs of us. We have seen friends once noble slowly subdued to decay through some selfish course, until, while they still hold out their hands to our love, we turn from them in despair. Much of earthly association, ex- ternally smooth, is inwardly hesitant and dogged with doubt. By contrast how holy and how honest is our communion with our dead! Both the friends here and the friends beyond our sight are graciously sent us for 126 APRIL BURIAL our strengthening and our joy, but so fallible are we all that only those passed from us are forever safe from all misunderstanding and all cruelty on their part or on ours. Because of this security they have become the warp and woof of our being. They are nearer than we know. How close they seem to us sometimes, our dead! Sometimes we wake drowsily, feeling all the darkness palpitant with their presence. Perhaps they yearn to reach us through all the barricades of sense. It is disloyal to doubt that they still love us as we love them. They, too, have learned to understand us better, as we them, since we were parted. Always, when we think of them, we have a sense of happy intimacy. Invisible though they are, we are aware of serene eyes, of strong presences freed from the old sad handicap of pain. Sometimes they even seem to be laughing at us, beautiful laughter like the mirth of little April winds above a grave — divine merri- ment of reassurance, as if they were trying to tell us that our feet were sundered from them merely that they might learn to knit step to theirs more blithely here and hereafter. At times we shiver a little, remembering how dull we were to their beauty when they were with us of old, or conjecturing how earth-life 127 APRIL BURIAL with Its myriad means of severance might have menaced this our present glad security. In these long years we have seen the flower- ing of the grave, we have tasted the fruitage of our loneliness. When we enter that exist- ence that consummates earth, clear faces of love will smile in greeting, and some sweet, amused voice will welcome, asking us, "Did you really think that you had lost me when in no other way could I have walked so close to you all this while?" GRACE BEFORE BOOKS WE live In an age that does not ask the blessing. To some of us, wistful for an older fashion, the world may seem to have had comelier manners in days when little chil- dren did say grace in every Christian kind of place. There is a spiritual gaucherie in our present sheepishness before the Unseen, an aesthetic loss in the fact that heads no longer bow and knees no longer kneel In Instinctive reverence. It Is to no graceless age that liter- ature owes the tender homeliness of the bless- ings that Herrick asked, or the exquisite gratitude implied in Lamb's protest against "Grace before Meat." These were two men who always sat down with a relish to the meal of life, although the fare that was served them may look to us harsh enough. It was because he found so many things holier to enjoy that Lamb deprecated a ritual of thanks con- fined to "the solitary ceremony of mandu- cation." We to whom life may sometimes seem a bitter banquet, squalidly set forth, may some- times, reading, envy Lamb, seeing that neither the stale boredom of the counting-house nor 129 GRACE BEFORE BOOKS the acrid sting of the madhouse ever spoiled the gusto of his palate. It is with the high- heart gayety that is the finest essence of thanksgiving that he demands: "A form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts — a grace before Milton, a grace before Shake- speare, a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading 'The Faerie Queene'.!*" A poet of to-day has echoed Lamb's desire: "Myriad-leaved as an elm; Starred with shining word and phrase; Wondrous words that overwhelm, Phrases vivid, swift, divine; Gracious turn of verse and line — O God, all praise For a book: its tears, its wit, Its faults, and the perfect joy of it.'* In an age when tongue and pen alike are stiff and straitened in the utterance both of prayer and praise, it were, perhaps, an exer- cise enfranchising for the spirit to formulate certain graces for those books that, devoured, have become our bone and sinew and red cor- puscle, but that we have received and rel- ished with "never a civil word to God." The dishes named in Lamb's book-feast have been 130 GRACE BEFORE BOOKS also the chief dishes of our own sustenance. We might offer this tardy grace for Milton: "Jehovah, who dost speak by prophets, we thank thee for thy prophet-poet, for music martial with the battle-cries of hell and heaven, and melodious with the peaceful praise of earth, for manhood austere and lonely, for faith fearless In defeat and dark- ness; through him may we believe that genius is greatest through speaking the glory of God, that the scholar Is wisest through the study of holiness; that the soldier Is bravest who, unbroken unto death, serves no king but God." To Image a world without Shakespeare Is as hard as to Image an earth without the sun; but which one of us has ever thanked God for him? In saying grace for the king of words, all others' words must stammer: "God In man, we thank thee that to one man thou didst lend thine own creatorship to make a world; we bless thee that each one of us may enter there and. In the only poet speech that ever made word and passion one, may hear souls speak fear, hate, love, and know each soul only our own made myriad by a poet's magic; and, looking within our own heart to find there Hamlet and Caliban, Romeo and Puck, may see, with God and 131 GRACE BEFORE BOOKS Shakespeare, the universal heart, which to perceive is to pity, which to understand is to love, which to reverence i3 to aspire." It should not be in the humdrum language of every day, but in the woven melody of the Spenserian stanza that we ask a blessing upon our reading of the poet of the poets: "God of beauty, we thank thee for those woods and waters of enchantment where knights and ladies ride to the adventure of a wizard's brain, where shines forever a light that never shone, where lies forever a world that never was. We thank God for one who out of the bleak stones of rectitude could build a palace of radiant righteousness, bright with beings moving forth from faerie to the harmonies of a music timed to earth's hidden heart-beats and to the pulsing of the stars. We whose lives are prose thank God that the poets' poet chose to sing in imperishable story the grace of goodness and the loveliness of love." But would one who was himself past- master in appreciation and its expression have approved these our blessings before books .f* One wishes that Lamb himself had set to words his gratitude for his poets. We can utter no grace he could not have bettered, except perhaps one, a grace for Elia himself: 132 GRACE BEFORE BOOKS "Father, who in love didst ordain sunshine to cheer our eyes and laughter to cheer our souls, we thank thee for that great and simple man, because his mirth was as that of the flowers, which every morning praise thee. We thank thee for wit and wisdom and whim- sey, and all the sun-bright weapons thou didst give him against a darkling fate. We thank thee for one who, loving the men of the past as he loved the men of the present, is by us loved even as he loved. We thank thee for one who loved a book as he loved a man, and we thank thee for his book because it is himself." SOME REASONS FOR BEING REJECTED I SOMETIMES wonder by what wireless communication editors attain their una- nimity of attitude and phrase. Presumably seated in many several offices, how do they so often contrive to say the same thing at the same time? A few years ago illustrated mag- azines exhibited a brief but conspicuous iden- tity in cover designs, all showing infancy in bedtime costume. For a while children in nighties and pajamas capered in droves over the counters of all stationers. Now, how did every artist know that every other artist was going to the night nursery for models.'' Looking back over a dozen years of Grub Street, I find that the fashions for editors are just as contagious as those for illustrators. By seeing the date alone of a rejection, I can give the editorial reasons without further investi- gation as to what editor or what magazine. I write as one who has attained the doubtful dignity of the personal letter of refusal. I find that ten years ago editors very generally re- jected me because my manuscripts did not "quite compel acceptance." Now this is an 134 REASONS FOR BEING REJECTED over-civil statement of the over-civility of my gentle little sketches and tales. The truth is, they grew up in New England and were never trained In cowboy manners. "Compelling acceptance" always suggests to my mind a mustachio'd ranchman presenting a pistol and a check to some lone bank clerk and demanding gold in exchange. This money-or- your-life method of "compelling acceptance" is as impossible to my stories as It would be to the ladies, fragrant " with boxwood and lemon verbena, about whom I like to write. A few years later the phrase polite for "no admittance" changed. The buffet became more robust and ringing. Editors at this pe- riod asked for "a little more ginger." Six or seven years ago all editors were crying for "ginger." I could not give it to them, but so many other people could and did, that pres- ently they had enough ginger and were pass- ing on to demand stronger condiment: they no longer wanted ginger, but "a little more pep, please." Editors at this stage were be- coming less gentle In language as well as in desires. At first I merely could not "quite compel acceptance," but later rebuff was ad- ministered In figurative speech that became constantly more arresting. "Ginger" and "pep" were mild and gastronomic In sugges- 135 REASONS FOR BEING REJECTED tion, but from the "pep" period on, editorial imagery has been becoming more and more vigorous. For a long tim.e "punch" dominated the vocabulary and intentions of all periodicals. It made no difference what other accomplish- ments a manuscript might possess: if it could not "punch," it might as well stay at home. A writer had no choice but to drop contempla- tion, remove his coat, hand his spectacles to his wife, adopt the language of the prize-ring and "punch" his reader — an audacious en- terprise and productive of more unanimity in rejection than any other course I have pur- sued. My literary career under enforced editorial guidance has steadily advanced from suavity to violence. At first I tried merely to "compel attention"; next I obediently served "ginger" and "pep"; after that, weakly and mildly, have I endeavored to "punch"; but there are progressive ordeals yet before me. To " punch," in the prize-fight, there is allowed a degree of decorum; there are still rules for the game in "punching," but I discover that even " punch " is obsolescent. This morning an editor returns my offerings with the comment, "Excellent of their kind, but I prefer stories with more 'kick'!'' Can I, must I, "kick"? 136 REASONS FOR BEING REJECTED According to the cumulative demand of editors for ferocity, after "kick," what? Next week shall I be requested to "stab"? To make a stiletto of the innocent pen whose first efforts were taught manners by Sir Roger de Coverley? I wonder how Addison and Irving would have responded if they had been asked to "kick." My pained Imagina- tion looks forward into the years of bread- winning still before me, to read in fancy the reasons for future rejection, as editors be- come more frenzied and more figurative. Will It be: "We are under orders to accept no freight at this depot except high explosives"; or, "No magazine can keep on the market to-day that Is not prepared to blow the reader's brains out." Two things I am pondering. Does the reader never long to be approached by methods of peace and propriety? Even If he is that ogre of the artist, the Tired Business Man, Is drubbing my sole manner of meet- ing him? If It is not. It Is high time you said so, reader, to ears having authority. If you do not speak out, the treatment in store for you Is no exaggeration on my part. I am behind the scenes, and I know. I have It straight from Caesar that I must "kick" you, REASONS FOR BEING REJECTED so Impervious are you to ways of pleasant- ness. The other thing I am pondering Is, what will be the editorial reason for rejecting this essay. THE STORY IN THE MAKING FOR some years I have followed In various magazines those various outpourings that throw light on literature In the making, studying to see just how literature lays hold of my fellow workers. I often wonder how other people make stories. For me the most frequent way in which the embryonic story presents itself Is as a face, a piquant, challenging face, glimpsing at me, as It were, out of a mist. "Complete my anat- omy, discover my character, write my story, If you dare!" it seems to say, and straightway vanishes. Sometimes it is a gray old face, strange with mysterious wisdom; sometimes It is a middle-aged face, the lips twitching with subtle humor; but all the faces are alike in one respect, the promptness with which they vanish when I try to fix them with an analytical eye. From their first tantalizing elusiveness, to their last chill entombment in cold print, these bodiless beings exhibit an incredible harshness of behavior toward their best friend and well wisher, the author. They show the most Incomprehensible aversion to being created. They never lend a helping 139 THE STORY IN THE MAKING hand to their own development; they let their creator do all the work while they have all the fun. Of course after a character has once shown its mocking, charming face peeping at you from obscuring curtains of fog, there is noth- ing for it but to be up and after. True, I used to be more civil to my own creations, used to think that they would come forth in gracious vividness if I would merely sit and wait with politely receptive mind. Thus I waited, until I fell asleep, and they never came. They don't fool me in that way now. I let them know at once just what sort of creator they have to deal with, and I proceed straightway to hound them down to the finish. First, I sit with my eye fixed on that spot in the mental mist where the face has last vanished, and I look and look until my eye pierces the fog, and I find the fugitive, and slowly see form and feature, and I don't let go until — "There! have I drawn or no Life to that lip?" — until I know the way my face parts its hair, and the way it parts its lips, until I know all the changes in its eyes, and the way it crinkles itself when it laughs. Then I must proceed to fit face with figure and costume, and next, 140 THE STORY IN THE MAKING hardly daring to relax the grip of my glance long enough, I make the whole walk up and down in front of me so that I can see just what are the tricks of its gait. All through the process the creature has wriggled and writhed from my grasp like a very Proteus, and at the end I positively have to pound him into pro- priety while I fasten him to a chair in a blaze of daylight. Ten to one, he'll be off before I can get back, for I must away, hallooing into the mist again to find others for my pretty puppet to play with. Back I come after a while, pulling a reluctant train. I tack them all to their seats, for they are so mutinous that I hardly dare to turn my back upon them. I consult them at every turn, but they refuse to answer a single word. They will not say whether they prefer the mountains or the sea, whether they like their dining-rooms in orange tawny or terra cotta, whether they prefer Botticelli or Charles Dana Gibson on their walls. I do my best, but when I have clapped on the last weatherboard, and clipped off the last protruding twig of their hedge- rows, they sniff at me because I do not know their tastes. It is just here that the saddest part of my story-making begins, and the heartless com- pany there present, well they know it. "Ha!" 141 THE STORY IN THE MAKING they cry, "you can lead a character up to action, but you cannot make him act." How I wish that the editor and the public would receive the story at the present stage! Have I not really done enough! Perfectly ignorant of carpentry and mason-work, I have built that lordly gray pile on the hillside yonder, not to mention that bustling city in the dis- tance. Utterly inexperienced in horticulture, I have laid out some twenty acres of land- scape gardening over which the public is at liberty to wander at will; and chief, I have introduced to your acquaintance half a dozen fascinating people, most charming and sym- pathetic towards all humanity but their author. But this is not enough; the public de- mands of me yet more inspiration and per- spiration. My mutineers must dance through a plot, and look as if they enjoyed It, too. At first, of course, they are inexorably in- active. I protest and I plead hopelessly. But at last as caged animals finally condescend to the tricks of the circus ring out of very ennui, I see my characters pricking up their ears a bit at the poses I suggest. Flattery works tolerably well. "You'd look so pretty In an incident," I suggest to my heroine, and lan- guidly she rises, but warms presently to more spirited pantomime before her mirror. 142 THE STORY IN THE MAKING Also I appeal to their loyalty to each other, "Whist!" I cry, "here's our pretty young hero having a 2 a.m. tussle with a burglar in the coal-bin. Up with you, and down to the rescue, every man of you!" and down they scurry. Presently, happy sight, behold the whole company prancing and pirouetting with an animation I would not have believed possible ten minutes ago ! After all the trouble I have had to set them jigging, it is hard to raise a protesting voice and call a halt — "Stop! this is action, I grant you, but it is n't plot. Clear the stage! Hero and heroine and climax to the front, if you please." Such adroitness and diplomacy as I have to exert in order to per- suade them all to take their proper places in the march of incidents! I try all sorts of ap- peal; my second lady being in the dumps, I say, "Shame! You must let Olivia have the first proposal scene. It's naughty to be jeal- ous, and don't you remember that you have a New England conscience? It's about all you have got, too, except your eyebrows. Besides, I leave you at the end with another proposal distinctly looming upon the horizon." I always have most exhausting arguments with my puppets about their actions. They say they are disgusted with the obsequious- 143 THE STORY IN THE MAKING ness with which I refer to the pubHc, and they don't believe I know anything about the pub- lic anyway; if I'd just once give them a free hand unhampered by introduction, sequence, climax, or denouement, they would make me a plot that would make me a made man. Somehow at last by dint of infinite patience I persuade them all to go through their proper incidents in their proper order. The next task is to make them pause in their poses long enough for me to catch up my pen and sketch them in action. Puffing, panting, pleading, somehow or other I get them all down in black and white at last, and then, seeing that I have finished, they all come tiptoeing up to look over my shoulder at what I have written. I turn up my collar against the storm of abuse. ■■■. ' • "Is that leering old reprobate meant for me.'"' inquires the most delightful grand- father I ever met in imagination. The heroine's cheeks are hot. "I never flirted so outrageously as that with any one in my life," she cries, "not even with — " Here she glances at the hero. "She did n't, and you had no business to say so!" he takes up the cudgels. "But, pray, what is this curious fringe I observe orna- menting my vocabulary? College slang! I as- 144 THE STORY IN THE MAKING sure you that it never grew In any college for gentlemen. It sounds to me like an opium den, and I should like to inquire, sir, where you learned it!" *' Where in the world are my eyebrows?" wails the second lady. Unable to control myself longer, I jump from my chair and turn upon them, " See here, if you think making a story is so much easier than being one, just take my desk and chair and pen and try it!" THE WIZARD WORD THE world is In danger of being too acutely discovered. Pretty soon there won't be any Nowhere. There will be a road- map through It for every tooting motor, a cloud-map through It for every wheeling air- ship. We are Impelled to know and know and know, and all the time knowledge is such a stupid quarry to be always hunting down. The only real sport Is mystery. Presently neither sea nor sky will be left for the spirit to adven- ture, yet the imagination must have some- where to sail. It is here that the world of words comes in so handily. That is a universe never to be re- duced to terms of sense and science; words are too fraught with sense for that. Language is still a place of sun-gleams and shadows, of lightnings and half-lights, and things forgotten and things to be, of odors and tastes and pic- tures and hauntings, whole pageants of dead dynasties evoked perhaps by a small adjective. Words are so elusive, so personal. In their sug- gestion, that science will never bully all fancy out of us so long as we have words to talk in, to dream In. 146 THE WIZARD WORD It Is just in proportion as words retain their mystery, that they retain their magic. So soon as they present too definite a picture, odor, taste, they lose their wizardry. We may outgrow our fairy tales, but there are few of us for whom some words do not always retain their witchery of suggestion, words that have never become in our minds too definite, words that still glimpse haze and mystery and the magic of ignorance. I would so much rather look into my heart for the meaning of a word than into the dictionary; it Is one of many methods of defending one's imagination from the encroachments of knowledge. Some words possess a mysterious spacious- ness: try "Homeric," think it, pronounce it, and you will see in the flash of that adjective men and women growing to god-size, taller, stronger, more beautiful than any but Homer ever thought of, and you will see everything In vast numbers, great herds of cattle for the hecatomb, tens of thousands of men-at-arms surging, limitless spear-points pricking all the plain. No fleet, no army, could be so big and vast as that one word Homeric. Another word that suggests number be- yond any ciphering is the word "doubloon." Could any one ever feel so rich In terms of dollars as In terms of doubloons.'* This Is be- 147 THE WIZARD WORD cause nobody with any imagination knows how much a doubloon is worth, or wants to and people without any imagination can never feel rich any way, no matter how many dollars or doubloons they have. "Galleon" is a noun that twins with doub- loon. A galleon is the stanchest vessel any one can go to sea in, although it is only a word, not a ship any longer. There's a splendor, a pride, about a galleon. It glides, it never sails, and it always has favoring winds, it commands them. Nobody can picture a galleon with sails a-flap in a dead calm, or with sails in ribbons in a gale. A galleon is always mis- tress of all weathers. On the other hand a galleon is not altogether a craft for highest emprise, it's not what "merchant-adven- turers" would sail in. "Merchant-adventur- ers" — there is a word that fits with a brawl- ing and buffeting sea, or deadly tropic calm and the sighting of low, fronded islands, or the black rim of a pirate boat on the treach- erous, unknown water. But what a ring of rollicking jollity and dauntless fellowship there is in that brave old compound noun, merchant-adventurers ! It is one of the many words that, fading from our vocabulary, carry with them whole decades of history. It lays open all "the spacious days of great Eliza- 148 THE WIZARD WORD beth." Yet when I apply it to definite names, Drake, Forbisher, Raleigh, Instantly some of the magic fades. I want no names for my merchant-adventurers. There are other words that echo to the vast- ness of the Elizabethan imagination. "Em- pery" resounds with the thundering con- quests of Tamburlaine, which in turn were but echoes of the insatiable soul-quest of Kit Marlowe. The word to me spells Marlowe, and spells Keats; not all the world could sup- ply the indomitable desire that is dreamed of in empery, not all the kingdoms of earth were enough for the empery of Tamburlaine. Empery is richer, vaster, more insatiably desirable than empire. Empire dwindles to a petty exactness beside it. Empire is not the only word to turn to magic by the addition of the suggestive suffix, ry. Ry might be termed the supernatural suffix, for it always has a connotation of spirit-peopled places. The word "glamour" has in it a certain degree of magic, but change it to "glamoury," and see what happens, what glimmering vistas of elfland open forth. And if the y following the r be changed to ie, the result has even more of wizardry, which word is itself an ex- ample of my ry argument. Notice the differ- ence of degree in glamour, glamoury, glam- 149 THE WIZARD WORD ourie, and in "fairy," which is mild in meaning when set beside "faerie." And is there any word in our tongue so capable of evoking the sensations of that shivery borderland between the known and the unknowable as the dissyl- lable "eerie"? "A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover!" The connotation of words in ry and rie is an example in the superlative degree of the magic of indefiniteness, but there is plenty of conjuring power in terms which have no supernatural suggestion. All the romance of a bygone period may often be better evoked by a word than by treatises of overdone his- torical research. Often some word of wearing apparel may summon forth a whole pageant of costume. Try "wimple," "kirtle," "shift." I should have no idea of the size or shape of the de- sired garment, should be helpless before my needle and scissors; but in spite of this ig- norance, and, as I maintain, because of it, the word "wimple" shall always call up for me peaked crown and flowing veil, and the can- tering and the clinking and chattering of all Chaucer's blithe procession ; the word " kirtle " flashes Perdita upon my vision, Perdita, the ISO THE WIZARD WORD sliepherdess-princess weaving her dance; and "shift" is a noun which crowds upon me all the crude, quick Hfe of the ballads; for in this garment, beneath a hovering halo, forsaken ladies drowned were always floating about on midnight waters by way of reproach to their lords. The innermost luxury of all sense-percep- tion is never experienced from the too clearly analyzed sensation, however acute. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." No music has such a spell for our feet as is implied in the words "piping" and "fifing," but few of us have ever danced to piping or to fifing. In the realm of smell is any rose as sweet as the quaint word "posy"? Yet can you tell its shape, or color or odor.f* It is a spicy mingling of all the fragrance of all sweet gardens that ever were — or that never were There exists nothing so toothsome as the food and drink we have never tasted and shall never taste. A "venison pasty" never ap- peared on any menu we ever read, yet we know that we have never eaten anything so savory. "Mead," "canary," "mulled wine," are drinks delectable. The mighty goblets of Valhalla ran with "mead," and from them we quaff great hero draughts; "canary" fires 151 THE WIZARD WORD all our veins with the tingling, ringing young exuberance of the Mermaid Tavern; while "mulled wine" is the most comforting of toddies, soothing to sleep after the coziness and confidences of midnight slippers and dressing-gown. There are few people so prosaic as not to possess, hidden away from their own and others' investigation as securely as every man's secret belief in ghosts, a whole con- juror's chest of wizard words. I have merely mentioned some of those nouns which have for me the power to set me free to adventure the unknown. To every man his own words, his own enchantments, so long as they have might to release from the chains of knowledge, and to unshackle the imagination for the spirit's free adventuring. THE PLEASURES OF THE PREPOSITION INHERE Is no sin in playing with pebbles, ^ If one does not forget their connection with the stars and the suns. It Is not repre- hensible to "study Plato for his preposi- tions," if one remains mindful of the phil- osophic deduction that may depend on the interpretation of irapa or viro. One loving the human whimsicalities of synonyms may be excused if he sometimes turn away from the bombastic Importance of the noun, the nerv- ous Insistence of the verb, the glaring orna- ment of adjective or adverb, to regard some of the subtleties of the humble preposition. All word-workers have their pet preposi- tions, and have a critical eye for writers who do not share their regard for this or that favorite, who are careless, say, with "by," or indiscriminate with "in." Unhappily there exist artists who show a lively interest in the more prominent parts of speech, but who seem to have no respect for the precious connec- tives; who make an ugly knot when they em- ploy a conjunction, or stitch in a preposition with a prominence that offends the pattern. 153 PLEASURES OF THE PREPOSITION The purpose of the preposition is to point out the place of its superiors, their relation each to each, "above," "below," "around," "near"; but its own place is shown by its usurping no other: its dignity consists in its obscurity. And yet the preposition is itself often so full of meaning that it requires a skillful stylist to give it all its due of signifi- cance, and at the same time confine it to its humble position. Without the preposition, nouns and verbs, however important in themselves, might remain mere separate splashes of color or shape; it is for the preposition so to weave them into the web of the sentence that their relative positions may indicate to the full the significance of the patterned thought. Be- cause its primary business Is with placing other words, indicating each varying angle of their relation each to each — as for example whether a thing emanates "from" a man or goes "to" him or passes "through" him — the preposition Is always hard to separate from its place-meaning, even with all the subtle distinctions of thought to which it may attain. Of these distinctions our ado- lescence, Impatient of the schooling of rule and rhetoric, grows weary; but later there comes a pleasure in the play of connotation 154 PLEASURES OF THE PREPOSITION we may employ. Prepositions become pic- turesque with their import for our fancy. Ex- amine "in" and "into": "into" has a cata- pultic impact, suggests the splash of a stone thrown "into" the water, to be readily con- trasted with the static quality of "in," the stillness, the permanence of the stones, the plants, "in" the water. The distinction some- times veers away from the primary difference, when, for instance, the pen hesitates in writ- ing that the individual is merged "into" the whole or "in" the whole. To my mind, the waters of oblivion close over him with more finality if he is merged "in" than "into." One enjoys preserving the accuracy of "between" and "among," conscious of all the intimacy of "between," all the promiscuity of "among." In comparing "with" and comparing "to," the imagination perceives an implication of social strata, since one compares a man "with" his fellows, in a democratic homoge- neity; but in comparing him "to" another, one connotes the existence of a superior, an aristocracy by means of which we measure and contrast. An instinct for niceties often leads us to turn to the greater subtlety obtainable by employing prepositions from another tongue than our own. The place element in a native 155 PLEASURES OF THE PREPOSITION preposition is likely so to persist, that one substitutes for its obtrusive literalness the greater subtlety possible to the foreign prepo- sition from its unfamiliarity. Our own "for" and "against" are heavy with place-sugges- tion, as against the weight of pure argument inherent in the Latin "pro" and "con." The prepositions of one's own language never can be made utterly free of literalness. Note how in "under the rose" the thought is obscured by the picture, while in "jwi rosa^^ we in- stantly get the desired impression of all the whispered stealth of scandal. About the Latin "nVcfl" there floats a delightful historic misti- ness; ^'circa^^ 300 B.C. has a nebulosity not obtainable by the matter-of-fact "about." Each of us has, perhaps, his pet preposi- tions from alien tongues, as pleasing to his pen as his favorites of his own vernacular. Who of us has not a fondness for the dear dis- cursive "i/^," which long ago opened to us the pleasant paths of "Amicitia" and the strong self-reliance of "Senectute".^ "/)