Chapter IX: Part 9

Will our contrary-minded correspondent believe that these studies, these finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, with the same cæsura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each couplet. The most artificial and the most natural poets were at one in their literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of Crabbe's impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material unemployed in English poetry before, that you forget all the affectations of the outward convention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the quaintness of their use for his purposes. How imperishable, anyway, is the interest of things important to the spirit, the fancy, and how largely does this interest lie in the freshness of the mind bringing itself to the things, how little in the novelty of the things! The demand for strangeness in the things themselves is the demand of the sophisticated mind: the mind which has lost its simplicity in the process of continuing unenlightened. It is this demand which betrays the mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race, the sophistication of the English mind, and the obfuscation (which is sophistication at second-hand) of the American mind. The non-imaginative person is nowhere so much at home as in a voluntary exile; and this may be why it was sometime said that travel is the fool's paradise. For such a person to realize anything the terms are that he shall go abroad, either into an alien scene or into a period of the past; then he can begin to have some pleasure. He must first of all get away from himself, and he is not to be blamed for that; any one else would wish to get away from him. His exaction is not a test of merit; it is merely the clew to a psychological situation which is neither so novel nor so important as to require of our hard-worked civilization the production of an order of more inspired criticism than it has worried along with hitherto.

XXV

A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK

They sat together on a bench in the Park, far enough apart to distinguish themselves from the many other pairs who were but too obviously lovers. It could not be said quite that these two were actually lovers; but there was an air of passionate provisionality over and around them, a light such as in springtime seems to enfold the tree before it takes the positive color of bud or blossom; and, with an eye for literary material that had rarely failed him, he of the Easy Chair perceived that they were a hero and heroine of a kind which he instantly felt it a great pity he should not have met oftener in fiction of late. As he looked at them he was more and more penetrated by a delicate pathos in the fact that, such as he saw them, they belonged in their fine sort to the great host of the Unemployed. No one else might have seen it, but he saw, with that inner eye of his, which compassion suffused but did not obscure, that they were out of a job, and he was not surprised when he heard the young girl fetch a muted sigh and then say: "No, they don't want us any more. I don't understand why; it is very strange; but it is perfectly certain."

"Yes, there's no doubt of that," the young man returned, in a despair tinged with resentment.

She was very pretty and he was handsome, and they were both tastefully dressed, with a due deference to fashion, yet with a personal qualification of the cut and color of their clothes which, if it promised more than it could fulfil in some ways, implied a modest self-respect, better than the arrogance of great social success or worldly splendor. She could have been the only daughter of a widowed father in moderate circumstances; or an orphan brought up by a careful aunt, or a duteous sister in a large family of girls, with whom she shared the shelter of a wisely ordered, if somewhat crowded, home; or she could have been a serious student of any of the various arts and sciences which girls study now in an independence compatible with true beauty of behavior. He might have been a young lawyer or doctor or business man; or a painter or architect; or a professor in some college or a minister in charge of his first parish. What struck the observer in them and pleased him was that they seemed of that finer American average which is the best, and, rightly seen, the most interesting phase of civilized life yet known.

"I sometimes think," the girl resumed, in the silence of her companion, "that I made a mistake in my origin or my early education. It's a great disadvantage, in fiction nowadays, for a girl to speak grammatically, as I always do, without any trace of accent or dialect. Of course, if I had been high-born or low-born in the olden times, somewhere or other, I shouldn't have to be looking for a place now; or if I had been unhappily married, or divorced, or merely separated from my husband, the story-writers would have had some use for me. But I have tried always to be good and nice and lady-like, and I haven't been in a short story for ages."

"Is it so bad as that?" the young man asked, sadly.

"Quite. If I could only have had something askew in my heredity, I know lots of authoresses who would have jumped at me. I can't do anything wildly adventurous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary period, because I'm so afraid; but I know that in the course of modern life I've always been fairly equal to emergencies, and I don't believe that I should fail in case of trouble, or that if it came to poverty I should be ashamed to share the deprivations that fell to my lot. I don't think I'm very selfish; I would be willing to stay in town all summer if an author wanted me, and I know I could make it interesting for his readers. I could marry an English nobleman if it was really necessary, and, if I didn't like to live in England because I was fond of my own country, I believe I could get him to stay here half the time with me; and that would appeal to a large class. I don't know whether I would care to be rescued a great deal; it would depend upon what it was from. But I could stand a great deal of pain if need be, and I hope that if it came to anything like right or wrong I should act conscientiously. In society, I shouldn't mind any amount of dancing or dining or teaing, and I should be willing to take my part in the lighter athletics. But," she ended, as she began, with a sigh, "I'm not wanted."

"Yes, I see what you mean," the young man said, with a thoughtful knot between his brows. "I'm not wanted myself, at present, in the short stories; but in the last dozen or so where I had an engagement I certainly didn't meet you; and it is pleasant to be paired off in a story with a heroine who has the instincts and habits of a lady. Of course, a hero is only something in an author's fancy, and I've no right to be exacting; but it does go against me to love a girl who ropes cattle, or a woman who has a past, or a husband, or something of the kind. I always do my best for the author, but I can't forget that I'm a gentleman, and it's difficult to win a heroine when the very idea of her makes you shudder. I sometimes wonder how the authors would like it themselves if they had to do what they expect of us in that way. They're generally very decent fellows, good husbands and fathers, who have married lady-like girls and wouldn't think of associating with a shady or ignorant person."

"The authoresses are quite as inconsistent," the professional heroine rejoined. "They wouldn't speak to the kind of young men whom they expect a heroine to be passionately in love with. They must know how very oddly a girl feels about people who are outside of the world she's been brought up in. It isn't enough that a man should be very noble at heart and do grand things, or save your life every now and then, or be masterful and use his giant will to make you in love with him. I don't see why they can't let one have, now and then, the kind of husbands they get for themselves. For my part, I should like always to give my heart to a normal, sensible, well-bred, conscientious, agreeable man who could offer me a pleasant home--I wouldn't mind the suburbs; and I could work with him and work for him till I dropped--the kind of man that the real world seems to be so full of. I've never had a fair chance to show what was in me; I've always been placed in such a false position. Now I have no position at all, not even a false one!"

Her companion was silent for a while. Then he said: "Yes, they all seem, authors and authoresses both, to lose sight of the fact that the constitution of our society is more picturesque, more dramatic, more poetical than any in the world. We can have the play of all the passions and emotions in ordinary, innocent love-making that other peoples can have only on the worst conditions; and yet the story-writers won't avail themselves of the beauty that lies next to their hands. They go abroad for impossible circumstances, or they want to bewitch ours with the chemistry of all sorts of eccentric characters, exaggerated incentives, morbid propensities, pathological conditions, or diseased psychology. As I said before, I know I'm only a creature of the storyteller's fancy, and a creature out of work at that; but I believe I was imagined in a good moment--I'm sure _you_ were--and I should like an engagement in an honest, wholesome situation. I think I could do creditable work in it."

"I _know_ you could," the heroine rejoined, fervently, almost tenderly, so that it seemed to the listener there was an involuntary _rapprochement_ of their shadowy substances on the bench where they floated in a sitting posture. "I don't want to be greedy; I believe in living and letting live. I think the abnormal has just as good a right to be in the stories as the normal; but why shut the normal out altogether? What I should like to ask the short-story writers is whether they and their readers are so bored with themselves and the people they know in the real world that they have no use for anything like its average in their fiction. It's impossible for us to change--"

"I shouldn't wish _you_ to change," the hero said, so fondly that the witness trembled for something more demonstrative.

"Thank you! But what I mean is, couldn't _they_ change a little? Couldn't they give us another trial? They've been using the abnormal, in some shape or other, so long that I should think they would find a hero and heroine who simply fell in love at a dance or a dinner, or in a house-party or at a picnic, and worked out their characters to each other, through the natural worry and difficulty, and pleasure and happiness, till they got married--a relief from, well, the other thing. I'm sure if they offered me the chance, I could make myself attractive to their readers, and I believe I should have the charm of novelty."

"You would have more than the charm of novelty," the hero said, and the witness trembled again for the _convenances_ which one so often sees offended on the benches in the Park. But then he remembered that these young people were avowedly nice, and that they were morally incapable of misbehavior. "And for a time, at least, I believe you--I believe _we_, for I must necessarily be engaged with you--would succeed. The difficulty would be to get the notion of our employment to the authors." It was on the listener's tongue to say that he thought he could manage that, when the hero arrested him with the sad misgiving, "But they would say we were commonplace, and that would kill the chance of our ever having a run."

A tremendous longing filled the witness, a potent desire to rescue this engaging pair from the dismay into which they fell at the fatal word. "No, no!" he conjured them. "_Not_ commonplace. A judicious paragraph anticipative of your reappearance could be arranged, in which you could be hailed as the _normal_ hero and heroine, and greeted as a grateful relief from the hackneyed freaks and deformities of the prevalent short story, or the impassioned paper-doll pattern of the mediæval men and maidens, or the spotted and battered figures of the studies in morbid analysis which pass for fiction in the magazines. We must get that luminous word _normal_ before the reading public at once, and you will be rightly seen in its benign ray and recognized from the start--yes! in _advance_ of the start--for what you are: types of the loveliness of our average life, the fairest blossoms of that faith in human nature which has flourished here into the most beautiful and glorious civilization of all times. With us the average life is enchanting, the normal is the exquisite. Have patience, have courage; your time is coming again!"

It seemed to him that the gentle shapes wavered in his vehement breath, and he could not realize that in their alien realm they could not have heard a word he uttered. They remained dreamily silent, as if he had not spoken, and then the heroine said: "Perhaps we shall have to wait for a new school of short-story writers before we can get back into the magazines. Some beginner _must_ see in us what has always pleased: the likeness to himself or herself, the truth to nature, the loyalty to the American ideal of happiness. He will find that we easily and probably _end well_, and that we're a consolation and refuge for readers, who can take heart from our happy dénouements, when they see a family resemblance in us, and can reasonably hope that if they follow our examples they will share our blessings. Authors can't really enjoy themselves in the company of those degenerates, as _I_ call them. They're mostly as young and right-principled and well-behaved as ourselves, and, if they could get to know us, we should be the best of friends. They would realize that there was plenty of harmless fun, as well as love, in the world, and that there was lots of good-luck."

"Like ours, now, with no work and no prospect of it?" he returned, in his refusal to be persuaded, yet ready to be comforted.

Having set out on that road, she would not turn back; she persisted, like any woman who is contraried, no matter how far she ends from her first position: "Yes, like ours now. For this is probably the dark hour before the dawn. We must wait."

"And perish in the mean time?"

"Oh, we shall not perish," she responded, heroinically. "It's not for nothing that we are immortal," and as she spoke she passed her translucent hand through his arm, and, rising, they drifted off together and left the emissary of the Easy Chair watching them till they mixed with the mists under the trees in the perspective of the Mall.

OTHER ESSAYS

I

AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY

In the morning the trees stood perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air stirred their stricken foliage, but the leaves left the spray and dripped silently, vertically down, with a faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears of a grief which is too inward for any other outward sign; an absent grief, almost self-forgetful. By-and-by, softly, very softly, as Nature does things when she emulates the best Art and shuns the showiness and noisiness of the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea, which turned iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the trees began to bend, and writhe, and sigh, and moan; and their leaves flew through the air, and blew and scuttled over the grass, and in an hour all the boughs were bare. The summer, which had been living till then and dying, was now dead.

That was the reason why certain people who had been living with it, and seemed dying in it, were now in a manner dead with it, so that their ghosts were glad to get back to town, where the ghosts of thousands and hundreds of thousands of others were hustling in the streets and the trolleys and subways and elevateds, and shops and factories and offices, and making believe to be much more alive than they were in the country. Yet the town, the haunt of those harassed and hurried spectres, who are not without their illusory hilarity, their phantasmal happiness, has a charm which we of the Easy Chair always feel, on first returning to it in the autumn, and which the representative of the family we are imagining finds rather an impassioned pleasure in. He came on to New York, while the others lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused himself very well, in a shadowy sort, looking at those other shades who had arrived in like sort, or different, and were there together with him in those fine days just preceding the election; after which the season broke in tears again, and the autumn advanced another step toward winter.

There is no moment of the New York year which is more characteristic of it than that mid-autumnal moment, which the summer and the winter are equally far from. Mid-May is very well, and the weather then is perfect, but that is a moment pierced with the unrest of going or getting ready to go away. The call of the eld in Europe, or the call of the wild in Newport, has already depopulated our streets of what is richest and naturally best in our city life; the shops, indeed, show a fevered activity in the near-richest and near-best who are providing for their summer wants at mountain or sea-shore; but the theatres are closing like fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every outward breeze; the tables d'hôte express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms; the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with their retarded displays of butcher's meats and poultry.

But with what a difference the mid-autumn of the town welcomes its returners! Ghosts, we have called them, mainly to humor a figure we began with, but they are ghosts rather in the meaning of _revenants_, which is a good meaning enough. They must be a very aged or very stupid sort of _revenants_ if their palingenetic substance does not thrill at the first nightly vision of Broadway, of that fairy flare of electric lights, advertising whiskeys and actresses and beers, and luring the beholder into a hundred hotels and theatres and restaurants. It is now past the hour of roof-gardens with their songs and dances, but the vaudeville is in full bloom, and the play-houses are blossoming in the bills of their new comedies and operas and burlesques. The pavements are filled, but not yet crowded, with people going to dinner at the tables d'hôte; the shop windows glitter and shine, and promise a delight for the morrow which the morrow may or may not realize.

But as yet the town is not replete to choking, as it will be later, when those who fancy they constitute the town have got back to it from their Europes, their Newports, their Bar Harbors, their Lenoxes, their Tuxedos, weary of scorning delights and living laborious days in that round of intellectual and moral events duly celebrated in the society news of the Sunday papers. Fifth Avenue abounds in automobiles but does not yet super-abound; you do not quite take your life in your hand in crossing the street at those corners where there is no policeman's hand to put it in. Everywhere are cars, carts, carriages; and the motorist whirs through the intersecting streets and round the corners, bent on suicide or homicide, and the kind old trolleys and hansoms that once seemed so threatening have almost become so many arks of safety from the furious machines replacing them. But a few short years ago the passer on the Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty automobiles in his walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza; now he can easily number hundreds, without an emotion of self-approval.

But their abundance is only provisional, a mere forecast of the superabundance to come. All things are provisional, all sights, all sounds, and this forms the peculiar charm of the hour, its haunting and winning charm. If you take the omnibus-top to be trundled whiningly up to one of the farther east-side entrances of the Park, and then dismount and walk back to the Plaza through it, you are even more keenly aware of the suspensive quality of the time. The summer, which you left for dead by mountain or sea-shore, stirs with lingering consciousness in the bland air of the great pleasance. Many leaves are yet green on the trees, and where they are not green and not there they are gay on the grass under the trees. There are birds, not, to be sure, singing, but cheerfully chirping; and there are occasional blazons of courageous flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern blasts will soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who have frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who cumber the footway before them with their perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar at the passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is high carnival of the children with hoops and balls; it is the supreme moment of the saddle-donkeys in the by-paths, and the carriage-goats in the Mall, and of the rowboats on the ponds, which presently will be withdrawn for their secret hibernation, where no man can find them out. When the first snow flies, even while it is yet poising for flight in the dim pits of air, all these delights will have vanished, and the winter, which will claim the city for its own through a good four months, will be upon it.

Always come back, therefore, if you must come at all, about the beginning of November, and if you can manage to take in Election Day, and especially Election Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York has five saturnalia every year: New Year's Night, Decoration Day, Fourth of July, Election Night, and Thanksgiving, and not the least of these is Election Night. If it is a right first Tuesday of November, the daytime wind will be veering from west to south and back, sun and cloud will equally share the hours between them, and a not unnatural quiet, as of political passions hushed under the blanket of the Australian ballot, will prevail. The streets will be rather emptied than filled, and the litter of straw and scrap-paper, and the ordure and other filth of the great slattern town, will blow agreeably about under your feet and into your eyes and teeth. But with the falling of the night there will be a rise of the urban spirits; the sidewalks will thicken with citizens of all ages and sexes and nations; and if you will then seek some large centre for the cinematographic dissemination of the election news, you will find yourself one of a multitude gloating on the scenes of comedy and tragedy thrown up on the canvas to stay your impatience for the returns. Along the curbstones are stationed wagons for the sale of the wind and string instruments, whose raw, harsh discords of whistling and twanging will begin with the sight of the vote from the first precinct. Meantime policemen, nervously fondling their clubs in their hands, hang upon the fringes of the crowd, which is yet so good-natured that it seems to have no impulse but to lift children on its shoulders and put pretty girls before it, and caress old women and cripples into favorable positions, so that they may see better. You will wish to leave it before the clubbing begins, and either go home to the slumbers which the whistling and twanging will duly attend; or join the diners going into or coming out of the restaurants, or the throngs strolling down into the fairy realms of Broadway, under the flare of the whiskeys and the actresses.

At such a time it is best to be young, but it is not so very bad to be old, for the charm of the hour, the air, and the place is such that even the heart of age must rise a little at it. What the night may really be, if it is not positively raining, you "do not know or need to know." Those soft lamps overhead, which might alike seem let garlanding down from the vault above or flowering up from the gulfs below out of a still greater pyrotechnic richness, supply the defect, if there is any, of moon and stars. Only the air is actual, the air of the New York night, which is as different from that of the London night as from that of the Paris night, or, for all we know, the St. Petersburg night. At times we have fancied in its early autumnal tones something Florentine, something Venetian, but, after all, it is not quite either, even when the tones of these are crudest. It is the subtlest, the most penetrating expression of the New York temperament; but what that is, who shall say? That mystic air is haunted little from the past, for properly speaking there never was a city so unhistorical in temperament. A record of civic corruption, running back to the first servants of the Dutch Companies, does not constitute municipal history, and our part in national events from the time we felt the stirrings of national consciousness has not been glorious, as these have not been impressive. Of New York's present at any given moment you wish to say in her patient-impatient slang, "Forget it, forget it." There remains only the future from which she can derive that temperamental effect in her night air; but, again, what that is, who shall say? If any one were so daring, he might say it was confidence modified by anxiety; a rash expectation of luck derived from immunity for past transgression; the hopes of youth shot with youth's despairs: not sweet, innocent youth, but youth knowing and experienced, though not unwilling to shun evil because of the bad morrow it sometimes brings. No other city under the sun, we doubt, is so expressive of that youth: that modern youth, able, agile, eager, audacious; not the youth of the poets, but the youth of the true, the grim realists.

Something, a faint, faint consciousness of this, visits even the sad heart of age on any New York night when it is not raining too hard, and one thinks only of getting indoors, where all nights are alike. But mostly it comes when the autumn is dreaming toward winter in that interlude of the seasons which we call Indian Summer. It is a stretch of time which we have handsomely bestowed upon our aborigines, in compensation for the four seasons we have taken from them, like some of those Reservations which we have left them in lieu of the immeasurable lands we have alienated. It used to be longer than it is now; it used to be several weeks long; in the sense of childhood, it was almost months. It is still qualitatively the same, and it is more than any other time expressive of the New York temperament, perhaps because we have honored in the civic ideal the polity of our Indian predecessors, and in Tammany and its recurrently triumphant braves, have kept their memory green. But if this is not so, the spiritual fact remains, and under the sky of the Election Night you _feel_ New York as you do in no other hour. The sense extends through the other autumn nights till that night, sure to come, when the pensive weather breaks in tears, and the next day it rains and rains, and the streets stream with the flood, and the dull air reeks with a sort of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a brother: a brother whose wants are many and whose resources are few. The morning after the storm, there will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but wholesome and bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a renovated conscience, and the city presses forward again to the future in which alone it has its being, with the gay confidence of a sinner who has forgiven himself his sins and is no longer sorry for them.

After that interlude, when the streets of the Advanced Vaudeville, which we know as New York, begin again and continue till the Chasers come in late May, there will be many other sorts of weather, but none so characteristic of her. There will be the sort of weather toward the end of January, when really it seems as if nothing else could console him for the intolerable freezing and thawing, the snow upon snow, the rain upon rain, the winds that soak him and the winds that shrivel him, and the suns that mock him from a subtropic sky through subarctic air. We foresee him then settling into his arm-chair, while the wind whistles as naturally as the wind in the theatre around the angles of his lofty flat, and drives the snow of the shredded paper through the air or beats it in soft clots against the pane. He turns our page, and as he catches our vague drift, before yielding himself wholly to its allure, he questions, as readers like to do, whether the writer is altogether right in his contention that the mid-autumnal moment is the most characteristic moment of the New York year. Is not the mid-winter moment yet more characteristic? He conjures up, in the rich content of his indoor remoteness, the vision of the vile street below his flat, banked high with the garnered heaps of filthy snow, which alternately freeze and thaw, which the rain does not wash nor the wind blow away, and which the shredded-paper flakes are now drifting higher. He sees the foot-passers struggling under their umbrellas toward the avenues where the reluctant trolleys pause jarringly for them, and the elevated trains roar along the trestle overhead; where the saloon winks a wicked eye on every corner; where the signs of the whiskeys and actresses flare through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across the trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more respectful vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and best, who have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and are forcing the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras. He himself remains midway between the last fall and the next spring; and perhaps he decides against the writer, as the perverse reader sometimes will, and holds that this hour of suspense and misgiving is the supreme, the duodecimal hour of the metropolitan dial. He may be right; who knows? New York's hours are all characteristic; and the hour whose mystical quality we have been trying to intimate is already past, and we must wait another year before we can put it to the test again; wait till the trees once more stand perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson, russet, and the wind comes up and blows them bare, and yet another summer is dead, and the mourners, the ghosts, the _revenants_ have once more returned to town.

II

PERSONAL AND EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES

A constant reader of the Easy Chair has come to it with a difficulty which, at the generous Christmas-tide, we hope his fellow-readers will join us in helping solve: they may, if they like, regard it as a merry jest of the patron saint of the day, a sort of riddle thrown upon the table at the general feast for each to try his wits upon

"Across the walnuts and the wine."

"How," this puzzled spirit has asked, "shall I address a friend of mine who, besides being a person of civil condition, with a right to the respect that we like to show people of standing in directing our letters to them, has the distinction of being a doctor of philosophy, of letters, and of laws by the vote of several great universities? Shall I greet him as, say, Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes, or Smythe Johnes, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., or simply Mr. Smythe Johnes?"

Decidedly, we should answer, to begin with, _not_ "Mr. Smythe Johnes" if you wish to keep the finest bloom on your friendship with any man who knows the world. He will much prefer being addressed simply "Smythe Johnes," with his street and number, for he feels himself classed by your "Mr. Smythe Johnes" with all those Mr. Smythe Johneses whom he loves and honors in their quality of tradesmen and working-men, but does not hold of quite the same social rank as himself. After our revolt in essentials from the English in the eighteenth century, we are now conforming more and more in the twentieth to their usages in non-essentials, and the English always write Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes or the like, unless Mr. Smythe Johnes is in trade or below it. They, indeed, sometimes carry their scruple so far that they will address him as Mr. Smythe Johnes at his place of business, and Smythe Johnes, Esq., at his private residence.

The English, who like their taffy thick and slab, and who, if one of them happens to be the Earl of Tolloller, are not richly enough satisfied to be so accosted by letter, but exact some such address as The Right Honorable the Earl of Tolloller, all like distinctions in their taffy, and are offended if you give them a commoner sort than they think their due. But the Americans, who pretend to a manlier self-respect, had once pretty generally decided upon Mr. Smythe Johnes as the right direction for his letters. They argued that Esquire was the proper address for lawyers, apparently because lawyers are so commonly called Squire in the simpler life. In the disuse of the older form of Armiger they forgot that _inter arma silent leges_, and that Esquire was logically as unfit for lawyers as for civil doctors, divines, or mediciners. He of the Easy Chair, when an editor long ago, yielded to the prevalent American misrendering for a time, and indiscriminately addressed all his contributors as "Mr." One of them, the most liberal of them in principle, bore the ignominy for about a year, and then he protested. After that the young editor (he was then almost as young as any one now writing deathless fiction) indiscriminately addressed his contributors as Esq. Yet he had an abiding sense of the absurdity in directing letters to John G. Whittier, Esq., for if the poet was truly a Friend and an abhorrer of war, he could not be hailed Armiger without something like insult.

With doctors of divinity the question is not so vexing or vexed; but it is said that of late a lion is rising in the way of rightly addressing doctors of medicine. If you wish to be attended by a physician who pays all visits after nightfall in evening dress, it is said that you are now to write Smythe Johnes, M.D., Esq., and not Dr. Smythe Johnes, as formerly. In England, the source of all our ceremonial woes, you cannot call a surgeon "doctor" without offence; he is Mr. Smythe Johnes when spoken to, but whether he is Mr. Smythe Johnes through the post, Heaven knows.

It is a thousand pities that when we cut ourselves off from that troubled source politically, we did not dam it up in all the things of etiquette. We indeed struck for freedom and sense at the very highest point, and began at once to write George Washington, President, as we still write William H. Taft, President. The Chief Magistrate is offered no taffy in our nation, or perhaps the word President is held to be taffy enough and to spare; for only the Governor of Massachusetts is legally even so much as Excellency. Yet by usage you are expected to address all ambassadors and ministers as Excellencies, and all persons in public office from members of Congress and of the Cabinet down to the lowest legislative or judicial functionaries as Honorables. This simplifies the task of directing envelopes to them, and, if a man once holds military rank in any peace establishment, he makes life a little easier for his correspondents by remaining General, or Captain, or Admiral, or Commander. You cannot Mister him, and you cannot Esquire him, and there is, therefore, no question as to what you shall superscribe him.

A score of years ago two friends, now, alas! both doctors of philosophy, of letters, and of laws, agreed to superscribe their letters simply Smythe Johnes and Johnes Smythe respectively, without any vain prefix or affix. They kept up this good custom till in process of time they went to Europe for prolonged sojourns, and there corrupted their manners, so that when they came home they began addressing each other as Esq., and have done so ever since. Neither is any the better for the honors they exchange on the envelopes they do not look at, and doubtless if mankind could be brought to the renunciation of the vain prefixes and affixes which these friends once disused the race would be none the worse for it, but all the better. One prints Mr. Smythe Johnes on one's visiting-card because it passes through the hands of a menial who is not to be supposed for a moment to announce plain Smythe Johnes; but it is the United States post-office which delivers the letters of Smythe Johnes, and they can suffer no contamination from a service which conveys the letters of plain William H. Taft to him with merely the explanatory affix of President, lest they should go to some other William H. Taft.

Undoubtedly the address of a person by the name with which he was christened can convey no shadow of disrespect. The Society of Friends understood this from the beginning, and they felt that they were wanting in no essential civility when they refused name-honor as well as hat-honor to all and every. They remained covered in the highest presences, and addressed each by his Christian name, without conveying slight; so that a King and Queen of England, who had once questioned whether they could suffer themselves to be called Thy Majesty instead of Your Majesty by certain Quakers, found it no derogation of their dignity to be saluted as Friend George and Friend Charlotte. The signory of the proudest republic in the world held that their family names were of sufficiency to which titles could add nothing, and the Venetian who called himself Loredano, or Gradenigo, or Morosini, or Renier, or Rezzonico did not ask to be called differently. In our own day a lady of the ancient and splendid family of the Peruzzi in Florence denied that the title of count existed in it or need exist: "Ognuno può essere conte: Peruzzi, no." ("Any one may be a count; but not a Peruzzi.") In like manner such names as Lincoln and Franklin, and Washington and Grant, and Longfellow and Bryant could have gained nothing by Mr. before them or Esq. after them. Doctor Socrates or Doctor Seneca would not have descended to us in higher regard with the help of these titles; and Rear-Admiral Themistocles or Major-General Epaminondas could not have had greater glory from the survival of parchments so directed to them.

The Venetian nobles who disdained titles came in process of time to be saluted as Illustrissimo; but in process of time this address when used orally began to shed its syllables till Illustrissimo became Lustrissimo, and then Strissimo, and at last Striss, when perhaps the family name again sufficed. So with us, Doctor has familiarly become "Doc," and Captain, "Cap," until one might rather have no title at all. Mr. itself is a grotesque malformation of a better word, and Miss is a silly shortening of the fine form of Mistress. This, pronounced Misses, can hardly add dignity to the name of the lady addressed, though doubtless it cannot be disused till we are all of the Society of Friends. The popular necessity has resulted in the vulgar vocative use of Lady, but the same use of Gentleman has not even a vulgar success, though it is not unknown. You may say, with your hand on the bell-strap, "Step lively, lady," but you cannot say, "Step lively, gentleman," and the fine old vocative "Sir" is quite obsolete. We ourselves remember it on the tongues of two elderly men who greeted each other with "Sir!" and "Sir!" when they met; and "Step lively, sir," might convey the same delicate regard from the trolley conductor as "Step lively, lady." Sir might look very well on the back of a letter; Smythe Johnes, Sir, would on some accounts be preferable to Smythe Johnes, Esq., and, oddly enough, it would be less archaic.

Such of our readers as have dined with the late Queen or the present King of England will recall how much it eased the yoke of ceremony to say to the sovereign, "Yes, ma'am," or "Yes, sir," as the use is, instead of your Majesty. But to others you cannot say "Yes, ma'am," or "Yes, sir," unless you are in that station of life to which you would be very sorry it had pleased God to call you. Yet these forms seem undeniably fit when used by the young to their elders, if the difference of years is great enough.

The difficulty remains, however. You cannot as yet write on an envelope, Smythe Johnes, Sir, or Mary Johnes, Lady; and, in view of this fact, we find ourselves no nearer the solution of our constant reader's difficulty than we were at first. The Socialists, who wish to simplify themselves and others, would address Mr. Johnes as Comrade Smythe Johnes, but could they address Mrs. Johnes as Comradess? We fancy not; besides, Comrade suggests arms and bloodshed, which is hardly the meaning of the red flag of brotherhood, and at the best Comrade looks affected and sounds even more so. Friend would be better, but orally, on the lips of non-Quakers, it has an effect of patronage, though no one could rightly feel slight in a letter addressed to him as Friend Smythe Johnes.

It is wonderful to consider how the ancients apparently got on without the use of any sort of prefix or affix to their names on the roll of parchment or fold of papyrus addressed to them. For all we know, Cæsar was simply C. Julius Cæsar to his correspondents, and Pericles was yet more simply Pericles to the least of his fellow-citizens. These historical personages may have had the number of their houses inscribed on their letters; or Pericles might have had Son of Xanthippus added to his name for purposes of identification; but apparently he managed quite as well as our Presidents, without anything equivalent to Excellency or Hon. or Mr. or Esq. To be sure, with the decline of

"The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,"

name-honors crept in more and more. It was then not only politer but much safer to address your petition To the Divine Domitian, or To the Divine Nero, than to greet those emperors by the mere given names which were not yet Christian; probably it would not have been enough to add Cæsar to the last name, though Cæsar seems to have finally served the turn of Esq., for all the right that the emperors had to bear it. In the Eastern Empire, we are not ready to say what was the correct style for imperial dignitaries; but among the sovereigns who divided the Roman state and inherited its splendor, some rulers came to be sacred majesties, though this is still a sensible remove from divine.

However, our present difficulty is with that vast average who in common parlance are Mr. and Mrs. Smythe Johnes. How shall they be styled on the backs of their letters? How shall Mrs. Smythe Johnes especially, in signing herself Mary Johnes, indicate that she is not Miss Mary but Mrs. Smythe Johnes? When she is left a widow, how soon does she cease to be Mrs. Smythe Johnes and become Mrs. Mary? Is it requisite to write in the case of any literary doctorate, Smythe Johnes, LL.D., or Litt.D., or Ph.D., or is it sufficient to write Dr. before his name? In the case of a divine, do you put Rev. Dr. before the name, or Rev. before it and D.D. after it? These are important questions, or, if they are not important, they are at least interesting. Among the vast mass of unceremonied, or call it unmannered, Americans the receiver of a letter probably knows no better than the sender how it should be addressed; but in the rarer case in which he does know, his self-respect or his self-love is wounded if it is misaddressed. It is something like having your name misspelled, though of course not so bad as that, quite; and every one would be glad to avoid the chance of it.

The matter is very delicate and can hardly be managed by legislation, as it was on the point of our pen to suggest it should be. The first French Republic, one and indivisible, decreed a really charming form of address, which could be used without offence to the self-love or the self-respect of any one. Citoyen for all men and Citoyenne for all women was absolutely tasteful, modest, and dignified; but some things, though they are such kindred things, cannot be done as well as others. The same imaginative commonwealth invented a decimal chronology, and a new era, very handy and very clear; but the old week of seven days came back and replaced the week of ten days, and the Year of our Lord resumed the place of the Year of the Republic, as Monsieur and Madame returned victorious over Citoyen and Citoyenne. Yet the reform of weights and measures, when once established, continued, and spread from France to most other countries--to nearly all, indeed, less stupid than Great Britain and the United States--so that the whole civilized world now counts in grammes and metres. What can be the fine difference? Here is a pretty inquiry for the psychologist, who has an opportunity to prove himself practically useful. Is it that grammes and metres are less personal than week-days and addresses? That can hardly be, or else the Society of Friends could not have so absolutely substituted First Day and Second Day, etc., for the old heathen names of our week-days, and could not have successfully refused all name-honor whatsoever in addressing their fellow-mortals.

But titles have come back full-tide in the third French Republic, one and indivisible, so that anybody may wear them, though the oldest nobility are officially and legally known only by their Christian and family names, without any prefix. This is practically returning to Citoyen and Citoyenne, and it almost gives us the courage to suggest the experiment of Citizen and Citizenne as a proper address on the letters of American republicans. The matter might be referred to a Board, something like that of the Simplified Spelling Board, though we should not like to be included in a committee whose members must be prepared to take their lives in their hands, or, short of death, to suffer every manner of shame at the hands of our journalists and their correspondents. Short of the adoption of Citizen and Citizenne, we have no choice but to address one another by our given names and surnames merely, unless we prefer to remain in our present confusion of Mr. and Esq. In a very little while, we dare say, no lady or gentleman would mind being so addressed on his or her letters; but perhaps some men and women might. Now that we no longer use pets names so much, except among the very highest of our noblesse, where there are still Jimmies and Mamies, we believe, plain Gladys Smythe or Reginald Johnes would be the usual superscription. Such an address could bring no discomfort to the recipient (a beautiful word, very proper in this connection), and if it could once be generally adopted it would save a great deal of anxiety. The lady's condition could be indicated by the suffix Spinster, in the case of her being single; if married, the initials of her husband's given names could be added.

III

DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER

Among the high excitements of a recent winter in New York was one of such convulsive intensity that in the nature of things it could not last very long. It affected the feminine temperament of our public with hysterical violence, but left the community the calmer for its throes, and gently, if somewhat pensively, smiling in a permanent ignorance of the event. No outside observer would now be able to say, offhand, whether a certain eminent innkeeper had or had not had his way with his customers in the matter not only of what they should eat or drink, but what they should wear when dining in a place which has been described as "supplying exclusiveness to the lower classes." It is not even certain just how a crucial case was brought to the notice of this authority; what is certain is that his instant judgment was that no white male citizen frequenting his proud tavern should sit at dinner there unless clothed in a dress-coat, or at least in the smoking-jacket known to us as a Tuxedo; at breakfast or at luncheon, probably, the guest, the paying guest, could sufficiently shine in the reflected glory of the lustrous evening wear of the waiters. No sooner was the innkeeper's judgment rendered than a keen thrill of resentment, or at least amusement, ran through the general breast. From every quarter the reporters hastened to verify the fact at first-hand, and then to submit it to the keeper of every other eminent inn or eating-house in the city and learn his usage and opinion. These to a man disavowed any such hard-and-fast rule. Though their paying guests were ordinarily gentlemen of such polite habits as to be incapable of dining in anything but a dress-coat or a Tuxedo, yet their inns and eating-houses were not barred against those who chose to dine in a frock or cutaway or even a sacque. It is possible that the managers imagined themselves acquiring merit with that large body of our vulgar who demand exclusiveness by their avowal of a fine indifference or an enlightened tolerance in the matter. But at this distance of time no one can confidently say how the incident was closed with respect to the pre-eminent innkeeper and his proud tavern. Whether the wayfarer, forced by the conditions of travel upon the company of the exclusive vulgar, may now dine there in the public banqueting-hall in his daytime raiment, or must take his evening meal in his room, with a penalty in the form of an extra charge for service, nowise appears.