Chapter II (7)

When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.

Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.

But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave for, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.

But passive renunciation is not the whole wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.

Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart.

When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognize that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world--in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death--the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very center of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watch-towers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honor to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.

But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be--Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity--to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.

This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.

The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

SOME HISTORIANS

By PHILIP GUEDALLA

Philip Guedalla, born 1889, is a London barrister and at the
present time an Independent Liberal candidate for the House of
Commons. He has written excellent light verse and parodies, and a
textbook on European history, 1715-1815. His most conspicuous
achievement so far is the brilliant volume _Supers and Supermen_,
from which my selection is taken.

_Supers and Supermen_ is a collection of historical and political
portraits and skits. It is mercilessly and gloriously humorous.
Those who can always follow the wit and irony that Guedalla knows
how to conceal in a cunningly turned phrase, will find the book a
prodigious delight. He has an unerring eye for the absurd; his
paradoxes, when pondered, have a way of proving excellent truth.
(Truth is sometimes like the furniture in Through the Looking
Glass, which could only be reached by resolutely walking away from
it.)

Ten years ago Mr. Guedalla was considered the most continuously and
insolently brilliant undergraduate of the Oxford of that day. The
charm and vigor of his ironical wit have not lessened since his
fellow-undergraduates strove to convince themselves that no man
could be as clever as "P. G." seemed to be. When Mr. Guedalla
"holds the mirror up to Nietzsche" or "gives thanks that Britons
never never will be Slavs," or dynasticizes Henry James into three
reigns: "James I, James II, and the Old Pretender;" or when he
speaks of "the cheerful clatter of Sir James Barrie's cans as he
went round with the milk of human kindness," there will be some who
will sigh; but there will also (I hope) be many who will forgive
the bravado for the quicksilver wit.

It was Quintillian or Mr. Max Beerbohm who said, "History repeats itself: historians repeat each other." The saying is full of the mellow wisdom of either writer, and stamped with the peculiar veracity of the Silver Age of Roman or British epigram. One might have added, if the aphorist had stayed for an answer, that history is rather interesting when it repeats itself: historians are not. In France, which is an enlightened country enjoying the benefits of the Revolution and a public examination in rhetoric, historians are expected to write in a single and classical style of French. The result is sometimes a rather irritating uniformity; it is one long Taine that has no turning, and any quotation may be attributed with safety to Guizot, because _la nuit tous les chats sont gris_. But in England, which is a free country, the restrictions natural to ignorant (and immoral) foreigners are put off by the rough island race, and history is written in a dialect which is not curable by education, and cannot (it would seem) be prevented by injunction.

Historians' English is not a style; it is an industrial disease. The thing is probably scheduled in the Workmen's Compensation Act, and the publisher may be required upon notice of the attack to make a suitable payment to the writer's dependants. The workers in this dangerous trade are required to adopt (like Mahomet's coffin) a detached standpoint--that is, to write as if they took no interest in the subject. Since it is not considered good form for a graduate of less than sixty years' standing to write upon any period that is either familiar or interesting, this feeling is easily acquired, and the resulting narrations present the dreary impartiality of the Recording Angel without that completeness which is the sole attraction of his style. Wilde complained of Mr. Hall Caine that he wrote at the top of his voice; but a modern historian, when he is really detached, writes like some one talking in the next room, and few writers have equaled the legal precision of Coxe's observation that the Turks "sawed the Archbishop and the Commandant in half, and committed other grave violations of international law."

Having purged his mind of all unsteadying interest in the subject, the young historian should adopt a moral code of more than Malthusian severity, which may be learned from any American writer of the last century upon the Renaissance or the decadence of Spain. This manner, which is especially necessary in passages dealing with character, will lend to his work the grave dignity that is requisite for translation into Latin prose, that supreme test of an historian's style. It will be his misfortune to meet upon the byways of history the oddest and most abnormal persons, and he should keep by him (unless he wishes to forfeit his Fellowship) some convenient formula by which he may indicate at once the enormity of the subject and the disapproval of the writer. The writings of Lord Macaulay will furnish him at need with the necessary facility in lightning characterization. It was the practice of Cicero to label his contemporaries without distinction as "heavy men," and the characters of history are easily divisible into "far-seeing statesmen" and "reckless libertines." It may be objected that although it is sufficient for the purposes of contemporary caricature to represent Mr. Gladstone as a collar or Mr. Chamberlain as an eye-glass, it is an inadequate record for posterity. But it is impossible for a busy man to write history without formulæ, and after all sheep are sheep and goats are goats. Lord Macaulay once wrote of some one, "In private life he was stern, morose, and inexorable"; he was probably a Dutchman. It is a passage which has served as a lasting model for the historian's treatment of character. I had always imagined that Cliché was a suburb of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford. Thus, if the working historian is faced with a period of "deplorable excesses," he handles it like a man, and writes always as if he was illustrated with steel engravings:

The imbecile king now ripened rapidly towards a crisis. Surrounded
by a Court in which the inanity of the day was rivaled only by the
debauchery of the night, he became incapable towards the year 1472
of distinguishing good from evil, a fact which contributed
considerably to the effectiveness of his foreign policy, but was
hardly calculated to conform with the monastic traditions of his
House. Long nights of drink and dicing weakened a constitution that
was already undermined, and the council-table, where once Campo
Santa had presided, was disfigured with the despicable apparatus of
Bagatelle. The burghers of the capital were horrified by the wild
laughter of his madcap courtiers, and when it was reported in
London that Ladislas had played at Halma the Court of St. James's
received his envoy in the deepest of ceremonial mourning.

That is precisely how it is done. The passage exhibits the benign and contemporary influences of Lord Macaulay and Mr. Bowdler, and it contains all the necessary ingredients, except perhaps a "venal Chancellor" and a "greedy mistress." Vice is a subject of especial interest to historians, who are in most cases residents in small county towns; and there is unbounded truth in the rococo footnote of a writer on the Renaissance, who said _à propos_ of a Pope: "The disgusting details of his vices smack somewhat of the morbid historian's lamp." The note itself is a fine example of that concrete visualization of the subject which led Macaulay to observe that in consequence of Frederick's invasion of Silesia "black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America."

A less exciting branch of the historian's work is the reproduction of contemporary sayings and speeches. Thus, an obituary should always close on a note of regretful quotation:

He lived in affluence and died in great pain. "Thus," it was said
by the most eloquent of his contemporaries, "thus terminated a
career as varied as it was eventful, as strange as it was unique."

But for the longer efforts of sustained eloquence greater art is required. It is no longer usual, as in Thucydides' day, to compose completely new speeches, but it is permissible for the historian to heighten the colors and even to insert those rhetorical questions and complexes of personal pronouns which will render the translation of the passage into Latin prose a work of consuming interest and lasting profit:

The Duke assembled his companions for the forlorn hope, and
addressed them briefly in _oratio obliqua_. "His father," he said,
"had always cherished in his heart the idea that he would one day
return to his own people. Had he fallen in vain? Was it for nothing
that they had dyed with their loyal blood the soil of a hundred
battlefields? The past was dead, the future was yet to come. Let
them remember that great sacrifices were necessary for the
attainment of great ends, let them think of their homes and
families, and if they had any pity for an exile, an outcast, and an
orphan, let them die fighting."

That is the kind of passage that used to send the blood of Dr. Bradley coursing more quickly through his veins. The march of its eloquence, the solemnity of its sentiment, and the rich balance of its pronouns unite to make it a model for all historians: it can be adapted for any period.

It is not possible in a short review to include the special branches of the subject. Such are those efficient modern text-books, in which events are referred to either as "factors" (as if they were a sum) or as "phases" (as if they were the moon). There is also the solemn business of writing economic history, in which the historian may lapse at will into algebra, and anything not otherwise describable may be called "social tissue." A special subject is constituted by the early conquests of Southern and Central America; in these there is a uniform opening for all passages running:

It was now the middle of October, and the season was drawing to an
end. Soon the mountains would be whitened with the snows of winter
and every rivulet swollen to a roaring torrent. Cortez, whose
determination only increased with misfortune, decided to delay his
march until the inclemency of the season abated.... It was now the
middle of November, and the season was drawing to an end....

There is, finally, the method of military history. This may be patriotic, technical, or in the manner prophetically indicated by Virgil as _Belloc_, _horrida Belloc_. The finest exponent of the patriotic style is undoubtedly the Rev. W. H. Fitchett, a distinguished colonial clergyman and historian of the Napoleonic wars. His night-attacks are more nocturnal, and his scaling parties are more heroically scaligerous than those of any other writer. His drummer-boys are the most moving in my limited circle of drummer-boys. One gathers that the Peninsular War was full of pleasing incidents of this type:

THE NIGHT ATTACK

It was midnight when Staff-Surgeon Pettigrew showed the flare from
the summit of Sombrero. At once the whole plain was alive with the
hum of the great assault. The four columns speedily got into
position with flares and bugles at the head of each. One made
straight for the Watergate, a second for the Bailey-guard, a third
for the Porter-house, and the last (led by the saintly Smeathe) for
the Tube station. Let us follow the second column on its secret
mission through the night, lit by torches and cheered on by the
huzzas of a thousand English throats. "---- the ----s," cried
Cocker in a voice hoarse with patriotism; at that moment a red-hot
shot hurtled over the plain and, ricocheting treacherously from the
frozen river, dashed the heroic leader to the ground. Captain
Boffskin, of the Buffs, leapt up with the dry coughing howl of the
British infantryman. "---- them," he roared, "---- them to ----";
and for the last fifty yards it was neck and neck with the ladders.
Our gallant drummer-boys laid to again, but suddenly a shot rang
out from the silent ramparts. The 94th Léger were awake. _We were
discovered!_

The war of 1870 requires more special treatment. Its histories show no particular characteristic, but its appearance in fiction deserves special attention. There is a standard pattern.

HOW THE PRUSSIANS CAME TO GUITRY-LE-SEC

It was a late afternoon in early September, or an early afternoon
in late September--I forget these things--when I missed the boat
express from Kerplouarnec to Pouzy-le-roi and was forced by the
time-table to spend three hours at the forgotten hamlet of
Guitry-le-sec, in the heart of Dauphiné. It contained besides a
quantity of underfed poultry one white church, one white mairie,
and nine white houses. An old man with a white beard came towards
me up the long white road. "It was on just such an afternoon as
this forty years ago," he began, "that...."

"Stop!" I said sharply. "I have met you in a previous existence.
You are going to say that a solitary Uhlan appeared sharply
outlined against the sky behind M. Jules' farm." He nodded feebly.

"The red trousers had left the village half an hour before to look
for the hated Prussian in the cafés of the neighboring town. You
were alone when the spiked helmets marched in. You can hear their
shrieking fifes to this day." He wept quietly.

I went on. "There was an officer with them, a proud, ugly man with
a butter-colored mustache. He saw the little Mimi and drove his
coarse Suabian hand upward through his Mecklenburger mustache. You
dropped on one knee...." But he had fled.

In the first of the three cafés I saw a second old man. "Come in,
Monsieur," he said. I waited on the doorstep. "It was on just such
an afternoon...." I went on. At the other two cafés two further old
men attempted me with the story; I told the last that he was
rescued by Zouaves, and walked happily to the station, to read
about Vichy Célestins until the train came in from the south.

The Russo-Japanese War is a more original subject and derives its particular flavor from the airy grace with which Sir Ian Hamilton has described it. Like this:

WAO-WAO, _Jan._ 31.--The _rafale_ was purring like a _mistral_ as I
shaved this morning. I wonder where it is; must ask ----. ---- is a
charming fellow with the face of a Baluchi Kashgai and a voice like
a circular saw.

11:40--It was eleven-forty when I looked at my watch. The
shrapnel-bursts look like a plantation of powder-puffs suspended in
the sky. Victor says there is a battle going on: capital chap
Victor.

2 P. M.--Lunched with an American lady-doctor. How feminine the
Americans can be.

7 P. M.--A great day. It was Donkelsdorp over again. Substitute the
Tenth Army for the Traffordshire's baggage wagon, swell Honks
Spruit into the roaring Wang-ho, elevate Oom Kop into the frowning
scarp of Pyjiyama, and you have it. The Staff were obviously
gratified when I told them about Donkelsdorp.

The Rooskis came over the crest-line in a huddle of massed
battalions, and Gazeka was after them like a rat after a terrier. I
knew that his horse-guns had no horses (a rule of the Japanese
service to discourage unnecessary changing of ground), but his men
bit the trails and dragged them up by their teeth. Slowly the
Muscovites peeled off the steaming mountain and took the funicular
down the other side.

I wonder what my friend Smuts would make of the Yen-tai coal mine?
Well, well.--_"Something accomplished, something done."_

The technical manner is more difficult of acquisition for the beginner, since it involves a knowledge of at least two European languages. It is (a) cardinal rule that all places should be described as _points d'appui_, the simple process of scouting looks far better as _Verschleierung_, and the adjective "strategical" may be used without any meaning in front of any noun.

But the military manner was revolutionized by the war. Mr. Belloc created a new Land and a new Water. We know now why the Persian commanders demanded "earth and water" on their entrance into a Greek town; it was the weekly demand of the Great General Staff, as it called for its favorite paper. Mr. Belloc has woven Baedeker and geometry into a new style: it is the last cry of historians' English, because one was invented by a German and the other by a Greek.

WINTER MIST

_By_ ROBERT PALFREY UTTER

Robert Palfrey Utter was born in 1875, in Olympia, Washington. He
graduated from Harvard (I am sorry there are so many Harvard men in
this book: I didn't know they were Harvard men until too late) in
1898 and took his Ph.D. there in 1906. After a varied experience,
including editorial work on the _Youth's Companion_, reporting on
the New York _Evening Post_, ranching in Mexico and graduate study
at Harvard, he went to Amherst, 1906-18, as associate professor of
English. He was on the faculty of the A. E. F. University at
Beaune, France, 1919; and in 1920 became associate professor of
English at the University of California.

Mr. Utter has contributed largely to the magazines, and has
published _Guide to Good English_ (1914), _Every-Day Words and
Their Uses_ (1916), and _Every-Day Pronunciation_ (1918).

Former students of his at Amherst have told me of the lasting
stimulus his teaching has given them: that he can beautifully
practise what he preaches of the art of writing, this essay shows.

From a magazine with a rather cynical cover I learned very recently that for pond skating the proper costume is brown homespun with a fur collar on the jacket, whereas for private rinks one wears a gray herringbone suit and taupe-colored alpine. Oh, barren years that I have been a skater, and no one told me of this! And here's another thing. I was patiently trying to acquire a counter turn under the idle gaze of a hockey player who had no better business till the others arrived than to watch my efforts. "What I don't see about that game," he said at last, "is who wins?" It had never occurred to me to ask. He looked bored, and I remembered that the pictures in the magazine showed the wearers of the careful costumes for rink and pond skating as having rather blank eyes that looked illimitably bored. I have hopes of the "rocker" and the "mohawk"; I might acquire a proper costume for skating on a small river if I could learn what it is; but a bored look--why, even hockey does not bore me, unless I stop to watch it. I don't wonder that those who play it look bored. Even Alexander, who played a more imaginative game than hockey, was bored--poor fellow, he should have taken up fancy skating in his youth; I never heard of a human being who pretended to a complete conquest of it.

I like pond skating best by moonlight. The hollow among the hills will always have a bit of mist about it, let the sky be clear as it may. The moonlight, which seems so lucid and brilliant when you look up, is all pearl and smoke round the pond and the hills. The shore that was like iron under your heel as you came down to the ice is vague, when you look back at it from the center of the pond, as the memory of a dream. The motion is like flying in a dream; you float free and the world floats under you; your velocity is without effort and without accomplishment, for, speed as you may, you leave nothing behind and approach nothing. You look upward. The mist is overhead now; you see the moon in a "hollow halo" at the bottom of an "icy crystal cup," and you yourself are in just such another. The mist, palely opalescent, drives past her out of nothing into nowhere. Like yourself, she is the center of a circle of vague limit and vaguer content, where passes a swift, ceaseless stream of impression through a faintly luminous halo of consciousness.

If by moonlight the mist plays upon the emotions like faint, bewitching music, in sunlight it is scarcely less. More often than not when I go for my skating to our cosy little river, a winding mile from the mill-dam to the railroad trestle, the hills are clothed in silver mist which frames them in vignettes with blurred edges. The tone is that of Japanese paintings on white silk, their color showing soft and dull through the frost-powder with which the air is filled. At the mill-dam the hockey players furiously rage together, but I heed them not, and in a moment am beyond the first bend, where their clamor comes softened on the air like that of a distant convention of politic crows. The silver powder has fallen on the ice, just enough to cover earlier tracings and leave me a fresh plate to etch with grapevines and arabesques. The stream winds ahead like an unbroken road, striped across with soft-edged shadows of violet, indigo, and lavender. On one side it is bordered with leaning birch, oak, maple, hickory, and occasional groups of hemlocks under which the very air seems tinged with green. On the other, rounded masses of scrub oak and alder roll back from the edge of the ice like clouds of reddish smoke. The river narrows and turns, then spreads into a swamp, where I weave my curves round the straw-colored tussocks. Here, new as the snow is, there are earlier tracks than mine. A crow has traced his parallel hieroglyph, alternate footprints with long dashes where he trailed his middle toe as he lifted his foot and his spur as he brought it down. Under a low shrub that has hospitably scattered its seed is a dainty, close-wrought embroidery of tiny bird feet in irregular curves woven into a circular pattern. A silent glide towards the bank, where among bare twigs little forms flit and swing with low conversational notes, brings me in company with a working crew of pine siskins, methodically rifling seed cones of birch and alder, chattering sotto voce the while. Under a leaning hemlock the writing on the snow tells of a squirrel that dropped from the lowest branch, hopped aimlessly about for a few yards, then went up the bank. Farther on, where the river narrows again, a flutter-headed rabbit crossing at top speed has made a line seemingly as free from frivolous indirection as if it had been defined by all the ponderosities of mathematics. There is no pursuing track; was it his own shadow he fled, or the shadow of hawk?

The mist now lies along the base of the hills, leaving the upper ridges almost imperceptibly veiled and the rounded tops faintly softened. The snowy slopes are etched with brush and trees so fine and soft that they remind me of Dürer's engravings, the fur of Saint Jerome's lion, the cock's feathers in the coat of arms with the skull. From behind the veil of the southernmost hill comes a faint note as

From undiscoverable lips that blow
An immaterial horn.

It is the first far premonition of the noon train; I pause and watch long for the next sign. At last I hear its throbbing, which ceases as it pauses at the flag station under the hill. There the invisible locomotive shoots a column of silver vapor above the surface of the mist, breaking in rounded clouds at the top, looking like nothing so much as the photograph of the explosion of a submarine mine, a titanic outburst of force in static pose, a geyser of atomized water standing like a frosted elm tree. Then quick puffs of dusky smoke, the volley of which does not reach my ear till the train has stuck its black head out of fairyland and become a prosaic reminder of dinner. High on its narrow trestle it leaps across my little river and disappears between the sandbanks. Far behind it the mist is again spreading into its even layers. Silence is renewed, and I can hear the musical creaking of four starlings in an apple tree as they eviscerate a few rotten apples on the upper branches. I turn and spin down the curves and reaches of the river without delaying for embroideries or arabesques. At the mill-dam the hockey game still rages; the players take no heed of the noon train.

Let Zal and Rustum bluster as they will,
Or Hatim call to supper....

Their minds and eyes are intent on a battered disk of hard rubber. I begin to think I have misjudged them when I consider what effort of imagination must be involved in the concentration of the faculties on such an object, transcending the call of hunger and the lure of beauty. Is it to them as is to the mystic "the great syllable Om" whereby he attains Nirvana? I cannot attain it; I can but wonder what the hockey players win one-half so precious as the stuff they miss.

TRIVIA

_By_ LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

It would be extravagant to claim that Pearsall Smith's _Trivia_,
the remarkable little book from which these miniature essays are
extracted, is well known: it is too daintily, fragile and absurd
and sophisticated to appeal to a very large public. But it has a
cohort of its own devotees and fanatics, and since its publication
in 1917 it has become a sort of password in a secret brotherhood or
intellectual Suicide Club. I say suicide advisedly, for Mr. Smith's
irony is glitteringly edged. Its incision is so keen that the
reader is often unaware the razor edge has turned against himself
until he perceives the wound to be fatal.

Pearsall Smith was, in a way, one of the Men of the Nineties. But
he had Repressions--(an excellent thing to have, brothers. Most of
the great literature is founded on judicious repressions). He came
of an excellent old intellectual Quaker family down in the
Philadelphia region. His father (if we remember rightly) was one of
Walt Whitman's staunchest friends in the Camden days. But when the
strong wine of the Nineties was foaming in the vats and noggins,
Mr. Smith (so we imagine it, at least) was still too close to that
"guarded education in morals and manners" that he had had at
Haverford College, Pennsylvania (and further tinctured with
docility at Harvard and Balliol) to give full rein to his inward
gush of hilarious satirics. Like a Strong Silent Man he held in
that wellspring of champagne and mercury until many many years
later. When it came out (in 1902 he first began to print his
_Trivia_, privately; the book was published by Doubleday in 1917)
it sparkled all the more tenderly for its long cellarage.

But we must be statistical. Logan Pearsall Smith was born at
Melville, N. J., in 1865. As a boy he lived in Philadelphia and
Germantown (do you know Germantown? it is a foothill of that
mountain range whereof Parnassus and Olivet are twin peaks) and was
three years at Haverford in the class of '85. He went to Harvard
for a year, then to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his
degree in 1893. Ever since then, eheu, he has lived in England.

STONEHENGE

They sit there for ever on the dim horizon of my mind, that Stonehenge circle of elderly disapproving Faces--Faces of the Uncles and Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth.

In the bright center and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my dance; but when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For nothing ever placates them, nothing ever moves to a look of approval that ring of bleak, old, contemptuous Faces.

THE STARS

Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and rain, a sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back into the shelter of a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open; the illumination of the Stars poured down from behind the dispersing clouds.

I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the night with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by them; Arcturus followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses, and then emerged triumphant, Lord of the Western Sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own footsteps, my thoughts were among the Constellations. I was one of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me also there was something that was not insignificant and mean and of no account.

THE SPIDER

What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse?

No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its center, pondering for ever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.

L'OISEAU BLEU

What is it, I have more than once asked myself, what is it that I am looking for in my walks about London? Sometimes it seems to me as if I were following a Bird, a bright Bird that sings sweetly as it floats about from one place to another.

When I find myself, however, among persons of middle age and settled principles, see them moving regularly to their offices--what keeps them going? I ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my Bird.

There is though a Philosophic Doctrine--I studied it at College, and I know that many serious people believe it--which maintains that all men, in spite of appearances and pretensions, all live alike for Pleasure. This theory certainly brings portly, respected persons very near to me. Indeed, with a sense of low complicity, I have sometimes watched a Bishop. Was he, too, on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing his Bird?