Chapter VIII: Part 8

It has been one of the grievances of those whose material surroundings have been more favorable and who have possessed more ostensible social refinement than the mass of the population, that they were regarded askance and excluded from public service and influence. There used to be some foundation for this charge, but the counter plea of the complainants of lack of sympathy and distrust of country was still more true, and an explanation and, in a large measure, a justification of the prejudice. True strength and refinement of character has always in the end commanded the respect and admiration of our people, but they have been roughly suspicious of any class isolation or assumption of superiority. It has been difficult accordingly for that type of Americans who arrogated tacitly, but nevertheless plainly, the prerogatives of social importance, to take an active part in the responsibilities of citizenship. They have been mistrusted, and sneered at, and not always unjustly, for they have been prone to belittle our national institutions and to make sport of the social idiosyncrasies of their unconventional countrymen for the entertainment of foreigners. And yet the people have never failed to recognize and to reverence the fine emanations of the spirit as evidenced by our poets, historians, thinkers, or statesmen. Our forceful humanitarian and ethical movements, our most earnest reforms found their most zealous and untiring supporters among the rank and file of the people. Abraham Lincoln was understood last of all by the social aristocracy of the nation. Emerson's inspiration found an answering chord in every country town in New England. True it is that on the surface the popular judgment may often seem superficial and cheap in tone, but the wise American is chary of accepting surface ebullitions as the real index of the public judgment. He understands that mixed in with the unthinking and the degenerate is a rank and file majority of sober, self-respecting men and women, whose instincts are both earnest and original, and who are to be depended on in every serious emergency to think and act on the side of civilizing progress. It is the inability to appreciate this which breeds our civic censors, who are led by their lack of perspective to underestimate the character of the people and to foretell the ultimate failure of our experiment.

The increase of wealth and a wider familiarity with luxury and comfort through the country has made a considerable and more important class of those whose material and social surroundings are exceptional. The participation of the citizens of this class in the affairs of government is no longer discouraged--on the contrary, it is welcomed by the community. Indeed, many men have secured nomination and election to office solely because of their large means, which enabled them to control men and caucuses in their own favor.

(_Note._--An appearance of spontaneity is preserved in these cases by the publication of a letter from leading citizens requesting the candidate to stand for office. He thereupon yields to the overwhelming invitation of the voters of the district, and his henchmen do the rest.)

But though the possession of wealth and social sophistication are no longer regarded as un-American, the public sentiment against open or tacit assumption of social superiority, or a lack of sympathy with democratic principles, is as strong as ever. It is incumbent, therefore, on you, if you would be an American in the best sense, to fix your ideal of life high, and at the same time to fix it in sympathy with the underlying American principle of a broad and progressive common humanity, free from caste or discriminating social conventions. It is not necessary for you to accept the standards and adopt the behavior of the superficial and imperfectly educated, but it is indispensable that you accept and act on the faith that your fellow-man is your brother, and that the attainment of a freer and more equal enjoyment of the privileges of life is essential to true human progress. We have, as I have intimated, passed through the pioneer stage of national development; we have tilled our fields, opened our mines, built our railroads, established our large cities--in short, have laid the foundations of a new and masterful civilization; it now remains for us to show whether we are capable of treating with originality the old problems which confront complex societies, and of solving them for the welfare of the public and the consequent elevation of individual character.

The originality and clearness of the American point of view has always been a salient national characteristic. Hitherto its favorite scope has been commercial and utilitarian. Yankee notions have been suggestive of sewing-machines, reapers, and labor-saving contrivances, or the mechanism of rushing trade. Now that we have caught up with the rest of the world in material progress and taught it many tricks, it remains for the true American to demonstrate equal sagacity and clear-headedness in dealing with subtler conditions. To be sure the scope of our originality has not been entirely directed to things material, for we have ever asserted with some vehemence our devotion to the things of the spirit, squinting longingly at them even when obliged to deplore only a passing acquaintance with them because of lack of time. The splendid superficiality of the army of youth of both sexes in the department of intellectual and artistic exertion, which has been one of the notable features of the last thirty years, has shown clearly enough the true temper and fibre of our people. To regard this superficiality as more than a transient symptom, and thereby to lose sight of the genuine intensity of nature which has animated it, would indicate the shallow observer. Our youth has been audacious, self-confident, and lacking in thoroughness because of its zeal to assert and distinguish itself, and thus has justly, in one sense, incurred the accusation of being superficial, but it has incurred this partially because of its disposition to maintain the privileges of individual judgments.

Our young men and women have been blamed for their lack of reverence and their readiness to form conclusions without adequate knowledge or study in the teeth of venerable opinion and convention. Indisputably they have erred in this respect, but indisputably also the fault is now recognized, and is being cured in the curriculum of education. Yet, evil as the fault is, the traits which seem to have nourished it--unwillingness to accept tradition and a searching, honest clearness of vision--are virtues of the first water, and typical of the best national character. There are many persons of education and refinement in our society who accept as satisfactory and indisputable the old forms and symbols which illustrate the experience, and have become the final word of the older civilizations in ethics, politics, and art. They would be willing that we should become a mere complement to the most highly civilized nations of Europe, and they welcome every evidence that we are becoming so. As I have already suggested to you, the nations of the world are all nearer akin in thought and impulse than formerly, but if our civilization is to stand for anything, it must be by our divergence from the conclusions of the past when they fail to pass the test of honest scrutiny, not by tame imitation. Profoundly necessary as it is that we should accept with reverence the truths of experience, and much as our students and citizens may learn from the wisdom and performance of older peoples, it behooves the American to prize and cherish his birthright of independent judgment and freedom from servile adherence to convention. Almost everything that has been truly vital in our production has borne the stamp of this birthright.

The American citizen of the finest type is essentially a man or woman of simple character, and the effect of our institutions and mode of thought, when rightly appreciated, is to produce simplicity. The American is free from the glamour or prejudice which results from the conscious or unconscious influence of the lay figures of the old political, social, or religious world, from the glamour of royalty and vested caste, of an established or dominant church, of aristocratic, monkish, or military privilege. He is neither impelled nor allured to subject the liberty of conscience or opinion to the conventions appurtenant to these former forces of society. For him the law of the state, in the making of which he has a voice, and the authority of his own judgment are the only arbiters of his conduct. He accords neither to fineness of race nor force of intellect the right of aristocratic exclusiveness which they have too often hitherto claimed. To the cloistered nun he devotes no special reverence; he sees in the haughty and condescending fine gentleman an object for the exercise of his humor, not of servility; he is indifferent to the claim of all who by reason of self-congratulation or ancient custom arrogate to themselves special privileges on earth, or special privileges in heaven. This temper of mind, when unalloyed by shallow conceit, begets a quiet self-respect and simple honesty of judgment, eminently serviceable in the struggle to live wisely.

To the best citizens of every nation the most interesting and vital of all questions is what we are here for, what men and women are seeking to accomplish, what is to be the future of human development. For Americans of the best type, those who have learned to be reverent without losing their independence and without sacrifice of originality, the problem of living is simplified through the elimination of the influence of these symbols and conventions. Their outlook is not confused or deluded by the specious dogmas of caste. They perceive that the attainment of the welfare and happiness of the inhabitants of earth is the purpose of human struggle, and that the free choice and will of the majority as to what is best for humanity as a whole is to be the determining force of the future. To those who argue that the majority must always be wrong, and that as a corollary the will of the cheap man will prevail, this drift of society is depressing. The good American in the first place, recognizing the inevitability of this drift, declines to be depressed; and in the second, without subscribing to the doctrine that the majority must be wrong, exercises the privilege of his own independent judgment, subject only to the statute law and his conscience.

There is a noble strength of position in this; there is a danger, too, in that it suggests a lack of definiteness of standard. Yet this want of precision is preferable to the tyranny of hard and fast prescription. It is clear, for instance, that if the men and women of civilization are determined to modify their divorce laws so as to allow the annulment of marriage when either party is weary of the compact, no canon or anathema of the church will restrain them. Nor, on the other hand, will the mere whim or volition of an easy-going majority force them to do so. The judgment of men and women untrammelled by precedent and tradition and seeking simply to ascertain what is best and wisest for all will settle the question. Though the majority will be the force that puts any law into effect, the impulse must inevitably come from the higher wisdom of the few, and that higher wisdom in America works in the interest of a broad humanity, free from the delusions of outworn culture. The wisdom of the few may not seem to guide, but in the end the mass listens to true counsel. Honesty toward self and toward one's fellow-man, without fear or favor, is the leavening force of the finest Americanism, and, if persevered in, will lead the many, sooner or later, with a compelling power far beyond that of thrones and hierarchies. The wise application of this doctrine of the search for the common good in the highest terms of earthly condition to the whole range of economic, social, and political questions is what demands to-day the interest and attention of earnest Americans. The problems relating to capital and labor, to the restraint of the money power, to the government of our cities, to the education of all classes, to the status of divorce, to the treatment of paupers and criminals, to the wise control of the sale of liquor, to equitable taxation, and to a variety of kindred matters are ripe for the scrutiny of independent, sagacious thought and action. To the consideration of these subjects the best national intelligence is beginning to turn with a fresh vigor and efficiency, but none too soon. Though democracy and Americanism have become largely identical, the spread of the creed of a broader humanity in the countries of civilization where autocratic forms of government still obtain, has been so signal and productive of results that the American may well ask himself or herself if our people have not been slovenly and vain-glorious along the paths where it seemed to be their prerogative to lead. Certainly in the matter of many of the civic and humanitarian problems which I have cited, we may fitly borrow from the recent and modern methods of those to whom we are apt to refer, in terms of condescending pity, as the effete dynasties of Europe. They have in some instances been more prompt than we to recognize the trend of ours and the world's new faith.

IV

In this same connection I suggest to you that in the domain of literary art an Englishman--a colonist, it is true, and so a little nearer allied to us in democratic sentiment--has more clearly and forcibly than anyone else expressed the spirit of the best Americanism--of the best world-temper of to-day. I refer to Rudyard Kipling. Human society has been fascinated by the virility and uncompromising force of his writings, but it has found an equal fascination in the deep, simple, sham-detesting sympathy with common humanity which permeates them. He has been the first to adopt and exalt the idea of the brotherhood of man without either condescension or depressing materialistic realism. He has interpreted the poetry of "the trivial round and common task" without suggesting impending soup, blankets, and coals on earth and reward in heaven on the one hand, or without emphasizing the dirtiness of the workman's blouse on the other. His imagery, his symbols and his point of view are essentially alien to those of social convention and caste. Yet his heroes of the engine-room, the telegraph-station, the Newfoundland Banks, and the dreary ends of the earth, democratic though they are to the core, appeal to the imagination by their stimulating human qualities no less than the bearers of titles and the aristocratic monopolists of culture and aspiration who have been the leading figures in the poetry and fiction of the past. Strength, courage, truth, simplicity and loving-kindness are still their salient qualities--the qualities of noble manhood--he expounds them to us by the force of his sympathy, which clothes them with no impossible virtues, yet shows them, in the white light of performance, men no less entitled to our admiration than the Knights of King Arthur or any of the other superhuman figures of traditional æsthetic culture. He recognizes the artistic value of the workaday life in law courts and hospitals and libraries and mines and factories and camps and lighthouses and ocean steamers and railroad trains, as a stimulus to and rectifier of poetic imagination, negativing the theory that men and women are to seek inspiration solely from what is dainty, exclusive, elegantly romantic, or rhapsodically star-gazing in human conditions and thought. This is of the essence of the American idea, which has been, however, slow to subdue imagination, which is the very electric current of art, to its use by reason chiefly of the seeming discord between it and common life, and partly from the reluctance of the world to renounce its diet of highly colored court, heaven and fairy-land imagery; partly, too, because so many of the best poets and writers of America have adopted traditional symbols. The school of great New England writers which has just passed away were, however, the exponents of the simple life, of high religious and intellectual thought amid common circumstance. They stood for noble ideals as the privilege of all. Yet their mental attitude, though scornful of pomp and materialism, was almost aristocratic; at least it was exclusive in that it was not wholly human, savoring rather of the ascetic star-gazer than the full-blooded appreciator of the boon of life. Their passion was pure as snow, but it was thin. Yet the central tenet of their philosophy, independent naturalness of soul, is the necessary complement to the broad human sympathy which is of the essence of modern art. The difficulty which imagination finds in expressing itself in the new terms is natural enough, for the poet and painter and musician are seemingly deprived of color, the color which we associate with mystic elegance and aristocratic prestige. Yet only seemingly. Externals may have lost the dignity and lustre of prerogative; but the essentials for color remain--the human soul in all its fervor--the striving world in all its joy and suffering. There is no fear that the tide of existence will be less intense or that the mind of man will degenerate in æsthetic appreciation, but it must be on new lines which only a master imbued with the value and the pathos of the highest life in the common life as a source for heroism can fitly indicate. There lies the future field for the poet, the novelist, and the painter--the idealization of the real world as it is in its highest terms of love and passion, struggle, joy, and sorrow, free from the condescension of superior castes and the mystification of the star-reaching introspective culture which seeks only personal exaltation, and excludes sympathy with the every-day beings and things of earth from its so-called spiritual outlook.

ANNE

By Fanny V. de G. Stevenson

Anne was walking down the slope of a hill at the time of the first stirring of dawn on a spring morning. She was an old woman, now, her youth lying years behind her; but she had not been one to fall easily into the sere and yellow leaf. Though frail in health, she had kept her manifold interests sharp and lively; pictures gave her pleasure keen as of yore, and there was no critic of literature more quick than she to detect a lapse in taste or art, nor with a readier appreciation of style, originality, or even intention. She was, at last, however, forced to believe that she was growing old. She _was_ old, and the days were flying past her with an incredible rapidity. She rebelled with passionate fierceness against the inevitable, approaching end. As bitterly as for herself (she was sixty and past), she resented the fact that John, her husband, stood even nearer the final catastrophe than she; John, whom, though ten years her senior, she had petted and spoiled like a child. Hers had always been the dominant mind. John, older and aging more rapidly than she, had now become absolutely dependent on her, almost for his thoughts. Their marriage was blessed with no children, wherefore all the motherly instincts of the wife had been lavished on the husband. "My very love has made him helpless," thought Anne; "pray God he be called before me."

She walked more quickly, in time with her thoughts, which now wandered along devious pathways through the past. The scenes she recalled were nothing in themselves, no more than most elderly people keep stored in their memories; but to her, who had played the principal parts, they were of the liveliest interest. The day she and John took possession of the house that had been their own ever since was as vivid as yesterday. Nay, more vivid, for she was not at all sure concerning yesterday; she had had a headache, and was stupid, and had slept a good deal; and John dozed in his chair; there was nothing to remember in yesterday.

But that first day in the new house, both so proud, so fond, so full of plans; and it was all over. The plans matured or failed, and they were only two old people, conscious of ever-failing strength, careful of draughts, easily tired--well, no, not so very easily tired after all, at least not Anne, or at least not to-day. It must be the early morning, or the spring weather. She had heard of old people who recovered their faculties in a sort of Indian summer, possibly her Indian summer was about to burst into a mature blossoming. She felt so light on her feet, so uplifted as with a wholesome, altogether delightful intoxication. The sensation carried her far back to her childhood, to a first day in the garden after a winter's illness. How she skipped, and ran, and laughed. She was conscious to-day of the same pure joy in living. It was like being a child again. And those sad, querulous days, yesterday, and the days and years before--that was the child's illness; such a long illness, ever-increasing, with but one terrible cure.

But not even that fancy could depress Anne to-day, glorious to-day, this day of ten thousand! She laughed aloud, pretending, as children pretend, that she had, unknowing, drunk of the golden elixir; her eyes should be unclouded, her cheeks flower-fresh, her scant, white locks changed to rings of softest brown; a tall, slim slip of a girl, as John first met her. At the foot of the meadow where she kept tryst with John there used to be a still pool where she preened her feathers while waiting for her gallant. She looked about for a pool, smiling at this vanity in an old woman; but suppose--suppose--?

Of course she was always properly dressed and coifed as became one of her station and fortune, with a certain well-bred deference to the prevailing modes, and she owned to a nice taste in lace and jewels. Jane, her maid, had been very much remiss when she laid out the gown her mistress wore this morning. It must be a new one, by the way, or an old one remodelled; it was not in her usual style, but of a singular cut, stiff, plain, and ungraceful in its prim folds. However, it was white, and white was still Anne's color. And what matters a gown when one is in so high a humor?

The valley below was everywhere covered with a white rime which ran in sparkles as the sun touched it. It should be sharply cold, Anne thought, but she felt no chill. Frost generally passed over the high ground, while it nipped the lower. She hoped it had spared the tender plants in her garden, and the budding peaches. Already the crocuses were in bloom, and the lilacs showed a few timid, scented leaves. Anne was very fond of her garden, and it was one of her grievances against time that she could no longer tend it in person.

She had forgotten why she searched for the pool; she was a little confused, doubtless the effect of yesterday's headache--nothing unpleasant, rather a delightful, dizzy jumbling of thoughts, ideas, remembrances. At any rate, here was the pool, clear and unruffled; new grass was springing on its banks, and here and there woolly brown bosses showed where ferns were sprouting. She would fetch John here one day--if he were able to walk so far. John used to like a pool when his sight was stronger; not in Anne's way; her liking was innocent and sentimental. John would bring his microscope and discover the most wonderful things in water that appeared absolutely pure. Decidedly she must manage to fetch John.

Anne leaned over and looked into the pool. She leaned farther, lower, turned her head this way and that, and then drew back in utter bewilderment. There was no reflection of her face in the water! She was overwhelmed with disappointment. This enchanting rejuvenation, then, was only a dream. She could almost have wept; not quite, for the dream still held her as in an embrace of joyousness. She wondered what her body looked like, lying on its bed while its soul was roaming the fields. She pitied it, the worn, frail, old body, as though it were a thing separate from herself. It had suffered in its fairly long life, and had endured many contrarieties, but there had been more than compensating happinesses, and no great sorrows. She hoped it slept well. John's dear, white head would be lying on the pillow beside it. "Oh," she thought, "I wish I could give my dream to John. Well, it shall be the best dream in the world if John is only to have it at second hand."

In the certainty that she was dreaming, Anne now gave her imagination a free rein. False shame is out of place in a dream. She gambolled like a prisoned kid set free, and sang--softly, lest the dream should be shattered. As the day advanced wild things came out of the wood; squirrels, and other animals so shy by nature that she had only seen them, heretofore, at a distance, stopped beside her and conversed together in their own language. She saw what no naturalist has ever beheld, God's creatures at home and unafraid. She laid her hand on the head of a doe as it drank at a pool, and ran with it feather-footed. She spurned the earth and took long, smooth flights over the undergrowth like a bird sailing on the wing.

Suddenly she became aware of a voice, clear and penetrating, that spoke the name--_Anne_. A face was before her, vaguely familiar, a face of her childhood.

"Marian!" she cried; "my mother's cousin, Marian."

"You remember me, dear Anne."

"You--you went to India," murmured Anne in a maze; "I thought--mother talked of you to us children--your portrait in the school-room----"

"Yes, I went to the Indies; I died there when you were a little child. You were always much in my mind, for I loved your mother, and you were her favorite. So she did not allow my name to be forgotten? She talked of me to her children, and she kept my portrait."

"Did you say--died!" repeated Anne, who had given an involuntary start at the word. "I wonder if I am really meeting your spirit in a dream? It might be. Why should it not?"

"You certainly are meeting my spirit, which is myself, but not in a dream, dear."

Anne felt a thrill of terror. What if this were not a dream? "_I_ am not dead?" She looked at Marian with frightened, questioning eyes.

"You must be dead," was the answer, "else how should you be here? Your mother used to write me that you had unusual powers; I never had. You might, as a mortal, possibly see me, but I could not be conscious of you unless you were as real as myself."

Anne stared hard at her companion. "I have, it is true," said she, "imagined I saw spirits, but they were not like you; they were phantoms, ghosts, immaterial." She hesitated, and then took Marian's hand in hers. "This hand is as solid as my own. If I believed you were dead--if I thought I was--dead--myself, oh, it would be appalling!"

"My dear Anne," said Marian, "we are both spirits; we were always spirits, only in the body we were chained spirits. Material or immaterial only means a point of view, not a difference."

"I am no spirit," said Anne. "I am of the earth, and the flesh; all my thoughts are with, and on the earth, and of the earth. As to you, Marian, I don't know. There is an uncertainty in my mind--no, I mean an enlightenment; I don't know what to call it--an apprehension. Marian, do you mind? I thought heaven was a very different place. I should expect something more serious, more solemn. The idea of an everlasting sabbath used to depress me. I have no desire for such a state----"

"Heaven! Heaven! Did you think you were in heaven? Oh, no, this is not heaven. I trust there may be a heaven, and a future life, but this is not heaven. I only _know_ about this world in which I exist, and that it is immeasurably better than that other world we have both happily left."

"It is all so different from one's dreams," said Anne. "Dreams," she repeated; "dreams. Marian, did you long for those you left behind? Were you lonely without them? Or were you with them, following all their affairs with sympathy and understanding?"

"No," replied Marian, "I knew no more of my loved ones in the past life than they knew of me. That is the worst of it, both now and before; the separation, the waiting. I wish I had had more faith in the old days. I wish my faith were greater now. My dearest ones left me when I was no more than thirty, and I was eighty when I died. It was a long waiting. You were a little child, then, and you must have been well in years when----"

"Don't, don't!" cried Anne; "don't repeat that dreadful word! I am not, I cannot be! And yet I know, and hate the knowledge, that it must come to me very soon, for I am, as you say, an old woman. Let me enjoy this beautiful dream wherein I am still young. But is this youth? When I look at you, Marian, you are not old, but you are not young. My intellect will not conceive it what it is."

"If you would only believe me," said Marian, "that we are both relieved of the burden of the flesh with all its infirmities and limitations. It is that, only that. There can be no pain where there is no flesh to suffer."

"And no sorrow?" asked Anne.

"Sorrow," replied Marian, "that is of the mind, and the mind is part of ourselves."

"Separation is the worst," replied Anne. "Separation." "Suppose," she thought, "that I am really in another existence, where then is my dear, old John, my husband?"

"Marian," she cried out, "I must go home; at once!"

"But my dear," said Marian, "you cannot; as a mortal you could not come here; how then can you now go there? Oh, Anne, there are many loved ones waiting for you here. Many who loved you. We knew you would arrive suddenly; we were warned of that; I came first--it was thought best--to prepare you for the great meeting."

"I tell you," said Anne, sharply, "I am going home. John will miss me. I have been too long away already."

"Your mother, Anne, she is coming," pleaded Marian.

"Not mother, nor father, nor friends beloved can come between John and me. I must see John first. Something may have happened."

She looked about her. "I don't quite know where I am. There should be people about. I see no one to put me on the road."

"Anne," said Marian, "neither you nor I can find that road."

"Oh, come with me," cried Anne, "help me to find John; I must find John."

The two women moved together hand in hand down the hill into the valley.

"I can make out nothing in this bewildering fog," said Anne, peering out from under her hand. "Whenever I seem just about to recognize a familiar place or object, it is to be blotted out by the fog. There was no fog before. Oh, Marian, it should be hereabouts; our house should be here!"

Marian withdrew her hand from Anne's.

"You disturb me," she said; "what you are doing is unlawful. Come away; something mortal might appear. If you will not, Anne, you drive me from you; I dare not stay."

Anne stood alone, trying to pierce with her gaze the fog which grew perceptibly thinner. The elm, and then the shrubbery of her garden began to show darkly, like shadows. She drew closer, for now the house itself loomed up, large and imposing, but in some intangible way different. The walls, the doors, the windows, all were there, all in their appointed places. What, then, was the indefinable change? It used to be considered such a pleasant house, so cheerful, so gay with its hanging creepers, and the bright curtains at the windows. Two years running a bird had nested in the cornice over the porch. But to-day it presented an aspect of gloom that was forbidding in the extreme. It gave the impression of a house to be avoided, a place where wrong things had happened, or might happen. Anne, now that she was so near that a word spoken aloud would reach her husband's ear, and she had only to lift the knocker and enter her own door, shrank back with an odd reluctance. She would walk round to the study first, and look through the window. Perhaps John would be there, reading, or writing a letter, and, without doubt, wondering what had become of his wife. The blinds were closed. How like John not to think of opening them. With all the blinds down like that, people would think there was a death----

John was sitting by the table, leaning forward, apparently asleep. He was so still, so quiet. Oh, if anything had happened to John! No; he raised his head as though he heard someone call, looking straight in his wife's eyes. Why did he not speak? What ailed him to look like that? Anne remembered that she was behind the closed blinds. His eyes had a strained look as though he almost saw her.

"John! John!" she cried.

The old man shivered and looked vaguely round him. Anne noticed that he had no fire. The hoar-frost of the morning, that looked so beautiful, he would feel that; he was very sensitive to changes of temperature and weather. His clothes, too, looked thinner than he was in the habit of wearing--and with a great black patch on one sleeve! Anne must see to this at once. John was less fit than ever to take care of himself. He looked so feeble, so old, so much older than she had thought. Ah, what would John do without her? Her heart yearned over him with the tender compassion of the strong for the weak, the deep affection that belongs to the habit of a lifetime--stronger than the love of youth.

"John, John, my husband!"

Again he turned his face toward the window, a leaden gray face. Slow tears ran down his furrowed cheeks and fell on his breast.

"Oh, what is it? Oh, my poor old husband!"

Anne flew to the closed door and snatched at the knocker. Her hands closed on vacancy. Her own house, her home, John's home, and she could not get in! Back she ran to the window. He was still there, his head lying on his clenched hands. As though from a long distance, thin and faint, his voice came to Anne, broken with weeping. He was calling on her name--"_Anne, Anne!_"

"Oh, my dear old husband, do you miss me so sorely? John, John, open the window and let me in!"

He moved, as though in answer, but sank back again with a weary shake of his head. Anne lifted her arms and struck at the wall. That it should prove "such stuff as dreams are made on" gave her no surprise. She was beside John; nothing else was of importance. A shadowy serving-maid opened a door, looked wildly round, shuddered, and fled. John seemed conscious of her presence; oh, why not, then, of Anne's?

She knelt beside him, she laid her hands on his, she murmured all the foolish endearing phrases that were their own; but he saw nothing, he heard nothing.

"Oh, my dear old husband," she said; "husband of my youth and of my old age; we are one; we cannot be parted. I will not leave you. I shall wait beside you."

John turned with seeing eyes. "_Anne!_" he cried, with a loud voice, as his head fell on her breast.

Together they passed out of the house, paying no heed to what was left behind, nor to the terrified call of the serving-maid, "Help, help, master is dead!"

HUSH!

By Julia C. R. Dorr

O hush thee, Earth! Fold thou thy weary palms!
The sunset glory fadeth in the west;
The purple splendor leaves the mountain's crest;
Gray twilight comes as one who beareth alms,
Darkness and silence and delicious calms.
Take thou the gift, O Earth! on Night's soft breast
Lay thy tired head and sink to dreamless rest,
Lulled by the music of her evening psalms.
Cool darkness, silence, and the holy stars,
Long shadows when the pale moon soars on high,
One far, lone nightbird singing from the hill,
And utter rest from Day's discordant jars;
O soul of mine! when the long night draws nigh
Will such deep peace thine inmost being fill?

THE POINT OF VIEW

It is more than a full generation, it is going on for half a century, since Thackeray, lecturing on Charity and Honor, in New York, paid the street-manners of the city the pretty compliment that all readers ought to remember:

[Sidenote: American Urbanities]

I will tell you when I have been put in mind of the courteous
gallantry of the noble knight, Sir Roger de Coverley, of
Coverley Manor, of the noble Hidalgo Don Quixote of la Mancha:
here, in your own omnibus-carriages and railway-cars, when I
have seen a woman step in, handsome or not, well-dressed or
not, and a workman in hob-nailed shoes, or a dandy in the
height of the fashion, rise up and give her his place.

"Omnibus-carriages" have given way altogether to the horse-car; and the horse-car has ceded to the elevated train, to the cable-car, to the under-ground trolley. These vehicles subsist, but in what one of them could the admiring tourist see repeated as a rule what was, without question, the rule in 1852?

"The age of chivalry is gone" from the public conveyances of New York. Apparently it has gone farther from New York than from any other American city. At least that is the conclusion to which a New Yorker is reluctantly driven who has occasion to visit other American cities. The boorishness of New York is now what impresses the British tourist. Stevenson made his first appearance in New York a matter of seventeen years after Thackeray's last appearance, and he in turn recorded his observation. It was that he was received in casual places where he was personally unknown with a surprising mixture of "rudeness and kindness." But what struck him first, struck him in the face, so to say, was the rudeness. The healing kindness came after, and the final conclusion was that New Yorkers (he was careful not to say Americans) were well-meaning and kind-hearted people who had no manners. The good intentions and the kind hearts may be questioned by any spectator of the scramble at a station of any one of the elevated roads during the crowded hours, where male creatures may be seen using the superior strength of their sex to arrive at seats in advance of women. Even where this is not put too grossly in evidence, it is plain to the spectator of the scramble that the age of chivalry is gone.

The travelling New Yorker becomes aware that this is largely local. A Southern newspaper man, writing from New York to his paper, not long ago, noted its manners with even a touch of horror. "When I saw a man sitting in a car in which a woman was standing," he says, "I knew that I was far from home." A very recent British observer, the clever author of "The Land of The Dollar," proceeding from New York to Philadelphia, recorded his refreshment at happening upon an American town where the inhabitants were not too busy, when the stranger thanked them for a piece of information, to answer "You're very welcome."

When the New Yorker goes abroad at home, he finds unwelcome confirmation of the suggestion that his own city is the most unmannerly of all. The New Englander has undoubtedly a way, as Anthony Trollope noted, of giving you a piece of information as if he were making you a present of a dollar. But for all that, the sensitive stranger finds himself much less rasped at the end of a day in Boston, than at the end of a day in New York. As you go Southward, the level of manners rises in proportion almost to the respective stages of social culture reached in the colonial times, when Josiah Quincy found in Charleston a degree of "civility" and "elegance" such as the good Bostonian recorded that he had never seen, nor expected to see, on this side of the Atlantic. One is driven, in view of the Southern courtesy, to wonder whether there may not be something in Goethe's defence of the duello, to the effect that it is more desirable that there should be some security in the community against a rude act than that all men should be secure of dying in their beds.

But this explanation does not account for the fact that in whatever direction the New Yorker goes from home he finds better manners of the road, manners of the street-car, manners of the elevator, than those he left. Western cities, unless they be Southwestern also, have not the soothing softness and deference of Southern manners, but there is in these a recognition on the part of the human brother whom you casually encounter, of your human brotherhood which you are by no means so sure of eliciting from the casual and promiscuous New Yorker. The Chicagoan will tell you in detail what you want to know, even though, as Mr. Julian Ralph has remarked, he makes you trot alongside of him on the sidewalk while he is telling it. And in an elevator in which there is a woman, the Chicagoan hats are as promptly and automatically doffed as the Bostonese, while in this regard it is New York and not Philadelphia that is the Quaker city.

"Ethnic" explanations of the bad manners of New York will occur to many readers, which "it may be interesting not to state." These mostly fall to the ground before the appalling fact that Chicago is better-mannered. The elevated roads are great demoralizers. It is barely that primitive human decency escapes from the "Sauve qui peut" and "Devil take the hindmost" of that mode of transit, to say nothing of the fine flower of courtesy. Let us hope it is all the doing of the elevated roads.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Public Manners of Women]

It is painful to have to say that inquiry among males for an explanation of the degeneration just mentioned reveals yet another lamentable decline in chivalry. For it is a fact that the current masculine hypothesis attributes it to the women themselves. This is a reversion to a state of things which prevailed long before the age of chivalry had come. The scandalous behavior of Adam, in devolving upon the partner and fragment of his bosom the responsibility for his indulgence in the "_malum prohibitum_" of Eden, has been frequently cited in assemblages of Woman in proof of the innate and essential unchivalrousness of Man. It is there regarded as, to say the least of it, real mean.

The citation may not appear germane to an appeal for merely equal rights, which is the professed object of the "woman-women," but it is surely pertinent to the male contention that woman would get more by throwing herself upon the mercy of man than by appealing to his justice. If we take a more modern view of the origin of the relations of the sexes, it is evident that only that minimum of courtly consideration for the weaker vessel which was needful for the preservation of the species was to be expected from a gentleman whose habits had only just ceased to be arboreal, and that the age of chivalry must have been a very long time in coming.

It is, all the same, a fact that, when a son of Adam of the younger generation is asked how, in a public conveyance, he can retain both his seat and his equanimity while a daughter of Eve is standing, he is apt to recur to the third chapter of Genesis, and to put the blame on "the woman thou gavest to be with me." "You don't even get thanked for it," he will say. His father, and much more his grandfather, would have been ashamed to offer that excuse. It would have been ruled out as invalid, even if accurate; and the heir of all the ages who makes it does not put it to the proof often enough to know whether it is accurate or not.

But it must be owned that there is too much truth in it. Woman's inhumanity to man is a good deal in evidence. The late Senator Morton, of Indiana, was, it will be remembered, an invalid and a cripple. He came into a company at the capital one day in a state of great indignation because, in a street-car crowded with young women, not one had offered him a seat, and he had been compelled to make the journey painfully and precariously supported upon his crutches. The like of this may very often be seen. Humanity, consideration for weakness and helplessness, is the root of which chivalry is the fine flower. The Senator's experience was not unique, was not even exceptional. It is a startling proposition that man's inhumanity to man is less than woman's, but the time seems to give it some proof. At any rate, a man evidently disabled would not be allowed to stand in a public conveyance in which able-bodied men were seated, even in the most unchivalrous part of our country, which I have given some reasons for believing to be the city of New York. And, if that be true, it seems that the assumption of the right of an able-bodied woman to remain seated while a disabled man is standing is an assumption that the claims of chivalry are superior to those of humanity. On the other hand, it may fairly be said that the selfishness of women with regard to the wayfaring man is more thoughtless and perfunctory than the selfishness of men with regard to the wayfaring woman. In this country, at least, this latter is in all cases felt to be a violation of propriety and decency. The native American feels himself to be both on his defence and without defence, when he is arraigned for it. This was illustrated one day in a car of the New York elevated road, in which a middle-aged woman was standing in front of a young man who was sitting. Fixing him with her glittering eye, she said, calmly but firmly, "Get up, young man, I want that seat." The conscience-stricken youth rose meekly and automatically at the summons, and left his seat the spoil of the Amazonian bow and spear.

However it may be with woman's inhumanity to man, there can be no question about her inhumanity to woman. It does "make countless thousands mourn." And this not alone in the familiar sense in which

Every fault a tear may claim,
Except an erring sister's shame.

Whatever male has assisted at a function at which males are not supposed to assist, and at which the admixture of males is so small as to be negligible, has seen sights as astonishing in their way as the sights witnessed by the rash males who, at the peril of their lives, smuggled themselves into those antique mysteries from which they were expressly excluded. Nowhere in the gatherings of men does shameless selfishness find so crude an expression as, say, at a crowded matinée. It could not be exhibited at a prize-fight, for the exhibitor would subject himself to prompt personal assault. But the female bully is without fear as without shame. She elbows her way through and past her timid sisters, takes tranquil possession of the standing-places they have reserved by occupation, and scatters them to flight as the fierce hawk the pavid doves. Of course the bullies are a small minority, but one hawk suffices to flutter the most populous dove-cote, and to characterize the assemblage which it dominates. The young man who excuses his own bad manners by blaming "the woman" only emphasizes his want of chivalry; but the validity of his plea is more deniable than its accuracy.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The English Voice on the American Stage]

In the play of "Pudd'nhead Wilson," made out of Mark Twain's book by Frank Mayo, the evil genius combines in his veins the bad blood and craven instincts of two races. The _rôle_ was given, when first presented, a remarkable impersonation in which there was a subtle mingling of a white man's presumption and a negro's animalism. But the creator of the part was the brother of a leading English poet! An American actor essayed the _rôle_ in the second season with decidedly less success. In "The Heart of Maryland," a strenuous developing of Civil War emotions and events, the fate of the hero, a soldier whose devotion to the North alienates him from father and sweetheart, was given in both its first two seasons to actors of good schooling indeed, but distinctly English. The "leading juvenile," supposedly a Confederate officer with all a Southron's manner of speech, was also most pronouncedly a Briton in tongue, build, and carriage. In that exciting coil about a lovable spy--"Secret Service"--not exactly the villain, but the chief meddler with the hero's plans, was on the programme a Virginia gentleman, but on the stage entirely British.

Multiplying examples is unnecessary; there is enough food for reflection in these three recent plays. They are all marked with particular Americanism, and a prominent share of that Americanism is entrusted to actors foreign-born and foreign-bred.

We are so used here to accepting certain mannerisms of speech as indigenous to, and proper to, the theatre, and so many of our actors follow British pronunciation and inflection, that we hardly see the extent to which the natively English voice prevails on our stage. Once the thing gets on one's nerves, however, it is most noticeable. Indeed, the presence of English actors on the American stage is so pervasive of everything, from farce-comedy to society-tragedy, that they fairly invest our national drama.

Now of all insularities the most abominable, the one most to be shunned by this country is artistic insularity. It is an excellent cosmopolitanism that gives our patronage so generously to the greatest foreign stars, although it is bald snobbery that often leads us to favor mediocre importations over native genius. But it is surely carrying our worldliness too far when we accept and approve the hopeless incapacity of foreigners to enact _rôles_ demanding American local color. This may substantiate our proverbial patience, but it deals hard with our boasted sense of the incongruous. So much have unlike environments in a hundred years differentiated the two races that an English impersonation of an American character can never be acceptable to real criticism.

The reason for the sway of English actors over our stage is not far to seek. It is not that the best of them can act better than our best, for we have in our little day produced a very few of the greatest actors, tragic and comic. And we still have an excellent array of the plebs of the stage. It is the middle class--which is ever the grand average and backbone of any organization--that is not satisfactory and must draw on foreign aid. The average middle-class actor in England supplies the demand, for he is far above our similar caste in training and finish, and for good reason. In England the stage is taken more seriously than here, at least by the players. There an actor enters upon his career with the same desire for the thoroughness that comes from humble beginnings and complete experience as anyone entering upon any other profession. He may cherish vague hopes of greatness--as every American lawyer hopes to be President--but he is content if his lot is cast in respectable places, where the labor is agreeable and the compensation decent. The result is an army of thoroughly drilled actors that can do almost anything well, though they may do nothing brilliantly.