Chapter L: E. W. 71 (1)

Our Extension Course 75

Some Recipes 78

Adventures of a Curricular Engineer 82

Santayana in the Subway 87

Madonna of the Taxis 95

Matthew Arnold and Exodontia 99

Dame Quickly and the Boilroaster 109

Vacationing with De Quincey 114

The Spanish Sultry 132

What Kind of a Dog? 137

A Letter from Gissing 140

July 8, 1822 143

Midsummer in Salamis 148

The Story of Ginger Cubes 153

The Editor at the Ball Game 183

The Dame Explores Westchester 191

The Power and the Glory 197

Gissing Joins a Country Club 202

Three Stars on the Back Stoop 208

A Christmas Card 213

Symbols and Paradoxes 218

The Return to Town 223

Maxims and Minims 228

Two Reviews 262

Buddha on the L 271

Intellectuals and Roughnecks 279

The Fun of Writing 288

A Christmas Soliloquy 291

THE POWDER OF SYMPATHY

AN OXFORD SYMBOL

When in October, 1910, we arrived, in a hansom, at the sombre gate of New College, Oxford; trod for the first time through that most impressive of all college doorways, hidden in its walled and winding lane; timidly accosted Old Churchill, the whiskered porter, most dignitarian and genteel of England’s Perfect Servants; and had our novice glimpse of that noble Front Quad where the shadow of the battlemented roof lies patterned across the turf--we were as innocently hopeful, modestly anxious for learning and eager to do the right thing in this strange, thrilling environment as ever any young American who went looking for windmills. No human being (shrewd observers have remarked) is more beautifully solemn than the ambitious Young American. And, indeed, no writer has ever attempted to analyze the shimmering tissue of inchoate excitement and foreboding that fills the spirit of the juvenile Rhodes Scholar as he first enters his Oxford college. He arrives with his mind a gentle confusion of hearsay about Walter Pater, Shelley, boat races, Mr. Gladstone, Tom Brown, the Scholar Gypsy, and Little Mr. Bouncer. Kansas City or Sheboygan indeed seem far away as he crosses those quadrangles looking for his rooms.

But even Oxford, one was perhaps relieved to find, is not all silver-gray mediæval loveliness. The New Buildings, to which Churchill directed us, reached through a tunnel and a bastion in a rampart not much less than a thousand years elderly, were recognizably of the Rutherford B. Hayes type of edification. Except for the look-off upon gray walls, pinnacles, and a green tracery of gardens, and the calculated absence of plumbing (a planned method of preserving monastic hardiness among light-minded youth), the immense cliff of New Buildings might well have been a lobe of the old Johns Hopkins or a New York theological seminary. At the top of four flights we found our pensive citadel. Papered in blue, upholstered in a gruesome red, with yellow woodwork, and a fireplace which (we soon learned) was a potent reeker. It would be cheerful to describe those two rooms in detail, for we lived in them two years. But what first caught our eye was a little green pamphlet lying on the red baize tablecloth. It was lettered

NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD
Information and Regulations
_Revised October, 1910_

Our name was written upon it in ink, and we immediately sat down to study it. Here, we thought, is our passkey to this new world of loveliness.

First we found the hours of college chapel. Then, “All Undergraduates are required to perform Exercises.” In our simplicity we at first supposed this to be something in the way of compulsory athletics, but then discovered it to mean intellectual exercises. Fair enough, we thought. That is what we came for.

“Undergraduates are required, as a general rule, to be in College or their Lodgings by 11 p. m., and to send their Strangers out before that time.... No Undergraduate is allowed to play on any musical instrument in College rooms except between the hours of 1 and 9 p. m., unless special leave has been obtained beforehand from the Dean.... No games are allowed in the College Quadrangles, and no games except bowls in the Garden.” Excellent, we meditated; this is going to be a serious career, full attention to the delights of the mind and no interruption by corybantic triflers.

“A Term by residence means pernoctation within the University for six weeks in Michaelmas or in Hilary Term, and for three weeks in Easter or in Trinity (or Act) Term.”... We felt a little uncertain as to just what time of year Hilary and Act happened. But we were not halting, just now, over technicalities. We wanted to imbibe, hastily, the general spirit and flavour of our new home.... “Every member of the College is required to deposit Caution-money. Commoners deposit £30, unless they signify in writing their intention to pay their current Battels weekly; in this case they deposit £10. An undergraduate battling terminally cannot withdraw part of his Caution-money and become a weekly battler without the authority of his parent or guardian.” We at once decided that it was best to be a weekly battler. Battling, incidentally, is a word that we believe exists only at Eton and Oxford; dictionaries tell us that it comes from “an obsolete verb meaning to fatten.” Sometimes, however, in dispute with the Junior Bursar, it comes near its more usual sense. We wondered, in our young American pride, whether we were a Commoner? We were pleased to note, however, that the alternative classification was not a Lord but a Scholar.

We skimmed along through various other instructions. “A fine of 1s. is charged to the owner of any bicycle not put away before midnight.” The owner, or the bicycle, we mused? Never mind--we would soon learn. Coals and faggots, we noted, were variable in price. “The charge for a cold bath is 2d., for a hot 4d., inclusive of bath-towel.” The duties of a mysterious person named as the Bedmaker (but always, in actual speech, the Scout) were punctually outlined. But now we found ourself coming to Kitchen, Buttery, and Store-Room Tariffs. This, evidently, was the pulse of the machine. With beating heart we read on, entranced:

Beer, Mild half-pint 1½
Beer, Mixed “ 2
Beer, Strong “ 2½
Beer, Treble X glass 3
Beer, Lager pint 6
Stout half-pint 2
Cider “ 1½

There was something significant, we felt by instinct, in the fact that Treble X was obtainable only by the glass. Vital stuff, evidently. Our education was going to come partly in casks, perhaps? In the Kitchen Tariff we read, gloatingly, magnificent syllables. _Grilled Sausages and Bacon_, commons, 1/2. _Devilled Kidneys_, commons, 1/. (A “commons,” we judged, was a large portion; if you wanted a lesser serving, you ordered a “small commons.”) _Chop with Chips_, 11d. _Grilled Bones_, 10d. _Kedgeree_, plain or curried, commons, 9d. (Oh noble kedgeree, so nourishing and inexpensive, when shall we taste your like again?) Herrings, Bloaters, Kippers, each 3d. (To think that, then, we thought the Junior Bursar’s tariff was a bit steep.) Jelly, Compôte of Fruit, Trifle, Pears and Cream. Creams ... commons, 6d. “Gentlemen’s own birds cooked and served ... one bird, 1/. Two birds, 1/6.”

We went on, with enlarging appreciation, to the Store Room and Cellar Tariffs: Syphons, Seltzer or Soda-water, 4½d. Ginger-beer, per bottle, 2d. Cakes: Genoa, Cambridge, Madeira, Milan, Sandringham, School, each 1/. Foolscap, per quire, 10d. Quill Pens, per bundle, 1/6. Cheroots, Cigars, Tobacco, Cigarettes--and then we found what seemed to be the crown and cream of our education, LIST OF WINES.

Port, 4/ per bottle. Pale Sherry, 3/. Marsala, 2/. Madeira, 4/. Clarets: Bordeaux, 1/6. St. Julien, 2/. Dessert, 4/. Hock or Rhenish Wine: Marcobrunner, 4/. Niersteiner, 3/. Moselle, 2/6. Burgundy, 2/ and 4/. Pale Brandy, 5/. Scotch Whisky, 4/. Irish Whisky, 4/. Gin, 3/. Rum, 4/.

It is really too bad to have to compress into a few paragraphs such a wealth of dreams and memories. We sat there, with our little pamphlet before us, and looked out at that great panorama of spires and towers. We have always believed in falling in with our environment. The first thing we did that afternoon was to go out and buy a corkscrew. We have it still--our symbol of an Oxford education.

SCAPEGOATS

The man who did most (I am secretly convinced) to deprive American literature of some really fine stuff was Mr. John Wanamaker. It was in his store, some years ago, that I bought a kind of cot-bed or couch, which I put in one corner of my workroom and on which it is my miserable habit to recline when I might be getting at those magnificent writings I have planned. Every evening I pile up the cushions and nestle there with _The Gentle Grafter_ or some detective story (my favourite relaxation), saying to myself: “Just ten minutes of loafing”....

But perhaps Messrs. Strawbridge and Clothier (also of Philadelphia) are equally at fault. When I wake up, on my Wanamaker divan, it is usually about 2 A. M. Not too late, even then, for a determined spirit to make incision on its tasks. But I find myself moving towards a very fine white-enamelled icebox which I bought from Strawbridge and Clothier in 1918. With that happy faculty of self-persuasion I convince myself it is only to see whether the pan needs emptying or the doors latching. But by the time I have scalped a blackberry pie and eroded a platter of cold macaroni au gratin, of course work of any sort is out of the question.

So do the Philistines of this world league themselves cruelly against the artist, plotting temptation for his carnal deboshed instincts, joying to see him succumb. Once the habit of yielding is established, Wanamaker, Strawbridge and Clothier (dark trio of Norns) have it their own way. Just as surely as robins will be found on a new-mown lawn, as certainly as bonfire smoke veers all round the brush pile to find out the eyes of the suburban leaf burner, so inevitably do the Divan and the Icebox exert their cruel dominion over us when we ought to be pursuing our lovely and impossible dreams. Wanamaker and Strawbridge and Clothier have blueprints of the lines of fissure in our frail velleity. As William Blake might have said:

Let Flesh once get a lead on Spirit,
It’s hard for Soul to reinherit:
When supper’s laid upon a plate
Mind might as well abdicate.

But one of the things I think about, just before I drop off to sleep on that couch, is My Anthology. Like every one else, I have always had an ambition to compile an anthology of my own; several, in fact. One of them I call in my own mind _The Book of Uncommon Prayer_, and imagine it as a kind of secular breviary, including many of those beautiful passages in literature expressing the spirit of supplication. This book, however, it will take years to collect; it will be entirely non-sectarian and so truly religious that many people will be annoyed. People do not care much for books of real beauty. That anthology edited by Robert Bridges, for instance--_The Spirit of Man_--how many readers have taken the trouble to hunt it out?

But the _Uncommon Prayer Book_ is not the kind of anthology I have in mind at the moment. What I need is a book that would boil down the best of all the books I am fond of and condense it into a little bouillon cube of wisdom. I have always had in mind the possibility that I might go travelling, or the house might burn down, or I might have to sell my library, or something of that sort. I should like to have the meat and essence of my favourites in permanent form, so that wherever I were I could write to the publisher and get a fresh copy.

This thought came with renewed emphasis the other day when I was talking to Vachel Lindsay. He was saying that he had lately been rereading Swinburne, for the first time in nearly twenty years, and was grieved to see how the text of the poet had become corrupted in his memory. He had been misquoting Swinburne for years and years, he said, and the errors had been growing more and more firmly into his mind. That led me to think, suppose we had only memory to rely on, how long would the text of anything we loved remain unblurred? Suppose I were on a desert island and yearned to solace myself by spouting some of the sonnets of Shakespeare? How much could I recapture? Honestly, now, and with no resort to the book on the shelf at my elbow, let me try an old friend:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken--
Love is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Then there’s something about a sickle, but I can’t for the life of me quite get it. Presently I’ll look it up in the book and see how near I came.

Before opening the Shakespeare, however, let’s have one more try:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I wail the lack of many a thing I sought
... my dear time’s waste----

And all the rest of that sonnet that I can think of is something about “death’s dateless night.” A pretty poor showing. Of course, I should do better on a desert island: there would be the wide expanse of shining sand to walk upon, and I could throw myself into it with more passion and fury. The secret of remembering poetry is to get a good barytone start and obliterate the mind of its current freight of trifles. The metronomic prosody of the surf would help me, no doubt, and the placid frondage of the breadfruit trees. But even so, the recension of Shakespeare’s sonnets that I would write down upon slips of bark would be a very corrupt and stumbling text. Favourite lines would be scrambled into the wrong sonnets, and the whole thing would be a pitiful miscarriage of memory.

The only sagacious conduct of life is to prepare for every possible emergency. I have taken out life insurance, and fire insurance, and burglary insurance, and automobile insurance. I have always insured myself against losing my job by taking care not to work too hard at it, so I wouldn’t miss it too bitterly if it were suddenly jerked from under me. But what have I done in the way of Literary Insurance? Suppose, to-morrow, Adventure should carry me away from these bookshelves? How pleasant to have a little microcosm of them that I could take with me! And yet, unless I can shake off the servitude of those three Philadelphia mandarins, Wanamaker and Strawbridge and Clothier, I shall never have it.

When I think of the plays that I would have written if it weren’t for those three rascals.

TO A NEW YORKER A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

I wonder, old dear, why my mind has lately been going out towards you? I wonder if you will ever read this? They say that wood-pulp paper doesn’t last long nowadays. But perhaps some of my grandchildren (with any luck, there should be some born, say twenty-five years hence) may, in their years of tottering caducity, come across this scrap of greeting, yellowed with age. With tenderly cynical waggings of their faded polls, perhaps they will think back to the tradition of the quaint vanished creatures who lived and strove in this city in the year of disgrace, 1921. Poor old granfer (I can hear them say it, with that pleasing note of pity), I can just remember how he used to prate about the heyday of his youth. He wrote pieces for some paper, didn’t he? Comically old-fashioned stuff my governor said; some day I must go to the library and see if they have any record of it.

You seem a long way off, this soft September morning, as I sit here and sneeze (will hay fever still exist in 2021, I wonder?) and listen to the chime of St. Paul’s ring eleven. Just south of St. Paul’s brown spire the girders of a great building are going up. Will that building be there when you read this? What will be the Olympian skyline of your city? Will poor old Columbia University be so far downtown that you will be raising money to move it out of the congested slums of Morningside? Will you look up, as I do now, to the great pale shaft of Woolworth; to the golden boy with wings above Fulton Street? What ships with new names will come slowly and grandly up your harbour? What new green spaces will your street children enjoy? But something of the city we now love will still abide, I hope, to link our days with yours. There is little true glory in a city that is always changing. New stones, new steeples are comely things; but the human heart clings to places that hold association and reminiscence. That, I suppose, is the obscure cause of this queer feeling that impels me to send you so perishable a message. It is the precious unity of mankind in all ages, the compassion and love felt by the understanding spirit for those, its resting kinsmen, who once were glad and miserable in these same scenes. It keeps one aware of that marvellous dark river of human life that runs, down and down uncountably, to the unexplored seas of Time.

You seem a long way off, I say--and yet it is but an instant, and you will be here. Do you know that feeling, I wonder (so characteristic of our city) that a man has in an elevator bound (let us say) for the eighteenth floor? He sees 5 and 6 and 7 flit by, and he wonders how he can ever live through the interminable time that must elapse before he will get to his stopping place and be about the task of the moment. It is only a few seconds, but his mind can evolve a whole honeycomb of mysteries in that flash of dragging time. Then the door slides open before him and that instantaneous eternity is gone; he is in a new era. So it is with the race. Even while we try to analyze our present curiosities, they whiff away and disperse. Before we have time to turn three times in our chairs, we shall be the grandparents and you will be smiling at our old-fashioned sentiments.

But we ask you to look kindly on this our city of wonder, the city of amazing beauties which is also (to any man of quick imagination) an actual hell of haste, din, and dishevelment. Perhaps you by this time will have brought back something of that serenity, that reverence for thoughtful things, which our generation lost--and hardly knew it had lost. But even Hell, you must admit, has always had its patriots. There is nothing that hasn’t--which is one of the most charming oddities of the race.

And how we loved this strange, mad city of ours, which we knew in our hearts was, to the clear eye of reason and the pure, sane vision of poetry, a bedlam of magical impertinence, a blind byway of monstrous wretchedness. And yet the blacker it seemed to the lamp of the spirit, the more we loved it with the troubled eye of flesh. For humanity, immortal only in misery and mockery, loves the very tangles in which it has enmeshed itself: with good reason, for they are the mark and sign of its being. So you will fail, as we have; and you will laugh, as we have--but not so heartily, we insist; no one has ever laughed the way your tremulous granfers did, old chap! And you will go on about your business, as we did, and be just as certain that you and your concerns are the very climax of human gravity and worth. And will it be any pleasure to you to know that on a soft September morning a hundred years ago your affectionate great-grandsire looked cheerfully out of his lofty kennel window, blew a whiff of smoke, smiled a trifle gravely upon the familiar panorama, knew (with that antique shrewdness of his) a hawk from a handsaw, and then went out to lunch?

A CALL FOR THE AUTHOR

But who will write me the book about New York that I desire? The more I think about it, the more astonished I am that no one attempts it. I don’t mean a novel. I would not admit any plot or woven tissue of story to come between the reader and my royal heroine, the City herself. Not to be a coward, should I try to write it myself? It is my secret dream; but, better, it should be written by some sturdy rogue of a bachelor, footfree, living in the very heart of the uproar. Some fellow with a taste and nuance for the vulgar and vivid; a consort of both parsons and bootleggers; a _Beggar’s Opera_ kind of rascal. I can think of three men in this city who have magnificent powers for such a book; but they are getting perhaps a little elderly--yes, they are over forty! Ginger must be very hot in the mouth of my imagined author. He must be young (dashed if I don’t think about 32 is the ideal age to write such a book), but not one of the Extremely Brilliant Young Men. They are too clever; and they are not lonely enough. For this is a lonely job. It’s got to be done _solus_, slowly, with an eye only upon the subject. It has got to show the very tremble and savour of life itself.

The man who will write this book will not necessarily enjoy it. To get into the secret of Herself he has got to have a peculiar feeling about her. For years he must have wrestled with her almost as a personal antagonist. He must have vowed, since he first saw her imperial skyline serrated on blue, to make her his own; a mistress worthy of him, and yet he himself her master. But he must know, in his inward, that in the end she triumphs, she tramples down mind and heart and nerve. Loveliest enemy in the world, implacable victor over reason and peace and all the quieter sanities of the spirit, her mad, intolerable beauty crazes or silences the sensitive mind that woos her. If you think this is only fine writing and romantic tall-talk, then you know her only with the eye, not with the imagination. With good reason, perhaps, her poets have, for the most part, kept mum. Enough for them to see and cherish in imagination her little sudden glimpses. A girl, slender, gayly unconscious of admiration, poises on one foot at the edge of the subway platform, leaning over to see if the train is coming. That gallant figure is perhaps something of a symbol of the city’s own soul.

There must be many who feel about Herself as I do--and, more wisely, are tacit. There are many whose minds have trembled on the steep sills of truth, have felt that golden tremble of reality almost within touch, and rather than mar the half-apprehended fable, have turned troubled away. But there is such poetry in her, and such fine, glorious animal gusto--why is there not some determined attempt to set it down, not with “rhetoricating floscules,” but as it is? Day after day one comes to the attack; and returning, as the sloping sunlight and fresh country air flood the dusty red plush of the homeward smoking-car, readmits the expected defeat. Here is a target for you, O generation of snipers. Let us have done with pribbles and prabbles. Who is the man who will write me the book I crave--that vulgar, jocund, carnal, beautiful, rueful book!

MR. PEPYS’S CHRISTMASES

Christmas being the topic, suppose we call upon Mr. Samuel Pepys for testimony. The imperishable Diarist had as keen a faculty of enjoyment as any man who ever lived. He wrote one of the world’s greatest love stories--the story of his own zealous, inquisitive, jocund love of life. Surely it is not amiss to inquire what record be left as to the festival of cheer.

On seven of the nine Christmases in the Diary, Mr. Pepys went to church--sometimes more than once, though when he went twice he admits he fell asleep. The music and the ladies’ finery were undoubtedly part of the attraction. “Very great store of fine women there is in this church, more than I know anywhere else about us,” is his note for Christmas, 1664. But in that generously mixed and volatile heart there was a valve of honest aspiration and piety. One can imagine him sitting in his pew (on Christmas, 1661, he nearly left the church in a huff because the verger didn’t come forward to open the pew door for him), his alert mind giving close attention to the sermon of his favourite Mr. Mills, busy with sudden resolutions of virtue and industry, yet happily conscious of any beauty within eyeshot.

The giving of presents was not a large part of Christmas in those days. In 1662 Mr. Gauden gave Pepys “a great chine of beef and three dozen of tongues,” but this had its drawbacks. Pepys had to give five shillings to the man who brought it and also half a crown to the porters. Drink and food were the important part of the festival. At Christmas, 1660, Mr. and Mrs. Pepys, with Tom Pepys as guest, enjoyed “a good shoulder of mutton and a chicken.” This was a brave Christmas for Mrs. Pepys--she had “a new mantle.” We must remember that the fair Elizabeth, though already married five years, was then only twenty years old. Not all Mrs. Pepys’s Christmases were as merry as that, I fear. On Christmas, 1663, she was troubled by anxious thoughts----

My wife began, I know not whether by design or chance, to
enquire what she should do, if I should by any accident die, to
which I did give her some slight answer, but shall make good
use of it to bring myself to some settlement for her sake.

Why haven’t the ingenious life insurance advertisers made use of this telling bit of copy?

Christmas, 1668, seems to have been poor Mrs. Pepys’s worst Yule, but perhaps it was only her natural feminine frivolity that caused the sadness. Samuel says:

Dinner alone with my wife, who, poor wretch! sat undressed all
day, till 10 at night, altering and lacing of a noble petticoat.

This noble petticoat was perhaps to be worn at the play they attended the next day, “Women Pleased.” What a pleasant Christmas card that scene would make: Mrs. Pepys sitting, négligée, over the niceties of her needlework, with Samuel beside her “making the boy read to me the Life of Julius Cæsar.” But we do not “get” (as the current phrase is) Mrs. Pepys at all if we think of her as merely the irresponsible girl. For, at Christmas, ’66, we read:

Lay pretty long in bed, and then rose, leaving my wife desirous
to sleep, having sat up till 4 this morning seeing her maids
make mince-pies.

Ah, we have no such mince pies nowadays. Mrs. Pepys’s mince pies were evidently worthy the tradition of that magnificent delicacy, for at Christmas, 1662, when Elizabeth was ill abed, Samuel records--with an evident touch of regret--that he had to “send abroad” for one.

* * * * *

Which brings us back to the Christmas viands. In 1662, besides the mince pie from abroad, he “dined by my wife’s bedside with great content, having a mess of brave plum-porridge and a roasted pullet.” We are tempted to think 1666 was Samuel’s best Christmas. Parson Mills made a good sermon. “Then home and dined well on some good ribs of beef roasted and mince pies; only my wife, brother, and Barker, and plenty of good wine of my own, and my heart full of true joy.” After dinner they had a little music; and he spent the evening making a catalogue of his books (“reducing the names of all my books to an alphabet”), which is probably the happiest task a man of Pepys’s temperament could enjoy.

Christmas Eve, 1667, was evidently a cheerful evening. Mr. Pepys stopped in at the Rose Tavern for some “burnt wine”; walked round the city in the moonlight, and homeward early in the morning in such content that “I dropped money in five or six places, which I was the willinger to do, it being Christmas Day, and so home, and there find my wife in bed, and Jane and the maid making pies.” The evening of that Christmas Mrs. Pepys read aloud to him--_The History of the Drummer of Mr. Mompesson_, apparently a kind of contemporary Phillips Oppenheim--“a strange story of spies, and worth reading, indeed.” It was only in 1660 that the Christmas cheer was a little too much for our Diarist. December 27, 1660, “about the middle of the night I was very ill--I think with eating and drinking too much--and so I was forced to call the maid, who pleased my wife and I in her running up and down so innocently in her smock.”

* * * * *

It is painful to this tracker of Mr. Pepys’s vestiges to note that on Christmas Day, 1662, Bishop Morley at the Chapel Royal “made but a poor sermon.” The Bishop apparently rebuked the levity of the Court. “It was worth observing how far they are come from taking the reprehensions of a Bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill-actions and courses. He did much press us to joy in these public days of joy, and to hospitality; but one that stood by whispered in my ear that the Bishop do not spend one groat to the poor himself.” In 1665 we fear that Samuel indulged himself in church with some rather cynical thoughts:

Saw a wedding in the church, and the young people so merry one
with another; and strange to see what delight we married people
have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every
man and woman gazing and smiling at them.

One could continue for some space recounting the eupeptic Pepys in his Christmas merriments--so large an edifice of pleasing conjecture can be built upon even his slightest notes. One observes, for instance, that on December 27, 1664, when “my wife and all her folks” came “to make Christmas gambols,” Samuel left the party and went to bed. This was very different from his usual habit when there was fun going. He was annoyed also that on this occasion his wife revelled all night, not coming to bed until 8 the next morning, “which vexed me a little, but I believe there was no hurt in it at all, but only mirth.”

So we take leave of the Christmases of the Pepyses; 1668 is the last one recorded--the time when Elizabeth stayed at home all day altering her petticoat. After supper, the boy played some music on the lute, and Samuel’s mind was “in mighty content.” Let us think kindly of the good fellow; and not forget that he coined one of the enduring phrases of English literature--a phrase that is no such ineffective summary of all the lives of men--_And so to bed_.

CHILDREN AS COPY

Titania said: “You haven’t written a poem about the baby yet.”

It is quite true. She is now thirteen months old, and has not yet had a poem written about her. Titania considers this deplorable. The first baby was hardly a week old before all sorts of literary studies were packing the mails, speeding to such editors as were known to be prompt pay. (I hope, indeed I hope, you never saw that astounding essay--published anonymously in _Every Week_ which expired soon after--called “The Expectant Father,” which was written when the poor urchin was some twenty-four hours old. It was his first attempt to earn money for his parent. If any child ever paid his own hospital bills--C. O. D., as you might say--it was he. I believe in bringing up my children to be self-supporting.)

And the second baby was only three weeks old when the first poem about _her_ was written.

But here is this third morsel, thirteen months old and no poem yet. Titania, I say, considers this a kind of insult to the innocent babe. No, not at all, my dear. I admit that it would be very helpful if H. (I will call her that, for _baby_ is a word that cannot be repeated in print very often without all hands growing maudlin; and I don’t like to use her own name, which seems too personal; just remember, then, that H. stands for a small brown-eyed creature who is still listed in the Bureau of Records of the Department of Health [certificate No. 43515, _anno_ 1920] as _Female Morley_, because when the birth was registered by the doctor her name had not been decided, and ever since then I have been too busy to go round to call on Dr. Copeland, the Health Commissioner, and ask him to have her more specifically enrolled)--I admit it would be very helpful if she were to turn to and lend a hand in paying the coal bill by having some verses written about herself. I have looked at her with admiration every day for these thirteen months, trying, as one might say, to get some angle on her that would lead to a poem. She does not seem very angular.

I insist that my not having written a poem about her is really very creditable. Titania seems to think that it implies my having become, in some sense, blasé about children. Again, not so, not so at all. I must confess that in my enthusiasm I rather made use of the two older urchins as copy. But H., droll infant that she is, is too subtle for me. I’ll come to that in a minute.

I talked all this matter over (being of a cautious turn, and fond of getting experienced advice) with two eminent author-parents--Mr. Tom Masson and Mr. Tom Daly--long ago, before Titania and I began putting on heirs. Both these gentlemen have made a lot of use of their children in earning, or at any rate gaining, a living. Their advices coincided. I myself was worried, but Mr. Tom Masson insisted that there was nothing like having offspring as a source of copy; he said that he would pay ten cents a word, in _Life_, for anything about the then shortly arriving urchin. (He said it would be fifteen cents a word if it was a girl, because girls cost you so much more later on. He has had experience in that matter, I believe.) Mr. Tom Daly, who has run rather to boys, said very much the same thing; but he was not in a position to buy my stuff, so I paid less attention to him.

But to get back to H. There never was a more enchanting infant. Mr. Walter de la Mare, who is also an authority, has written me delightful letters about her, although he has never seen her. But even a prose letter from a poet like Mr. de la Mare is more valuable, I think, than an actual poem from most other poets, so darling H. cannot say she has been neglected. But she is much too delicious for me to be able to sit down easily and write something that would do her justice. The night before she was born her mother and I did two things. We went to Huyler’s for chocolate ice-cream soda, and we read aloud Bernard Shaw’s autobiography, which is printed in Frank Harris’s _Contemporary Portraits_. I dislike to bring Mr. Harris into this, for certainly I can think of no one who has less in common with H., that celestial nugget. But I have to tell the truth, don’t I? Mr. Harris wrote an essay about Shaw; and Shaw, feeling that it was not adequate, wrote a really amusing sketch to show how Harris should have done it. Well, there is something symbolic about this, for H. is as sweet as anything Huyler ever compounded; and she is even more enigmatic than Shaw. (I can see now it should have been Page and Shaw instead of Huyler.)

But I feel that pretty soon I shall be writing a poem about her. I have felt it coming for some time. But it has got to _come_; I am not going to bring it. That shows how I have matured by associating with H. Sometimes I wish I could hire a really great poet to write about her. Swinburne might do for the rough draft. “Oh, what a bee-yootiful babby!” he used to cry when he saw them in their prams up at Putney--so, I think, Max Beerbohm describes. But I should want to have his rough draft polished and refined by someone else. I can only think of Mr. Walter de la Mare. He alone has just the right insight. For babies thirteen months old--the best age of all--must not be treated condescendingly, nor fulsomely, nor adoringly, nor sugarishly. William Blake, if left alone in the room with H., would have understood her. What an infant, I give you my word! Living with children is largely a contest of endurance. It is a question of which one can tire the other out first. (This is a great secret; never before made plain.) Start in early in the morning, and take things with a rush. If you are strong, austere, resolute, you may be able to wear them down and exhaust them by dusk. If you can do so, without prostrating yourself, then you may get them to bed safely and have a few hours of cheerful lassitude. But take every possible advantage. Let them run and frolic, yourself sitting down as much as you can. Favour yourself, and snatch a little rest while they are not looking. Even so, the chances are you will crack first.

This applies to older children; after they gain the use of their limbs and minds. But H. has not reached that harrowing stage. Placable, wise, serene, she sits in her crib. She has four teeth (beauties). To hear her cry is so rare that I hardly know what her voice of sorrow sounds like. Sometimes, for an instant, she looks a little frightened. Then I like her best, for I know she is human, and has in her the general capsule of frailty.

You may be quite sure of one thing, I shall never print that poem unless I feel that it comes somewhere near doing her justice.

HAIL, KINSPRIT!

The keenest pleasure in life, of course, is to find a Kindred Spirit--one whose mind glows and teeters with delight at the same queer things that rouse us to excitement. We have just found one, and yet we shall never know him, except by his address, which is Y. 1926, the _Times_, E. C. 4, London. For we are much too busy to write to any one, even to a Kindred Spirit.

We will tell you _why_ we feel sure he is a Kindred Spirit; but in parenthesis, it was Mr. Pearsall Smith who lamented the fact that the English language contains no satisfactory word for “a person who is enthusiastic about the same things that you are enthusiastic about.” It is too grossly clumsy to say _fellow-fan_ or _co-enthusiast_; so Mr. Smith, a philologist of charming finesse (have you read his little book _The English Language_ published by Henry Holt?) boldly proposed to fill the vacancy by coining the word _milver_. This, he said, would be useful to poets, since there is no rhyme in English for _silver_.

The word _milver_, alas, leaves us cool, in spite of its usefulness as a rhyme. It does not strike down in the great subsoil of the language--the dark deep skein of inherited word-roots from which our present meanings blossom and put forth. We suggest--without much thought--a mere contraction. How would _kinsprit_ do? We rather like the look of it; it has a droll, benign, elvish appearance as we put it down. A couplet occurs to us--

_They pledged their bond with joyful oath--
A kinsprit passion knit them both._

That shows you it could be used as an adjective as well. Come, now, if we all pull together very likely we can get Messrs. Merriam to put it in the next edition of Webster:

=Kinsprit=, _n_ and _a_. (orig. obscure: perh. contracted from
kin[dred] sprit[e])--A fellow-enthusiast, one impassioned with
the same zeal or hobby or enthusiasm.

The reason why we know that Y. 1926 is a kinsprit is in the following notice in the _Personal_ column of the London _Times_:

LOST in Taxi last week, SMALL PORTFOLIO containing colour
diagrams and newspaper print of Lamb’s portrait of Lytton
Strachey. Finder rewarded. Y. 1926, The _Times_, E. C. 4.

Well, well, we say to ourself: then there is one other person in the world who felt just as we did about that gloriously entertaining portrait of Mr. Strachey, and who carried it about with him just as we did ours, clipped from the _Manchester Guardian_. But we are luckier than poor Y. 1926, because in an access of enthusiasm we wrote to Mr. Henry Lamb, the artist, and begged from him a photo-print of the picture, which is in front of us now. We think that Mr. Alfred Harcourt, Mr. Strachey’s publisher, should implore the loan of the canvas for a few months, and have it exhibited in a Fifth Avenue window where we could all have a good look at it.

We are consumed with curiosity to know more about Y. 1926--where he was going in that taxi, and what the colour diagrams were (they sound interesting) and what are his general comments on life?

ROUND MANHATTAN ISLAND

We were talking with an American who had just come back after living several years in Europe. He expressed with some dismay his resensitized impression of the furious ugliness and clamour of American life; the ghastly wastes of rubbish and kindling-wood suburbs fringing our cities; and suggested that the trouble is that we have little or no instinctive sense of beauty.

To which we replied that perhaps the truth of it is that the American temperament is more likely to see opportunities for beauty in large things than in small. But we were both talking bosh. Only an extraordinarily keen and trained philosophic perception--e. g., a Santayana--can discuss such matters without gibbering. A recent book on young American intellectualism recurs to us as an example of the futility of undigested prattle about æsthetics. Even the word _æsthetics_ itself has come to have a windy savour by reason of much sophomore talk.

But, though we have laid by our own copy of that particular book as a permanent curio in the realm of well-meant gravity, its author was obeying a sound and praisable instinct in trying to think about these things--beauty, imagination, the mind’s freedom to create, the meaning of our civilization. We are all compelled to such an attempt: shallow, unversed, clumsily intuitive, we grope into them because we are sincerely hungry to understand. The same wise, brave, gracious spirit that moved Mr. Montague to write his exquisite book _Disenchantment_ is tremulously and tentatively alert in thousands of less competent minds. And we, for our own part, grow just a little impatient with those who are quick to damn this wildly energetic and thronging civilization because it shows a poverty of settled, tranquil loveliness. We look out of our window into this morning where Mrs. Meynell’s “wind of clear weather” tosses the Post Office flags and the rooftop plumes of steam; we see the Woolworth pinnacle hanging over our head--and ask, is it possible that this great spectacle breathes from her towers only the last enchantments of a muddled age?

Aristotle remarked that “the flute is not an instrument which has a good moral effect; it is too exciting.” And very likely New York civilization falls under the same reproach. But even if it is all madness, what a gallant raving! You cannot see the beauty in anything until you love it for its own sake. Take the sightseeing boat round Manhattan if you want to get a mental synthesis of this strangest of islands. From a point in the East River off Coenties Slip you will see those cubed terraces of building rising up and upward, shelves and ledges of rectangular perspective like the heaven of a modernist painter. Nor do we deny the madness and horror. Farther up the river you will see the ragged edges of the city, scows loading their tons of jetsam and street scourings, wizened piers, grassless parks, all the pitiful makeshift aquatics of the Harlem region. And yet, all along that gruesome foreshore, boys--and girls, too--bathing gayly in the scum-water, flying ragged kites from pier-bollards, merry and naked on slides of rock or piles of barrels. Only on the three grim islands of Blackwell, Ward, and Randall will you see any touch of beauty. There, grass and trees and beds of canna and salvia (the two great institutional flowers) to soothe the criminal and the mad. When your mind or your morals or your muscles give way, the city will allow you a pleasant haven of greenery and air. It is odd to see the broad grounds of the Children’s Hospital--on Randalls Island, is it?--with no child in sight; but across the river the vile and scabby shore is thick with them. And the bases of the Harlem swing-bridges, never trod by any one, are carefully grassed and flowered.

So the history of every modern city consists of a painful, slow retracing of its errors, an attempt to undo painfully and at vast expense the slattern stupidities it has allowed to accumulate. But to see only these paradoxes and uglinesses is to see less than the whole. He cannot have lived very long or thoughtfully with humanity for neighbour who does not ruefully accept greeds and blindnesses as part of its ineradicable habit. It takes a strong stretch of the imagination to grasp this island entire; to see, even in its very squalors and heedlessnesses, an integral portion of its brave teeming life. You must love it for what it is before you have a right to love it for what it may be. We have never been able to think this thing out, but there seems to us to be some vital essence, some miraculous tremor of human energy and folly in the whole scene that condones and justifies the ugliness. It is queer, but the hideous back-lots of the city do not trouble us so greatly: we have a feeling that they are on their way towards being something else. We do not praise them, but we feel in an obscure way they are part of the picture. Zealous passion and movement always present, to the eye of dispassion, aspects either grotesque or terrible, according to that eye’s focus. In this ugly hurly-burly we feel daily (though we cannot define it) that there is a beauty so overriding that it does not depend on beautiful particulars. And, to feel that beauty fully, one must discard all hankerings to improve humanity, or to preach to it, or even understand it--simply (as Uncle Remus said) “make a great ’miration”--accept it as it thrillingly is, and admire.

THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN

We shall never forget being in Washington when the great celebration was held in honour of the Unknown Citizen.

The day was proclaimed a National Fête. On that day the Unknown Citizen--chosen after long investigation by a secret committee sworn to silence--arrived at the Union Station. He and his wife had been quietly lured away from their home on a plausible pretext and then kidnapped into a gaudy special train, where everything had been explained to them. Halts had been made at big cities en route for the crowds to pay homage.

It would take too long to describe the clever selective process by which the Citizen had been chosen. Suffice it to say that he was a typical _homo Americanus_--a worthy and slightly battered creature, who had raised a family of four children and plugged along at his job and paid his taxes and cranked his flivver and set up a radio on the roof and planted sunflowers in the back yard and lent his wife a hand at the washing and frequently mended the kitchen stove-pipe. He had never broken open the china pigs containing the children’s money.

We saw him arrive at the great station in Washington. He was strangely troubled and anxious, a bit incredulous, too, believing this was all some sort of put-up job. Also, somewhere on the train he had lost one of his elastic sleeve-suspenders, and one cuff kept on falling round his wrist. He walked uneasily along the red velvet carpet and was greeted by President Harding and the Ambassadors of Foreign Powers. Mr. Sousa’s band was there, and struck up an uproarious anthem composed for the occasion. The tactful committee of Daughters of the American Bourgeoisie had made all arrangements and taken all possible precautions. It had been feared that perhaps the Citizen’s Wife might be overcome, and an ambulance was waiting behind potted palms in case of any emergency. But it is always the unexpected that happens. It was Senator Lodge, who had been appointed to read the telegrams from prominent people, who swooned. President Harding, with kindly readiness, stepped into the breach. As they were handed to him he read aloud the messages from M. Clemenceau, Mr. Lloyd George, William Allen White, Samuel Gompers, Dr. Frank Crane, President Ebert, Paul Poiret, M. Paderewski, M. Venizelos, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Isaac Marcosson. Mr. Harding then spoke in the most friendly and charming way, appraising the value of preserved nationality, the solid virtue of the Founding Fathers, and the services of the Unknown Citizen to his country.

For a moment there was an awkward pause, but the Citizen’s Wife, evidently a strong-minded woman, nudged him sharply, and the Citizen tottered forward. Fortunately some New York newspaper men had been on the train with him, and had written a little speech for him to deliver. He read it, a bit tremulously. It stated that he was aware this tribute was not meant for him personally, but for the great body of middle-class citizenship he had been chosen to represent. There was great speculation in the audience as to what part of the country the Citizen came from: his accent was perhaps a trifle Hoosierish, but wiseacres insisted that his general fixings were plainly Sears-Roebuck and not identifiable with any section.

Accompanied by a troop of cavalry and the national colours, the Unknown Citizen was taken to the Capitol, where Congress, convened in joint session, awaited to do him honour. He was presented to the great body by Senator Lodge, who had now completely recovered. After being introduced, the Citizen stammered a few words of embarrassment. During the buffet lunch in the lobbies, however, he began to pluck up heart, for he found the Congressmen very human. He even ventured to express, very politely, a few sentiments about the bonus, the tariff, the income tax, the shipping subsidy, and the coal strike. Gathering confidence, he might have grown almost eloquent over these topics, but the Senatorial committee, foreseeing trouble, hastened him along to see the gifts that had been sent from all over the world. They were all laid out for inspection. Henry Ford had sent a new sedan, with a self-starter and the arms of the United States gilded on the door. William Randolph Hearst had sent a bound volume of Arthur Brisbane’s editorials. The Prince of Wales, perhaps misunderstanding the exact nature of the ceremony, had sent a solid gold punch bowl engraved _Dieu et Mon Drought_. The Premier of New Zealand had sent a live kangaroo. The Bailiff of Angora had sent a large silky goat. Mayor Hylan had sent a signed photograph of himself wearing overalls. The Shipping Board had sent a silver flask. But we have not space for the full list of presents.

Tea was served at the White House. All the _corps diplomatique_ were there, and were presented to the Citizen and his Wife. It was a great afternoon. The Marine Band played in the garden; Senator Borah and William Jennings Bryan, beginning to see a sort of prickly heat burn out upon the Unknown Citizen’s forehead, tactfully played a tennis match to keep the crowd in good humour. Laddie Boy, wagging his tail vigorously, kept at the Unknown Citizen’s heels and did much to cheer him. The Unknown Citizen liked Mr. Harding greatly and found him easy to talk to; but some of the Special Representatives from abroad, such as Mr. Balfour and M. Tardieu, he found difficult.