Chapter III: Haggis and Bagpipes (1)

Haggis should always be served with bagpipes. The reason for this will be explained later.

In our recipes we always try to give the easiest way in which our favourite dishes may be attained. The easiest way to enjoy Haggis is to enlist the assistance of a number of Scotsmen, who by tradition, training, temperament, and centuries of romantic strife have fitted themselves to prepare and eat this sovereign piece of resistance.

Make friends, therefore, with as many prominent local Scots as possible. Season the mixture by adding a few directors of some well-known Scottish steamship companies. These friendships must be cultivated gently and cannot be unduly hurried. Subscribe to the _Caledonian_ or some other Scottish-American magazine. Eventually, if all goes well, you may be invited to a dinner of the Caledonian Club or the St. Andrews Society, or a luncheon on an Anchor Line steamship. At this dinner The Haggis will be served.

The bagpipes are for the purpose of muffling any metaphysical argument that may arise round the tables, and also to drown out any stories that begin “There was a man frae Aberdeen----”

Do not ask your neighbour at table why it is that the pipes always play the same tune. If you do, you will not be invited again. It is better to garnish the occasion with a few carefully chosen Scottish phrases--such as _’Tis a braw day the day_; _I’ll no can keep that appointment for three o’clock_; _Let the world gang tapsalteerie_; _Whaur’s Wullie Shaksper noo?_

ADVENTURES OF A CURRICULAR ENGINEER

Having made up our mind to become an engineer, we thought it would be a mistake not to take advantage of all possible aid. We were passing the corner of Church and Fulton streets just now when we saw, in a drugstore, a fair young lady sitting in the window conducting a demonstration of Violet Rays. She wore a most appealing expression, held in her hand a glass tube with a bulbous end which was filled with pale blue electrical excitement, and was displaying various placards inviting the public to enjoy a free treatment of the Violet Ray. This Ray, her placards said, confers all imaginable pleasures and animations upon the user. It subdues inflammations and tumescences; it imparts the vigorous glow of health and beauty; it dispels lethargy and that Omar Khayyám kind of feeling that we get on a warm day in spring; it confers (so we gathered) all the benefits of Pelmanism without having to read George Creel’s little essays.

A large crowd of loitering gentry stood at the window watching the lady who was applying the Violet Ray to her own person and getting more seemly every moment. But none of them, self-satisfied chaps apparently, seemed eager to try the effect of the sparks when she pushed them towards the pane. But we, in our humility, feeling the need of greater ambition and resoluteness, offered our hand to the thunder-stone and absorbed as much of the life-giving current as she was willing to give away. We felt sure, somehow, that the Violet Ray would help us in learning to understand our new self-propelled vehicle. (We have to call it that, for to call it a _car_ is a little too imposing; and to call it a flivver is a little too degraded; besides, it isn’t. Hereafter we shall call her by her given name, which is Dame Quickly.)

Our first adventures with Dame Quickly, by the way, were not devoid of excitement. One who on his second day as a curricular engineer, navigates the main roads of Long Island on Decoration Day may be said to be a daring soul. Titania, who was with us, says that our publisher passed by in his limousine and looked annoyed because we did not acknowledge his friendly gesture; but, indeed, all the concentrated powers of our retinal system were focussed upon the highway, and even if he docks our royalties for rudeness we cannot help it. We noticed, however, that the drivers who overhauled us as we prowled cautiously along had a way of looking sideways at us in a fixed, not exactly hostile, but at any rate curious gaze, as though to reassure themselves as to what kind of person this was. We remained bland and undismayed, for we are still a driver without spirit; we will give any man as much of the road as he wants; we have no sense of humiliation, nor any competitive lust. Any collisions that Dame Quickly suffers will occur only in her rearward parts.

Oyster Bay, we aver, is a dangerous place to be on the afternoon of Decoration Day. We reached that amiable town around two hours post meridiem, exceedingly hungry from our anxieties en route. As we unobtrusively trundled along the main street our general nervousness was not allayed by the spectacle of a motor fire engine rushing towards us at full speed. Our general idea was to attract as little attention as possible, so we made a bashful détour among back ways. To our horror, there was another fire engine, also roaring along at a furious pace. The whole town of Oyster Bay is burning up, was our thought; however, that is a small matter compared to getting this vehicle to a safe place where we can eat lunch and at the same time watch her with a paternal eye. (Our neighbour in Salamis had said something about new cars getting stolen, and we had a dreadful vision of being trailed along the highways by an experienced crook who would get away with Dame Quickly if we left her unwatched for five minutes.) But every time we approached the main street, trying to slip in unobserved, either a man on a motor bike would rush up and shout something quite unintelligible or else we would hear the roar of another fire engine dashing about. Gradually we divined that a number of Long Island fire departments were having their annual competition; but the fact that it was only a game, and not a real fire, made things worse. No fire engine would go to a real fire with the furious zest with which those fellows sped up and down the street. So, chivvied about by fire engines and cops, we had to take lunch at the only place we could approach unobserved, a very small hash-house which, since we cannot praise, we will not mention.

However, we had cause, later, to be grateful to these fire engines that had so terrified us. For, after some delightful rambling by blue watersides and under green colonnades of ancient trees, we found ourselves endeavouring to shake off the pursuing traffic on a remote and hilly byroad. We shall not go into the why and how of this matter, but the fact is that at one moment the honourable and shining Dame Quickly might have been seen docilely purring along the road; and then, a few minutes later, she was insecurely suspended half over the slope of a steep ravine, quite immovable. The curricular engineer wrung his hands. This, he asserted, is the End. With beaded brow he made some amateurish play with logs of wood that he found in that solitary woodland; but the back wheels of the beautiful, the lovely, the spirited Dame Quickly only revolved grindingly in the sand, and her commodious form hung inert, not to say in peril. Then did the engineer realize that, even on such short acquaintance, he loved her already; and the thought of intrusting her sweet body to the harsh hands of an alien garage man was poisonous. And if we leave her to go back to a garage, we thought, the earth will give; she will plunge to her doom. Titania, we think, prayed.

And then, gods from the machine, here came the Glen Cove Fire Department, some twenty strong, merrily speeding past. What they were doing up this bosky bypath we did not halt to inquire. The hand of Providence, patently, was at work. When the hand of Providence appears, one does not stop to inquire into its palmistry. We laid, bashfully, our case before these great-hearted lads. With a shout they seized our dear Mrs. Quickly; strong arms and gallant hearts of Glen Cove bore her up the perilous precipice; she stood again on level roadway, catching the sun on her noble enamel. The task accomplished, the Glen Cove Fire Department, with their two red engines behind them, looked humorously at us and seemed tacitly to inquire how any sane man would get into such a position. We said, sheepishly, a word of explanation. They roared with laughter.

SANTAYANA IN THE SUBWAY

To confess one’s self to have had a seizure of pure happiness is, by one theory, to admit one’s self a boob.

And yet we do not know when we have been more happy--in our own secret definition of that state--than when we set off for the subway yesterday noon-time. A more timid or more subtle spirit, perhaps, would not dare the envy of the gods by mentioning it. A fig for the gods!

For, in the first place, that clear pearly light, the patchwork of sun and shadow down the harsh channel of Broadway, the close embrace of wintry air (so dartingly cold that it seemed to enfold and surround one as water does the bather) and the great Singer tower lifting above the cliffs in a tender wash of blue--these were enough of themselves to make one lively. Again, we were bound uptown on an errand of pure generosity, to turn over to a publisher the MS. of a book written by a friend of ours, which we believe to be a fine book. Further, we even considered it possible that the publisher might buy our lunch.

We went down into the subway, and clanked through the turnstile. The thought occurred to us that it seems pretty poor sportsmanship to make merry--as some of the papers have been doing--over the fact that many people have devised ways of bilking the turnstiles. We suppose we shall be accused of having been bought with mickle gold, but we must admit that we have never had any hankering to cheat the subway. There are many corporations we would cheat without a qualm, but the subway is not one of them. It gives us more for a nickel--not only in the way of transportation, but also privacy, mental relaxation, and scrutiny of the human scene--than anything else we know.

We stood in the subway express, about to open a book. We noticed, sitting a little farther along, a young woman whose hat interested us. It was pierced in front by a pin of silver and brilliants, zigzag in shape, representing (we supposed) a bolt of lightning. It was emblematic, we opined, of high-spirited humanity itself, that toys with lightning in more ways than one. This of itself, while valuable for meditation, was not the cause of our happiness. We had a book with us, a book that we have wanted to read for some time. We began to read it.

It was not necessary to travel more than a few lines to be perfectly happy. Why were we happy? We could write many pages to try to explain it to you, and even then should probably fail. This is what we read:

About the middle of the nineteenth century, in the quiet
sunshine of provincial prosperity, New England had an Indian
summer of the mind; and an agreeable reflective literature
showed how brilliant that russet and yellow season could be.
There were poets, historians, orators, preachers, most of
whom had studied foreign literatures and had travelled; they
demurely kept up with the times; they were universal humanists.
But it was all a harvest of leaves; these worthies had an
expurgated and barren conception of life; theirs was the purity
of sweet old age. Sometimes they made attempts to rejuvenate
their minds by broaching native subjects; they wished to prove
how much matter for poetry the new world supplied, and they
wrote “Rip van Winkle,” “Hia----”

That was exactly the first page, as we read it; we needed to go no further to have cause for complete and unblemished satisfaction. There was the kind of writing that we understand, that speaks to us. There, barring the fact that Rip was not written in New England, was that exact, humorous, and telling use of every word--“_demurely_ kept up with the times”; “the purity of sweet old age”--if you don’t get pleasure out of that sort of thing, then there is no use trying to labour it in. And there, in every line and syllable, was exactly what we had expected to find--a genuine Intellect speaking, and not a pseudo and jejuvenile “Young Intellectual.” There were urbanity, charm, the word well-weighed, the strong, reticulated thought. To go into private minutiæ, we even had additional pleasure from the fact that the usage of the semicolons (a matter of great delight to some enthusiasts) conformed to our own private sense of felicity. And we gazed about the car in a tranquil ecstasy.

The book was George Santayana’s _Character and Opinion in the United States_.

We said to ourself, in a kind of anger (for truly a certain ingredient of anger is necessary for complete happiness; a zealous espousal of what one believes to be worth while carries with it the most cheerful flush of irritation towards those who have not, one thinks, sufficiently espoused it)--we said, Why is it that no one has hitherto driven in upon our mind that this book (published a year ago) is one that we could not possibly get along without? Why is it that our admirable colleague L. E. W., from whom we borrowed it, did not long ago come and sit on our desk and talk to us, endlessly, calmly, suasively, about it and about?

We went on reading, and stood there in as perfectly felicitous an absorption as we have ever enjoyed. We could have said to that golden instant, as Mephistopheles promised Faust he would be able to say, “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!” We had committed Grand Larceny. We had achieved what the news headlines daily describe as a “Daring Robbery.” We had stolen, from uncajolable and endless Time, a Perfect Moment.

We see you smile gravely, and perhaps pityingly, at our simplicity. Never mind. We shall never forget the mood of serene peacefulness and cheer in which we then turned to Mr. Santayana’s preface and began to read:

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long
winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic
Christendom--picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode--may be
coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for
despair....

Ah, we said to ourself, that is the kind of writing that makes us truly happy!

* * * * *

We cannot remember when we have marvelled more truly at the pregnancy, the wit, and the exquisite under-piercing insight of any book. We should like to ask those competent to speak--certainly we ourself are not competent; and it is the sheerest bumptiousness for us even to offer an opinion on a book so consummately wise and lovely--whether there has ever been written any more thrillingly potent examination of a whole civilization? In a book so packed and rifted with gold one knows not where to start quoting; but almost at random we seize this passage--not by any means one of the subtlest, but it will serve to begin with:

... The American is imaginative; for where life is intense,
imagination is intense also. Were he not imaginative he
would not live so much in the future. But his imagination is
practical, and the future it forecasts is immediate; it works
with the clearest and least ambiguous terms known to his
experience, in terms of number, measure, contrivance, economy,
and speed. He is an idealist working on matter. Understanding
as he does the material potentialities of things, he is
successful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in
emergencies. All his life he jumps into the train after it has
started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once
gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

Or, if you prefer, consider this:

That philosophers should be professors is an accident,
and almost an anomaly. Free reflection about everything
is a habit to be imitated, but not a subject to expound;
and an original system, if the philosopher has one, is
something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be
taught, nor is there much danger that any one will learn
it. The genuine philosopher--as Royce liked to say, quoting
the Upanishads--wanders alone like the rhinoceros.... If
philosophers must earn their living and not beg (which some
of them have thought more consonant with their vocation), it
would be safer for them to polish lenses like Spinoza, or to
sit in a black skull-cap and white beard at the door of some
unfrequented museum, selling the catalogues and taking in the
umbrellas; these innocent ways of earning their breadcard in
the future republic would not prejudice their meditations
and would keep their eyes fixed, without undue affection, on
a characteristic bit of that real world which it is their
business to understand.... At best, the true philosopher can
fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself
or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves
in the same boat. It is not easy for him to shout, or address a
crowd; he must be silent for long seasons; for he is watching
stars that move slowly and in courses that it is possible
though difficult to foresee, and he is crushing all things in
his heart as a winepress until his life and their secret flow
out together.

You understand (don’t you?) that we do not necessarily recommend Santayana for _you_. As we grow, painfully, in sagacity, we realize the absurdity of recommending anything to anybody. We are simply saying that for us he fulfils (both in what we agree with and what we dissent from) most of the requirements of our private conception of beauty and happiness.

It is a book that quickens the mind. Continuing it on the train, as the smoking car spins through those green Long Island meadows, we look round on our fellow travellers with renewed amazement. Somehow it gives us a strange pleasure to see them immersed in the _Evening Journal_ or the _Evening World_, those grotesque monuments of human frailty. How damnable it would be if they were all reading Santayana. How we should hate them! We know that all humanity are precious fools, and ourself the most arrant of the lot; but we like them that way. It adds to the cheerful comedy of the scene.

Certainly you would have said that two names that sound something alike are at opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum--Santayana and Pollyanna. And yet, oddly enough, the thought has come to us that the foundations of the two philosophies interlock. Santayana’s method of extracting happiness from life; his perfection of cool, tender, smiling, grave, cruel, and imperturbable resignation; the exquisitely sophisticated contentment of his solitude, flight from needless buzbuz, reverie in places haunted by old association; his noble ridicule of destiny--all this brings to a reasonably sophisticated mind the same kind of heavenly refreshment and sense of truth that simpler people find in literature of the Pollyanna sort.

We vented this tentative idea to some colleagues of ours, and they leapt upon us with shouts of anger and contradiction.

Yet we think there is something in it. There is no way of assessing the operations of other people’s minds. But we are inclined to think that very possibly the pure happiness we experience in Mr. Santayana’s calm, humorous, disillusioned, and poetic reveries is not essentially different from the cheerful exaltation some young woman feels reading either of the Mrs. Porters in the Y. W. C. A.

MADONNA OF THE TAXIS

Speaking of commuting, the Long Island Railroad owes us $7, and we are wondering how long it will take us to collect it.

The incident, tragic as it was, will prove a lesson to us never again to be unfaithful to our beloved Brooklyn.

On Wednesday evening we had to decide whether we would take the train for Salamis from the Penn. Station or from Brooklyn. We decided we would take it from Penn. Station, because we were without reading matter, and knew that at Penn. Station we could stop in at the bookshop in the Arcade and get something to amuse us en route. All began merrily. We got to the station at 9 o’clock, bought an Everyman edition of Kit Marlowe’s plays, and, well supplied with tobacco, we set sail on the 9:10 vehicle. How excellent are the resources of civilization, said we to ourself, as we retraced the sorrows of Dr. Faustus. Here we are, we cried, sitting at ease in a brilliantly lighted smoker reading “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,” and in fifty minutes we will greet again the shabby but well-loved station at Salamis. We even meditated writing a little verse in Marlowe’s own vein, to be called “The Passionate Long Islander to His Love”:

Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
That Patchogue, Speonk, Hempstead fields,
Ronkonkoma or Yaphank yields.

At this moment, which was 9:15, and just issuing from the tunnel, the train stopped, all lights went out, and we sat gazing at the dreary dormitory of Pullman cars in Long Island City.

For thirty-six minutes we sat so. Occasionally there would be the sound of a heavy sigh, a long-drawn suspiration of some mentally troubled commuter whose feels (in the language of Opal Whiteley) were not satisfaction feels; but commuters are a tested and toughened lot. The time lagged heavily and darkly by, but there was no shrill outcry, no futile beating of the breast. One shining thought there was to console, and the conductor ratified it (we asked him ourself). “Oh, yes,” he said, “the Oyster Bay connection waits for this train at Jamaica.” We envisaged the picture of that battered and faithful old Oyster Bay loco, waiting patiently for its lovers along the windy platform, and we were heartened.

But when we got to Jamaica, the old harridan steam train had gone.

Then, indeed, hearts were broken. Then there was scudding to and fro, and voices raised in menace and imprecation. The next train to Oyster Bay, said the officials, leaves at 12:10. The mourners gathered in little groups, drawn by their several affinities. Those who yearned for Garden City formed one posse. Those who yearned for Babylon and Bayshore, another. But, let it proudly be said, the Oyster Bay group were the loudest in outcry, the angriest in mood. We have a pride of our own on the Oyster Bay branch. (“Cut was the branch that might have gone full straight.”) In Salamis alone, Gen. Pershing is living there, and Dorothy Gish visits sometimes. Are we to be trifled with? Off went the Oyster Bay contingent, some twenty angry, to see the Station Master. Words were passed, without avail.

We ourself are a realist at such moments. We saw that the Station Master held no balm for the sufferers. We fled from the brutal scene. Downstairs one taxi, the only one, was just embarking a passenger and wheeling off. For an instant (we confess it) our nerve was shaken. We screamed, and there was in that scream the dreadful keening note of a lioness balked of her whelps or a commuter ravished of his train. Ha! the taxi halted. It was, strangely enough, a lady chauffeur, and tender of heart. No man chauffeur would have halted at such a time, but this madonna of taxi drivers had a bosom of pity. Her fare, already in situ, was bound for Garden City. They agreed to take us along, and after Garden City had been made she would steer for Salamis.

O Lady Taxi Driver of Jamaica, a benison befall thee. The wind roared stiffly across the plains, and the small henry made leeway. The small henry scuttled like a dog, half sideways, nosing several points upward into the gale in order to pursue a straight course. The other passenger was plainly a Man of Large Affairs, sunk in a generous melancholy. There was little talk. We sat, or, when the roadway required it, leaped aloft like striking trout. Garden City was duly reached, and then, by and by, the woody glens of Salamis Heights. The fare we paid our saviour was $7. We did not grudge it her. She has a seven-year-old boy, and all day she keeps house, all night she runs her taxi. But, in candour, we think the railroad owes us that $7. It has ever been held a point of honour that the Oyster Bay train shall wait for its children. When there are only two after-dinner trains, that seems not much to ask.

If we had gone from Brooklyn, all would have been well.

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND EXODONTIA

I

This year (1922) brings the centennial of Matthew Arnold’s birth. Except for a few of his more important poems, we confess to an affectionate ignorance about Arnold. Of course, we remember taking notes during a number of lectures about him when we were at college; a few catchwords about culture and anarchy; sweetness and light; seeing life steadily and seeing it whole; Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace--a few faded buntings of this sort flutter rather dingily from the halliards of our memory; and we remember that he had exceptionally fine whiskers. We used to speculate, in the jejune manner of youth, as to whether Matt, as Rugby boy and Oxford undergraduate, was not a rather amusing contrast to the robust Tom Brown whom his father made famous. But, as you will see, Arnold has never been more than an interesting and gracious wraith in our mind. Those of his essays that we were told to reread we have forgotten, or else (more likely) we never opened.

But rambling not long ago in the cellar of Mr. Mendoza’s bookshop on Ann Street we found, with a shock of excitement, a little book published in Boston in 1888, called _Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America_, by Matthew Arnold. We wondered whether this little book had ever been perused by any of the vigorous skeptics who published a recent large volume with the same title. They made, as far as we can recall, no allusion to it. Yet they would have found in it much nourishing meat.

Matthew Arnold’s analysis of American life is interesting to read now. Much of his estimate he would certainly wish to revise. We forget just when it was that he travelled over here--in the 80’s, we suppose--but his general comment was that American civilization was not _interesting_. He used the word in a very special sense, apparently; he explains it by mentioning the sense of beauty and the sense of distinction. He found American life lacking in charm and in those elements of beauty which appeal to the tranquil and more reflective emotions. It is entertaining--in view of later developments--to hear him say that “the American cities have hardly anything to please a trained or a natural sense for beauty ... where the Americans succeed best in their architecture--in that art so indicative and educative of a people’s sense for beauty--is in the fashion of their villa-cottages in wood.” One cannot help putting a little covey of exclamation marks in the margin at that point. Those “villa-cottages in wood” of the 1880’s are now the jest and rapidly vanishing pox of our suburbs. Even to Abraham Lincoln, by the way, he denies “distinction.” He says, “shrewd, sagacious, humorous, honest, courageous, firm; a man with qualities deserving the most sincere esteem and praise, but he has not distinction.” We have read somewhere (it is an unforgettable crumb of human oddity) that Arnold was chiefly interested in Lincoln’s assassination because the murderer shouted in Latin as he leapt on the stage.

There is much that might be said about a point of view so sincere, so sympathetic, so bravely honest, and yet so lacking in some qualities of imagination as that we seem to find in Arnold’s book. But what we want to quote is a portion of his comment on the American newspapers. Perhaps it is more nearly true still--and, since Northcliffe, more nearly true of British newspapers also--than any other part of his remarks. But we wish to quote it without either assent or denial. He wrote:

You must have lived amongst their newspapers to know what they
are. If I relate some of my own experiences, it is because
these will give a clear enough notion of what the newspapers
over there are, and one remembers more definitely what has
happened to oneself. Soon after arriving in Boston I opened a
Boston newspaper and came upon a column headed: “Tickings.”
By _tickings_ we are to understand news conveyed through the
tickings of the telegraph. The first “ticking” was: “Matthew
Arnold is sixty-two years old”--an age, I must just say in
passing, which I had not then reached. The second “ticking”
was: “Wales says, Mary is a darling”; the meaning being that
the Prince of Wales expressed great admiration for Miss Mary
Anderson. This was at Boston, the American Athens. I proceeded
to Chicago. An evening paper was given me soon after I arrived;
I opened it, and found under a large-type heading, “_We have
seen him arrive_,” the following picture of myself: “He has
harsh features, supercilious manners, parts his hair down the
middle, wears a single eyeglass and ill-fitting clothes.”
Notwithstanding this rather unfavourable introduction, I was
most kindly and hospitably received at Chicago. It happened
that I had a letter for Mr. Medill, an elderly gentleman of
Scotch descent, the editor of the chief newspaper in those
parts, the Chicago _Tribune_. I called on him, and we conversed
amicably together. Some time afterwards, when I had gone back
to England, a New York paper published a criticism of Chicago
and its people, purporting to have been contributed by me to
the _Pall Mall Gazette_ over here. It was a poor hoax, but many
people were taken in and were excusably angry, Mr. Medill of
the Chicago _Tribune_ amongst the number. A friend telegraphed
to me to know if I had written the criticism. I, of course,
instantly telegraphed back that I had not written a syllable
of it. Then a Chicago paper is sent to me; and what I have the
pleasure of reading, as the result of my contradiction, is
this: “Arnold denies; Mr. Medill refuses to accept Arnold’s
disclaimer; says Arnold is a cur.”

There were California boosters even then, we note. Arnold quotes a Coast newspaper which called all Easterners “the unhappy denizens of a forbidding clime,” and added: “The time will surely come when all roads will lead to California. Here will be the home of art, science, literature, and profound knowledge.”

II

You probably thought (and justly) that we cut off Matthew Arnold rather abruptly yesterday. Well, we did; but there’s always a reason for everything. We had to hurry uptown, by order of Dr. James Kendall Burgess, the philosophical dentist, to call on Dr. Hillel Feldman for some exodontia. In the old days, we dare say, it would have been called having a tooth pulled, but we like the word exodontia much better.

Now, since we have always been candid with our clients, we will admit that we were a bit nervous. Of course, we knew that these operations rarely turn out fatally; but still, we could see, as soon as we got into that medical office building at 616 Madison Avenue, that we were out of our element. Everywhere there were trained nurses in uniform--going about on “errands of mercy,” we supposed. There was one near the elevator downstairs; there was another in the corridor upstairs; and the soothing, tender way they asked what we wanted made us, somehow, even more conscious of the painful nature of our errand.

However, another of our habits came somewhat to our rescue when we found ourself sitting in Dr. Feldman’s chair. We are timid, we admit; but we are also inquisitive and like to know the details of what’s going on. We could see right away that Dr. Feldman is a tactful man, for he keeps his instruments under a neat little napkin so that you don’t have a chance to be alarmed by all those interesting gouges and pincers. Dr. Feldman immediately pierced our jaw with some stuff he called novocaine, and then, quite as though this was a very commonplace proceeding, began to chat leisurely. “You know,” he said, “a fellow can’t read your things in the paper just for a laugh. Those other fellows’ columns, you can read them and get some fun out of it; but your stuff, you have to read carefully and wade through a long slab to see what it’s all about.”

“Yes,” we said, “we’re like you, Doctor. We believe in giving our patients discipline--making them suffer.”

Now, of course, we said this hoping to give Dr. Feldman a chance to say right away, “Oh, I’m not going to make you suffer. This won’t hurt a bit.”

He didn’t say it, however. He chuckled in a way that seemed to us a trifle threatening. We hastened to appease him by saying some complimentary things about his shining, complicated apparatuses. To our displeasure we found that our jaw now had a numb and frozen feeling, so that we could not talk properly. We could only mumble.

The calm, genial way in which Dr. Feldman sized us up as we sat there with our jaw getting more and more queer--a curious sensation of mingled freezing and heat--reassured us a little. “Does the novocaine make perspiration come out on your forehead like that?” he asked, with a sort of intellectual curiosity. “No, no,” we hastened to say, out of the other side of our mouth. “We’ve been hurrying to get here, Doctor. Didn’t want to keep you waiting.” That was true; but we were afraid he would think we were scared. He began to toy gently with the corner of the napkin on his instrument stand. We were tremendously eager to see what kind of tools he had concealed there. But he outwitted us. He suddenly uttered the excellent words we had been hoping for. “This’ll be absolutely painless,” he said, and then with great gusto and alacrity he sprang upon us. There was a sound rather like grinding out a stone that is imbedded in a frozen pond. It was very interesting. We think the adverb _absolutely_ perhaps was a trifle too strong: perhaps a precisian in words might substitute _almost_; but at any rate our sense of excitement far outweighed any small twinges. By the time we thought that he was getting well started, “That’s all,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better have a little stimulant.”

Well, naturally, by this time we felt that Dr. Feldman was one of the best friends we had ever had. We shook his hand warmly and assured him we wouldn’t have missed the adventure for anything. Then we went to browse for a few minutes in the second-hand bookshops on Fifty-ninth Street to think it over. We called on Mr. Mitchell Kennerley at the Anderson Galleries. As our jaw was still very much frostbitten, we couldn’t talk very clearly, and we had to hold our pipe in an unaccustomed corner of our mouth. We fear he misunderstood our condition; but he was too polite to say so. Our mind went back to Matthew Arnold.

Matthew Arnold, as we were saying, complained that American civilization was not _interesting_. A silly thing to say, it seems to us. He meant, evidently, that it did not supply the kind of interest to which he was accustomed, or for which he yearned. For surely, to any one ready to lay aside preconceptions, _interesting_ is exactly what American life has always been. We reflected that the one word we instinctively used in explaining to Dr. Feldman how we had enjoyed our visit to him was just that--_interesting_. We feel that if Arnold had been a little more courageously imaginative he might have felt the same way about America. It may very truly have troubled some of his sensitive nerves; it may have caused him terror and shuddering; it may have seemed violent and tragic; but surely he might have seen that it was a teeming laboratory of life and amazement. We believe, by the way, that it was 1883 when he was first here; for we have just noticed in Mendoza’s bookshop a copy of Arnold’s poems autographed by him for a lady, and dated 1883. It was an American edition, so probably he signed it while in this country.

Mr. Arnold’s comments on American newspapers, we should like to add, were perhaps just a little scarce in humour. It is all very well to stand aghast at the jocular irreverence of much newspaper writing; but evidently it never occurred to Arnold that much of it is not mere vulgarity but expresses a national sense of gusto and hilarity that is far from a bad thing.

We cannot resist concluding this too brief excursus by quoting a letter which came to us from a mysterious correspondent--whom we know only by the initials N. O. N. P. It seems to us the most charming portrait of Arnold that we have ever seen. N. O. N. P. wrote:

There is no art to read the mind’s construction in the face;
but it is possible to see the correspondence, after the cypher
has been well de-coded. Matthew Arnold--a plain face--a
plain brow--dark hair, parted exactly in the middle--and
cheek whiskers! A long nose, slightly thick, and drooping--a
wide plaster of mouth, firm but highly sensitive--a six-foot
stature and slim build--a scholastic figure and face and
cut--tutorial, perhaps; and in that plain face the expression
of _im_pression--that is, the visible result of sensitiveness.
Every pre-natal and post-natal fineness of his rarely fine,
high, sincere mind pervaded the texture of his countenance and
gave its stamp of authentic quality to render nugatory anything
that might seem superficially to counteract the inherent
integrity. Superficially, it might have seemed (perhaps) a smug
face or a supercilious one; not inwardly. Inward daintiness
might have been there, as there certainly was fastidiousness,
if not a frigidity. But a warm heart corresponded to that
mouth, which was thick without seeming sensual, and back of
that face was a just, a clear, a steady mind, a heat for right
and truth, a manly spirit with a manly intellect, a manly sense
of clean beauty--and with whatever æsthetic narrowings (if
they existed), a broad, direct, noble simplicity and humanity.
I hope he will verily have his reward, for in his brave,
unwhining, spotless life, he did most valuable, intelligent
drudgery for his bread; and out of a beautiful gift composed
the loftiest, simplest, broadest, gravest, most reserved and
felt, and perhaps most musical and moving poem (as pure poem)
of his generation--_Sohrab and Rustum_. It lacks all the
prettinesses of his contemporaries, but is the sole product of
his time, in “The Grand Style”--this, however, being of course
only the individual opinion of the present commenter.

If a man, one hundred years after his birth, still evokes such graceful and pensive homage, he has evidently some durable claim upon our hearts. Ever since our teens we have wondered what _Sohrab and Rustum_ was about and why it was always assigned as required study for College Entrance. Now we intend to read it.

DAME QUICKLY AND THE BOILROASTER

Something had happened to Dame Quickly’s storage battery, and all the amperes seemed to have escaped. An extremely friendly and cheerful young man came up from Fred Seaman’s garage, with mysterious medical-looking instruments, to grant a consultation. In the course of the chat he remarked, “If you once ride in a _Boilroaster_ car, you’ll never be satisfied with any other.”

His energetic hands were at that moment deep in our loved Dame Quickly’s mechanisms; she was wholly at his mercy; naturally we did not feel like contradicting him or saying anything tactless. We wondered, but only privately, whether the fact that Fred Seaman is the local agent for the _Boilroaster_ had anything to do with this comment? Or perhaps, we thought to ourself, our friend the battery expert really is a convinced enthusiast for the _Boilroaster_, and felt that way about it before he took a job at Fred Seaman’s establishment? We were sorry that William James was dead, for we felt that the author of _The Will to Believe_ would be the man to whom to submit this philosophical problem. We were puzzled, because only a few days earlier another man had said to us (with an equal accent of decisiveness and conviction) that he would rather have a Dame Quickly than any _Boilroaster_ ever made. “They stand up better than any of ’em,” he had said. Suddenly it occurred to us how useful it would be if there were some kind of spiritual gauge--like the hydrometer our friend was plunging into the cells of the Dame’s battery--which one could dip into a man’s mind to test the intellectual mixture of his remarks; to evaluate the proportions of those various liquids (the strong acid of self-interest, the mild distilled water of candour, etc.) which electrify his mental ignition.

Well, how about the _Boilroaster_, we said--(searching for a technical term that would show him we are a practical man)--Do they stand up?

He suggested that we get into his own _Boilroaster_, which stood grandly overshining the dusty Dame (reminding us of those pictures where a silhouette of the new _Majestic_ is placed behind a little picture of the _Teutonic_ or some other humble ship of older days) and take a run around Salamis while he tinkered with the battery.

Oh, no, we said nervously. Dame Quickly is the only car we know how to run, and besides the gear shift is different in the _Boilroaster_; we might get confused and have to come all the way home in reverse, which would be bad for our reputation in the village.

Have you ever ridden in the _Boilroaster_? he asked.

Yes, we said--Fred Seaman took us over to Locust Valley the other evening. (Suddenly a horrid thought struck us. We had thought that Fred had given us that lift over to Locust Valley just in the goodness of his heart. But now we wondered----)

When he left, he put in our hand a handsome book all about the _Boilroaster_. That, we felt, was the first step in breaking down our “sales resistance,” as they say in the _Business e19 Course_ up at Columbia.

We’ve been reading that book, and we want to say that the chaps who write that sort of literature are cunning fellows, and masters of a very insinuating prose style. They begin with a very pretty frontispiece of a _Boilroaster_ car standing, all alone and dazzling-new, in a magnificent landscape of snow-clad peaks and clear lakes. How the _Boilroaster_ got way up there (evidently somewhere near Banff) without any one driving her, and without even a speck of dust on her fenders, is a mystery. But there she is. Perhaps the man who drove her all those miles from the nearest distributing agency is at the bar of the C. P. R. Hotel, off behind those pine forests.

All the highbrow critics will tell you that the truly great writers are lovers of Beauty. Well, the anonymous author of the _Boilroaster_ book is as keen a champion of Beauty as any one we ever heard of. And not only beauty, but refinement, too. There are two whole pages giving little pictures of “refinements.” This is a book, we think, that could be put in the hands of the young without any hesitation. In fact, that is just where we did put it, for the urchin is cutting out the pictures of _Boilroasters_ at this very minute. The whole trend of Advertising nowadays (we wonder if they mention this in the lectures on Advertising Psychology up at Columbia) is to give delight to children. We would hate to tell the Cunard Line and the International Mercantile Marine Company how many of their folders our juveniles have scissored up with shouts of delight.

The _Boilroaster_ book is going to be a lesson to us. We don’t know if we will ever own a _Boilroaster_, but we are certain that before we do we have got to spruce up and be a bit more genteel. At present, we would be a bit of anticlimax riding in a car like that. There is “new beauty in its double bevel body line.” We want to look a bit more streamline ourself before we go in for one. There are “massive head lamps, graceful cowl lights, the louvres are more in number and their edges show a smart touch of gold.” There is “a courtesy light illuminating the left side of the car,” and a ventilator in the cowl. We don’t know exactly what the cowl is, or the louvres, or at any rate we’ve never discovered them in Dame Quickly.

Just as we are writing this, we see a headline in the papers (in the _Evening Post_, to be accurate) about Sir Charles Higham, who “Sees Advertising as a Great Moral Force.” We know of no writer who has a more solid appreciation of moral forces than the author of our _Boilroaster_ brochure. What he has to say about “sheer merit,” “sound principles,” “elimination of waste,” “combination of beauty and utility,” “superiority and refinement,” “good taste” and “harmony of colour” makes this work a genuine essay in æsthetics. Moreover, we like his rational eclecticism. When the car has a 126-inch wheelbase, it makes it very easy riding and gives it charming “roadability.” When it has a 119-inch wheelbase, it “gives a short turning radius which makes it remarkably easy to handle.” Even in the least details, our author has an eye for loveliness. He confesses himself struck by “the attractive grouping of instruments on the dash, which emphasizes _Boilroaster_ individuality.” The upholstery, he says, is “restful.” The folding seat for the extra passenger is “in reality a comfortable chair.” And when we learn that the opalescent dome and corner lamps “provide enough light for reading,” our only regret is that he doesn’t add a suggested list of readings for tenants of a _Boilroaster_ Enormous Eight.

Unhappily space is lacking to tell you in detail what a competent and winning fellow this author is. In the scientific portions of the work he rivals Fabre--in regard to the clutch, he says “the driven member is a single spider rotating between two rings.” His passion for elegance, comfort, simplicity, and economy has never been surpassed--no, not by Plato or Walter Pater. The only drawback about his essay is that we feel we could never live up to the vehicle he describes.

VACATIONING WITH DE QUINCEY

I

Having severed our telephone wire and instructed the office boys to tell all callers that we are out at lunch, we look forward to a happy summer. We are going to begin enjoying ourself by systematically exploring the books in the library of the _Evening Post_. On a top shelf, well sprinkled with dust, we have found the excellent collected edition of De Quincey, in fourteen volumes, edited by David Masson. It is true that the first four volumes seem to have disappeared; but even if we begin at Volume V we calculate we shall find enough to keep us entertained for some time.

After we have finished De Quincey we are going to tackle P. T. Barnum’s _Struggles and Triumphs_, a book that has long tempted us. We think kindly of the Founding Fathers of the _Post_ for having assembled all these interesting volumes for our pleasure.

We have begun De Quincey with Volume V--_Biographies and Biographic Sketches_. Some of this--particularly the Joan of Arc--has a faintly familiar taste: perhaps we were made to read it at school. But we do not think we ever read before the magnificent essay on Charles Lamb. There is a long interpolated passage about Joan of Arc which does not seem to have anything to do with Lamb. Perhaps the _North British Review_ (in which the essay first appeared in 1848) paid its contributors on a space basis. But, ejecting this parenthesis, it is certainly noble stuff. Moreover, it is interesting to note that at the time De Quincey wrote, Lamb was by no means established on the pinnacle of security as a permanent brightness in our literature. De Quincey writes as though consciously contradicting some opposition. It seems odd to hear him speak of people who “regard him [Lamb] with the old hostility and the old scorn.”

We had intended not to introduce any quotations, for in this very volume De Quincey makes some stinging remarks about people who pad out their copy by interlarding material from stronger fists. But indeed the following passage seems to us so near the top of prose felicity that we lapse from grace:

In regard to wine, Lamb and myself had the same habit, viz.,
to take a great deal _during_ dinner, none _after_ it.
Consequently, as Miss Lamb (who drank only water) retired
almost with the dinner itself, nothing remained for men of our
principles, the rigour of which we had illustrated by taking
rather too much of old port before the cloth was drawn, except
talking; amœbean colloquy, or, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, a
dialogue of “brisk reciprocation.” But this was impossible;
over Lamb, at this period of his life, there passed regularly,
after taking wine, a brief eclipse of sleep. It descended
upon him as softly as a shadow. In a gross person, laden with
superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been
disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and
wiry as an Arab of the desert or as Thomas Aquinas wasted by
scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a
network of aërial gossamer than of earthly cobweb--more like
a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a
cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair
as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly
alive, he presented the image of repose midway between life and
death, like the repose of sculpture; and, to one who knew his
history, a repose affectingly contrasting with the calamities
and internal storms of his life.

De Quincey’s essay on Lamb, like so many of the great critiques of the early nineteenth century, was originally written as a book review. We like to imagine what a _Blackwood_ or _Edinburgh_ reviewer would have said if the editor (in the manner of to-day) had told him to deal with a volume in 500 or 1,000 words. The nineteenth century reviewer took a spacious view of his job. Of this particular essay, which purported to be a notice of Talfourd’s _Final Memorials of Charles Lamb_ (1848), De Quincey said (very nobly):

Liberated from this casual office of throwing light upon a
book, raised to its grander station of a solemn deposition to
the moral capacities of man in conflict with calamity--viewed
as a return made into the chanceries of heaven upon an issue
directed from that court to try the amount of power lodged in
a poor desolate pair of human creatures for facing the very
anarchy of storms--this obscure life of the two Lambs, brother
and sister (for the two lives were one life), rises into
grandeur that is not paralleled once in a generation.

Of course, De Quincey was a celestial kind of reviewer. Not even opium could make most of us write like that. Also he had the right idea about dealing with correspondence and accumulated papers. He used to live in one set of lodgings until the mass of miscellaneous matter filled the room. Then he would move to other quarters, leaving the pile in charge of the landlady. He always took care not to inform her of the new address.

There is a great deal more to be said about this Volume V, but we must skip along. (There is no reason, you know, why you shouldn’t look up the book for yourself.) We will just be generous enough to pass on De Quincey’s anecdote about how Coleridge first became a great reader. Coleridge, as a child, was going down the Strand in a day dream, imagining himself swimming the Hellespont. Moving his hands as though swimming, he happened to touch a gentleman’s pocket. The latter thought him a young pickpocket. “What! so young and yet so wicked?” The boy, terrified, sobbed a denial, and explained that he had been imagining himself as Leander. The gentleman was so pleased that he gave him a subscription to a circulating library.

The next volume of De Quincey that we intend to study is X, in which we find _Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected_. We are rather stricken to note that these were addressed to a young man who was exactly the same age as ourself.