Chapter XIII: Preface: To the Third Edition (1)

The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find most stimulating to production, and therefore in this new edition I am able to include several new poems. "The Ode to a Seamew," the "Fracas on an Ice Floe," and the sequence of triolimericks are all new. If I have been able to convey anything of the bracing vigour of the Nova Zembla _locale_ the praise is due to my friendly and suggestive critic, the editor of _Gooseflesh_, the leading Nova Zemblan review.

Vachel Lindsay's new book, "The Tango," has not yet appeared, therefore I may perhaps say here that he is hard at work on an "Ode to the Gulf Stream," which has great promise.

The success of this little book has been such that I am encouraged to hope that the publisher's exemption of royalties will soon be worked off.

THE SKIPPER

I have been reading again that most delightful of all autobiographies, "A Personal Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. Conrad's mind is so rich, it has been so well mulched by years of vigorous life and sober thinking, that it pushes tendrils of radiant speculation into every crevice of the structure upon which it busies itself. This figure of speech leaves much to be desired and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the trellis growth of Mr. Conrad's memories, here blossoming before the delighted reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine or Virginia creeper, spreading hither and thither, redoubling on itself, branching unexpectedly upon spandrel and espalier, and repeatedly enchanting us with some delicate criss-cross of mental fibres. One hesitates even to suggest that there may be admirers of Mr. Conrad who are not familiar with this picture of his mind--may we call it one of the most remarkable minds that has ever concerned itself with the setting of English words horizontally in parallel lines?

The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have been the first on this continent to appreciate the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad grows numerous indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of O. Henry and the pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. It would be amusing to enumerate the list of those who have assured me (over the sworn secrecy of a table d'hôte white wine) that they read the proof-sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in 1895, etc., etc. For my own part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever heard of Mr. Conrad before December 2, 1911. On that date, which was one day short of the seventeenth anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small club of earnest young men was giving a dinner to Sir Sidney Colvin at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of R.L.S., and when the evening was far spent I remember that someone asked him whether there was any writer of to-day in whom he felt the same passionate interest as in Stevenson, any man now living whose work he thought would prove a permanent enrichment of English literature. Sir Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and sensitive critic, and a sworn enemy of loose statement; let me not then pretend to quote him exactly; but I know that the name he mentioned was that of Joseph Conrad, and it was a new name to me.

Even so, I think it was not until over a year later that first I read one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I am happy to remember that it was "Typhoon," which I read at one sitting in the second-class dining saloon of the _Celtic_, crossing from New York in January, 1913. There was a very violent westerly gale at the time--a famous shove, Captain Conrad would call it--and I remember that the barometer went lower than had ever been recorded before on the western ocean. The piano in the saloon carried away, and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an ideal stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my head through a window I could see excellent combers of green sloshing down into the 'tweendecks.

But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be imitated here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But sometimes, when one sits at midnight by the fainting embers and thinks that of all novelists now living one would most ardently yearn to hear the voice and see the face of Mr. Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in "A Personal Record" one comes as close as typography permits to a fireside chat with the Skipper himself. He tells us that he has never been very well acquainted with the art of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set this down as polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and the famous preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of his genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James, and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who would omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in these informal confessions there are pieces that are destined to be classics of autobiography as it is rarely written.

One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally labelled complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as simple as lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, sincerity--those are the words that stand again and again across his pages. "I have a positive horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first condition of good service." He has carried over to the world of desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says that he has been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he sees, and that the attempt to move others to the extremities of emotion means the surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing one's self to be carried away beyond the bounds of normal sensibility. Self-restraint is the duty, the dignity, the decency of the artist. This, indeed, is the creed of the simple man in every calling; and from this angle it appears that it is the Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are complicated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the great simplicity of life and death.

Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since the synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts as where the writer was born, and when, and the customary demonology of boyhood and courtship and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored. A statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary accountant, would rise from the volume nervously shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was all about. The only person in the book who is accorded any comprehensive biographical résumé is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Nicholas B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to Moscow, and was bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lithuania. To the delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad devotes his most affectionate and tender power of whimsical reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family history make the tragedies of Poland clearer to me than several volumes of historical comment. In his prose of that superbly rich simplicity of texture--it is a commonplace that it seems always like some notable translation from the French--he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes us with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him to his uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And to our delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long chapters constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is waiting for dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable tenderness he reviews the formative contours of boyish memories, telling us the whole mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the only true autobiography ever written: true to the inner secrets of the human soul. It is the passkey to the Master's attitude toward all the dear creations of his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel he has written. What self-revealing words are these: "An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety toward all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales." And when one stops to consider, how essentially impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels of the Slop and Glucose school!

This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything that deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of probability, this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart of Europe was integrated into the greatest living master of those who in our tongue strive to portray the riddles of the human heart--such is the kind of calculus that makes "A Personal Record" unique among textbooks of the soul. It is as impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting out only with the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing less than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. And the sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler would gladly burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and start all over again with truer ideals for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to meet the Skipper face to face.

Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been necessary to invent him, the indescribable improbability of his career speaks so closely to the heart of every lover of literary truth. Who of his heroes is so fascinating to us as he himself? How imperiously, by his own noble example, he recalls us to the service of honourable sincerity. And how poignantly these memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a sob, the smile which is not a grin.

A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD

Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on.

--EDWARD FITZGERALD.

I heard the other day of the death of dear old John Loder, the Woodbridge bookseller, at the age of ninety-two. Though ill equipped to do justice to his memory, it seems to me a duty, and a duty that I take up gladly. It is not often that a young man has the good fortune to know as a friend one who has been a crony of his own grandfather and great-grandfather. Such was my privilege in the case of John Loder, a man whose life was all sturdy simplicity and generous friendship. He shines in no merely reflected light, but in his own native nobility. I think there are a few lovers of England and of books who will be glad not to forget his unobtrusive services to literature. If only John Loder had kept a journal it would be one of the minor treasures of the Victorian Age. He had a racy, original turn of speech, full of the Suffolk lingo that so delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, of the delicacies of rich thought and feeling. He used to lament in his later years that he had not kept a diary as a young man. Alas that his Boswell came too late to do more than snatch at a few of his memories.

There is a little Suffolk town on the salt tidewater of the Deben, some ten miles from the sea. Its roofs of warm red tile are clustered on the hill-slopes that run down toward the river; a massive, gray church tower and a great windmill are conspicuous landmarks. Broad barges and shabby schooners, with ruddy and amber sails, lie at anchor or drop down the river with the tide, bearing the simple sailormen of Mr. W.W. Jacobs's stories. In the old days before the railway it was a considerable port and a town of thriving commerce. But now--well, it is little heard of in the annals of the world.

Yet Woodbridge, unknown to the tourist, has had her pilgrims, too, and her nook in literature. It was there that George Crabbe of Aldeburgh was apprenticed to a local surgeon and wrote his first poem, unhappily entitled "Inebriety." There lived Bernard Barton, "the Quaker poet," a versifier of a very mild sort, but immortal by reason of his friendships with greater men. Addressed to Bernard Barton, in a plain, neat hand, came scores of letters to Woodbridge in the eighteen-twenties, letters now famous, which found their way up Church Street to Alexander's Bank. They were from no less a man than Charles Lamb. Also I have always thought it very much to Woodbridge's credit that a certain Woodbridgian named Pulham was a fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the East India House. Perhaps Mr. Pulham introduced Lamb and Barton to each other. And as birthplace and home of Edward FitzGerald, Woodbridge drew such visitors as Carlyle and Tennyson, who came to seek out the immortal recluse. In the years following FitzGerald's death many a student of books, some all the way from America, found his way into John Loder's shop to gossip about "Old Fitz." In 1893 a few devoted members of the Omar Khayyam Club of London pilgrimaged to Woodbridge to plant by the grave at Boulge (please pronounce "Bowidge") a rosetree that had been raised from seed brought from the bush that sheds its petals over the dust of the tent-maker at Naishapur. In 1909 Woodbridge and Ipswich celebrated the FitzGerald centennial. And Rupert Brooke's father was (I believe) a schoolboy at Woodbridge; alas that another of England's jewels just missed being a Woodbridgian!

Some day, if you are wise, you, too, will take a train at Liverpool Street, and drawn by one of those delightful blue locomotives of the Great Eastern Railway speed through Colchester and Ipswich and finally set foot on the yellow-pebbled platform at Woodbridge. As you step from the stuffy compartment the keen salt Deben air will tingle in your nostrils; and you may discover in it a faint under-whiff of strong tobacco--the undying scent of pipes smoked on the river wall by old Fitz, and in recent years by John Loder himself. If you have your bicycle with you, or are content to hire one, you will find that rolling Suffolk country the most delightful in the world for quiet spinning. (But carry a repair kit, for there are many flints!) Ipswich itself is full of memories--of Chaucer, and Wolsey, and Dickens (it is the "Eatanswill" of Pickwick), and it is much pleasure to one of Suffolk blood to recall that James Harper, the grandfather of the four brothers who founded the great publishing house of Harper and Brothers a century ago, was an Ipswich man, born there in 1740. You will bike to Bury St. Edmunds (where Fitz went to school and our beloved William McFee also!) and Aldeburgh, and Dunwich, to hear the chimes of the sea-drowned abbey ringing under the waves. If you are a Stevensonian, you will hunt out Cockfield Rectory, near Sudbury, where R.L.S. first met Sidney Colvin in 1872. (Colvin himself came from Bealings, only two miles from Woodbridge.) You may ride to Dunmow in Essex, to see the country of Mr. Britling; and to Wigborough, near Colchester, the haunt of Mr. McFee's painter-cousin in "Aliens." You will hire a sailboat at Lime Kiln Quay or the Jetty and bide a moving air and a going tide to drop down to Bawdsey ferry to hunt shark's teeth and amber among the shingle. You will pace the river walk to Kyson--perhaps the tide will be out and sunset tints shimmer over those glossy stretches of mud. Brown seaweed, vivid green samphire, purple flats of slime where the river ran a few hours before, a steel-gray trickle of water in the scour of the channel and a group of stately swans ruffling there; and the huddled red roofs of the town with the stately church tower and the waving arms of the windmill looking down from the hill. It is a scene to ravish an artist. You may walk back by way of Martlesham Heath, stopping at the Red Lion for a quencher (the Red Lion figurehead is supposed to have come from one of the ships of the Armada). It is a different kind of Armada that Woodbridge has to reckon with nowadays. Zeppelins. One dropped a bomb--"dud" it was--in John Loder's garden; the old man had to be restrained from running out to seize it with his own hands.

John Loder was born in Woodbridge, August 3, 1825. His grandfather, Robert Loder, founded the family bookselling and printing business, which continues to-day at the old shop on the Thoroughfare under John Loder's son, Morton Loder. In the days before the railway came through, Woodbridge was the commercial centre for a large section of East Suffolk; it was a busy port, and the quays were crowded with shipping. But when transportation by rail became swift and cheap and the provinces began to deal with London merchants, the little town's prosperity suffered a sad decline. Many of the old Woodbridge shops, of several generations' standing, have had to yield to local branches of the great London "stores." In John Loder's boyhood the book business was at its best. Woodbridgians were great readers, and such prodigal customers as FitzGerald did much to keep the ledgers healthy. John left school at thirteen or so, to learn the trade, and became the traditional printer's devil. He remembered Bernard Barton, the quiet, genial, brown-eyed poet, coming down the street from Alexander's Bank (where he was employed for forty years) with a large pile of banknotes to be renumbered. The poet sat perched on a high stool watching young Loder and his superior do the work. And at noon Mr. Barton sent out to the Royal Oak Tavern near by for a basket of buns and a jug of stout to refresh printer and devil at their work.

Bernard Barton died in 1849, and was kid to rest in the little Friends' burying ground in Turn Lane. That quiet acre will repay the visitor's half-hour tribute to old mortality. My grandmother was buried there, one snowy day in January, 1912, and I remember how old John Loder came forward to the grave, bareheaded and leaning on his stick, to drop a bunch of fresh violets on the coffin.

Many a time I have sat in the quiet, walled-in garden of Burkitt House--that sweet plot of colour and fragrance so pleasantly commemorated by Mr. Mosher in his preface to "In Praise of Old Gardens"--and heard dear old John Loder tell stories of his youth. I remember the verse of Herrick he used to repeat, pointing round his little retreat with a well-stained pipestem:

But walk'st about thine own dear bounds,
Not envying others' larger grounds:
For well thou know'st, 'tis not th' extent
Of land makes life, but sweet content.

Loder's memory used to go back to times that seem almost fabulous now. He had known quite well an English soldier who was on guard over Boney at St. Helena--in fact, he once published in some newspaper this man's observations upon the fallen emperor, but I have not been able to trace the piece. He had been in Paris before the troubles of '48. I believe he served some sort of bookselling apprenticeship on Paternoster Row; at any rate, he used to be in touch with the London book trade as a young man, and made the acquaintance of Bernard Quaritch, one of the world's most famous booksellers. I remember his lamenting that FitzGerald had not dumped the two hundred unsold booklets of Omar upon his counter instead of Quaritch's in 1859. The story goes that they were offered by Quaritch for a penny apiece.

I always used to steer him onto the subject of FitzGerald sooner or later, and it was interesting to hear him tell how many princes of the literary world had come to his shop or had corresponded with him owing to his knowledge of E.F.G. Arme Thackeray gave him a beautiful portrait of herself in return for some courtesy he showed her. Robert H. Groome, the archdeacon of Suffolk, and his brilliant son, Francis Hindes Groome, the "Tarno Rye" (who wrote "Two Suffolk Friends" and was said by Watts Dunton to have known far more about the gipsies than Borrow) were among his correspondents.[D] John Hay, Elihu Vedder, Aldis Wright, Canon Ainger, Thomas B. Mosher, Clement Shorter, Dewitt Miller, Edward Clodd, Leon Vincent--such men as these wrote or came to John Loder when they wanted special news about FitzGerald. FitzGerald had given him a great many curios and personal treasures: Mr. Loder never offered these for sale at any price (anything connected with FitzGerald was sacred to him) but if any one happened along who seemed able to appreciate them he would give them away with delight. He gave to me FitzGerald's old musical scrapbook, which he had treasured for over thirty years. This scrapbook, in perfect condition, contains very beautiful engravings, prints, and drawings of the famous composers, musicians, and operatic stars of whom Fitz was enivré as a young man. Among them are a great many drawings of Handel; FitzGerald, like Samuel Butler, was an enthusiastic Handelian. The pictures are annotated by E.F.G. and there are also two drawings of Beethoven traced by Thackeray. This scrapbook was compiled by FitzGerald when he and Thackeray were living together in London, visiting the Cave of Harmony and revelling in the dear delights of young intellectual companionship. Under a drawing of the famous Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: "As I saw and heard him many nights in the Pit of Covent Garden, in company with W.M. Thackeray, whom I was staying with at the Bedford Coffee House."

[Footnote D: No lover of FitzGerald can afford not to own that exquisite tributary volume "Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath," by Francis Hindes Groome, which Mr. Mosher published in 1902. It tells a great deal about Woodbridge, and is annotated by John Loder. Mr. Mosher was eager to include Loder's portrait in it, but the old man's modesty was always as great as his generosity: he would not consent.]

When I tried, haltingly, to express my thanks for such a gift, the old man said "That's nothing! That's nothing! It'll help to keep you out of mischief. Much better to give 'em away before it's too late!" And he followed it with Canon Ainger's two volumes of Lamb's letters, which Ainger had given him.

Through his long life John Loder lived quietly in Woodbridge, eager and merry in his shop, a great reader, always delighted when any one came in who was qualified to discuss the literature which interested him. He and FitzGerald had long cracks together and perhaps Loder may have accompanied the Woodbridge Omar on some of those trips down the Deben on the _Scandal_ or the _Meum and Tuum_ (the _Mum and Tum_ as Posh, Fitz's sailing master, called her). He played a prominent part in the life of the town, became a Justice of the Peace, and sat regularly on the bench until he was nearly ninety. As he entered upon the years of old age, came a delightful surprise. An old friend of his in the publishing business, whom he had known long before in London, died and left him a handsome legacy by will. Thus his last years were spared from anxiety and he was able to continue his unobtrusive and quiet generosities which had always been his secret delight.

Looking over the preceding paragraphs I am ashamed to see how pale and mumbling a tribute they are to this fine spirit. Could I but put him before you as he was in those last days! I used to go up to Burkitt House to see him: in summer we would sit in the little arbour in the garden, or in winter by the fire in his dining room. He would talk and I would ask him questions; now and then he would get up to pull down a book, or to lead me into his bedroom to see some special treasure. He used to sit in his shirtsleeves, very close to the fire, with his shoe laces untied. In summer he would toddle about in his shaggy blue suit, with a tweed cap over one ear, his grizzled beard and moustache well stained by much smoking, his eyes as bright and his tongue as brisk as ever. Every warm morning would see him down on the river wall; stumping over Market Hill and down Church Street with his stout oak stick, hailing every child he met on the pavement. His pocket was generally full of peppermints, and the youngsters knew well which pocket it was. His long life was a series of original and graceful kindnesses, always to those who needed them most and had no reason to expect them. No recluse he, no fine scholar, no polished litterateur, but a hard-headed, soft-hearted human man of the sturdy old Suffolk breed. Sometimes I think he was, in his own way, just as great a man as the "Old Fitz," whom he loved and reverenced.

He died on November 7, 1917, aged ninety-two years three months and four days. He was extraordinarily sturdy until nearly ninety--he went in bathing in the surf at Felixstowe on his eighty-sixth birthday. Perhaps the sincerest tribute I can pay him is these lines which I copy from my journal, dated July 16, 1913:

"Went up to have tea with old John Loder, and said a cunningly veiled Good-bye to him. I doubt if I shall see him again, the dear old man. I think he felt so, too, for when he came to the door with me, instead of his usual remark about 'Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest,' he said, 'Farewell to thee' in a more sober manner than his wont--and I left with an armful of books which he had given me 'to keep me out of mischief.' We had a good talk after tea--he told me about the adventures of his brothers, one of whom went out to New Zealand. He uses the most delightful brisk phrases in his talk, smiling away to himself and wrinkling up his forehead, which can only be distinguished from his smooth bald pate by its charming corrugation of parallel furrows. He took me into his den while he rummaged through his books to find some which would be acceptable to me--'May as well give 'em away before it's too late, ye know'--and then he settled back in his easy chair to puff at a pipe. I must note down one of his phrases which tickled me--he has such a knack for the proverbial and the epigrammatic. 'He's cut his cloth, he can wear his breeches,' he said of a certain scapegrace. He chuckled over the Suffolk phrase 'a chance child,' for a bastard (alluding to one such of his acquaintance in old days). He constantly speaks of things he wants to do 'before I tarn my toes up to the daisies.' He told me old tales of Woodbridge in the time of the Napoleonic wars when there was a garrison of 5,000 soldiers quartered here--this was one of the regions in which an attack by Boney was greatly feared. He says that the Suffolk phrase 'rafty weather' (meaning mist or fog) originates from that time, as being weather suitable for the French to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat-boats.

"He chuckled over the reminiscence that he was once a great hand at writing obituary notices for the local paper. 'Weep, weep for him who cried for us,' was the first line of his epitaph upon a former Woodbridge town crier! I was thinking that it would be hard to do him justice when the time comes to write his. May he have a swift and painless end such as his genial spirit deserves, and not linger on into a twilight life with failing senses. When his memory and his pipe and his books begin to fail him, when those keen old eyes grow dim and he can no longer go to sniff the salt air on the river-wall--then may the quick and quiet ferryman take dear old John Loder to the shadow land."

A VENTURE IN MYSTICISM

I had heard so much about this Rabbi Tagore and his message of calm for our hustling, feverish life, that I thought I would try to put some of that stuff into practice.

"Shut out the clamour of small things. Withdraw into the deep quiet of your soul, commune with infinite beauty and infinite peace. You must be full of gladness and love for every person and every tiniest thing. Great activity and worry is needless--it is poison to the soul. Learn to reflect, and to brood upon eternal beauty. It is the mystic who finds all that is most precious in life. The flowers of meditation blossom in his heart." I cut out these words and pasted them in my hat. I have always felt that my real genius lies in the direction of philosophic calm. I determined to override the brutal clamour of petty things.

The alarm clock rang as usual at 6.30. Calmly, with nothing but lovely thoughts in my mind, I threw it out of the window. I lay until eight o'clock, communing with infinite peace. I began to see that Professor Tagore was right. My wife asked me if I was going to the office. "I am brooding upon eternal beauty," I told her.

She thought I was ill, and made me take breakfast in bed.

I usually shave every morning, but a moment's thought will convince you that mystics do not do so. I determined to grow a beard. I lit a cigar, and replied "I am a mystic" to all my wife's inquiries.

At nine o'clock came a telephone call from the office. My employer is not a devotee of eternal calm, I fear. When I explained that I was at home reading "Gitanjali," his language was far from mystical. "Get here by ten o'clock or you lose your job," he said.

I was dismayed to see the same old throng in the subway, all the senseless scuffle and the unphilosophic crowd. But I felt full of gladness in my new way of life, full of brotherhood for all the world. "I love you," I said to the guard on the platform. He seized me by the shoulders and rammed me into the crowded car, shouting "Another nut!"

When I reached the office my desk was littered with a hundred papers. The stenographer was at the telephone, trying to pacify someone. "Here he is now," I heard her say.

It was Dennis & Company on the wire.

"How about that carload of Bavarian herrings we were to have yesterday without fail?" said Dennis.

I took the 'phone.

"In God's good time," I said, "the shipment will arrive. The matter is purely ephemeral, after all. If you will attune yourself--"

He rang off.

I turned over the papers on my desk. Looked at with the unclouded eye of a mystic, how mundane and unnecessary all these pettifogging transactions seemed. Two kegs of salt halibut for the Cameron Stores, proofs of the weekly ad. for the _Fishmongers' Journal_, a telegram from the Uptown Fish Morgue, new tires needed for one of the delivery trucks--how could I jeopardize my faculty of meditation by worrying over these trifles? I leaned back in my chair and devoted myself to meditation. After all, the harassing domination of material things can easily be thrown off by a resolute soul. I was full of infinite peace. I seemed to see the future as an ever-widening vista of sublime visions. My soul was thrilled with a universal love of humanity.

The buzzer on my desk sounded. That meant that the boss wanted to see me.

Now, it has always seemed to me that to put one's self at the beck and call of another man is essentially degrading. In the long perspective of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than mine? In this luminous new vision of my importance as a fragment of immortal mind, could I, should I, bow to the force of impertinent trivialities?

I sat back in my chair, full of love of humanity.

By and by the boss appeared at my desk. One look at his face convinced me of the truth of Tagore's saying that great activity is poison to the soul. Certainly his face was poisonous.

"Say," he shouted, "what the devil's the matter with you to-day? Dennis just called me up about that herring order--"

"Master," I said mildly, "be not overwrought. Great activity is a strychnine to the soul. I am a mystic...."

A little later I found myself on the street with two weeks' pay in my pocket. It is true that my departure had been hasty and unpleasant, for the stairway from the office to the street is long and dusty; but I recalled what Professor Tagore had said about vicissitudes being the true revealers of the spirit. My hat was not with me, but I remembered the creed pasted in it. After pacing a block or so, my soul was once more tranquil.

I entered a restaurant. It was the noon hour, and the room was crowded with hurrying waiters and impatient people. I found a vacant seat in a corner and sat down. I concentrated my mind upon the majestic vision of the brotherhood of man.

Gradually I began to feel hungry, but no waiter came near me. Never mind, I thought: to shout and hammer the table as the others do is beneath the dignity of a philosopher. I began to dream of endless vistas of mystical ham and eggs. I brooded upon these for some time, but still no corporeal and physical units of food reached me.

The man next me gradually materialized into my consciousness. Full of love for humanity I spoke to him.

"Brother," I said, "until one of these priestly waiters draws nigh, will you not permit me to sustain myself with one of your rolls and one of your butter-balls? In the great brotherhood of humanity, all that is mine is yours; and _per contra_, all that is yours is mine." Beaming luminously upon him, I laid a friendly hand on his arm.

He leaped up and called the head waiter. "Here's an attic for rent!" he cried coarsely. "He wants to pick my pocket."

By the time I got away from the police station it was dusk, and I felt ready for home. I must say my broodings upon eternal beauty were beginning to be a little forced. As I passed along the crowded street, walking slowly and withdrawn into the quiet of my soul, three people trod upon my heels and a taxi nearly gave me a passport to eternity. I reflected that men were perhaps not yet ready for these doctrines of infinite peace. How much more wise were the animals--and I raised my hand to stroke a huge dray-horse by the pavement. He seized my fingers in his teeth and nipped them vigorously.

I gave a yell and ran full tilt to the nearest subway entrance. I burst into the mass of struggling, unphilosophic humanity and fought, shoved, cursed, and buffeted with them. I pushed three old ladies to one side to snatch my ticket before they could get theirs. I leaped into the car at the head of a flying wedge of sinful, unmystical men, who knew nothing of infinite beauty and peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit clergyman outside, and I hope he fell on the third rail. As I felt the lurching, trampling, throttling jam of humanity sway to and fro with the motion of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess it?--I was perfectly happy!

AN OXFORD LANDLADY

It was a crisp October afternoon, and along Iffley Road the wind was chivvying the yellow leaves. We stood at the window watching the flappers opposite play hockey. One of them had a scarlet tam-o'-shanter and glorious dark hair underneath it.... A quiet tap at the door, gentle but definite, and in came Mrs. Beesley.

If you have been at our digs, you know her by sight, and have not forgotten. Hewn of the real imperial marble is she, not unlike Queen Victoria in shape and stature. She tells us she used to dance featly and with abandon in days gone by, when her girlish slimness was the admiration of every greengrocer's assistant in Oxford--and even in later days when she and Dr. Warren always opened the Magdalen servants' ball together. She and the courtly President were always the star couple. I can see her doing the Sir Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was loosed long ago, and she has expanded with the British Empire. Not rotund, but rather imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one, and when you come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily has gone off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see Mrs. Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately canal boat) before the advancing guest. Very large of head and very pink of cheek, very fond of a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow and full of dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent of former lodgers, bold as a lion when she thinks she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles humorous and placable--such is our Mrs. Beesley.

She saw us standing by the window, and thought we were watching the leaves twisting up the roadway in golden spirals.

"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. "I loves to see the leaves 'avin' a frolic. They enjoys it, same as young gentlemen do."

"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were watching the flappers play hockey, Mrs. Beesley. One of them is a most fascinating creature. I think her name must be Kathleen...."

Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her head in that delightful way of hers. "Oh, dear, Oh, dear, you're just like all the other gentlemen," she said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for the young ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was just the same, an' he was engaged to be marrit. 'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he did. I thought it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit gentleman."

"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. Beesley?" I suggested:

"Beauty must be scorned in none
Though but truly served in one."

"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too scornful," said Mrs. Beesley. Her eyes began to sparkle now that she saw herself fairly embarked upon a promising conversation. She sidled a little farther into the room. Lloyd winked at me and quietly escaped behind her.

"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, "I come to you to see about dinner to-night. I knows as you're the father of 'em all." (That is her quaint way of saying that she thinks me the leading spirit of the three who dig with her.) "How about a little jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares there are in Cowley Road now. I thinks 'are is very tender an' tasty. That, an' a nice 'ot cup o' tea?"

The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all the ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare agrees with Mr. Williams," I said.

"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner of the table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. "A pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well with the cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a Welsh rabbit and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw me, ''Ow about that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, dear, 'e _is_ a kind gentleman! 'E gave us a book once--''Istory of Magdalen College,' I think he wrote it 'imself."

"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began looking for a book.

"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for dinner?" asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd come if he knew."

"We might send him a telegram," I said.

"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a fantastic thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened this morning," she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. But we didn't find 'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e usually does. 'I wonder what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' said Em'ly.

"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' I said. (You know we 'ad a gent'man 'ere once that pawned nearly all 'is things--a Jesus gentleman 'e was.)

"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three balls on a pawnbroker's sign mean?'

"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one you never gets 'em back."

Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled away chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play hockey.

_October, 1912._

"PEACOCK PIE"

Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which brings a real tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which responds to the vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar the years is by the really good books they bring one. Each twelve month the gnomon on the literary sundial is likely to cast some shadow one will not willingly forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year that introduced me to William McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most of us remember as Rupert Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River Anthology, if you prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season when I first got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of all, in 1913 I read "Peacock Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de la Mare.

"Peacock Pie" having now been published in this country it is seasonable to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and delightful of present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so little known over here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," was published in England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written novels and essays, all shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle of imagination and charm. He has the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie" is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden of Verses."

I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Vachel Lindsay are among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to open "The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to see how the seductions of ragtime and the clashing crockery of the Poetry Society's dinners are coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not native in our hearts, and we might as well admit it.

To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland suggests perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rubbers in the subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is found wandering blithely in Central Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the Tenderloin is waiting four hundred strong for him to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is the more modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak without offense) be mistaken for a New York stock broker, or a member of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order of poets who do not wear rubbers.

One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who reads a book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a collection of poems for children. But it is not that, any more than "The Masses" is a paper for the proletariat. Before you have gone very far you will find that the imaginary child you set out with has been magicked into a changeling. The wee folk have been at work and bewitched the pudding--the pie rather. The fire dies on the hearth, the candle channels in its socket, but still you read on. Some of the poems bring you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. When at last you go up to bed, it will be with the shuddering sigh of one thrilled through and through with the sad little beauties of the world. You will want to put out a bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee--did you not know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the morning.

One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his utter simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after. Who can read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is young? I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection:

Three jolly Farmers
Once bet a pound
Each dance the others would
Off the ground.
Out of their coats
They slipped right soon,
And neat and nicesome,
Put each his shoon.
One--Two--Three--
And away they go,
Not too fast,
And not too slow;
Out from the elm-tree's
Noonday shadow,
Into the sun
And across the meadow.
Past the schoolroom,
With knees well bent
Fingers a-flicking,
They dancing went....

Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade?

The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best, even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist journals please copy.

One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something fey about much of the book: it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange things. In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of whim and Æsopian brevity, I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you one more slice of this rarely seasoned pastry.

THE LITTLE BIRD

My dear Daddie bought a mansion
For to bring my Mammie to,
In a hat with a long feather,
And a trailing gown of blue;
And a company of fiddlers
And a rout of maids and men
Danced the clock round to the morning,
In a gay house-warming then.
And when all the guests were gone, and
All was still as still can be,
In from the dark ivy hopped a
Wee small bird: and that was Me.

"Peacock Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir Walter said of his scrip of joy. Annealed as we are, I think it will discompose the most callous. It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit, It is full of outlets of sky.

As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest man and keeps behind his songs. Recently he paid his first visit to America, and we may hope that even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. He lectured at some of our universities and endured the grotesque plaudits of dowagers and professors who doubtless pretended to have read his work. Although he is forty-four, and has been publishing for nearly sixteen years, he has evaded "Who's Who." He lives in London, is married, and has four children. For a number of years he worked for the Anglo-American Oil Company. Truly the Muse sometimes lends to her favourites a merciful hardiness.

THE LITERARY PAWNSHOP

Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only literary man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a manuscript for immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams had in his saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, "as well worth a hundred pounds as a shilling was worth twelve pence." Offering one of these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper, to lend him three guineas but the latter had so little stomach for a transaction of this sort that "he cried out, 'Coming, sir,' though nobody called; and ran downstairs without any fear of breaking his neck."

As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these matters) puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly coordinated with life.

Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A watch, a ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, all these will find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which happens not to meet the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle in your drawer though it sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence collectors may list it in their catalogues. No mount of piety along Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it for corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dismal thing.

This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be gained by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the most famous writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in their early days. There were times when they would have sold their epics, their novels, their essays, for the price of a square meal. Think of the booty that would accumulate in the shop of a literary pawnbroker. The early work of famous men would fill his safe to bursting. Later on he might sell it for a thousand times what he gave. There is nothing that grows to such fictitious value as manuscript.

Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant in Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. His early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and wrapping paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few shillings. Or Edgar Poe in the despairing days of his wife's illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits of depression caused by his helpless dependence upon his father for funds. What a splendid opportunity these crises in writers' lives would offer to the enterprising buyer of manuscripts!

Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself an appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, even though the author of it be starving. Richard Le Gallienne has spoken somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books that should never have been written to the customers who should never have been born." Our pawnbroker must guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. He will be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the first to offer him some. But his task will be to discover new and true talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely bite will mean more than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later.