Chapter III: Haggis and Bagpipes (4)

But it was after lunch, when we turned into the Boston Post Road, that the real thrills began. On that famous highway Dame Quickly seemed to feel herself really in swell company. But we were glad we had not attempted it in our freshman days as a driver. Off in the distance we could see Long Island, a quiet, blue profile: how calm it looked. A vast vanload of elated coloured folk, packed ecstatically on lurching camp stools, groaned uphill on low gear. All subsequent traffic was stalled by this vehicle’s sudden halt, and we found an impulsive flivver browsing along our fender. We began to wonder whether Westchester was as élite as they had told us. We were startled, also, by the number of kennels offering chows and those animals called Pekingese. We were glad Gissing had not accompanied us: we fear his hardy, vulgar soul would have scoffed.

New Rochelle seemed an almost unnecessarily large town; much larger than Long Islanders are used to. Larchmont is evidently very civilized. In Mamaroneck, when we sought the waterfront, we found ourself embarrassingly arriving at the front door of a private mansion. On such occasions Dame Quickly, who is really a very noble creature, looks suddenly paltry and shameful. We turned towards home, though we were sorry to leave the view of the rocks called SCOTCH CAPS. These appealed to all our instincts as a printer. And by the way: the low tide seems to go much lower over there than it does along Paumanok. Real estate men, we are told, always take care to bring their clients out that way at high water.

Titania had an eagerness to see Neptune Avenue in New Rochelle, where she had lived as an urchin. She hadn’t been there for more than twenty years and said it was much changed. Trying to discover which had been the house, we found one for sale, and the door yielded to pressure. Inside, in an empty room, was a gilt sword blazoned with emblems of the Knights of Pythias or the Knights Templars or something of that sort. Somehow this seemed like an ideal setting for a humorous mystery story. We hoped that a crime had been committed; and yet the sword was very blunt.

We are still a confirmed Long Islander.

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

Dear old Dr. Johnson used to pray to be delivered from “vacillation and vagrancy of mind, mental vellications and revulsions.” These are also our most painful infirmity. The conflict of ambitions in the mind is no easy problem. When one considers the career of a man like Lord Northcliffe it is fairly evident that he knew more or less clearly what he wanted, and went after it. He wanted to be a Great Newspaper Proprietor, and he wanted to be a figure behind the scenes (but the scenes need not be too opaque) in politics. He succeeded very powerfully in all this, as competent and dogged men do when they have a clearly defined objective. And in order to succeed in this manner, it is fairly plain that he did not mind failure in the other realms of life. Poetry, peaceful privacy, philosophy, and all the other pensive pleasures that begin with a p, he was content (we imagine) to ignore.

This business of making up one’s mind among the various ambitions that an exciting planet offers is highly perplexing. There is one part of our mind that hankers only for seclusion, rambling by lonely watersides, and plenty of ink and paper. There is another unregenerate lobe of our brain that would find a life of important trivial bustling like Northcliffe’s highly diverting and agreeable. It must be interesting (we sometimes ponder) to have a steam yacht, play golf with Premiers, talk choppily and brusquely over the telephone to a hireling Editor, and persuade oneself that the great laws of life are coming to heel very nicely. There is no doubt about it, the business of being a Public Figure probably has in it a great deal of exhilarating excitement that keeps the mind from brooding and painful activity.

We were interested to read in one of the papers not long ago a piece about how a conscientious young man of wealth is studying to fit himself for “public life”--which means, presumably, politics. It would be profitable to hear a discussion from the local magi as to what constitutes the best training for a political career. Aristotle made some comment--didn’t he?--about educating a special class of public servants--we must look it up in the _Politics_. We cannot rid ourself of the idea that the most important feature of such a training would be a considerable period of travel, to instil into the mind of the intending statesman that no one country has any monopoly of wisdom, humour, scenery, or good cooking. We have been much struck by the fact that since the war young graduates of British universities who would in earlier times have made their Grand Tour on the mainland of Europe have been trooping hither in astonishing numbers to have a look at the American scene. It has evidently penetrated the mind of the British political-minded classes that social phenomena over here are important and interesting enough to merit observation.

Almost every reasonably high-minded young man has, we suppose, thought at one time or another about the duty of going into politics--and then, if he has any tincture of sensitiveness, has sheered off in alarm after seeing the dreadful antics that the ambitious underling has to perform. He has seen, perhaps, a current event movie of an Assistant Secretary of the Navy marching gayly in a parade of The Elks at Atlantic City; or, driving quietly past a Long Island picnic glade, has noticed a gathering in motor trucks--Greenpoint Nest No. 653, Fraternal Order of Owls--being harangued, preliminary to hot dogs and Eskimo Pie, by a perspiring young man in white flannel trousers who hopes for a job as Assemblyman. Do not misunderstand us: we are not mocking these necessary small jobs at the foot of the political ladder. They have to be done, and it is only right that they should be done by those zealous fellows who can get some fun out of them. The life of politics, which we study with increasing amazement, must be an exhausting and exciting one, very foreign to the placid instincts of the philosophic observer. The latter, if he is wise, will restrain his impulse to mock, and will try to preserve that mood of affectionate scrutiny which is the only permanently valuable attitude towards human affairs. But sometimes he will think that newspaper men ought to be drafted, by an occasional compulsory legislation, into Government service. After several years of unrebuked privilege to snap and snigger at public men the tables ought to be turned. Some of us who show, in our unmolested kennels, such sweet untested wisdom, might well be hounded out to take a share in the difficult, damnable business of making the machinery go. But the electorate need not be alarmed. There is no real danger. At the first tread on the stair the editor would be out by the window.

But we were speaking of Lord Northcliffe. We have never made a careful study of his career, but oddly enough we have always had a sort of sneaking affection for the man himself while regarding that type of person in general as extremely mischievous. We do not care at all for these people who accumulate newspapers much as they would a number of suits of clothes, and who hire editors to traipse round the world with them as a kind of subservient mouthpiece. We are being told by all the papers that Northcliffe “wielded terrific power.” Well, in a way, we suppose he did; but it was a power that dealt mainly in ephemeral and unimportant things. Even his greatest triumph, the Premiership of Lloyd George, he could not permanently control. It was one of the oddities of coincidence that on the day of Northcliffe’s death a cable dispatch comes in telling us that four of Mr. George’s goats have won prizes at a goat show. Mr. George has a goat farm, it appears. If it would not seem heartless, we should say that Lord Northcliffe died rather than have to read Mr. Lloyd George’s memoirs. He had a great spirit and a huge ambition; but we cannot see in his career any evidence that Public Life and power necessarily develop the finer and more sensitive parts of man.

GISSING JOINS A COUNTRY CLUB

A number of our clients have been asking for news of Haphazard Gissing, the Synthetic Dog. Since we have always been so candid with our patrons, we shall have to tell the unvarnished story of the latest surprising chapter in that romantic animal’s career.

We say it with reluctance, and we say it with unfeigned sadness: we have had to deport Gissing. Admirable creature though he was, active, agile (you should have seen him play catch with a rubber ball), sonorous at night when he suspected alien footstep, highly intelligent and not devoid of a rude houndish comeliness--with all these gifts, he was not congenial among children. We do not know whether it was due to some dark strain of philosophy in him that rendered him too introspective to understand the ways of juveniles, or whether it was a blend of hot cavalier jealousy--at any rate, he never seemed able to unbend properly among the extremely young. The terror that he inspired in icemen and tinsmiths could be countenanced, but when he bristled and showed his teeth at neighbouring children something had to be done. It was the familiar problem of literature and life: here is an amiable creature, well beloved, possessed (by some kink of breeding) with an unexorcisable deviltry. We can leave it at that, and not harmonize the theme with sentimental arpeggios.

Of course the first thing to be done was to find a good home for the exile. We consulted Dr. Rothaug, the kindly veterinarian of Sea Cliff, at whose establishment Gissing took a cultural course last winter. Dr. Rothaug told us of a farmer in that pretty suburb of Glen Cove which is miscalled _Skunk’s Misery_, who was said to be looking for a fierce watch-dog to guard his chickens. Thither we went, and found the farmer milking at a barn on the lonely hillside. But just the night before he had been given a tramp collie. We liked the look of the farm at Skunk’s Misery; it was the kind of place where Gissing would have been well content, but the farmer said that one dog was enough. That night, very late, we let Gissing indoors, and shared a Last Supper with him at the icebox. Perhaps we shall remember that he seemed just a little surprised at the beef-bone and the arrowroot biscuits spread with Roquefort cheese. Well, we said to ourself defensively, he was always fond of Roquefort; there’s only a scrap of it left; and very likely he’ll never taste it again.

We refuse to be stampeded into any sentiment about this matter; we always thought that Gissing, as he matured, was developing a touch of the Thomas Hardy fatalism; he would be annoyed if we tried to over-dramatize this incident.

The next day the whole family was mustered to pay parting honours; all hands were embarked in Dame Quickly; the condemned dog ate a hearty breakfast, and with a bight of clothesline about his neck was escorted to the chariot, his long unused hawser having vanished since the Urchin used it to moor a full-rigged ship to a neighbouring sapling. By this time the victim had suspected something amiss; his deeply stricken cider-coloured eye was painfully interrogative. The Dame, however, seemed to us a trifle heartless. Off she went, her cylinders drumming with their usual alacritous smoothness. To a wedding or a funeral, all one to her. Gissing, now probably reviewing inwardly the tale of his errors (there must have been many of which we are ignorant: we never did know where he went on those long daily expeditions) was (we are pleased to record it) too honourable to attempt any insincere repentances. He kept climbing into the laps of his guardians, but the ironist insists that this was not all affection, but rather that the vibration of the floorboards tickled his pads. There was an occasional secret caress, both given and taken, but we know our clients are too stiff in the bosom to want to hear about such matters. The younger generation, in the back seat, were eager to see the country club that Gissing was going to join. So had the matter been explained to them.

Across those autumn-tinted fields of central Long Island--all colours of pink and fawn and panther with the weathered shrivelling corn-shocks like old ghost-Indian tepees, and the pumpkins bright in the stubble--we proceeded to the Bide-a-Wee Home, which lies tucked away in the woods near Wantagh. This place had been to us only a name, and indeed we knew not exactly what to expect. Great was our pleasure to find a charming old farmhouse with great barns and outhouses, and an immediate clamour from hundreds of dogs running gayly in fenced inclosures, and lesser dogs, both hale and cripple, about the yard. Gissing hopped out blithely: his tail lifted sharply over his back, feathering downward as it curved: the warm October air, one supposes, came to him sharply barbed with the aromas of innumerable congenials. He was very much alive, and walked nimbly on cushion toes. Holding the rope, we walked among the barns, saluted by prodigious applause from all sides. Even an inclosure full of cats showed gracious interest. The conclusion drawn by the Younger Generation was that Gissing’s friends were glad to see him. Then came a genial curator, Gissing was led to a wire gate, and introduced into an orchard plot among about thirty more or less his own size. There was a good deal of bristling and growling, but he stood his ground calmly while a dozen or so of his new clubmates inquired into his credentials.

We had been somewhat troubled by the signboard of the Bide-a-Wee, which calls itself a _Home for Friendless Animals_. We wished to impress upon the curator that Gissing was far from friendless, but we soon found that the legend on the board was inaccurate. Many very well-loved animals go there, for one reason or another; the organization tries to find a suitable home for all the beasts in its care; the name and characteristics of each are entered in a ledger when it arrives, and, if he so desires, the previous owner is notified when the animal goes to its new home. We were pleased to learn also that much of the broken bread from the Waldorf and Vanderbilt Hotels is shipped out to the Bide-a-Wee; so, if you are lunching there and don’t finish your roll, perhaps Gissing will get it. (He is particularly fond of the crescent-shaped ones, with little black specks on them.) The Home is supported by voluntary contribution. In the record book we inscribed Gissing’s biography very briefly:

GISSING: _origin doubtful: two years old: has always had a good
home. A fine watch-dog, but not good with children._

We would have liked to go on, for much more might have been said. We would have liked to tell the friendly curator that this very week (by the quaint irony of circumstance) a book is to be published of which Gissing--somewhat transformed--is the hero. But we thought it best not to mention this, lest it get around among the other members and they taunt Gissing about it. We were happy to leave him in so congenial and friendly a home. And if any of our clients happen to need a good dog for a lonely country place--a dog who is perhaps too intellectual and excitable for children, but a tocsin of excellent acoustic strength--there you’ll find him. He has promised to write to the Urchiness, provided she eats her cereal a little faster.

As we left, Gissing was standing on his hind legs looking through the fence. He wailed just a little. It would be less than justice (to both sides) not to admit it. Like Milton’s hero leaving the Garden, “a few natural tears he shed, but dried them soon.” As the friendly curator said, “By to-morrow he’ll think he’s lived here all his life.” On the way home, there being more room in the Dame, a supply of cider was laid in for consolation. Last night it seemed just a little strange to visit the icebox all alone. To-morrow, perhaps, we shall take lunch at the Waldorf.

THREE STARS ON THE BACK STOOP

Before starting on our new notebook we have been looking over the old one. We are painfully astonished to see so many interesting ideas that we never turned to account.

We see no reason for being ashamed of using a memorandum book to jot down casual excitements in the mind. If you are really interested in what goes on inside your head, that is the only possible way to keep track of those flittermice of thought. Astronomers spend much time examining the Great Nebula in Orion, and other pinches of star dust that circumspangle the universe. It is equally important to scrutinize those dim patches of mental shining where, once in a while, one suspects the phosphorescent emergence of Truth. Unhappily, most of the ideas jotted down for sonnets and meditations never get anything done to them. They lie there unexercised, and once a year or so, when we run through the pile of old notebooks just to cheer ourself up, we are newly gratified to see how many occasions for thought the world suggests. Often, however, we aren’t quite certain just what we meant. For instance, scattered through our now discarded memoranda we find the following cryptic entries:

_The army of unalterable bunk._

_Prayers for newspaper men._

_Nesting season for mares._

_Who wrote the line “A rose-red city half as old as time”?_

_The current fetiches, taboos, and hokums are as hard to expel
from the mind as the deboshed melody of some vulgar popular
song._

_As a child, the phrase “civil engineer” puzzled me--the
civility or civics of engineering I could not comprehend._

_It’s a mistake to conclude that the result of an action was
necessarily included in the purpose: i. e. Effects overlap
Causes, e. g. The Tariff._

_If every day we are surrounded by astonishment and unexpected
adventures in the actual realm, why may it not also be true in
the spiritual?_

_Kipling is the kind of man who, after half a dozen visits to
the dentist, would have been able to write a story filled with
accurate technical details of dental science._

_Sign on Italian restaurant on Park Place_: IF YOUR WIFE CAN’T
COOK DON’T DIVORCE HER--KEEP HER AS A PET, AND EAT HERE.

_Sign on a Manicure Parlour_: SPECIAL ATTENTION PAID TO OTHER
GIRLS’ FELLOWS.

_Potboiling--the crackling of a crown of thorns under a pot._

_Biography is impossible. There’s no such thing._

Well, the preceding items, lifted more or less at random from one of these notebooks, are sufficient to explain the sense of mystification with which one examines old memoranda. And yet one always hopes that he may chance upon some germ of thought which is worth the fun of expanding it. It reminds us rather of the Janitor Emeritus of the _Post_, an elderly and pensive darkness, who has a fixed idea that some day he is going to find something precious in the various rubbish of the office, and is to be seen gravely poking into baskets and canisters of jetsam in the hope of motion picture magazines, tobacco, and detective stories.

But among these fugitive and sudden scribbles we did find one notation that brings back to us more or less clearly what we had in mind. It was written thus: _People in N. Y. no rooted sense of place._

We had been thinking of the curious life of those who dwell in city apartments. We are a great lover of apartments every now and then, for a briefly adventurous term; and certainly every one who has read Simeon Strunsky’s admirable book _Bellshazzar Court_ will have realized how fecund with human episode these great, dense barracks are. But there can be no good life for very long unless one has an opportunity to plant feet on actual soil; to be close witness of earth’s colours and seasons; to be able (sovereign pleasure of all) to go out at night and make the circuit of one’s terrain and recognize a few stars. There are three stars, for instance, that we see (at certain seasons) from the back stoop when we visit the icebox towards midnight. We suspect them of being the trio known as Orion’s Belt. Anyhow, part of our pleasure in life is to notice them occasionally and know that they are still there, or _were_ still there when those agile beams left them to vibrate across all the light-years between us.

Orion’s Belt, by the way, seems to be a Sam Browne, for it is tilted up diagonally. We will show you exactly what his starry girth looks like, so you can recognize it:--

*

*

*

The simple and sensuous pleasures of place are not so easy to enjoy in the city. There is a feeling of unreality, of human and mechanical interposition, when you are snugly nested in a niche of a stone cliff fifteen stories high. Something stands between you and the realization of earth. That something may be fine, comfortable, reassuring, it may be highly stimulant for the mind; but there is also a loss to the spirit. It is a loss not to be able to see exactly how Nature tints her tapestry curtain of gold and bronze, behind which she quietly shifts the scenes for the next act; and then suddenly the curtain is shredded away; the landscape widens and is transvisible to the eye; going out on the porch at night you find the trees full not of leaves but stars.

This is a large topic: we can only hint at it. Science, criticism, ethics, these are urbane. Poetry and religion are rustic. Poetry particularly--whether the writing or the reading of it--thrives best where there is silence and the foundation on earth. The solid satisfaction of visiting one’s own cellar and the brightness of one’s own furnace grate, actually set down inside the shell of earth’s crust; of knowing one’s own chimney shaft open topward to the sky; the fall of autumn acorns rattling on the roof--are sentiments felt rather than understood. But from that quiet fertility of feeling understanding grows gradually. You must be quiet with things before you can love them; and you must love them before you can write about them.

But very likely these fragmentary ideas are true only for those who believe them. It is a way ideas have.

A CHRISTMAS CARD

[_December, 1921_]

As the Christmas season approaches, it sits heavily upon our mind that there are some to whom we should like to say a word of respectful admiration. First of these is Woodrow Wilson. This, you may think, is a gesture both irrelevant and impertinent on our part. We cannot help it. We feel, as the Friends say, a “concern.” The conjunction of the Christmas month, the Conference on Limitation of Armaments, the hopes and memories of all honest men, Mr. Wilson’s coming birthday, makes the occasion irresistible. There are some things that must be said.

Woodrow Wilson has found the peace he sought. Never before, perhaps, did a public man enjoy such posthumous privilege in his own lifetime. He has joined (in Melville’s noble phrase) “the choice hidden handful of the divine inert.” This phrase requires scrutiny. The divinity is not ascribed to Mr. Wilson, but to inertia. Silence, thought, withdrawal from the maddening struggles of mankind--these are divine; these are godlike. If there were ever any doubt as to his having qualities of true greatness, consider the patience and decency of his present silence. It is a silence, one feels, not of bitterness but of honourable dignity.

Sometimes, tucked away in the papers, one finds a single line or so that gives us more to ponder than all the rest of the day’s news. Such an item was the following, quoted lately by Mr. Tumulty as having been said by Mr. Wilson to one of his advisers at the Paris Conference:

“M. Clemenceau called me a pro-German and abruptly left the
room.”

They said this man was impatient and stubborn. Yet he endured insult calmly in the pursuit of his strangely hoped-for peace.

The post-Armistice career of Mr. Wilson has been called a tragedy. We do not see it so. The Paris Conference--it is easy to see it now--was foredoomed to a certain measure of failure. On sand one puts up a tent, not a house. Moreover, in so far as that Conference is concerned, Mr. Wilson has suffered a double fatality. He has never spoken candidly for himself; he has been unfortunate in those who have spoken for him. It has been the habit of those naïf and loyally affectionate souls who have been closest to him to assure us of his subtlety and quicksilver craft. We cannot see it. He has seemed to us, always, a man of genuine simplicity--what would have been called, at one time, a _righteous_ man.

It is an odd thing that when you say a character is rooted in simplicity and piety some will conclude that you are sneering. His character is a great character. Those influences which shake and unsettle men’s fibre more than anything else it has endured in full measure--adulation and hatred. The anger and mockery which were lavished upon Wilson are interesting to contemplate. But, so far as one can see, they did not trouble that stubborn zeal. There was a Cromwellian grimness and singleness of heart in his battle with Europe. You remember what Cromwell said (if Carlyle can be trusted as a reporter)--

“Would we have Peace without a Worm, lay we Foundations of
Justice and Righteousness.”

For that he struggled, burdening himself beyond human strength. For that he compromised, as all men do. For that he incurred the malice of all aspirants--both the pure and the impure.

It is amazing to remember the power and depth of that malice. In a perverse way, it is almost encouraging to remember it: it proves so excellently that this earth is still the fallen star, the cindered Eden, in which merely human failings incur more than human angers. What a gruesome life that of politics must be! And yet when, in our recent history, were more positive virtues and high-minded hopes brought into the muddled ferment of national politics? Do you remember how this man lay at death’s door for many silent months, and how ill suppressed were the satisfaction and the sneer? What was his crime? We used to wonder. Only that he had believed the world was ripe for some strokes of simplicity and unselfishness.

Little by little the minds of fair-hearted men are returning to realization and gratitude. There is nothing now accomplished, or even accomplishable, in matters of international dealing, that Woodrow Wilson was not fighting for three years ago. The granolithic minds of the old stand-patters and the luxurious sniffs of young, hot doctrinaires formed for a while a quaint partnership of scorn. Nor would we ourself deny that there were many things to lament. But the world still waits for a competent, understanding, and judicial expression of Woodrow Wilson’s service to men. It was not a perfect service, for it was marred by necessary mortal blunders and qualms. For that perhaps we reverence it the more. And when the just tribute comes, perhaps it will come from the hand of some great writer to whom the puerilities of partisan squabble fade into their deserved shadow; to whom the humour and the pathos will be evident; and most evident of all, the dignity and austerity of a great human hope, frustrated and postponed, but an addition to the honour of the race. Perhaps it will come from the hand of some great dramatist, with the dramatist’s art that can revive great figures, great moments; can purge the occasion of what was merely peevish and fortuitous, and remind us of truths and visions we lost in the hurly-burly of the time.

It is sheer selfishness on our part to hope that some such expression may come soon. We are jealous for the credit of this generation. We are proud to have lived in days when men suffered so hideously and yet did and said and wrote great things. We would like it to be said of this generation that it recognized greatness in its own time. That would be an honourable thing to be able to say. Have we erected, from our imagination, a figure that is not really there? We think not. And so, with humility and hesitation, but impelled by a motive we cannot resist, we would like to say to Woodrow Wilson that there are many who gratefully wish him Merry Christmas.

SYMBOLS AND PARADOXES

We always suspected, after reading _The Flying Inn_, that G. K. Chesterton is fond of dogs. And now, reading his book, _The New Jerusalem_ (which is full of very gorgeous matter), we learn that at his home in Beaconsfield he is host to both a dog (called “Winkle”) and a donkey (called “Trotsky”). Very genial is his picture of the start of his pilgrimage to Palestine and his last farewell to these beasts:

The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling
of fellowship went out to the dog; I am well aware that I
lay open my guard to a lunge of wit.... He jumped about me,
barking like a small battery, under the impression that I was
going for a walk; but I could not, alas, take him with me on a
stroll to Palestine.... The dog’s very lawlessness is but an
extravagance of loyalty; he will go mad with joy three times
on the same day at going out for a walk down the same road. We
hear strangely little of the real merits of animals; and one
of them surely is this innocence of all boredom; perhaps such
simplicity is the absence of sin. I have some sense myself
of the sacred duty of surprise; and the need of seeing the
old road as a new road. But I cannot claim that whenever I go
out for a walk with my family and friends, I rush in front of
them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness; or even leap
up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in this
power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely
things that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western
civilization.

The only thing that bothers us in this: If it had occurred to G. K. C. to prove that the scraper on his doorstep, or the radish growing in the garden, was the “eternal type” of Western civilization, would he not have made out an equally agreeable and convincing case for it? In fact, only a few steps away from his home, he came to the crossroads (and well we remember that crossroads, and the pub thereby--which is it, Mr. Chesterton: the _Saracen’s Head_, or the _Royal White Hart_?) and there decided that they were the symbol of civilization which had lost its way. And then, a few minutes later (in the train, we suppose) the glorious creature was noticing the heavy clouds that lay over the landscape, and decided that _they_ were the emblem of our civilization. It takes a good deal of agility to pursue our pilgrim through this book, for every olive tree, signboard, sunset, gateway, proves to be a magnificent symbol of some spiritual gorgeousness.

We were sorry that Mr. Chesterton, when leaving Beaconsfield, did not find some symbolism in a thing which impressed us when we went pilgriming in those parts. Edmund Burke lived there at one time, and we remember reading in some guide-book that his home was “bounded in front by a ha-ha.” We thought to ourself at that time, how excellently symbolic it would have been if G. K. C. had bounded his own house in the same way. In fact, we often went along his road to listen for it.

There was another bit of symbolism that used to impress us (it is surprising how quickly one can pick up the habit of symbolizing) when we dallied around Beaconsfield. That was that Edmund Waller is buried under the big walnut tree in the churchyard:

_Edmundi Waller hic jacet
id quantum morti cessit_

And we thought it pleasant that Mr. Chesterton should have settled in the village sacred to the poet who wrote the loveliest poem ever written on girth--or, rather, on slenderness. You remember, of course, his “On a Girdle.”

The average person dearly loves a label--also a libel: and Mr. Chesterton’s gnomes--which are sometimes nuggets, sometimes merely nugæ, but always golden--are ticketed as “paradoxes” by those who have small inkling of what a paradox really is. The best definition was that of Don Marquis, our happiest native contemporary practitioner in this art, when he said that if the positive and negative poles of a truth are bent until they meet (or approach) a spark flashes across.

The paradox is the oldest outcry of the philosopher on contemplating the absurdity of the world. Originally a paradox was simply a surprise--a statement contrary to generally accepted opinion, and very likely untrue. As Hamlet said: “This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.” But latterly we do not grant the virtue of paradox unless the epigram fulfils a double requirement: it must _seem_ absurd; it must _be_ true, or at any rate true enough to give the mind a sense of cheerful satisfaction. Its essence is that of surprise--which is the essence of humour.

The intellectual growth of humanity is shown by its increasing tolerance of the paradox. The greatest of all Paradoxers was crucified. Every true paradox is a little parable of human fallibility. A parabola is a conic section; a parable, one might say, is a comic section.

Mr. Chesterton once, in a delightful essay called “Christmas,” said something that lingers in our mind as an exhibition of the paradox both in its strength and weakness. He wrote:

It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality
to meet. Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and
Tolstoian nonresistance were not only not opposite, but were
the same thing. They are the same contemptible thought that
conquest cannot be resisted, looked at from the two standpoints
of the conqueror and the conquered. Thus again teetotalism and
the really degraded gin-selling and dram-drinking have exactly
the same moral philosophy. They are both based on the idea that
fermented liquor is not a drink, but a drug.

Now a moment’s thought will show the reader that while these two paradoxes are equal in wit, they are not equal in truth. The second is gloriously true; the first, delightfully acute as it is, begs the question. For the Tolstoian will retort that he does not maintain that conquest cannot be resisted; but that, on the contrary, it _is_ resisted and defeated by passive oppugnance.

The paradox holds the mirror up to nature, but it is not a plane mirror. It dignifies human nature by assuming that the mind is capable of viewing itself in the refraction of absurdity. Thoughtless people speak of the paradox as a reduction to absurdity. That is not so. There are some subjects that have to be elevated to absurdity.

In conclusion: it is a dangerous tool. It must be gingerly handled lest it become--like the pun--a mere verbicide. And towards the fair sex, beware of paradoxes. They esteem but rarely its prankish tooth. Was not Hamlet’s downfall--and his betrothed’s also--occasioned when he practiced paradoxes on Ophelia?

THE RETURN TO TOWN

It was with somewhat a heavy heart that we prepared to leave Salamis for the winter. Yet inscrutable lust of adventure spurred us on; the city, also, is the place for work. In the country one is too comfortable, and there are too many distractions. Either cider, or stars, or the blue sparkle of the furnace fire--all these require frequent attentions. But it was hard to part with Long Island’s charms in November, loveliest of months. The copper-coloured woods, the chrysanthemums, the brisk walk to the morning train, the yellow crackle of logs in the chimney, the chill dry whisper of the neighbouring belt of trees heard at midnight from an airy veranda--these are some of the excitements we shall miss. Most of all, perhaps, that stony little unlit lane, traversed in pitch darkness towards supper time, until, coming clear of the trees, you open up the Dipper, sprawled low across the northern sky.

It was hard, too, to leave Salamis just when its winter season of innocent gayeties was commencing. You would hardly believe how much is going on! Did you know that that deathless old railroad station is being (as they say of ships) reconditioned? And there’s going to be a drug store in Salamis Heights. The new Methodist church is nearly finished--and, most glamorous of all, we now have an actual tea-room at the entrance to the Salamis Estates. When you are motoring out that way you can see if we don’t speak the truth. In another five years, most likely, we shall have street lights along our lonely wood road to Green Escape--and pavements--and gas to cook with. But there never will be quite as many fairies in the woods as there have been these past three years.

But, perhaps fortunately, the day set for moving into town was wet and drizzly. And the labour of piling into Dame Quickly various baggages, hampers, toys, a go-cart, and the component railings, girders, rods, springs and mattresses of two cribs was lively enough to oust from the mind any pangs of mere sentiment. The mind of one who has accomplished that task, in shirt-sleeves under a dripping weather, is heated enough to make him ready for any sort of adventurous foray. The Dame, also, grossly overloaded, and travelling smartly on greasy ways, was skiddish. As is ever our fortune, we found the road through Astoria torn up for repairs. This involved a circuit along a most horrible bypath, where our ill-adjusted freight leaped crazily with every lurch, go-cart and mattresses descended on our neck, and the violence of the bumping caused the crib-girders to burst through the rear of the Dame’s canopy. Also we incurred, and probably deserved, a stern rebuke from a gigantic policeman on Second Avenue. To tell the truth, in a downshoot of rain and peering desperately through a streaming wind-shield, we did not know he was a policeman at first. We thought he was an L pillar.

Yet, when both voyages were safely accomplished--one for the baggage, and one for the household: it would be harder to say which lading was the tighter squeeze--what an exhilaration to move once more in the city of our adoring. It is true that we began by making an immediate enemy in the apartment house, for, as we were quite innocently taking a trunk upstairs in the elevator, assisted by the cheerful elderly attendant, a lady living in the same house entered by chance and burst into violent reproach because _her_ baggage had had to go aloft in the freight elevator. She accused the attendant of favouritism; to which he, quite placidly, explained that this particular baggage had been delivered at the front door in a private car. This compliment to the Dame pleased us, but knowing nothing of the rules, and being wet and pensive, we pretended to be an expressman and said naught. The only other shock was when we took the Dame to a neighbouring garage to recuperate for a few days. (We were glad, then, it had been raining, for the well-loved vehicle looked very sleek and shiny, and it was too dark for the garage man to notice the holes in her top. We wouldn’t want him to sneer at her, and his garage, we observed, was full of very handsome cars.) When he said it would cost the Dame $1.50 a night to live there we were a little horrified. That, we reflected, was what we used to pay ourself at the old Continental Hotel in Philly, the inn where the Prince of Wales (the old one) and Dickens and Lincoln and others stayed. We now look with greater and greater astonishment at all the cars we see in New York. How can any one afford to keep them?

We were dispatched to do some hasty marketing, in time for supper. We made off to our favourite shopping street--Amsterdam Avenue. Delightedly we gazed into those alluring windows. In a dairy, a young lady of dark and appealing loveliness made us welcome. When we ordered milk and laid in a stock of groceries, making it plain to her (by consulting a list) that we were speaking on behalf of the head of the house, she urged us to advise Titania to open an account. Money she seemed loath to accept: it could all be paid for at the end of the month, she said. It is well to shop referring perplexedly to a little list. This proves that you are an humble, honest paterfamilias, acting only under orders. To such credit is always lavish, and fair milkmaids generously tender.

Various tradesmen in that neighbourhood were surprised, in the tail end of a wet and depressing day, by unexpected increments of traffic. “Just nick the bone?” inquired the butcher, when, from our list, we read him the item about rib lamb chops. “Yes, just nick the bone,” we assented, not being very definite on the subject. We were interested in admiring the thick sawdust on the floor, very pleasant to slide the foot upon. The laundry man was just closing when we arrived with our bundle. “Here’s a new customer for you,” we announced. Whatever private sorrows he has were erased from his manly forehead. He told us that he also does tailoring. Cleaning and pressing, he insisted. We had a private feeling, a little shameful, that he hasn’t got as good a customer as he imagines. Next door to the tailor, by the way, and right opposite the apartment house, is a carpenter who advertises his skill at bookshelves.

How different it is from Salamis nights. Hanging out of the kitchen window (having gone to the rear of the apartment to see what the icebox is like: it’s a beauty)--instead of Orion’s Belt and the dry rustle of the trees, we see those steep walls of lighted windows, discreetly blinded, hear sudden shrills of music from above and below. Just through the wall, as we lie abed, we can hear the queer droning whine of the elevator; through the open window, the clang of trolleys on Broadway. Hunting through the books that belong in the furnished apartment, after startling ourself by reading Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s poems called _Look! We Have Come Through!_ we found an old Conan Doyle--always our favourite bedtime author. _The Adventures of Gerard_, indeed, and we are going to have a go at it immediately.

Yes, it’s very different from Salamis; but Adventure is everywhere, and we like to take things as we find them. We have never been anywhere yet, whether in the steerage of the _Mauretania_ or in a private lunch-room at the Bankers’ Club, where there wasn’t more amusement than we deserved.

MAXIMS AND MINIMS

KINSPRITS

You know how it is: there are books that magically convey a secret subtle intimation that _you_ are the only reader who has ever, will ever, wholly grasp their elusive wit and charm. So it is with certain people. I think of my friend Pausanias. He is quiet, shy; he makes his points so demurely, so quaintly, that you sometimes think, sadly, of all the occult little japes he may be making in the weeks that elapse when you don’t see him ... and no one, perhaps, “gets” them. Folly, of course--and yet I have seen his eye widen and brighten as it caught mine across the dinner table, and I knew that he and I, secretly, had both caught some faint, delicious savour of absurdity and human queerness--something that no one else there (I strongly believed it) had quite so sharply tasted. Yes, you can catch his eye--no word is necessary. Just a slow, enjoying, gentle grin. Across the great clamour of blurb and bunk, across the huge muddle of beauty, weariness, and frustration that makes up our daily life--I am always catching his eye.

JOURNALISM AND LITERATURE

Art is the only human power that can make life stand still. Each of us, desperately clutching his identity amid the impalpable onward pour of Time and Thought, finds only in art--and chiefly in written art--a means to halt that ceaseless cruel drift. Literature was invented to halt life, to hold it still for us to examine and admire.

Here you may see the essential distinction between literature and journalism. For journalism was devised to hurry life on even faster, to give the already whirling wheel an insane accelerating fillip. Journalism is, actually, a pastime; literature, a stoptime. I refer, of course, not to the journalism of facts, which is a department of government rather than of letters; but to the journalism of fancy. In great books life (however troubled and violent in itself) stands pure and unvexed, unfretted by time and interruption.

There are many schools of journalism; for journalism, being only a hasty knack, can readily be taught. There are no schools of literature, for that is born in your own hearts only, and by manifold joys and disgusts. If it is in you, you shall know; the disease will grow more and more potent. If it is in you, you shall be dedicated to misery unguessed by the easy minds beside you. A great poet spoke of hovering between two worlds, one dead, one powerless to be born. That shall be your mental lot. You shall realize, more and more, that the bustling cheery life of the general is, in some seizures, dead to your spirit: and yet that new brave world of imagination, which travails in your heart, can never quite come to paper. Would you know the mood and emotion that move behind literature, read Arnold’s _Scholar Gipsy_. I love journalism and honour it; but it must be added that it inhabits a different world from literature, and does not even faintly understand the language that literature speaks.

HOBBES

There are some famous books which are the delight of scholars but hardly at all known to the amateur reader. Of such, we think of Thomas Hobbes’ _Leviathan_. It is so nobly sagacious and entertaining that with a little trouble spent on rephrasing his stuff and giving it snappy captions we could probably sell it to a long chain of newspapers and enter into competition with the Syndicated Spinozas who prey upon the public appetite for aphorisms.

Hobbes’ wisdom is of the shrewd and nipping sort. If we had to choose but one passage, to show a seventeenth-century mind at its best, we should pluck his remarks on Laughter--famous indeed, but probably little known to casual readers. See the clear stream of the mind flowing in a channel of granite prose:--

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called
laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own
that pleaseth them, or by the apprehension of some deformed
thing in another by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud
themselves. And it is incident most to them that are conscious
of the fewest abilities in themselves: who are forced to keep
themselves in their own favour by observing the imperfections
of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of
others is a sign of pusillanimity. For of great minds one of
the proper works is to help and free others from scorn, and
compare themselves only with the most able.

On the contrary, sudden dejection is the passion that causeth
weeping, and is caused by such accidents as suddenly take
away some vehement hope or some prop of their power; and
they are most subject to it that rely principally on helps
external, such as are women and children. Therefore some weep
for the loss of friends, others for their unkindness, others
for the sudden stop made to their thoughts of revenge by
reconciliation. But in all cases, both laughter and weeping are
sudden motions, custom taking them both away. For no man laughs
at old jests, or weeps for an old calamity.

The vain-glory which consisteth in the feigning or supposing of
abilities in ourselves which we know are not is most incident
to young men, and nourished by the histories or fictions
of gallant persons, and is corrected oftentimes by age and
employment.

LADIES AT THE PHONE

There is a certain department store on the slope of Murray Hill which has in it a gallery much frequented by ladies for meeting their friends. Once in a while we have an appointment there to wait for Titania, and always we find it an entertaining corner of the world. Along one side of the gallery is a long line of telephone booths, and we know nothing more amusing than to stroll past the glass doors, with apparently abstracted and meditative air, to watch the faces of the fair captives within. How admirable a contrivance is the feminine face for reflecting the emotions! Some you will see talking animatedly, with bright colour, sparkling eyes, every appearance of mirth and merry cheer. Others are waiting, all anguish and grievance, for some dilatory connection; their small brows heavy with perplexity. Often it seems to be necessary, for some mysterious sharing of secrets or shopping plans, for two ladies to occupy the same booth at a time; how they do it we cannot guess; but they sit demurely squeezed upon one another and their faces appear side by side, both apparently talking at once into the receiver. Through the glass pane this offers a curious sight, apparently a lady with two heads; muffled by the barrier, shrill squeaks and conjectures are dimly heard. There are ladies, generous of physique, who find it hard enough to press in singly; when they seek to arise they are held tightly by the cage and a great wrench and backing outward are necessary. Particularly on a Saturday, shortly before matinée time, are these lively creatures full of animation and derring-do. A gay and vivid panorama of human frailty, only surpassed in quaint absurdity by a similar row of men in the phone booths of a large cigar store.

* * * * *

OF STREET CLEANING

(_By Our Own Lord Bacon_)

Snow is a deposit fair in itself, but a shrewd thing in a city. Where ways be crowded and traffic insisteth, let there be alacrity and stirring on the part of the city servants, lest the public have occasion of murmuring. Of streets which need purifying, there be three kinds: as Broadway, which is treacle; Fifth Avenue, syrup; and uptown, which is soup and all manner of beastliness. So also of snow there be three sorts, the dry and powdery; the wet and slushy, liquefying soon; the granular and sleety, whereof the latter adhereth long and occasioneth sudden prostrations, unwholesome to human dignity but opportunity of sport to the vulgar. When men are checked in their desires to pass to and fro without let or stoppage, then must the prince be wary to reason with the commuters, who being ever great self-lovers, _sui amantes sine rivali_, are like to be disproportionate in outcry. And for the most part, the subway will be still current, but small praise accrueth thereto from citizens, sudden cattle in protest but tardy to acknowledge favour. This is not handsome. Of the surface cars I will not speak; let them be, for the occasion, as though they existed not. For though there be some talk about revival of the service when the Broadway slot be picked and scalded by hand, yet is this but vaunting and idle boast. There is no impediment in the streets but may be wrought out by resolute labour. Of block parties, flame throwers, tractors, steam-ploughs and other ingenuities, I like them not. These be but toys. Let men toil with wit and will, by pick and shovel and horse-cart. This is best for the public.

* * * * *

DR. OSLER

“In seventy or eighty years” (said Thomas Browne, M. D.) “a man may have a deep Gust of the World, know what it is, what it can afford, and what ’tis to have been a Man. Such a latitude of years may hold a considerable corner in the general Map of Time.”