ill 11 ~f CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PS 688.T16 Essays and essay-writing :based on Atlan 3 1924 021 959 378 M\\\ Cornell University VM Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021959378 Atlantic €ejct0 ESSAYS AND ESSAY-WRITING Based on Atlantic Monthly Models EDITED WITH INTEODUCTION AND NOTES BY WILLIAM M. TANNER, M.A. The Universe of Texas W^t Atlantic jnonttilp l^xtisi BOSTON COPYRIGHT, I917, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS FIRST PRINTING, AUGUST, Ipl? SECOND PRINTING, JANUARY, I918 THIRD PRINTING, AUGUST, I9I8 FOtJRTH PRINTING, AUGUST, I919 PREFACE The favor with whicli Atlantic Classics is being received has encouraged the publication of this the second collection of Atlantic essays. The present vol- ume differs materially, however, from Atlantic Clas- sics in that it is made up almost entirely of short, familiar essays published anonymously in the ' Con- tributors' Club ' of the Atlantic, and is specially ed- ited for the use of students. Because of the anonymity of the author in most cases, choice has been governed solely by the individual merit of each selection. An attempt has been made to include those essays that possess general and permanent human interest. The collection represents a rather wide range and variety of subjects. The average length of the essays chosen is about one thousand words. Proper limitation of the nimiber to be included has been the most difficult part of the editor's task, for a great many essays have been omitted only because of lack of space. In the preparation of this volume, both the student and the general reader have been kept in mind. In the introductory section and in the brief prefaces to the five type-groups, an effort has been made to ren- der the study of the familiar essay a matter of pleas- ure and profit to the reader. It is hoped, furthermore, tteat these discussions may prove helpful to students who attempt the writing of familiar essays. To the anonymous Atlantic contributors who have furnished enjoyment to thousands of readers during the past forty years' existence of the ' Contributors' iv PKEFACE Club,' and who have made this volume possible, the editor gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness. They have supplied, out of the fabric of their lives, the ma- terial that composes this collection of intimate human documents. For the many happy hours spent with the members of the ' Contributors' Club,' the editor would express his appreciation by this endeavor to introduce to a still larger reading public a few of these delight- ful familiar essays. To the editorial staff of the At- lantic the editor wishes to express his sincere thanks for valuable counsel and thorough cooperation. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. The Essay as a Literary Form ix n. Origin and Development of, the English Essay . xi in. The Familiar Essay xix IV. Five General Types of the Familiar Essay . . xxii V. Suggestions for Studying the Familiar Essay . xxii ESSAYS OF TYPE I Pehsonal Expebiences, Confessions, and SeiiF- Analtses 1 Tympano 6 Thoughts While Gettmg Settled ." . . . .11 Asking for a Raise 18 The Daily Theme Eye 21 A Defense of Whistling 26 The Saturday-Night Bath 31 The Dictatorship of an Acrobatic Mind ... 36 Furnace and I ~ 39 The Flavor of Things 46 The Lost Art of Going to Church . ... 55 Night 58 Endicott and I Conduct an Orchestra ... 62 Bom Out of Time 69 ' Pet Economies 73 ESSAYS OF TYPE H Reflections and Comments on Life, Human Na- TDBE, Customs, and Experience .... 79 Straining at the Tether . ^ > . , ^ . 83 vi CONTENTS Ear-Trumpeting with Friar Juniper .... 87 On the Roof 91 Old-Clothes S^isations 95 The First Heritage 99 Returning 102 Fools 107 The Wisdom of Foolishness Ill Waggling 114 The Felt Location of the 'I' 118 Asylums for the Hopelessly Sane 120 The Passing of Friendship 125 An' Him Went Home to Him's Muwer . . . 127 • The Friendly Pillow 130 Turning-Pomts 134 The Passing of Emily Ruggles's 136 The Embarrassment of Finality 140 ■^TheEraof Predigestion 145 ESSAYS OF TYPE HI Obsebvations and Discoveries in the Familiab AND Commonplace ISO Traveling on the Branch 152 Man's Last Embellishment 157 The Lier in Bed 160 Fire Worship 166 On Sawing Wood 169 'Little Things' 174 The Left-Over Expression of Countenance . .177 On Noses 181 ■ Beneficent EfiPects of the Earth's Sphericity . 184 The Round World 187 * Amenities of Street-Car Travel 190 CONTENTS vii Rain 193 On Shower-Baths 195 ESSAYS OF TYPE IV Natube Essays 200 Butterfly Psychology 203 Woodland Mysteries 208 Jonas and Matilda 212 On the Hen ' 217 Human Nature in Chickens 222 Dogs 224 The Lure of the Berry 226 A Hunter of the Grass-Tops 231 Gossamer 235 The Rock and the Pool 239 A Problem in Favoritism 241 Fishes' Faces 244 Winter's Departure 247 ESSAYS OF TYPE V General Observations, Comments, and Opinions OF the Author 250 The Dominant Joke 251 Wit and Humor 254 Le Nouveau Pauvre 258 Behind the Eye 263 The Monotony of Our Minds 267 The Other Side 270 Interest in the Uninteresting 274 The Grace of Obscurity 279 A Speed Limit for Love 284 viii CONTENTS The Science of Names 288 Sleep 290 NOTES 295 APPENDIX A List of Subjects for Familiar Essays . . . 301 INTRODUCTION I. THE ESSAY AS A LITERARY FORM In every discussion of the various forms of literar tare that are designated essays, the question arises, first or last. What is an essay? It would seem that, in this the fourth century since the creation of the essay, the term in its exact significance would be well understood and clearly defined. Such, however, is not the case. Since Montaigne, in 1580, first modestly called his short, informal prose compositions Esaais, the word essay has been made to include an ever- increasing variety of literary forms. Because of this wide application and loose use, the term has become somewhat vague in meaning, with rather ill-defined limitations. It is indeed difficult to frame one defini- tion of the essay that will include such a variety of short prose compositions as those of Montaigne, Bacon, Addi- son, Macaiday, Lamb, De Quineey, Ruskin, and Stev- enson. In the popular, general sense in which the term is used it includes all short expositions. Though Pope wrote metrical compositions which he called essays (^Essay on Man and Essay on Criticism), and Locke an extensive prose treatise entitled Essay concerning Hwnnan Understanding, these are usually regarded as being too much at variance with the general type properly to be called essays. In this discussion the term will be limited to include only relatively short prose compositions. In spite of the fact that no very exact definition of X INTRODUCTION the essay can be given, it may be profitable just here to consider a few of the recognized meanings and some of the definitions that have been proposed. In the literary sense in which Montaigne, the first user of the term, employed it, the word meant literally ' a trial, attempt, or endeavor,' To his mind it seems to have represented the trial, or assay, of his subject. Tentativeness, incompleteness, and lack of elaboration and literary finish were felt by the inventor to be characteristic of this new literary genre. Doctor John- son has retained this idea of incompleteness in his dictionary definition of the word : ' A loose sally of the mind ; an irregular, undigested piece ; not a regular and orderly performance,' he states. According to a modern definition, given in the New English Diction- ary, an essay is ' a composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a subject ; origi- nally implying want of finish, " an irregular, undigested piece," but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.' It will be noticed, as indicated in this definition, that in the de- velopment of the essay tentativeness and incomplete- ness have in large measure given place to something of completeness and artistic unity, as well as literary finish, though, of course, the essay, because of its space limitations, does not pretend to the elaborate com- pleteness of the longer treatise or dissertation. The same limitations distinguish, in one respect, the short story from the novel as forms of prose fiction. In ad- dition to these definitions, Mr. Edmund Gosse, in his article on the essay in the EncyclopoBdia Britannica, proposed the following : ' As a form of literature, the essay is a composition of moderate length, usually in prose, which deals in an easy, cursory way with the INTRODUCTION xi external conditions of a subject, and, in strictness, with that subject only as it a£Eects the writer.' In this definition, naturalness and ease in style and the per- sonality of the author are additional characteristics of the essay. Since the essayist deals with his subject pri- marily as it affects Tiim, he allows the reader to look at the subject through his temperament and personality. Throughout the entire history of the essay, personal- ity has been a most important characteristic. In order to supplement these definitions, a brief synopsis showing the origin and the development of the essay during the three centuries of its history is given in the section that follows. It includes merely a summary of the principal characteristics of the essay in each century and an enumeration of some of the influences responsible for its particular character in each period. From the time of Montaigne and Bacon to the present, the essay has developed along two lines : the formal essay and the informal, or familiar, essay. In this brief outline, though the development along both lines wiU be indicated, chief attention will be de- voted to the progress and development of the familiar essay, the type that more truly represents the genuine essay-nature as conceived by Montaigne. n. THE ORIGIN AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH ESSAY Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), a retired law- yer, who, in addition to ' living in quiet and reading,' became interested in writing about himself, his per- sonal opinions and affairs, is usually referred to as the father of the modem prose essay, and 1580 is the accepted birth-year of this new literary genre. In that xii INTRODUCTION year Montaigne published the first two volumes of his Essais. Though there are some rather conservative persons who agree with Bacon in saying of the French author's use of the word essay, ' The word is late, though the thing is ancient,' and who, not being inclined to give Montaigne the credit for actually inventing this new prose type, call attention to various ' short dis- sertations ' and ' brief treatises,' such as the Booh of Ecdesiastes, Theophrastus's Characters, Cicero's De Senectute and De Amicitia, Caxton's Prefaces, Chau- cer's Tale of Melibeus, and various short prose com- positions of the earlier Elizabethan period, — all an- tedating the Essais, — there is virtual agreement in according Montaigne the honor of having named this new prose form and of having clearly illustrated it by his own writing. In the nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe, it will be recalled, performed a similar service in defining and illustrating the short story. In the hands of Montaigne the essay became a well-defined literary organ of personality. He very early turned aside from the compilation of moral dissertations and the imper- sonal style of writing then in vogue and began to write of himself and his affairs in an easy, colloquial style. This revolt of Montaigne's and the style of wiiting that he developed is responsible for the birth of the personal essay. In speaking of Montaigne, William Hazlitt, a nineteenth-century English essayist who most resembled him in his mastery of the familiar essay, and who fuUy appreciated the character and qual- ity of the French essayist's contribution to literature, said of him : ' His greatest merit was that he may be said to have been the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man; and as courage is generally the effect of conscious strength, INTRODUCTION xui he was, probably, led to do so by the richness, truth, and force of his own observations on books and men. He was, in the truest sense, a man of original mind; that is, he had the power of looking at things for himself, or as they really were, instead of blindly trust- ing to, and fondly repeating, what others told him that they were. . . . He was, in a word, the first author who was not a book-maker, and who wrote, not to make converts of others to established creeds and prejudices, but to satisfy his own mind of the truth of things. In this respect we know not which to be most charmed with, the author or the man.' Of him- self Montaigne wrote : ' I study myself more than any other subject. This is my metaphysic ; this my natural philosophy.' ' We converse v/ith Montaigne, or rather hear him talk,' says Hallam ; ' it is almost impossible to read his Essays without thinking that he speaks to us ; we see his cheerful brow, his sparkling eye, his negligent, but gentlemanly demeanor ; we picture him in his arm-chair, with his few books round the room, and Plutarch on the table.' Personality and an easy, natural, desultory style are the distinct contributions of Montaigne to the essay. In 1697, during the latter part of the Elizabethan period in literature, the essay made its appearance in England. In this year Bacon published in a slender volume ten short aphoristic essays. These essays are best characterized, in the words used by their author in referring to them, as ' brief notes set down signifi- canfly ' and as ' dispersed meditations.' In tone they very closely resemble other moral treatises of Bacon's period ; brevity and conciseness were their chief dis- tinguishing characteristics. In these first ten essays there is scarcely any evidence of the writer's person- liv INTRODUCTION ality. In his later essays, published in 1612 and 1625, the personal note is slightly discernible, though the English essayist never attained to the high degree of personal expression achieved by Montaigne. In 1603, the latter's Essais were made accessible to English readers by John Florio's translation, but Bacon had earlier become familiar with them in their original version. Though the English essayist's style became noticeably less formal, he never acquired the ease, the grace, and the charming discursiveness so pleasing in Montaigne. The seventeenth century was the experimental period of essay-writing in England. Although several writers, working within rather restricted limits, attempted the new form, few achieved any degree of eminence. Most essayists took Montaigne and Bacon as their models. Of these, Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), whose eleven essays were published in 1668 under the title Several Discourses, hy Way of Essays, in Verse and Prose, and Sir WiUiam Temple (1628-1699), whose essays were published in three volumes entitled Mis- cellanea, are the most worthy of note. The Meligio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), because of the decided personal note and the admirable prose style in which it is written, entitles its author to a prominent place among early English essayists. Of all seventeenth-century essayists, Cowley most nearly approached the familiar essay of Montaigne. Besides these personal essayists, there were such character- writers as John Earle (1601 ?-1665), famous for his Microcosviography, a collection of interesting char- acter-essays, written under the influence of Theophras- tus's Characters and Ben.Jonson's comedies of humors, and the more original Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), INTRODUCTION %y who is well known for his ' characters ' in The Holy and Profane State. Briefly summarized, the essay of the seventeenth century may be said to include the personal essay of the type of Montaigne, character-essays, and the criti- cal literary essays of JohnDryden (1631-1700). The essayists of this period found their chief interest centred in moral and ethical themes, but they treated their themes from the point of view of the individual rather than from that of society. The influence of Greek and Latin literature may be seen in the frequent allusions and references to the ancient poets, philosophers, and historians, and in the copious sprinkling of classical quotations by way of illustrative and decorative mate- rial. Though there were slight indications of a tend- ency to break away from the earlier models and the restrictions of the formal treatise, no gpfeat change in this respect took place before the beginning of the next century. Personality in the treatment of a theme and naturalness of expression were, however, two characteristics of the familiar essay cultivated and fairly well established during the seventeenth century. The essay of the eighteenth century differed widely in many respects from the essay of the preceding cen- tury. Most noticeable among these differences was the change in the theme and in the attitude of the essay- ist. Not individual morality and self -revelation, but politics, society and social institutions, manners, and customs constituted the essayist's chief interest. With the establishment of the new periodical essay by Steele and Addison, there was a very distinct breaking away from the classics and the earlier models in French and in English literature. The result was the produc- xiv INTRODUCTION ality. In his later essays, published in 1612 and 1626, the personal note is slightly discernible, though the English essayist never attained to the high degree of personal expression achieved by Montaigne. In 1603, the latter's Essais were made accessible to English readers by John Florio's translation, but Bacon had earlier become familiar with them in their original version. Though the English essayist's style became noticeably less formal, he never acquired the ease, the grace, and the charming discursiveness so pleasing in Montaigne. The seventeenth century was the experimental period of essay-writing in England. Although several writers, working within rather restricted limits, attempted the new form, few achieved any degree of eminence. Most essayists took Montaigne and Bacon as their models. Of these, Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), whose eleven essays were published in 1668 under the title Several Discourses, hy Way of Essays, in Verse and Prose, and Sir William Temple (1628-1699), whose essays were published in three volumes entitled Mis- cellanea, are the most worthy of note. The Seligio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), because of the decided personal note and the admirable prose style in which it is written, entitles its author to a prominent place among early English essayists. Of aU seventeenth-century essayists, Cowley most nearly approached the familiar essay of Montaigne. Besides these personal essayists, there were such character- writers as John Earle (16017-1665), famous for his Microcosmography, a collection of interesting char- acter-essays, written under the influence of Theophras- tus's Characters and BenJonson's comedies of humors, and the more original Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), INTRODUCTION xv who is well known for his ' characters ' in The Holy and Profane State. Briefly summarized, the essay of the seventeenth century may be said to include the personal essay of the type of Montaigne, character-essays, and the criti- cal literary essays of John Dryden (1631-1700). The essayists of this period found their chief interest centred in moral and ethical themes, but they treated their themes from the point of view of the individual rather than from that of society. The influence of Greek and Latin literature may be seen in the frequent allusions and references to the ancient poets, philosophers, and historians, and in the copious sprinkling of classical quotations by way of illustrative and decorative mate- rial. Though there were slight indications of a tend- ency to break away from the earlier models and the restrictions of the formal treatise, no great change in this respect took place before the beginning of the next century. Personality in the treatment of a theme and naturalness of expression were, however, two characteristics of the familiar essay cultivated and fairly well established during the seventeenth century. The essay of the eighteenth century differed widely in many respects from the essay of the preceding cen- tury. Most noticeable among these differences was the change in the theme and in the attitude of the essay- ist. Not individual morality and self-revelation, but politics, society and social institutions, manners, and customs 'constituted the essayist's chief interest. With the establishment of the new periodical essay by Steele and Addison, there was a very distinct breaking away from the classics and the earlier models in French and in English literature. The result was the produc- xvi INTRODUCTION tion of a new and original type. The essay of the eighteenth century was, in many respects, an analysis and criticism of contemporary political and social life. Greater freedom of the press gave birth to and fos- te^red many periodical publications that achieved greater or less success during the century. More than two hundred somewhat ephemeral publications ap- peared between 1700 and 1800. But the influence of these short-lived periodicals on the social life and the literature of the time can hardly be overestimated. By means of the periodical essay, such writers as Steele, Addison, Chesterfield, Johnson, and Goldsmith sought to reform and educate society by popularizing morality and knowledge. For this reason, the essay became markedly didactic and social in character, and hence less personal than formerly. The influence of the cof- fee-houses and the clubs in encouraging social and political discussions was plainly to be seen in the de- velopment of a more natural, sprightly, conversational style in writing. Though the essay of this period was stUl influenced to some extent by the earlier charac- ter-essays, the epistle, and visions and allegories of med- iaeval and classical literature, it was to a greater ex- tent a new and original type. But in addition to the political and social periodical essays proper, there ap- peared other types, like moral discourses, charac- ter-essays, and critical literary essays and reviews, like those of Johnson and Goldsmith. With the beginning of the nineteenth century there came still another great change in the nature and character of the essay. The essay of the seventeenth century, it will be recalled, was personal, moral, and reflective ; that of the eighteenth was social, didactic. INTRODUCTION xvii and critical in character. The essay of the nineteenth century included both the other types, which were greatly expanded and very highly perfected by the essayists of this period. A fair balance between the formal and the informal, or familiar, essay was main- tained throughout the century. Greater range and variety of subject, greater length, and greater literary finish, as compared with the essay of the two centuries preceding, were noticeable characteristics of the new essay. Furthermore, there was evidence of greater individuality in thought and directness in style. The essays were less didactic, and many of the familiar essayists were more personal and pleasingly egotistical than their predecessors had dared to be. Chief among the influences that brought about these changes were the growth of individualism in aU realms of thought ; the establishment of modern literary magazines, such as the Edivburgh Review (1802), the Quarterly He- view (1809), Blackwood's Magazine (1817), and the London Magazine (1820), — all of which gave great encouragement and rather liberal financial re- muneration to reviewers and critical essayists as well as to writers of the familiar essay ; and lastly, the revival of interest in Montaigne's JEssais. (In 1685 Charles Cotton had made a translation of the Essais which in large measure superseded Morio's translation of 1603. During the nineteenth century, Hazlitt made a revision of Cotton's translation, and thus enhanced the French essayist's popularity to an even greater degree.) Prominent among formal essayists of the last century may be mentioned such reviewers as Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850), Kobert Southey (1774- 1843), and S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834) ; such lit- erary critics as Macaulay (1800-1859), Carlyle (1795- xviii INTRODUCTION 1881), Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), and Pater (1839-1894) ; such biographical and historical essay- ists as Macaulay, Carlyle, and Bagehot (1826-1877); such sociological lecture-essayists as Ruskin (1819— 1900) and Matthew Arnold ; such scientific lecture- essayists as Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) ; and such philosophical essayists as Carlyle and Emerson (1803- 1882) in America. The familiar essay is well repre- sented by such masters and worthy disciples of Mon- taigne as Lamb (1775-1834), WiUiam Hazlitt (1778- 1830), Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), John Wilson ('Christopher North') (1785-1854), De Quincey (1785-1859), Thackeray (1811-1863), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). In the familiar essay of the nineteenth century at least four American essayists have attained to eminence ; these are Irving (1783-1859), George WiUiam Curtis (1824-1892), Holmes (1809-1894), and Donald Grant Mitchell (1822-1908). It is somewhat difficult to characterize and pass judgment upon the contemporary essay of England and America. There seems to be still a fair balance pre- served between the formal and the informal, or famil- iar, types, though at present there appears to be a falling off in the popularity of the ' pure ' literary and more serious contemplative and speculative essay of a quarter-century ago. To a considerable extent the so- called ' special article ' of the magazines is supplant- ing the ' pure ' essay. The familiar essay, however, appears to be holding its own in the better class of magazines, and is competing successfully with the short story in the case of those thoughtful, leisurely readers who are willing to take time to think and to live. INTRODUCTION nx Though many persons maintain that Stevenson was the last great name among English familiar essayists, and that Emerson is the only essayist that America has produced, there are, nevertheless, several men and women writing in both England and America who are doing creditable work in upholding the standards set by those whom we are accustomed to regard as essay- ists of the first rank. Among contemporary English essayists of note are A. C. Benson, John Galsworthy, G. K. Chesterton, E. V. Lucas, Hilaire Belloc, and Alice Meynell. In America, John Burroughs, Agnes Eepplier, Samuel McChord Crothers, Kobert Haven Schauffler, Simeon Strunsky, and Katherine Fullerton Grerould are familiar essayists worthy of mention. m. THE FAMILIAR ESSAY The familiar essay may be thought of as a compos- ite fabric delicately woven upon a slight framework called the theme or unifying idea. The pattern is of the essayist's own devising. The texture and the qual- ity of the resulting fabric depend upon his personality, his attitude toward his subject, and his skill in weav- ing — that is, his style of expression. The familiar essay in prose and the lyric in poetry are alike essen- tially literary organs of personality. In discussing the nature and the character of these two forms of litera- ture, it is well-nigh impossible to consider separately the subject, the author, and the style. The familiar essay, is most effectively defined by pointing out the interrelation of these three elements. In an article entitled ' On Essays at Large,' Mr. A. C. Benson, perhaps the foremost of contemporary English essayists, thus defines this type of the essay : XX INTRODUCTION 'The true essay, then, is a tentative and personal treatment of a subject ; it is a kind of improvisation on a delicate theme ; a species of soliloquy, as if a man were to speak aloud the slender and whimsical thoughts that come into his mind when he is alone on a winter evening before a warm fire, and, closing his book, abandons himself to the luxury of genial reve- rie. . . . The theme itself matters little — the art of it lies in the treatment. And the important thing is that the essay should possess what may be called at- mosphere and personality ; and thus it may be held to be of the essence of the matter that the result should appear to be natural, by whatever expenditure of toil that quality may need to be achieved. . . . The mark of the true essay is that the reader's thinking is all done for him. A thought is expanded in a dozen ways, until the most nebulous mind takes cognizance of it. The path winds and insinuates itself, like a little leafy lane among fields, with the hamlet-chim- neys and the spire, which are its leisurely goal, ap- pearing only by glimpses and vistas, just sufficiently to reassure the sauntering pilgrim as to the ultimate end of his enterprise.' It will be noticed that, in ad- dition to mentioning treatment and personality, the writer has included naturalness, clearness, and discur- siveness as other qualities of the familiar essay. The relation between the mood of the essayist and the subject that he may select is well indicated by Alexander Smith (1830-1867), the author of a col- lection of essays called Dreamihorp, in his article entitled ' On the Writing of Essays.' He says : ' The essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some central mood — whimsi- cal, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the INTRODUCTION xxi essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brood- ing meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with. . . . The essayist is a kind of poet in prose, and if questioned harshly as to his uses, he might be unable to render a better apology for his existence than a flower might. . . . The essayist plays with his subject, now whimsical, now in grave, now in melancholy mood. He lies upon the idle grassy bank, like Jacques, letting the world flow past him, and from this thing and the other he extracts his mirth and his moralities. His main gift is an eye to discover the suggestiveness of common things ; to find a sermon in the most unpromising texts. Beyond the vital hint, the first step, his discourses are not be- holden to their titles. Let him take up the most triv- ial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions over which the serious imagination loves to brood, — fortune, mutability, death, — just as inevi- tably as the runnel, trickling among the summer hiUs, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea ; or as, turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open country, with its waste places and its woods, where you are lost in a sense of strangeness and solitariness. The world is to the meditative man what the mvdberry plant is to the silkworm. The essay^writer has no lack of subject-matter. He has the day that is passing over his head ; and, if unsatisfied with that, he has the world's six thousand years to depasture his gay or serious humor upon.' rsii INTRODUCTION IV. FIVE GENERAL TYPES OF THE FAMILIAR ESSAY For the convenience of the reader, an attempt has been made in the present volume to classify the essays selected into five rather general types. This classifi- cation has been made primarily on the basis of sub- ject-matter and the mood of the essayist. Between some of the types there is no very sharp line of de- marcation. Some essays that are classified under one type may seem to possess characteristics suggesting a resemblance to some other type. Though the classi- fication is somewhat loose and general, it has been thought worth while. Since these types are discussed in the prefaces to their respective sections in the text, nothing more than an enumeration is included here. Essays of Type I: Personal Experiences, Confes- sions, and Self-Analyses. Essays of Type II: Reflections and Comments on Life, Human Nature, Customs, and Experience. Essays of Type III: Observations and Discoveries in the Familiar and Commonplace. Essays of Type IV: Nature Essays. Essays of Type V: General Observations, Com- ments, and Opinions of the Author. V. SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDYING THE FAMILIAR ESSAY The essay, though essentially expository in nature, is rarely pure exposition. It usually includes a com- bination of exposition with one or more of the other forms of discourse. In such familiar essays as Lamb's INTRODUCTION xxiii 'Dream-Children,' and 'The Saturday-Night Bath,' 'Endicott and I Conduct an Orchestra,' and 'Jonas and Matilda,' — the last three selections are found in this volume, — the narrative element may seem to predominate; but in essays of this kind it will usually be found that narration really contributes by way of illustration to the essay that is impliedly, at least, expository. Narration and description, fre- quently argument, contribute a considerable share to the essay. In almost every familiar essay, no matter how short or informally written, there is stated at the beginning or early in the essay some general thesis or central idea that the author uses as the text of his comments. This central idea is the most effective means of giving the essay unity. After setting forth his thesis, which often consists of an abstract statement, the writer usually proceeds to develop this central idea by the introduc- tion of concrete details and appropriate references. His personal experience and observation, together with well-chosen historical and literary allusions, furnish him the necessary illustrative material. The beginning of the essay is, from the reader's and from the writer's point of view, very important. Un- less the essay begins in an attractive fashion, few per- sons will be sufficiently interested to read beyond the first paragraph. Directness in beginning, clear, short, crisp sentences, a smooth, conversational style, and fair originality in thought — not necessarily a striking paradox, such as Mr. Chesterton is fond of using as an initial statement — will do much to give the essay a favorable introduction to the reader. Besides study- ing the beginnings of the essays included in this vol- ume, examine the opening paragraphs and the first few xxiv INTRODUCTION sentences in such essays as Hazlitt's 'The Feeling of Immortality in Youth ' and ' On Going a Journey ' ;" Lamb's 'The Two Races of Men' and 'Poor Rela- tions'; and Stevenson's ' Walking Tours,' 'Talk and Talkers,' and 'El Dorado.' In addition to the general comments just given, the following more direct suggestions and questions may be found helpful in the study of the familiar essay : — 1. After you have read the essay through carefully, try to determine exactly what Js the thesis (the central, unifying idea) that the writer ha« made the basis of his essay. State this thesis in one sentence, if possible. 2. Try to discover the method that the author has used in developing and Eimplifying this central idea ; note the use of concrete details, illustrations drawn from experience and observation, and literary and his- torical allusions. 3. Is the essay whoUj^ expository? If not, to^what extent have the o ther forms of discou rse been com- bined with exposition ? Is the essay largely narration and description, with only a slight suggestion or im- plication of exposition ? What justification have you for calling such a composition a f amiliar^essay ? 4. Consider the jubject-matter of the essay; then notice the effect that the writer's p ersonality, his moo d, and his treat ment of the subject have in making the essay readable and interesting. To what extent and by what means has the essayist given the reader an insight into his personality? Is the subject inherently interesting, wTias it been made interesting principally through the writer's rather original, personal treatment of it? 5. Try to analyze the style of the essayist. What INTRODUCTION xxv virtues does it possess? What limitations? Is the style well adapted to the subject ajjd the autiior's mobdT Is the style your chief interest in the essay? Will some of the following adjectives characterize the writer's style: easy, flowing, rhythmic, melodi- ous, graceful, picturesque, transparent, graphic, direct, forceful, clear, epigrammatic, intense, eloquent, pol- ished, abrupt, rugged, cautious, tame, restrained, trite, flat, wordy? Bead the essay aloud as a test of the natur- aJnesaoi.e2;pressiou and the conversational quality of style. 6. Notice the paragraphs and the sentences. Are they loBg-or- short? Well constructed? Effective in their particular context?^ Ts lEere anything distinctive about the essayist's choice of words? Does his diction add to the effectiveness and interest of the essay ? 7. Make free and regular use of the dictionary and books of reference as an aid to study. The meaning and connotation of words and the appropriateness of historical, literary, musical, and other allusions are very important in establishing a sympathetic understanding between the essayist and the reader. 8. Read as widely as possible in standard literature. In the reading of essays in particular, try to develop a feeling for what constitutes the particular character- istics of this type of prose literature. No amount of deflnition and abstract discussion of the essay can take the place of actual personal acquaintance with the essays themselves. Cultivate or acquire the faculty of being mentally alert. Be susceptible to impressions, and see how* greatly such an attitude adds to the pleasure of living, how much you are able to discover about your- self. Let yourself grow mentally through practice in the expression of your own intimate thoughts. TYPE I PERSONAL EXPERIENCES, CONFESSIONS, AND SELF-ANALYSES This book has a domestic and private object. It is intended for the nse of my relations and friends ; so that, when the; have lost me, which they will soon do, they may find in it some features of my con- dition and humours ; and by this means keep up more completely, and in a, more lively manner, the knowledge they have of me. . . . It is myself I portray. (Adapted from Montaigne's preface to his Eisais.) A modest, truthful man speaks better about himself than about anything else, and on that snbject his speech is likely to be most profitable to his hearers. Certainly, there is no subject with which he is better acquainted, and on which he has a better title to be heard. And it is this egotism, this perpetual reference to self, in which the charm of the essayist resides. If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well. The essayist gives you his thoughts, and lets you ■ know, in addition, how he came by themf He has nothing to conceal ; he throws open his doors and windows, and lets him enter who will. (Alexander Smith, On the Writing of Essays.) The three most interesting and universal subjects of conversation, as Stevenson observed, are, in the order of their interest and universality, ' I am I,' ' You are you,' and ' There are other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.' That is to say, the greater portion of conversation concerns itself with each speaker's self, his family, friends, and acquaint- ances, and other people more remote who possess only a vague, potential social interest for the speaker and his hearer. To paraphrase Pope, the most interesting study of mankind is man. This universal kinship of interest assures each person whose talk is of himself, or even of other people, of an interested listener. Whatever relates to a man, his life and experience, 2 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES his thoughts, desires, and dreams, will interest other men. The more personal and intimate the speaker makes his comments and confessions, the more inter- est there is inherent for the reader. Though man may never know himself fully and satisfactorily, and though he can never communicate to others all that is in his mind to say ahout even himself and his experiences and observations in living, he is constantly endeavor- ing to understand himself better and to entertain others with the interesting 'Tale of Me.' The entertaining conversationalist and the familiar essayist are very closely akin, for each is essentially a graceful, pleasing talker. The essayist's manner of expression is markedly conversational. When he is personal, informal, and easy, he is most interesting. In writing, he attempts to be as free and unaffected as he is in speaking with his intimate friend. Discur- siveness and whimsical digressions are almost as fre- quent in the familiar essay as in good conversation. Though the essayist is free to choose any subject suggested by a multitude of human interests and ex- periences, he most naturally selects those subjects that possess the strongest personal appeal. He may talk of his family, of his friends, of his more formal associates, of his acquaintances in general, or of other people still more remote from his interests ; but of himself he talks with greater zest and readiness, for his own self and experiences furnish him the best material for his re- flections and intimate musings. By self-observation he can study closely and analyze his own reactions to life and the readjustments that have come in the course of living, in a manner not possible when other persons, the objective world, and social relations are his subjects. Varying moods bring corresponding changes in the PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 3 personality, particular interest, and attitude of the familiar essayist. For this reason, his mood will usu- ally suggest to the writer that aspect of himself which he shall present in his personal comments. In writing about himself, he may assume a serious or semi-seri- ous attitude ; but more frequently he deals with his subject in a humorous, mock-serious, or even playful, manner, such as Lamb usually adopted in his quaint personal gossip. Ideally, there is no appearance of boasting or unbecoming self-praise in even the most personal familiar essays. The attitude of the author toward his subject and his humorous treatment of it may, however, permit him to be pleasingly egotistical ; but he smiles as frequently at his blunders and incon- sistencies as he does at his unsuspected cleverness and the wisdom that he has acquired in living. By his attitude of geniality the essayist invites the reader to share his thoughts, personal observations, and impressions. When he gives the reader tacitly to understand that, ' since " you are you," my friend and intelligent fellow-mortal, I have chosen you as one with whom I desire to share my reflections,' he assures himself of an interested, sympathetic reader. Because of this bond of sympathetic understanding, this per- sonal relationship between two minds, the reader en- joys the author's self-revelation, and not infrequently is highly pleased to discover many points of kinship between himself and the essayist. Such discoveries constitute one of the keenest pleasures of reading the familiar essay. They are the particular charm of the personal essay. Recognizing one's own characteristics in others and happening upon statements and echoes of one's own thoughts in the writings of another fur- nish the principal enjoyment in all essay reading. 4 PERSONAL EXPEMEKCES Among the interesting personal subjects that sug- gest themselves to the familiar essayist, a recent, vivid indiyidnal experience may please his {ancv most. He may record some interesting objeetive encounter or some mental experience in dreams or during illness and convalescence. His essay may be primarily an ac- count of the incident, accompanied by a brief com- ment on the interest and the significance of the hap- pening. At another time and under the influence of a different mood, he may confide to the reader what experience in liring has taught him aboiit himself. He may enter freely into a confidential analysis of his personality, temperament, moral ideas, religious be- lief, or philosophy of life. Again, should he be so inclined, his comments may be a confession, serious or whimsical, regarding his likes and dislikes, virtues and shortcomings, superstitions, self-deceptions, or other personal peculiarities. In a mood of reverie, he may share with the reader his enthusiasms, past and pres- ent, his day-dreams, pleasing fantasies, outgrown opin- ions and prejudices, and jealously-treasured memories. In a gayer, more talkative humor, he may entertain the reader with an exposition of some pet fad or cher- ished whim, may enumerate his hobbies or defend one of his caprices or Bohemian ideas. Furthermore, he may write a defense of an unpopular or conventionally- disapproved custom, or an apology for an iU-favored class, in which he has usually included himself. (Stevenson's ' An Apology for Idlers ' is, by the auth- or's own statement in a letter to a friend, ' really a defense of B, L. S.') In a moment of revolt he may inveigh against a custom or a convention which, he feels, cramps or restricts him in the exemse of what he considers his personal liberty or freedom of speech. PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 6 All these and many other aspects of the author's in- dividuality and experience may furnish appropriate subject-matter for this the most personal type of the familiar essay. TYMPANO As a boy I was fascinalted by the orchestral kettle- drummer. We dare confess as weaknesses of child- hood oddities which wonld stamp ns, grown men and women, as decidedly queer. I shall not confess that as a man I am still fascinated by the kettle-drum of the orchestra. It is easier to ask you whether, on your honor, the little bald-headed man behind his battery of polished mortars from which he dauntlessly fires single booming shells and rattling showers of grape has not helped you to pass more than one mu- sical evening without disgracing yourself by falling asleep. If you do not care to commit yourself, at least own that you too have been amused and inter- ested in watching his flying sticks and his bobbing head; for unless yon are an admirer of Tympano, these reminiscences wiU mean nothing to you. The important observation has been made that the blowers of wind-instruments are invariably bald or baldescent, while the sawyers of strings are adorned with locks to make a Dehlah's fingers itch. Clarinet, oboe, horn, trombone, tuba, and bassoon have blown each other's heads as bare as sirocco and simoom the pl^ns of Africa. But of all bald heads, Tympano's is the baldest. His radiant sconce beams out in the mu- sical storm like the moon amid broken clouds, and, I have no doubt, gives as much confidence to the navi- gators of the musical sea. He is never at a loss. He glares at the score. His uncompromising attitude shows you that he, at any rate, knows what it is all PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 7 about. Hovr admirable is bis self-possession as he screws up his diaphragms, taps them gently, caress- ingly, with critical ear inclined, and allays their throb- bings with unfevered palm, (And all this amid an avalanche of sound, like a man artistically tying his necktie while sliding down the Jungfrau.) How won- derful is his ability to keep one eye fixed on his score and the other on the leader, ever ready to insert, jauntily or circumspectly or decisively, into the theme his punctuation of stops, dashes, and exclamation- points ; yet also ready at any moment to set his sticks flying till they hover over the agitated surfaces of his drums, an indistinguishable cloud, out of which rise ominous mutterings of mobs, rumblings of thiinder, roar of surf, bellowings of all the bulls of Bashan. Tremendous tumult to be the offspring of a tempest, — not, it is true, in a teapot, but in a soup-kettle ! Never shall I forget the thrill that danced up and down my spine the first time I heard Grieg's Peer Gynt suite played by a great orchestra. The elfin music of Auitra's dance was done ; the funereal dirge . of Ase had died into silence like the groanings of Hamlet senior having his sins burned and purged away. Then Tympano arose and girded his loins for battle. He tested the knobs of his sticks, he turned his screws, he patted his sheepskins and ' over them softly his warm ear laid.' All was right and tight as a cruiser in fighting trim. He bent forward, alert and ready, but majestically calm. The Mountain King's ball began. The wild orgy rose and swelled. Winds howled in gorges, pines whistled and screamed, demons laughed, the sea moaned in far fiords. Superhuman buzzings sounded from the bass viols, demoniac chords from the 'cellos, 8 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES shrieks of pain from the clarinets and oboes, defiant challenges from the horns, piteous complainings from the bassoons. On and on, up and up, swept the tides of sound, but Tympano stood unmoved. Higher and nearer, till they threatened to engulf him, but he quivered not an eyelid. I had given him up for lost, but suddenly at a nod from the leader he came to life, he let loose his thunders, he roared his defiance. Low and uncertain at first he rumbled, but waxed in volume until, little man that he was, he all but drowned his toiling, sweating comrades in a long- drawn rattling peal that shook the seat whereon I sat and turned my blood to water within me. I dreamed of Tympano that night. I saw him rid- ing the wind, a new Hermes with a drumstick for a caduceus. This exploit of Tympano's took place in my twelfth year, and for a long time he occupied a niche of honor in my mental gallery of heroes as the most re- doubtable of drum-drubbers. Of course, I realized that I would rather listen to the orchestra without him than to him without the orchestra, yet I felt that the Mountain King's ball would be a poor af- fair without him, like a thunder-storm without any thunder. Perhaps a year later I discovered his soul-brother. It was at a seaside resort, and along the board-walk came marching a band of Highland bagpipers in full costume. They were tremendous fellows, but their music, to my untutored ears, was like the squealings of forty stuck pigs. Yet I have never heard strains to compare with theirs for arousing a desire to die for one's country. I think the bagpipe music must have been fashioned PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 9 back in the old days by some demon of perversity out of the whistle of arrows, the clash of claymores, the neighing of war-steeds, and the shrieks of the dying. When I hear it, I think of the wheel of fortune, the car of Juggernaut, the mills of the gods, and the in- quisitorial rack and screw. It whirls along with a cyclonic rhythm that sets the feet to tramping and the blood to boiling. And such a yell was there, Of sudden and portentous birth, As if men fought upon the earth. And fiends in upper air: Oh, life and death were in the shout, Recoil and rally, charge and rout. And triumph and despair. This particular band of six-foot Boderick Dhus came swinging along with the precision of a machine, twelve elbows and twelve legs moving as one, six grave faces set resolutely to the front, chins held high, fin- gers flying, bonnets and plaids flashing, plumes wav- ing. With the same jaunty gravity they would have led a wedding procession or a forlorn hope, and not missed a whistle or a squeak. I felt extremely smaU. as they went by, but was all eyes. For behind them strode the most prodigious figure I had ever seen. He was seven feet tall if he was an inch, and rest- ing on his wish-bone was the biggest bass-drum seen on earth since Tubal smote the chorded shell. Yet this astonishing man not only carried it with ease, but smote it with a vivacity and vigor which even Tym- pano could not outdo. And, what is more, he buffeted it on both sides, for he wielded a drumstick in each hand, and not only displayed all Tympano's precision, but managed to execute the most marvelous evolutions 10 FKimmAL EXi'y.aiKsayji between whaek*, Itrsmduhing fai« ntUtkn alternately W bind bi« head, hitting tbt; left unde of tb« drur/i witli hh ngbi-band t»tick, and rh^ vttrim, throwing ihcy atieiat into the air an<] catching tbctn again in the nick of time ; and all tfai« with a high dnvMW ; they bad mnjk low from a high e»tate ; yet for one boy they w<^re a bit of old-workl pageantry, an ejpimde in high r is said to have prt^grred the Saltan's i^^enade of three bondred drams to Jemqrlyiiid'* tnapag — 1/> fe) that there is something to 1^^ said fear the pereas iHnsions, thai ibr them two and two always mxdce four. Of coarse, Tympaoo dwells on a loftier iesthetic level ihaa tittt Heotehatsat ; h« kn//ws music, and can osnaUy play every instrument in the PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 11 orchestra a little; yet, like him, he sticks to his drums. They express his instinct for plain language, his desire to bring order out of chaos. As the Scotchman straightens out the spirals and involutions of his Gaelic pibrochs and coronachs, so Tympano, among the eva- sions and ambiguities and elusions of modern music, thumps and pounds and rumbles and roars, in much the same spirit as Doctor Johnson stamped on the ground in his argument with Bishop Berkeley. Kightly understood, they become a symbol. But moral applications have gone out of fashion. THOUGHTS WHILE GETTING SETTLED Properly speaking, the new house was old. A hundred years and more had gone over its chimney, — down which, as we were to discover later, a hun- dred flies and more would come when the open fires had warmed it, — and within doors it would have charmed any amateur of the Colonial by the antiquity of its furnishings. Temporarily it belonged to me, my executors, administrators, and assigns. But there were limits to our possession. None of us might 'permit any hole to be drilled or made in the stone or brick- work of said building ' ; no ' sign or placard ' might we place upon it ; we might not ' over-load, damage, or deface ' it ; nor might we ' carry on any unlawful, improper, noisy, or offensive trade' in it. We had ad- mitted that the glass was whole and in good order,, and bftund ourselves to keep it good, unless broken by fire, with glass of the same kind and quality. In case I became bankrupt I had agreed that the owner, the owner's executors, the owner's administrators, and the owner's assigns should treat me with every form 12 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES of ignominy that the law has yet invented to make bankruptcy more distressing. Nor could I hold them responsible if our guests fell down the cellar stairs ; although there I think they would be morally respon- sible, for a steeper flight of cellar stairs I simply can- not imagine. Of all documents there is hardly another so com- mon as a lease, or more suspicious. Observe the lessor — a benevolent, dignified, but cautious person ! Ob- serve the lessee — a worm with criminal tendencies ! Perhaps he is a decent sort of worm, but the lessor had better look out for him. Very likely he will com- mit murders in the dining-room, read the Contes Drolatiques in the library, play bass-drum solos in the parlor, and start a piggery in the cellar. One sus- pects that possibly the great army of hoboes is partly recruited from among supersensitive men who read their leases before signing them and preferred vaga- bondage to insult. But some of us control our sensi- tiveness. I, for example, read my lease ; and when, having agreed mentally to post no placard myself, I discovered a clause allowing the lessor to decorate my residence with the information that it was FOB SALE I crossed that clause out ! Observe the worm turning ! It was the dining-room that had won us, formerly the kitchen and still complete, — with the brick oven ; the crane; the fat, three-legged pots and spider; a thing that, after much debate, we think must have been a bread-toaster ; and a kind of overgrown curry- comb with which, so we imagine, the original dwellers were wont to rake the hot ashes from the brick oven. PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 13 Also a warming-pan. And although these objects charm me, and I delight to live with them, I cannot but wonder whether a hundred years from now there may not be persons to furnish their dining-rooms with just such a stove as stands at present in my real kitchen ; and perhaps to suspend beside it one of those quaint contraptions with which the jolly old chaps in the early twentieth century used to kill flies. I hear in imagination the host of that period explaining the implement to his wondering guests — being expert in such matters, he wiU. produce the technical term ' swat ' with an air of easy familiarity — and see him hang it reverently up again beside the dear old stove and right over the picturesque old coal-hod. Per- haps, too, he will point out the beautiful, sturdy lines of the coal-hod. Now in due time, or, to be exact, some hours later, strong men came to this house with a motor truck; and, working with concentrated fury, they put into it all our own furniture, our trunks, our books, our clothes, and everything that was ours. It had been our purpose to direct these men: to say, 'This goes here, kind sirs,' and, ' That goes there, gentlemen ' ; or, ' Believe me, this is the place for that,^ or, ' Thank you, sir, but that is the place for this.^ When they had come and gone, and the empty truck had rumbled away in the early autumn twilight, everything was to be just where we had planned in advance; 'getting settled ' would be a light but satisfying pleasure ; or- ganization, ' efficiency in business,' for we had been reading an article in a magazine, would have made changing our home as easy as changing our clothes. But these men were beyond mortal control. They came late and their mood was to depart early. Movers 14 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES always come late, for two reasons : first, because they like to feel that you are glad to see them, and, second, because they do not like to place each object just where it belongs. They prefer concentrated fury. Children of nature, they inherit their mother's abhorrence of a vacuum; unable, as they saw at a glance, to stuff the whole house from floors to ceilings, they devoted their attention, brushing us aside like annoying insects that they lacked time for killing, to stuffing such rooms as they instantly decided could be stuffed the tightest. If there was anything that we might pre- sumably need at once, they put it at the bottom and buried it under the heaviest available furniture. It was wonderful to see them. In the end they actually took money for what they had done and went away hastily. Organization and ' efficiency in business ' had accomplished something: the trunks were upstairs, and two barrels had reached their predestined place in the cellar. There appears in many business offices, although it is not, so far as I know, the official slogan of 'effi- ciency in business,' a card with the motto, 'Do It Now.' I looked into that room which was destined to be the library: formerly it had been a bedroom, and the four-poster bed and noble mahogany bureau were to have vanished upstairs before my arrival. But now, peering past and above and under the debris that the avalanche had left there, I recognized the noble mahogany bureau in the far corner, mourning pre- sumably for its departed companion, the four-poster. I beheld it with a misgiving which I tried to put from me, but which came back from moment to mo- pient and whispered in whichever ear was nearer. * Just suppose,' whispered Misgiving, 'that the man PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 15 who was hired to take that bureau upstairs found that it would n't go up ! ! ! ! ' And I thought of that stairway, that went up fur- tively from the dining-room that had once been the kitchen, a delightful stairway (especially when one realized what a discouraging time a burglar would have in finding it, and how he would probably find the cellar stairs instead and die of a broken neck at the bottom), but narrow, narrow; and with a right angle just where a right angle was least desirable. It had been as much as ever to get up the trunks. 'You will very likely have to leave the bureau in the library,' whispered Misgiving, 'and that will be inconvenient — won't it — when you have company. Company will have to dress in the library or else gather up its clothes and run.' — -Library!' said Misgiving. ' Who ever heard of a bureau in a li- brary? People will think the library table is a fold- ing bed. You can't disguise a noble old bureau like that by putting books on it,' said Misgiving. ' Once a bureau always a bureau. — What will your wife say,' asked Misgiving, 'when she learns that the spare-room bureau has to stay downstairs in the library?' People who, having something to do, 'do it now,' live in the present. I seized the nearest object, a chair, and dragged it into the next room; I seized the next object, a box, and carried it to the cellar; I risked my life on the cellar stairs; I became concen- trated fury myself. In getting settled, whether you are a pioneer or a householder, the first thing is to make a clearing. No matter where things go, pro- vided only that they go somewhere else. No matter what happened, bo paatter if bureaus remained for- 16 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES ever in libraries, no matter if the awful puzzle that the strong men of the moving van had left me re- mained forever insoluble — this was my home and I had to live in it for the term of one year. I took o£E my coat, hung it up somewhere — and found it again two days afterward. I attacked boxes, chairs, tables, boxes, books, bric-a-brac, more boxes, chairs, tables. I ran here and there, carrying things. I excelled the bee. I made a clearing, which grew larger and larger. I gained self-confidence. Elsewhere I knew that other hands were unpacking trunks ; that another mind was directing those mysteries which out of chaos would evolve dinner; now and then, in my defying feat of going down cellar, I caught a glimpse of the furnace, — fat-bellied monster whom I must later feed like a coal-eating baby. It is a question, parenthetically, whether it is truly sportsmanlike to live in a quaint old colonial cottage with a furnace and electric lights. I have heard amateurs of the Colonial declare that they would will- ingly die before they would live in an electrically lighted colonial cottage. The anachronism horrifies them : they would have death or candles. Probably they feel the same way about a furnace and a bath- room. Yet I have no doubt that the builders of this colonial cottage would have opened their hearts to all these inventions ; and I am not sure that they would have regarded as anything but funny the idea that their own kitchen paraphernalia would some day be used to decorate my dining-room. I go further. Granting that electric lights, a furnace, and a bath- room are anachronisms in this quaint old colonial cottage — what am I but an anachronism myself? We must stand together, the furnace, the electric PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 17 metre, the porcelain bathtub, and I, and keep each other in countenance. ' H-m-m-m-m ! ' whispered Misgiving. ' How about a bureau in the library ? That is n't an anachronism ; it 's an absurdity,' Making a clearing is a long step forward in getting settled; after that it is a matter of days, a slow dawn of orderliness. In a quaint old colonial cottage are many closets, few if any of them located according to modern notions of convenience. The clothes closet that ought to be in the spare room upstairs is down- stairs in the library with the spare-room bureau ; the upstairs closets are under the eaves of the sloping roof — the way to utilize them to the best advantage is to enter on your hands and knees, carrying an electric torch between your teeth. Inside the closet you turn on your back, illuminate the pendent gar- ments with your torch, drag whatever you select down from the hook, grasp it firmly with your teeth, and so out again on your hands and knees, rolling the elec- tric torch gently before you. We see now why in those good old days chests of drawers were popular — fortunately we have one of our own that somehow has got up the stairway; and we see also, as we begin , to settle into it, what is perhaps the secret of this humbler colonial architecture. The Colonial Jack who built this house wanted some rooms round a chimney and a roof that the snow would slide off; and so he built it; and wherever he found a space he made a closet or a cupboard ; and because he had no other kind, he put in small-paned windows; and all he did was substantial and honest — and beautiful, in its humble way, by accident. But about that bureau ? 18 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES Two strong, skillful men, engaged for the |)urpose, juggled with it, this way and that, muttering words of equally great strength — and it v/ent upstairs. Had it been a quarter of an inch wider, they said after- ward, the feat would have been impossible. It was a small margin, but it will save the company from hav- ing to knock timidly on the library door when it wishes to dress for dinner. ASKING FOE A RAISE Have you ever asked for a raise in salary ? If you have not, there is something coming to you in the way of a brand new feeling: I mean the sensation you ex- perience while approaching the boss on this quest. It is not just like sea-sickness ; it is not exactly the same as dropping ten stories in an elevator, yet there are points of similarity to it in each of these. Walking into the dentist's office with a tooth aching to be pulled approximates it as nearly as anything else, al- though in this case, the pain is reversed: the boss is the one who has the pain, and you are the one to do the pulling. As much depends upon your approach to the boss as does on your approach to the green, to use an ex- pression of golf. You must not shoot too far ; neither should you foozle and have to make an extra attempt. But go right in as if you belonged there. Never mind speaking about the weather as a self-starting device ; say what is on your mind. He can find out about the atmospheric conditions by looking out the window. When you go in on the green carpet the boss is very busy. He is frowning and looks decidedly squally. The thought comes over you that you will not say what PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 19 you meant to ; that this is not the time anyway, and besides he probably won't give it to you and you will feel chagrined ; a^d that you are an ass for coming in there at all. These are not separate thoughts, but one sickening, panic-stricken lurch of your brain. It is lucky that the boss does not look up and see the ex- pression on your face, because he would think that you had either lost your reason or had been taken violently ill. As it turns out, he leads. «WeU, Percival?' He manages to put a fatherly tone into these two words. He also contrives to inject into them a some- thing which tells you that he 'is about to refuse your request, if you have courage enough left to make it, and that he is going to feel hurt about the whole thing. You could feel sorry for him if you were not so busy feeling sorry for yourself. How he manages to do this is a mystery and a subject on which only a boss could write. The panic-stricken feeling abates just enough for you to see a mental picture of General Putnam going down the long flight of stone steps after something very fierce (you cannot remember just what), Nathan Hale making his famous wish, Horatius at the bridge, or Washington crossing the Delaware. With these examples of heroic endeavor prodding you on, you say the words. They are not the words that you have re- hearsed ; no, indeed. They are very extemporaneous. They are simple Anglo-Saxon words, not grammati- cally put together and totally dififerent from any that you had planned to say. However, they are out and you do not feel like Atlas any longer. A fleeting pain seems to pass though the boss, as if he had been secretly and suddenly stabbed. This wears 20 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES away, only to be succeeded by a long, thoughtful look, suggesting that he has not only been hurt, but surprised. (The old rascal knew what you wanted when you came in.) ' Well, you know, Percival, times are not what they should be. We 're under a big expense and the way things are, — I don't know. Let 's see, how long have you been with us?' You teU him, and he swings in the swivel chair the employees gave him last Christmas and looks out the window. He seems to be pondering over the terrific expense the firm is laboring under. You had enter- tained an idea that the concern was highly prosper- ous. But all your brains have been left outside and you gravely accept the thought that the business is tottering on the brink of failure. There is something the matter with your heart, you find. Too much smok- ing, probably. If you have sense enough to keep quiet, he will make the next move. ' Well, I guess it 's all right. You can tell Barker on the way out that I said you could have four dollars more after this.' You beam. Words of thanks come in a jumble, and perhaps a mist steals over your eyes. The boss deprecatingly raises his hand, growling, ' Not at all, not at all.' Then he turns to the burden he bears, which he somehow makes you feel has become four dollars more of a burden. You steal softly out, leaving him to the figures on the pad in front of him. They are the comparison of his goM score with that of Colonel Bogey, though you do not know that. The door closes, and you take a couple of steps which no Eussian dancer could even equal. You tell Barker, trying to keep your voice down where it PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 21 belongs. Barker smiles. You do not know what that smile means, but you will know some day, when you are a Barker. That evening you tell her. A thing like this must be told at just the right moment. The telling must not be delayed ; neither should it be an abrupt over- ture to a pleasant evening. One thing is certain : you will tell it casually. Should you be smoking, you will flick the ash from your cigarette as a period to the sentence. If you are not smoking, you will brush an imaginary speck from your knee. These are the only two gestures possible. She will say, 'No, recdlyf And you answer, ' Uh-huh.' And what does it matter then whether you are going to be a Barker or a Boss ? THE DAILY THEME EYE When I was an undergraduate at Harvard our in- structors in English composition endeavored to culti- vate in us a something they termed ' The daily theme eye.' This peculiar variety of optic, I fear, always re- mained a mystery to a majority of the toilers after clearness, force, and elegance. Clearness, force, and even a certain degree of elegance, may be acquired ; but the daily theme eye, like the eye for the sights of a rifle, may be discovered, developed, trained — but not acquired. It comes by the grace of Heaven, not of the Harvard or any other English department, and its possession is often one of the marks of the man whose destiny* compels him to write. The Harvard English department has but given it a name ; it has no local habitation. It is found in Henry James and the police reporter of the New York Sun; it illuminates the pages of The Harvard Monthly (sometimes) and of 22 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES George Moore. It winks at you in Heine and peers solemnly in Mrs. Humphry Ward. And it flashes and beams in a little lady I know who has written nothing save sprightly letters all the days of her life and never opened Hill's Rhetoric under the shade of the Washington Elm. The fairy who stood over my cradle, though he for- got the gold spoon and much else besides, at least bestowed the gift of this wonderful optic. It brought me my college degree ; for when other courses failed — which means when I failed in other courses — there was always English ; it has brought me a living since ; but more than all else it has brought me enjoy- ment, it has clothed the daily walk with interest, the teeming, noisy town with color and beauty, ' the soci- ety of my contemporaries,' to use Emerson's big phrase for my little purpose, with stimulating excitement. It has turned the panorama of existence into a play, or rather a thousand plays, and brought after sorrow or pain the great comfort of composition. Daily themes in my day had to be short, not over a page of handwriting. They had to be desposited in a box at the professor's door not later than ten-five in the morning. A classmate of mine, when an epigram was called for, once wrote, ' An epigram is a lazy man's daily theme written at ten-three a.m.' And because of this brevity, and the necessity of writing one every day whether the mood was on you or not, it was not always easy — to be quite modest — to make these themes literature, which, we were told by our instruc- tors, is the transmission through the written word, from writer to reader, of a mood, an emotion, a picture, an idea. I hate to think how few, in fact, of all the thou- sands that were poured into that yawning box were PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 23 literature, how seldom the poor instructors could dip their pens into their pots of red ink and write the magic A on the back. Their sarcastic comments were surely excusable. I have even forg;iven the young man with hair like yellow corn-tassels, who scrawled on verses of mine, required to be written in imitation of some poet, ' This may be O'Shaughnessy, it is n't poetry.' Did he think thus to kill two song birds with one stone ? Well, the effort of those of us who were sincere and comprehending in our pursuit of the elu- sive power to write was to make our themes literature as often as possible ; and to do this the first essential was the choice of a subject. Not everything one sees or does or thinks can take shape on a page of paper and reproduce itself for the reader. Selection was the first requirement. It became needful, then, to watch for and treasure incidents that were sharply dramatic or poignant, moods that were clear and definite, pictures that cre- ated a single clean impression. The tower of Memorial seen across the quiet marshes' against the cool, pink sky of evening ; the sweep of a shell under the bridge and the rush of the spectators to the other rail to watch the needle-like bow emerge, and the bent, brown backs of the crew ; the chorus girls, still rubbing the paint from their cheeks with a tiny handkerchief wrapped over the forefinger, coming out of a stage entrance into the snow ; the first sharp impression of a book just read or a play just seen, — these were the things we cherished, for these we could put on a page of paper with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and with some show of vividness. What we came to do, then, was to keep a note-book of our impressions, and when in June our themes were returned to us we had 24 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES a precious record for the year. By training the daily theme eye, we watched for and found in the surround- ings of our life, as it passed, a heightened picturesque- ness, a constant wonder, an added significance. That hardened cynic, the professional writer, will smile and say, ' You saw copy,' Yes, we saw copy ; but to see copy is to see the significant, to clarify what the ear and heart and eye receive, to add light and shadow to the monochrome of life. My college room-mate, a blessed boy fuU of good humor and serious purpose, was as incapable of ac- quiring the daily theme eye as a cat of obeying the eighth commandment. His idea of a daily theme was a task, not a pleasure. If there was no chance to write a political editorial, he supplied an anecdote of his summer vacation. Once he described a cliff he had seen in Newfoundland, and, determined to be picto- rial, he added, ' tumbling waterfalls ' and ' sighing pines.' Unfortunately, the instructor who read it had also been in Newfoundland, and he pointed out that his investigations of the cliff in question had failed to disclose either 'tumbling waterfalls 'or 'sighing pines.' My room-mate treated the matter as a joke ; he could not see that he had been guilty of any fault. And yet he is a much more moral man than I, with a far more troublesome conscience. Truth to his prin- ciples he would die for. But truth to the picture his mind retained and his hand tried to portray in the medium of literature, to him so trivial and unimpor- tant, he could not grasp. What did it matter ? So it would never occur to him to record in his themes the fleeting impressions of his daily life, to sit up half the night trying to pack into the clumsy frame of words the recollection of a strangely innocent face PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 25 seen suddenly in the flash of an opened door down a dark, evil alley where the gusts of winter swirled. He went to bed and never knew a headache or jumpy nerve. Yet I could not help thinking then that there was something in life he was missing besides the ulti- mate mark in our composition course. And I cannot help thinking that there is something in life he misses stiU. But perhaps that is only my fancy. George Moore says that happiness is no more than a faculty for be- ing surprised ; and it is the sudden vista, the beauty of a city square seen through falling snow, a street- car drama, the face of a passing woman, the dialogue of friends, which make the surprises for the man with the eye for copy. George Moore himself has a daily theme eye of preternatural keenness, and he may be speaking only for a class. Happiness for my room- mate lies, I suspect, rather in his faculty for not be- ing surprised. A sudden accession of emotion at the sight of an unexpected view, for instance, would prob- ably be immensely disconcerting. And if he should go into an art museum, as I did the other day, and see a little marble boy with a slightly parted mouth wet his lips with his tongue, I truly believe he would rush off to the doctor's at once, very unhappy, instead of rush- ing joyfully home to try to put the illusion into a son- net! Well, every class has its Pharisaism, which in reality is n't a form of priggishness, at all, but merely a recognition of difference. He thinks I am impracti- cal, a bit odd, not quite a grown man. I think he is — a charming fellow^ We are about quits on that 1 26 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES A DEFENSE OF WHISTLING Whistling girls and crowing hens have been brack- eted together by the wisdom of the ages, but 'bad ends ' have been allotted these ladies, because they have not as yet learned to perform in tune, not from anything inherently bad in whistling per se. Unfor- tunately the proverb has, however, by a fatal associa- tion of ideas, reflected on a noble art. Because girls and newsboys pipe 'ragtime' without regard to the diatonic scale, why should^my avocation be banned by polite society ? It would be quite as absurd to con- sider singing outri because burly baritones persist in roaring ' Wake not, but hear me. Love,' at afternoon concerts ; or to put the piano down as vulgar because a certain type of person is always whanging Chami- nade out of season. (For my part, I have never dis- covered Chaminade's season ; but then I am only a fiddler.) My avocation consists in whistling to myself the most beautiful melodies in existence, and I go about in a state of perpetual surprise that no one else does likewise. Never yet have I heard a passing stranger whistling anything worth while ; but I have my plans all laid for the event. The realization of that whistle will come with a shock like the one Childe Boland felt when something clicked in his brain, and he had actu- ally found the dark tower. I hope I shall not be a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sound, and so lose my man among the passers-by. When I hear him I shall chime in with the second violin or 'cello part perhaps, or, if he has stopped, I PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 27 shall pipe up the answering melody. Of course he will be just as much on the alert as I have been, and will search eagerly for me in the crowd, and then we shall go away together, and be crony-hearts forever after. I am constantly constructing romances, each with this identical beginning, for what could be more romantic than to find by chance the only other one in all the world who shared your pet hobby ? But I am grow- ing old in the quest, and sometimes fear that I may never find my stranger, though I attain the years and the technique of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The human whistle is the most delightfully informal of instruments. It needs no inglorious lubrication of joints and greasing of keys like its dearest relative the flute. It is not subject to the vocalist's eternal cold. It knows no inferno of tuning and snapping strings, nor does it need resin for its stomach's sake and its often infirmities. Its only approach to the baseness of mechanism is in a drainage system akin to that of the French horn, but far less brazen in its publicity. I love my whistle quite as I love my violin, but in a different way. They stand, the one to the other, very much in the relation of my little, profanely-extra- illustrated school Horace to that magnificent codex of the fifth century, the gem of my library. The former goes with a black pipe and a holiday, with luncheon under a bush by a little trout stream : the latter im- plies scholarship, or else visitors and Havana cigars. One of the best qualities of the whistle is that it is so portable. The whistler may not even have rings on his fingers, but he shall have music wherever he goes ; and to carry about the wealth of Schubert and Bee- thoven and Chopin is more to me than much fine gold. 28 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES Brahms is one of the most whistle-able of composers, and my two specifics for a blue Monday are to read Stevenson's Letters and to whistle aU the Brahms themes I can remember. I will begin perhaps with concertos, then rim through the chamber music and songs (which I prefer without words), reserving the overtures, suites, choral works, and symphonies for a climax. The most ultramarine devils could hardly re- sist the contagious optimism of a Brahms whistling- bout, and I believe that if Schopenhauer, ' that prince of miserabilists,' had practiced the art, it would have made him over into a Stanley HaU. Whistling to keep up the courage has passed into an adage, but the Solomons have said nothing about whistling to keep up the memory. Yet nothing is bet- ter for the musical memory than the game of 'Whistle.' A whistles a melody. If B can locate it, he wins the serve. If he cannot, A scores one. If the players have large repertoires, the field should be narrowed down to trios, or songs, or perhaps first movements of sym- phonies. I stiU feel the beneficent effects of the time when I used to sit with my chum in a Berlin cafe into the small hours, racking my brain and my lips to find a theme too recondite for him. For such purposes the whistle is exquisitely adapted. One often hears it re- marked that the violin is almost human ; but the whis- tle is absolutely human and, unlike the violin, is not too formal to take along on a lark. Though it cannot sing to others Of infinite instincts, — souls intense that yearn, it will stick loyally and cheerily by you through thick and thin, like PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 29 the comrade heart For a moment's play, And the comrade heart For a heavier day, And the comrade heart Forever and aye. The whistle is one of the best tests of musical gen- ius. Not that the divine spark lurks behind truly puck- ered lips, but you may be sure that something is amiss with that cotnposer whose themes cannot be whistled ; although, of course, the converse will not hold. He lacks that highest and rarest of the gifts of God, — melody. Certain composers nowadays, with loud dec- larations that this is the Age of Harmony, are trying to slur over their fatal lack by calling melody anti- quated, a thing akin to perukes and bustles — and sour grapes. By changing the key twice in the meas- ure, they involve us so deep in harmonic quicksands as to drown, momentarily, even the memory of Schu- bert. If this school prevails it will, of course, annihi- late my avocation, for I have known but one man who could whistle harmony, and even he could not soar above thirds and sixths. I shudder when I imagine him attacking a D'Indy symphony ! The whistle has even wider possibilities than the voice. It is quite as perfect and natural an instru- ment, and exceeds the ordinary compass of the voice by almost an octave. It can perform harder music with more ease and less practice. It has another ad- vantage : in whistling orchestral music, the drum-taps, the double-bass, the bassoon may be ' cued in ' very realistically and with little interruption by means of snores, grunts, wheezes, clucks, et cetera. The whistle's chief glory is that it is human, yet 30 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES single. Sometimes, especially during certain operas, I am inclined to think that when Music was ' married to Immortal Verse' she made a mesalliance. The couple seldom appear to advantage together; their ' winding bouts ' are sad public exhibitions of conjugal infelicity. Instead of cooperating, each misrepresents and stunts the other's nature. Both insist on talking at the same time, so that you can understand neither one plainly, and, as is generally the case, the lady gets in the first and last word, and shouts poor I. V. down between whiles. You would hardly take her, as she strides about red-faced and vociferous, for the goddess to whom you gave your heart when she was a maiden. But there, you must remember that I am only a fiddler who prefers ' absolute music,' and believes in the de- generacy of opera as a form of art. The whistle has almost as many different qualities of tone as the voice, although it is so young as still to be in the boy-chorister stage. Who can predict the developments of the art after its change of whistle? I, for one, fear that it wUl be introduced into the sym- phony orchestra before long, and this, I am sure, will make it vain, and destroy its young naivete, and its delicious informality. It would be like punching holes into my dear old black pipe, fitting it with a double reed, and using it in the future works of Max Reger as a kind of piccolo-oboe. I go about furtively looking at conductors' scores for fear I may see something like this : — Whistle I Whist. II Whist. Profondo. But with all my heart I hope that my avocation may PEKSONAL EXPERIENCES 31 not be formalized until after I have hung up the fid- dle and the bow on the staff of my life as a sort of double-bar. THE SATURDAY-NIGHT BATH Certain aspirations are so deeply rooted in the souls of men that they persist through generations in spite of every obstacle. I write in defense of one of these — a time-honored ceremonial, the Saturday-night bath. If you are city-bred, and accustomed from child- hood to step from a warm bed to a warm bathroom and thrill to an every-morning scrub, you are probably scornful of me and my theme. Let me ask you a ques- tion. Did you ever, on a freezing winter day, stand precariously in one slippery wash-basin while you sponged your shivering self with about a quart of water from another china bowl? If you think you would have persisted in this, morning after morning, in an unheated bed room, through zero weather, I sa- lute you ! You belong to the elect. I know there are such people ; my sister Frances was one of them. I remember that mother called in the family doctor to see if he did n't think it was this peculiar habit that made Frances so thin. My own childhood, as it stretches out behind me, is punctuated at regular intervals by furiously busy Sat- urdays and shining, immaculate Sundays. The weekly bai^ was a fixed institution — no one ever went to church without it ; but the problem of bathing eleven boisterous (and occasionally rebellious) children, and getting everybody finished and out of the way by nine o'clock at night, made Saturday an interesting day for 32 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES mother. Considering the difficulties we had to contend with, I think we were a very industrious family about bathing. In the first place, the reservoir on the kitchen range had to be filled thirteen separate times. It was the unvarying rule that each member of the family old enough to carry a pail must bring water from the cistern in the wood-shed for the one next in turn. It was a sad day for the wretch who used all the water and forgot to fill the reservoir. Then the tub had to be emptied each time, by dipping out the war ter until it was light enough to carry. Gerald and Charlie got around this once by using the same wa^ ter ; but mother strongly discouraged them from ever trying it again. We bathed according to age. The baby, whoever he was, had his bath right after breakfast, while such members of the family as were not otherwise occupied stood around in an adoring circle, ready to hand the safety-pins, to warm blankets, or fly upstairs for some forgotten accessory. (I must not give the impression that the baby was washed only on Saturday. He had his bath every morning until there was a newer one.) After he was tucked away for his nap the younger children, one at a time, engaged mother's attention until dinner. She did n't superintend any but the very smallest ; but she rigidly inspected each child before he was allowed to step from the tub — and woe to the culprit who had failed to wash behind his ears ! We older ones took turns during the afternoon, and we had to be ready promptly and be swift in action, for getting thirteen baths out of an ordinary range-reser- voir requires a high grade of efficiency. Six o'clock found us gathered around the supper table, radiantly clean and ravenously hungry. But the crowning cere- PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 33 monial of the whole day occurred at nine in the eve- ning, when mother filled the tub for father and laid out his clean things. Mother always encouraged father in bathing, and made it as easy for him as she could. In fact, as I lookback upon it, I think it was mother's deep yearning for the bath that kept us all in the paths of virtue. Her own ablutions occurred late at night, after the rest of the family were sound asleep. Stationary tubs and running water were virtually unknown in Brierly at that time, and our experiments with substitutes were varied and interesting. I remem- ber a tin tub, painted blue outside and white inside, with a back to lean against like a sleepy-hollow arm- chair, and little round soap-dishes on each side of the rim. We children sat Turk-fashion in it, and could lean back comfortably between scrubs. It must have been in one of these intervals of rest that Caroline, burning with injury over some family disagreenaent, scratched the following sentence on the inside of the rim, with a pin : ' Edward is an ugly, naughty boy. Hi yi, ki yi ! ' Edward's bath came after Caroline's, and this judgment confronted him weekly, as long as the tin tub endured. The rubber tub was bought when Tryphena had inflammatory rheumatism, and was a great luxury in those days. It was made of pliant rubber, and hung from a wooden frame which rested on two chairs. In repose it was about the size and shape of an ordinary porcelain tub, but it ' gave ' so unexpectedly when occuftied, and was so very slippery, that getting in was a science, staying in an adventure, and getting out an art. The courthouse burned down just about the time that mother read The Last Days of Pwnpeii, and I 34 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES think a vision of Roman tepidaria must have lingered in her mind when she built the Little Room. Father sent home two tall glass doors from the courthouse fire — all that was left of the building. Presumably they were given to him because he was the judge. Mother conceived the idea of walling in the little porch just off the kitchen and using these glass doors as part of the east wall. This was how the Little Porch became the Little Room. In the floor of this room mother instructed the surprised carpenter to build a tub, about six feet long by two and a half wide. He made it beautifully smooth inside, and calked the seams so that it could not leak. A drain was constructed leading into a gravel bank under the porch. The tub had a cover which matched the floor and which, when let down, transformed our bathroom to sun parlor. We were jubilant over this invention when it was finished ; but long before the carpenter's bill was paid on the installment plan, our illusions were dispelled. The drain refused to work as it should, and for a discouraging length of time after each bath the tub would stand half full of water. After the cover had been left up once or twice, and several of the fam- ily had walked into it in the dark, we gradually gave up using it. We had one small room called the Bathing Room, but no one ever bathed in it within my memory. The old black walnut washstand used to be kept there, which perhaps gave rise to its name. Later, as the family grew and closets became congested, hooks were installed all around the Bathing Room, and we hung our Sunday clothes on them. Still later, the baby's crib stood there — but the name remained. This, and another room called the China Closet, where no china PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 35 ever was, together with the Library, where mother kept her canned fruit, were a source of never-failing glee to visitors. In summer we sometimes bathed upstairs, but we objected to this in our youth because the water had to be carried up and down. It is true that Sherman and John conceived the labor-saving idea of pouring it out on the wood-shed roof, but they did it only once. Mother happened to be giving an order to the grocery boy at the moment, and he came out of the back door just in time to get the soa.py flood down his back. As we grew older, we developed an etiquette of bathing. A small clique, led by Frances, insisted that it was only decent to save half the water to rinse off in. Some of the rest of us warmly argued this point. We held that it was impossible to take a real bath in half a reservoir of water, and that the results obtained by rinsing did n't compensate for the extra labor in- volved. Personally, I went through life unrinsed until we moved to the city. Arthur was the one to found a cult of outdoor bathing. In an angle formed by the walls of the dining-room and the library he constructed an impromptu room of sheets strung on clothes-lines, with the russet apple tree for one comer. ' No roof but the blue above us. No floor but the beaten sod.' The idea took like wildfire. Bathing out of doors, with the apple blossoms and blue sky over our heads, took on a tinge of romance that was not to be resisted. But of course it was limited to the very warmest days in summer. When all was said and done, the thing we always came back to, like returning to the old-fashioned safety-pin after all these new-fangled contrivances to keep your skirt in place, was a wooden wash-tub by 36 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES the kitchen stove. There we arranged clothes-bars and chairs, draped them with sheets, blankets, and father's army blanket, to insure privacy, and succes- sively performed the Saturday rite, while the rest of the family waited their turn. Of course the old order changed in time. Galvan- ized tubs succeeded wooden ones, and finally a wind- mill and a tank on top of the house brought running water. When father gave up a coiuitry judgeship for^ a law office in town, and we moved to the city, bath- ing became an every-day affair. I would not say a word in deprecation of modern plumbing. Beyond a doubt it is one of our greatest blessings and the herald of a true democracy, when there shall be neither a ' great unwashed ' nor a ' sub- merged tenth.' But, somehow, Saturday has lost its savor. Life is tamer than it used to be. No man in his senses would wish, in this day of Pullman sleep- ers, to cross the Great Plains in a prairie schooner, but the names of the men who risked their lives to do it are enshrined in history. And so I Ihink we ought to build a little altar to the middle-class country mothers who, in the face of every obstacle, kept the Saturday-night bath a sacred institution, and handed it down to their children inviolate. THE DICTATORSHIP OF AN ACROBATIC MIND A FEW months ago one laboring under the bane of deliberation queried : — ' Is it worse to be thought-less or thought-tied ? ' It is neither the one nor the other. Both are merely bad. PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 37 Worse than either is the misfortune of possessing mental faculties so constructed that with the slightest pull of the intellectual string the whole equipment springs into instantaneous motion after the manner of an acrobatic jumping- jack. This condition is the bete noire of my existence. The severest cudgelings have failed to keep my insub- ordinate thoughts under control. They have bullied and oppressed me until I feel myself the abject prey of every chance comer. The weakest gosling of an idea is as potent against me as the cannonade of an ency- clopaedia. I listen to a lecture or a sermon. The orator begins to roU a ponderous period up a difficult hiU. Snap ! I have caught the impulse of a word or two, and off I go in leaps and bounds, hither and thither, but ever on until I arrive at the top, and find I have gathered in my jiggling flight so motley a crew of ideas they surely must begin with time and finish in eternity — • yet still they continue to arrive. I am contemplating them in dismay when the conscious movement of a neighbor attracts me. A new hat ! In one instant I have inspected every hat and coiffure in my vicinity, planned my next season's suit, and determined the rearrangement of my back hair. Another jump, and I am back with the speaker ; he is but halfway up. By a strenuous effort of will I accompany him to the top, that I may be present when he arrives at one of the foregone conclusions I have already arrayed there. If by mischance he does not reach the end expected, impelled by the stimulus of a new view-point away I fly, and thus miss the opening of the next sentence. It is not a fair start, but no matter, the process is the same. One leap, and I have returned ; another, 38 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES advanced, arrived, double, turn and twist, back and forth, up and down, in and out, and alas, too fre- quently never touching bottom. It is arduous. What is being thought-tied compared to this ? A bann of repose, and irresponsible thoughtlessness? — an unattainable joy to a mind whose only respite is an abeyance, a waiting for a fresh pull of the string. Nor is mine that happy-go-lucky species of mind which jumps at conclusions. I jump to conclusions indeed, but it is a series of jumps, a succession of leaps from one peak to another, until arriving at the summit, afar off it may be from the one intended, but guarded by a bulwark of opinions, here I stop, breathless. As a consequent of having stated these facts, a con- fession is now forced upon me : this high vaulting from one thought to another, this springboard asso- ciation of ideas, has created within me a memory of which I stand in deadly awe. It is unnecessary to recall to me the fact that psy- chologists consider memory of a very low order of in- tellect. I can substantiate the statement. But I protest that when I was young I had no memory, that this thing has grown apace with my years, the malevolent product of my mental gymnas- tics, until now, full grown, the amount of material it can furnish for the hashing of thoughts is something appalling. Overworked, my wiU has been dethroned and my judgment debased. But whatever the inner misery caused by these conditions, the unseemly outward manifestation is causing even my friends to regard me askance. There was a time when to me, also, the supplying of dates was something uncanny, the recall- ing of long-buried facts positively gruesome, and the PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 39 quick application of quotations a decided bore. The finding of a word for which a friend appears to be searching — if by ill-luck it happens to be of a slightly different meaning and thus throws him off the track from what he was intending to say — is not often con- sidered a friendly act. To see too quickly the point of a story and then forget to laugh at the proper time, or to insert a missing detail and with it a chance in- sinuation that you have heard the story before, does not enhance one's popularity. Undertake the telling for one's self and quickly one's auditors are swamped in a sea of suggested ideas, and the climax is pre- sented to submerged ears. Then in desperation one tries another tactic, one or two bold strokes, and the point appears so quickly that it passes for a mere de- tail. You are sure to be left speechless, with your audience politely waiting for the denouement. Poets pray for man the gift of a strong athletic brain, most especially the unhappy possessor of the acrobatic mind. Such a one, guided by the uncertain conduct of a mind which moYCS in spasmodic leaps and jumps, stimulated by any chance word or expression, can never travel up the road of Parnassus in the good fellowship of comrades. He can never scale the heights in the company of the elect. FUENACE AND I Stjmmek is the favorite time to advertise furnaces, for, although a pacifist might argue that being pre- pared for cold weather encourages frost, the practical persons who make and sell heating plants are firm be- lievers in preparedness. They produce diagrams show- ing how their furnace bisects the coal bill, and pictures 40 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES showing how easily a pretty child can run it from the front hall. But my furnace is different. I defy the prettiest child imaginable to run it. Indeed, in a strict sense, I defy anybody to run it, for this furnace has a mind of its own and an odd ambition to behave like a thermometer. On a warm day it goes up, on a cold day it goes down ; in zero weather it takes all the time of a determined man to head it off from becom- ing a large, inconvenient refrigerator. As for bisect- ing coal bills, the creature likes coal. I have even thought that it made strange, self-congratulatory, happy noises whenever there occurred a rise in the price of its favorite edible. Before meeting this furnace I had lived in apart- ments, and my mentEil conception of a ton of coal had been as of something enormous, sufficient to heat the average house a month. A furnace was to me a re- mote mystery operated by a high priest called ' jani- tor,' whom I vaguely connected with the lines of SmoUett — Th' Hesperian dragon not more fierce and fell; Nor the gaunt, growling janitor of Hell. I took my heat as a matter of course. If I wanted more of it, I spoke warmly to the janitor through a speaking tube — and, after a while, there was more heat. If I wanted less I spoke to him coldly, in the same 'distant, godlike way — and, after a while, there was less heat. In neither case, I discovered, did an ordinary tone of voice get any result whatever ; and, although a fat man himself, he sometimes growled back through the tube very much like the gaunt specimen mentioned by Smollett. But I gave little thought to him. I had what is called an ' intelligent idea ' that PERSONAL EXPEMENCES 41 to produce more heat he opened a ' draught,' and to reduce heat he closed it, the effect of a draught on a furnace being just the opposite to its effect on a jani- tor. At night he ' shook the furnace down ' and in the morning he ' shook the furnace up.' One gathers such knowledge casually, picks it up here and there without conscious effort or realization. I had in fact no more curiosity about the furnace than about the sun, for I seemed as unlikely ever to run one heater as the other. Then, like many another man who has lived in apartments, I turned suburbanite. I had a furnace, and I had to run it myself. How well I remember that autumn day when I started my first furnace fire ! There sat the monster on the floor of the cellar, im- passive as Buddha and apparently holding up the house with as many arms as an octopus, hollow arms through which presently would flow the genial heat. I peeked cautiously through a little door into his stomach, and marveled at its hollow immensity. I reached in tiU my arm ached — and my hand dangled in empty space. But my intelligence told me that there must be a bot- tom. Crumpling a newspaper into a great wad, I dropped it down, down into the monster's gullet, where it vanished forever ; I crumpled and dropped another; I continued until at last — oh, triumph of mind and industry over incalculable depth ! — I saw newspaper, and had something tangible on which to erect a pyre of kindlings. Where I could reach I laid them crosswise, and where I could n't I tossed them in at varying angles, gaining skill with practice. ' It is like a great wooden nest ! ' I cried in aston- ishment. ' JVow I know why the coal I have bought for my furnace is called " egg." ' 42 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES I lit the fire and made a grand smoke. It rose through the kindlings | it piled out through the little door ; it hung like great cobwebs to the roof of the cellar. With great presence of mind I hastily closed the little door and ran lightly up the cellar stairs. The smoke had preceded me ; it got there first through the convenient registers; and more was com- ing. I met a woman. ' Is the house afire ? ' she asked excitedly. ' It is not,'' I replied quietly, in a matter-of-course way. ' When you start your fire for the winter it always smokes a little.' We opened the windows. We went outside and looked at the house. It leaked smoke at every crevice except, curiously enough, at the chimney. Ah-h-h-h-h! I saw what had happened. I groped my way to the cellar and opened the back damper. Now the smoke went gladly up the chimney, and the view through the little door was at once beautiful and awful : it was like looking into the heart of an angry volcano. Evidently it was time to lay the eggs on the nest. I shoveled the abyss full of coal, and the volcano became extinct. Presently, instead of a furnace full of fire I had a furnace fuU of egg coal. I began taking it out, egg by egg, at first with my fingers and then with the tongs from the dining-room fireplace. And when the woman idly questioned me as to what I was going to do down cellar with the tongs, I bit my lip. . . . To the man who runs it (an absurd term as applied to a thing that has no legs and weighs several tons) the furnace is his first thought in the morning and his last thought at night. His calendar has but two sea- sons — winter, when the furnace is going ; and sum- mer, when the furnace is out. But in summer his PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 43 thoughts are naturally more philosophical. He sees how profoundly this recent invention (which he is not at the time running) has changed man's attitude to- ward nature. Why, he asks himself, have past genera- tions of men regarded autumn as continuously mel- ancholy, which it is n't, and spring as continuously cheerful, which it isn't either? Because they had no furnaces. They coidd n't warm their houses in winter. They suffered. Autumn was melancholy because it led to winter, and spring was cheerful because it pre- ceded summer when nobody needed a furnace. It is unfortunate, he realizes whimsically, that a man often forgets what a blessing his furnace is at the time he is running it ; but even so there is a kind of discipline, a strengthening of the moral nature — I am, of course, not referring to those furnaces which are endowed with more than the average human intelligence ; those Superfurnaces met with in the ad- vertisements, which shake themselves down, shovel their own coal, carry and sift their own ashes, regulate their own draughts, and, if they do not actually order and pay for their own coal, at least consume it as care- fully as if they did. Such furnaces — so long as no- body g;ives me one — seem positively weakening. There is no struggle, no opposition of wills, no variety of experience, no exercise of those noble characteristics, faith, hope, and charity. For the man with a Super- furnace life is too easy. ' Toddlekins,' he says to his little daughter, ' press the button.' ' Yes, Papa,' says Toddlekins. She puts down her doll, skips merrily into the front hall, presses the but- ton — and that is all there is to it. But with a furnace like mine a man experiences all 44 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES the emotions of which he is capable. He loves, he hates, he admires, he despises, he grieves, he exults. There have been times when I have felt like patting my fur- nace ; and again times when I have slammed his little door and spoken words to him far, far hotter than the fire that smouldered and refused to burn in his bowels. I judge from what I have read that taming a wild ani- mal must be a good deal like taming a furnace, with one important exception. The wild-animal-tamer never loses his temper or the beast would kill him ; but a furnace, fortunately for suburban mortality, cannot kill its tamer. When his furnace happens to be good-natured, how- ever, a man will often find the bedtime hour with it pleasant and even enjoyable. He descends, humming or whistling, to the cellar ; and the subsequent shak- ing and shoveling is, after all, no more than a healthy exercise which he would not otherwise take and which will make him sleep better. He is friendly with this rotund, coal-eating giant ; he regards it almost like a big baby which he is putting to bed — or at least he might so regard it if putting a baby to bed was one of his recognized pleasures. In such a mood he may even nod back gayly over his shoulder as he goes up the cellar stairs, and find himself saying ' Good night. Old Furnace.' Or, if he has lately been reading one of our more popular authors, ' Good night. Old Top.' But oh, what a difference in the morning! He awakes in the dark, startled perhaps from some pleas- ant dream by the wild alarm-m-m-m-m-m-m of a clock under his pillow ; and outside the snug island of warmth on which he lies, the Universe stretches away in every direction, above, below, and on every side of him, cold, dreary, and unfit for human habitation, to PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 45 and beyond the remotest star. In that cold Universe how small he is! — how warm and how weak! In- stantly he thinks of the furnace, and the remotest star seems near by comparison. The thought of getting up and going down cellar seems as unreal as the thought of getting up and going to meet the sun at that pale streak which, through his easterly window, heralds the reluctant coming of another day. Yet he knows that he MUST and that eventually he WILL get up. In vain he tells himself how splendid, how invigorating wiU be the plunge from his warm bed right into the fresh, brisk, hygienic morning air. The fresh, brisk, hygienic morning air does not appeal to him. Unwillingly he recalls a line in the Superfurnace advertisement — 'Get up warm and cozy ' — and helplessly wishes that he had such a fur- nace. ' Like Andrew Carnegie ! ' he adds bitterly. At that moment he would anarchistically assassinate An- drew, provided he could do it without getting up. Nevertheless — he gets up ! He puts on — ' Curse it, where is that sleeve?' — the bath robe and slippers that have been all night cooling for him, and starts on his lonely journey through the tomblike silence. Now, if ever, is the time to hum, but there is not a hum in him : down, down, down he goes to the cellar and peeks with dull hope through the familiar little door. ' Good morning. Fire.' He shakes, he shovels, he opens draughts and manipulates dampers. And the Furnace, impassive, like a Buddha holding up the house with as many arms as an octopus, seems to be watching him with a grave yet idle interest. Which is all the more horrible because it has no face. 46 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES THE FLAVOR OF THINGS ' Life is sweet, brother.' (Mr. Fetulengro.) There can be no doubt that for some people mathe- matics has flavor, even though for me it is as the apples of Sodom. I have known people who seemed to be in love with the triangles. Permutations and combina- tions and the doctrine of chances filled their souls with elation ; they would rather wander over the area of a parallelogram than over the greenest meadow under heaven, collecting angles and sides as another would daisies and buttercups, and chasing the un- known quantity as another might a butterfly. I envy these people this faculty which I can never hope to acquire. I used to try to work up a factitious enthusiasm for geometry by naming angle A Abra- ham, B Benjamin, C Cornelius, and so on ; side AB then became Abrajamin, side BC Benjanelius, side AC Abranelius, and the perimeter Abrajaminelius, — the last a name of MUtonic sonorousness, mouth-filling, and perfectly pronounceable if one scanned it as cat- alectic trochaic tetrameter. Although I never had the courage to introduce them to my teachers, I regarded the Abrajaminelian family with some affection until one day I tried to name the perimeter of a dodecagon, when I came to the con- clusion that it would require less time to learn the prop- osition by heart than to learn the name ; and from that day I gave up all attempt to infuse an adventitious interest into Legendre, and simply memorized him. I have heard geometry described as a 'beautiful science,' but — If she be not fair to me, What care I how fair she be ? PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 47 To me she was an obstacle in the path of knowledge, invisible, not hostile, but palpable and stubborn as the Boyg that gave Peer Gynt so much trouble. I tried in vain to squirm and wriggle past her. There is a pos- sibility that I should still be blindly bumping that obstruction halfway up the Mathematical Mountains if my professor of solid geometry had not opportunely departed from college leaving no class-records behind him. I passed — by an intervention of Providence — and my days of pure mathematics were over ; but I felt no undue elation, for applied mathematics re- mained. If I had impressed my instructors before as haK-witted, here I was wholly witless. One cannot apply what one does not possess. From a child I had had an obscure distrust of mechanism of all kinds. The people of Erewhon, you remember, feared it because they thought it had a soul : I feared it because it seemed to me to have none, until I discovered that its soul was mathemati- cal, a new ground for trepidation. Even yet 1 cannot feel warmly toward a machine. I can gape with won- der as well as anybody as 1 watch the white paper fed in at one end of a press in, say, the Herald Building, and the Sunday Illustrated Supplement taken out at the other ; but my wonder is only polite, merely intel- lectual ; there is no heart in it. My half hour spent thus has been instructive, it may be, but joyless. This curious diffidence, amounting to a covert hos- tility, I felt also in the presence of the celestial me- chanicSj I had no sense of comfort in the company of the stars and planets. For a while I might be in- terested in the inhabitants of Mars, but Jupiter's satellites and Saturn's rings could arouse no emotional response in me. I irrationally found more to wonder 48 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES at in a moon of green cheese than in a burned-out world. Try as I may to overcome the aversions of my youth, I cannot help thinking of the quadratics and binomials of days long gone, whenever I look at a fly- wheel or a piston. Across the glories of the heavens I detect a shadow cast over my spirit when I tried on a college examination to explain parallax. At the time — for a day or two — I was rather proud of that explanation. Desiring, as usual, to get a picture of the thing, I used, I remember, the analogy of an umbrella. If it were raining, I said, and you had an open umbrella and you held it perpendicularly over you and then ran, you would get wetter than if you merely walked. Just what the connection was, I am — and doubtless was — unable to say; but it seemed very neat. I chuckled over it, and felt as if at last I was beginning to get ahead in astronomy. And then, briefly and coldly, the professor pronounced my analogy bosh, and the only glimmer of original- ity I ever evinced in his subject winked and went out. If mathematics, pure and applied, had no flavor for me but an unpleasant one, I have no one to blame, I suppose, but myself, although, of course, I did blame my teachers. All through my boyhood I held the entirely unreasonable view that mathematicians were only slightly human, having, in fact, like their subject, no souls. Their subject as they presented it to me had a striking resemblance to the working of a machine, clean, precise, cold; it made me shiver. I felt for it the contempt of youth. Each science in turn I loved, as long as it had to do with things ; but the moment mathematics entered, as it always did, PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 49 soon or late, my love, as milk at the addition of cer- tain bacteria, curdled and turned bitter. Only the other day I listened to a lecturer on sun- spots expatiating on the enfranchising and ennobling power of his science, teaching as it does the majesty of God and his handiwork. I agreed, of course. The- oretically, I knew that he was right; yet, as for my- self, I could not help preferring to wonder at the hand of the Almighty in the creation of a dandelion, a sparrow, a flounder. The best that 's known Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small. View'd close the Moon's fair ball Is of ill objects worst, A corpse in Night's highway, naked, fire-scarr'd, accurst; And now they tell That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst Too horribly for hell. The poet speaks enthusiastically, as poets will; be- sides, he was a Catholic and may have been affected by doctrine; I cannot wholly ratify his sentiments, yet I can understand them and sympathize. Botanist and biologist friends call upon me to ad- mire a paramoecium or a spirogyra; they will grow quite enthusiastic over one, as you or I might over a dog or a baby. I can share their emotions, to a de- gree ; these little creatures, as the same poet observes, ' at the least do live ' ; yet I find that I cannot love a paramcEcium or a spirogyra, streptococcus and mi- crococcus arouse no friendly feelings, oscillaria and spirillum can never compete for my affections with a calf or a puppy. I can sympathize imaginatively with the microscopist who watches the contortions of an amoeba or a polyp, its table manners and general 50 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES deportment ; I can sit much longer at the microscope than at the telescope, and feel more comfortable there (Gulliver seems to have been more at his ease among the Lilliputians than among the Brobdingnagians) ; yet, once more, the hour spent thus has been instruc- tive rather than joyous. When I was a little boy, I used to get a great deal of satisfaction out of stroking a kitten or a puppy, or crushing a lilac leaf-bud for its spring fragrance, or smelling newly turned soil, or tasting the sharp acid of a grape tendril, or feeling the green coolness of the skin of a frog. I could pore for long minutes over a lump of pudding-stone, a bean-seedling, a chrysalis, a knot in a joist in the attic. There was a curious con- tentment to be found in these things. My pockets were always full of shells and stones, twigs and bugs ; my room in the attic, of Indian relics, fragments of ore, birds' eggs, oak-galls, dry seeds and sea-weeds, bottled spiders, butterflies on corks. All the lessons of the schoolroom seemed of no consequence compared with Things so full of intimacy, of friendliness. AU children love things in this way, because of their appeal to the senses ; and I suppose that all older people do, too, though they may not know it. My teachers used to try to make me see that a bird's egg or a hornet's nest is unimportant in comparison with the pageant of history, the beautiful mechanism of arithmetic; but what child cares anything about matters of abstract importance ? I had a fondness for the hornet's nest because I could feel of it, poke a stick in at the door, and picture the fiery little terma- gants flying in and out, chewing their paper-pulp, building their walls. What had Washington praying at Valley Forge, or even Lawrence refusing to give PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 51 up the ship, to contribute comparable with this? Yet few even of my companions understood the ridiculous pleasure I found in carrying a crab's claw in my pocket, although they, too, after their own fashion, worshiped things. Their things were electric batteries and printing-presses and steam-engines. My bosom-passion was for living things, — beast, bird, amphibian, reptile, fish, crustacean, insect, mol- lusc, worm, they were all one, if they were alive ; and, wanting these, which could not well be carried in pockets or kept in bedrooms, I loved their reliques. While I was studiously collecting the disjecta membra of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, however, I did not realize that I was also laying up a store of mem- ories that would in time make these seem about the only real things in the world. Here is the point. The common or curious but everyday objects of nature have for me a flavor so rich that they seem charmed, talismanic ; they are my philosopher's stone, my quin- tessence, my One Thing which can charge the base metal of thought with the gold of feeling. It is thus, I suppose, that poets and mystics are made, who see in the veriest stick or stone a symbol of one of the infinities. That I cannot do so, that I cannot make this passion the basis of a romanticism or a symbolism or a pantheism, is due, it may be, to my teachers who carefully discouraged any such non- sense. Practical people, they early taught me that 'life is real, life is earnest.' In church, too, I was duly infornaed that we are pilgrims and strangers traveling through a barren land. Such instructions, running counter as they did to all I learned when left to myself, produced a curious state of anarchy in my microcosm. Belonging by 62 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES nature to the class of the poetical and by education to the class of the practical, I find myself torn between the desire to loiter and the desire to get on, passively to enjoy and actively to do. A practical conscience is fighting with a poetical unmorality. I do not seem to be alone in this ambiguity. I see only an occasional person whom I could call com- pletely practical, who treats things as if they were al- gebraic symbols, loving them only as they help him on in some enterprise or toward some goal. I find, on the contrary, the most hard-headed men and women collecting and cherishing books and prints and rose- bushes and tulips and stamps and coins and Colonial furniture and teapots and cats and dogs. Whether openly or secretly, brazenly or sheepishly, they are, nine-tenths of them, addicted to the boy's habit of filling his pockets with inconsiderable nothings which he can finger and fondle. Nearly all of them defend their hobby on practical groimds, as educative, or rest- ful, or cultural, or what not, yet one and aU. are really following an instinct. If you could get them to be honest, they would confess that from these useless objects they derive a satisfaction that they cannot explain but that has its seat, not in any motives of practicality, not even, as many think, wholly in a sense of possession, but in the things themselves as things. The things are rich in implications, adum- brations, of course, ful}y felt perhaps only by the pos- sessor, yet, notwithstanding the accretions of memory and fancy, still things, appealing now, as in child- hood, to the senses with warmth and friendliness, as only objects of sense can. They are charmed things. ' Every one of them is 'like the first link in a long chain of associated ideas. Like the dwelling place of PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 53 infancy revisited in manhood, like the song of our country heard in a strange land, they produce upon us an effect wholly independent of their intrinsic value.' Macaulay here is speaking of the connotation of words, that which gives most of its flavor to literature. It seems to me, however, that words, wonderful as they are in their power to set the mind running, still lag far behind things. They are at their best only secondhand. The phrase ' an old rusty spade,' suggests little except an antiquated implement for digging; but as a thing, an old spade may call up thoughts of death and the grave, snow forts, green gardens, buried treasure, — all the digging and ditching since Adam delved and Eve span. I cannot think that it is entirely mundane to make such a to-do about that which we are accustomed to call the material. Although it is becoming old-fash- ioned to confess to a liking for domesticity, there are still few honest people who do not become attached to a home if they live in it long enough. It may be filled with surprisingly ugly furniture, and pictures such as may jar upon the finer sensibilities of the visi- tor, yet the ugliest becomes lovely with time. Next to the fellowship of the family, it is the furni- ture that makes the home, and old furniture is best. We become fond of a chair or a table or a bed almost as we do of a person, because, as we say, of its asso- ciations. Now, I look upon things as the furniture of the world, furniture that was there when we came into it and will be there when we go out, — veritable antiques with all the charm of age about them. Try to picture a world empty of things material and fur- nished only with mathematical formulae, and with so- 54 PERSONAL EXPERIENCES cial theories, theological speculations, and philosophic systems. Try to imagine — But no. These matters ' must be not thought after these ways ; so, it will make us mad.' Our forefathers had an interesting theory that swal- lows lived on air. Because the birds were observed to fly with their mouths open and never to come to ground, it was concluded that they must be closed with the knights of the Bound Table and the chameleons as aerophagi. There are many aerophagi abroad in the land to-day, high-flying folk who live on airy isms and ologies, and who are scornful of those who long for less windy food. Why one man loves things and an- other theories, or why one loves things for their con- notations and another for their use, or why one loves some kinds of things above all others, remains as in- explicable as why one cannot abide a gaping pig, why one a harmless necessary cat. It is all taste and tem- perament. Yet there are times when I grow tired of socialism and industrialism and syndicalism and Nietzscheism and Bergsonism and feminism ; times when I do not want to be a reformer or an uplifter or even a public- spirited citizen ; when ' I do not hunger for a well- stored mind ' and am tired of books, and of talking about them and urging others to read them. With much bandying-about these become unreal; one is filled with doubt about them, about their very exist- ence, at least about their importance. It is in such moods that one longs for the kitten or puppy, the lilac leaf-buds, the bean seedling, the chrysalis, the frog. PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 55 THE LOST AKT OF GOING TO CHURCH At the age of three I was led up the church aisle and lifted to the high cushioned seat of the family pew. I have been there — generally speaking — ever since. I have no apology to offer, though my contem- poraries frequently make me feel that one is due. Of course I realize that intellectually, socially, and even spiritually, it is not quite 'modern' to go to church. I grant that if I were intellectual I should be developed beyond superstition and custom ; if I were truly social I should join my kind at breakfasts ; if I were modishly spiritual I should feel that a good book or a country walk is the common-sense way of salva- tion. I appreciate and approve those views, — and yet each Sunday finds me in the corner of my church pew. High moral motives do not bring me there, but rather sheer enjoyment. I say it brazenly: I like, I have always liked, to go to church. Never have the moments dragged. In my early ex- perience there was the female orphan asylum, which filled the cross-pews on each side the pulpit. It held me fascinated. The children dressed just alike, and I reasoned that each little girl on entering the Home had her wardrobe duplicated by the orphans already there. Sunday after Sunday I sat enthralled by a vision of the artistic consequences of my becoming an orphan. Would twice six pews of my pink lawn be most effect- ive? or would the congregation prefer the same amount of white party-dress and blue bows ? With maturity, my subject-matter has changed, but not my frame of mind. Only this morning I sat in contented enjoyment of resources so broad that the hour of the service left many untouched. First of all, a6 FEBSOSAL EXPEBIEKCES I was rested bj lite mere Ingness of iite fine old build- ing. I do like ^aee. I tliink the most soul-satisfying tlnng abont foreign cathedral; i; not strle of architee- tme, not stained g^ass. or earring, bat rather length and l»eadth and heiglit, — and emptin^s. After ■ breathing dee^r,' as it vere, of the dear st3«teh between ^be ardies, I ^aneed at mr pew n^^i- boxB. I Eke them all, bat I {ncfer thoee vhom I hare not met ; and I hope never to find ont that my con- jeetnres eonoeming them are iniKfilR- Txansaenis, too. are respcmsiTe to the sl^itest eSort of the imagina- tion. Mnreorer, tbe^ afford an plwitpnt. of nncertaintr. idndi, in &b extremely eonserrative atxaoepbexe e£ my efanrdi, is deridedly stimnlating. Qnee a man dashed i^ the long aisie and b^an a, £a-nd oration which ^grus <^ec&ed br a taetfnl hatntne who took tiK intmder's arm. and be^ed him to come outside and speak whse he might hope for an even laigex aodi- enee. On amtthpr ooeasiaB, a jonng lady mounted the pulpit staiis and wailed: ' I am in lore with So-and- So, bat he does oak lore me.' I always look at tran- BMiiaa with an eye to th^r diamatie pnsaot wlitjps- My next resonree was the ncsaster. I nerer saw him before this morning, nor shall I in all likelihood see him ^;ain ; he passed this way bat once. I shall lemember him, h owever , widi ^easore. He was tall and academic, Ms hair was dark and came oown in a thi^ peak on his f ordiead, leaving a narrow txiai^^ on each side. Sneh a serioos. bqyidi faee. He was exactly like anybody's ^gaQreotvpe of Un^ Cdwaid ji^ b^>re Shiloh, or faAer at the time of his mar- riage. He r^ninded me, too, of a certain stmy-book heio, and then it natataDy strack me how seldom the mod- PERSONAL EXPERIENCES 57 orn heroine of fiction goes to church. She has her mo- ments, and her soul quivers on a diif overlooking the sea which soems to sparkle in gay mockery of her sorrows, or before the library fire whose ashes but typify the ideals she has been forced to forswear. It takes an Edna Earl and a St. Elmo to appreciate a church as a backgi"Ound for thrilling love-making, or a Jane Eyre and a Eoohester to present a climax before the altar. What I really enjoy most about my conventional use of Sunday morning, is the opportunity it offers for ruminating (a bovine word that pleases me). For absolute safety ivom interi-uption, I know of no spot to equal a corner seat in a church pew. No door-bell can peal, no telephone jingle, no knock resound. Only cataclysmic disaster could intrude upon me here. For at least an hour I am fi