Leader
Every generation is a foible. It is born of whim, and educated
on fantasy. In adulthood it is naturally a freak. This
younger generation in this year of our Lord 1922 is no exception.
We were born of respectability, educated on pedantry. In adulthood
we are revolutionaries. Could anything be more natural,
more un-Victorian?
We were born secretly. God knows how such things happened
in that age. Perhaps the Stork brought us, nicely done up in—well—baby-clothes.
We were brought up on platitudes. Most of
them were dressed up as Christian. We hid our meanings in
pretty words, and our sense in a blush. The word sex was
unheard of. We didn’t talk much about anything dirty. We
never swore. We said our prayers. With goodness we were
replete; it made our lives hideous. Ultimately it was our virtue
that drove us to sin. We were too good for this world. Forced
to live in it by the tyranny of our parents—we adjusted ourselves,
and became bad.
As soon as lies become platitudes they are doomed. The next
passer-by will see through their disguise and expose them. You
can fool yourself with your own lie; but if your neighbors catch
the habit from you, and begin fooling themselves with the same
lie, in no time that lie becomes a platitude. The Victorians fooled
themselves into thinking that anything you could forget didn’t
exist any more. So were we born into a Virgin world. Our
beloved ancestry had forgotten there was any sin; for us then
there would not be any. We were their realized dream.
But unfortunately these little cherubim, these little seraphim
grew up into adolescence, learnt things about sex by groping in
dark corners, learnt shocking social problems by looking up words
in Dictionaries; learnt in so doing to disbelieve every word the
Victorians uttered. They had put their faith in that sort of
royalty once too often. Genuinely they became skeptics. Because
they had been taught by liars they could not afford to believe
anything—without testing its verity. They are generous in their
estimate of the society into which they are born. Instead of
saying, “We are born into a world of liars,” they restrain themselves,
consider the question rationally and say, “No, only into a
world of fools.” And out of these Fools’ Paradise the younger
generation has toddled. To them it was a hell.
Their first independent action was to set up Truth as their God.
They had had enough of lies. Truth was their panacea. Ignorance
was the abiding sin of mortality. Their battle was for the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, not for the beautiful garden
of Eden—where nakedness did not prevail upon innocence and
blushing was unknown.
Part of this knowledge surely was scientific. The health of the
body was all important: Biology, Hygiene, sex education. For
these they cried out. They talked eagerly of germ-plasm and
genetics; defiantly of birth-control, the double-standard.
An equality between man and woman had suddenly been decreed
politically; philanthropists were already talking about it morally;
the younger generation carrying the movement one step further is
experimenting with it intellectually. What they think, they say.
Does it matter who is there? Bah! Victorian prudery. There
are no secrets now between the sexes.
But part of this knowledge of good and evil was common sense—when
once the Puritan and Victorian nonsense had been destroyed.
It is only to a sex-maniac that the shortening of skirts
can possibly do any harm. What, cries the younger generation,
is the difference between showing one’s legs, and one’s arms;
bobbing one’s hair is the same, or smoking, or drinking, or
swearing. If they aren’t good for the physique—well and good,
they are bad; but if they are only bad because our Puritan or
Victorian ancestry say so—or because Moses fell down the mountain
with some tombstones under his arm—what the hell?—they
aren’t bad at all.
So the gentlemen and ladies of the past lift their monocles and
their lorgnettes to watch these semi-nude girls, these godless men.
“Dear, dear,” they say. “Gracious me. That’s not a nice young
man.”
What really has happened, say the younger generation, is that
America for some time has been living up to ideals which they
have never expressed, and have expressed, in lieu of these, ideals
which they have never lived down to. Silly little superficial rules,
and some hideous inhibitions grew up out of these expressed
ideals. Otherwise they have been like corpses rotting before the
very eyes of those who created them. They were never alive at
all, say the younger generation. So it considers itself a generation
of building, not of destroying. With frankness a dominant characteristic
it must express the futility of the old expressed, as well
as the strength of the old unexpressed ideals. But it lays the
emphasis on the old unexpressed. For instance, it is not proud
that it has torn down the absurd anthropomorphic God of the
literature of the Past, but it is proud, that, having gotten rid of
that miasma, it has proceeded to the conclusion that God is but
the vision of the potentiality of mankind realized. That with
Thomas Hardy it can go forward
“with dependence placed
On the human heart’s resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close, and graced
With loving kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.”
It is not proud of having torn the veil off the carefully draped
Victorian womanhood, but having done so it is proud of the constructive
results, that no longer having ignorance, it can see the
beauty and purity in the nakedness of the sex. It has torn down
the ugly lies that covered the world with a respectable and morne
garland of fig-leaves, but out of the ruins of this demolition it is
creating a naked sanity, of which it is reasonably proud.
Thirty years ago “Jude the Obscure” was called “Jude the
Obscene”. To-day Jude is considered a masterpiece, dealing in
an intensely honest way with God and the divine right of the
marriage service. Marriage has become a less eternal and a more
kindly institution. Divorcees are considered less heinous people
than before. For better or for worse is no longer a very powerful
condemnation. In the Victorian era the sexual became an obsession
because it was over-emphasized by being left unmentioned.
In reaction, for a moment, under the Freudian influence it became
an obsession from the exactly opposite reason. With the younger
generation it is taking its place like hunger and thirst in the category
of normal desires. The relations between girl and boy are
more open, more real than in the past. There is no longer the
hideous restraint before marriage, causing unhappy lives. It is
an easier matter to know whom one is to marry among the younger
generation. More and more they are being honest with one
another. More and more they are coming to consider themselves
rational, kind-hearted people.
I am not justified in defending or attacking the younger generation.
I am doing my duty only in attempting to express the ideals
we live by, the ideals they teach me. Too long has the ridiculous
idea been current that they have no ideals. I have set myself to
define them. Because they are different from the past, they are
not non-existent. We are not, as a generation, more dishonest,
more dishonorable than our predecessors. Yet we have no ideals?
That is out of the mouths of fools only.
No, the Victorians thought that not knowing, or pretending not
to know, about things unpleasant was the way to destroy them—by
a slow process of forgetting. The younger generation thinks
that knowing, and everyone knowing thoroughly about things
unpleasant, will eventually arouse the race to do something about
them; to clean energetically the Augean stables. You can see there
is a fundamental difference in each generation’s idea of Humanity.
The Victorians thought that knowledge of sin tainted the virtuous
flower of innocence by rousing thoughts and passions for evil,
which could only be killed by long disusage. Mankind fundamentally,
said the Victorians to themselves, has a bad streak. We
must carefully avoid mentioning things that would start that
streak going. If man is not naturally bad, he naturally has some
bad in him. We must starve the devil out of him. The younger
generation denies this. Man is naturally good; anyway, fundamentally
so. Evil is an outgrowth of our own civilization, and
social scheme. Most, if not all, criminals are insane. Society is
to blame for insanity. We must study the causes of the insanities;
must publish them broadcast. People must know. If they know,
they will improve. We must educate ourselves up to knowing
what is good, what is bad. We must know the worst to do the
best.
Consciously, the Victorians were living by the theories of
church dogma, believing in original sin; unconsciously, the younger
generation is living by the theories of the romantic spirit, believing
in natural good. They are idealists beyond the common run of
mankind; and they are ruthless in the following of their ideals.
MAXWELL E. FOSTER.
The Meditations of a Non-Thinker
Look at your nose. It is smooth and round, and red and
shiny. Possibly ’tis flat, obtuse, snub, Roman, or Jew. Or
in case you happen to think of some other qualification, it is that.
So with your eyes—if only you will apply suitable adjectives.
And also with your chin, mouth, hair, ears, jowls, or whatever.
The reason I suggest this, is in order to add the insinuation that,
if you regard any of these members in a mirror for some length
of time, their aspect changes. For instance—you, my kind sir
of the snub nose, affirm that your nose did not appear beautiful
at first? But you will as well admit that its grossness lessened
in accordance with the time spent in contemplating it. You got
to know it just a little better than you knew it before. Or you
who wear the slight scraggly beard—no, not you, madam—, will
you kindly step forward to the glass and observe how your impression
of that fringe changeth from the disgust of a reformed
highwayman to the pride of a father? If we but had the time,
we should spend a delightful afternoon, dear reader, watching
such profitable changes in expression. Human nature is fascinating,
is it not? But verily all of this—for I shall leave aside
even the proposition of how such an outward change affects the
spiritual grace—is merely to remark that by taking thought on
any part of your person, no matter how small, you become acquainted
correspondingly with such a part.
This is indeed great. For the action pleases the gazer supremely
with his personality. Yet I hasten to assure you, my dear reader,
that such a phenomenon is quite natural—because after all, we
are all of us pretty much fools, and generally when a fool becomes
better acquainted with himself, he becomes more endeared to
himself. As to the question of the right or wrong of this human
attribute, I make no advances, for it is aside from my position as
recorder. But from what I have heard wise men say, I should
judge it to be a lamentable weakness, especially lamentable since
the whole evil appears to issue from a person’s having thought
too much. As a child I was taught to respect thought. And
actually I once believed this to be a worthy hypothesis. But now,
as I linger on the verge of a dreary grave, my old head is fearsomely
shaken with doubt. Ah yes, to think that—but I had
better not think!
When we think, we do not observe the golden mean. We rush
in where angels fear to tread. We are not humble, as Christians.
We are exalted, as fools—and as such we love ourselves. So
when we are in the act of thinking, we will not leave off with
any sane or wholesome solution. We believe such a conclusion
not good enough for us. We call it barren. We must needs
explore further. After finding a cliff at the edge of a rational
plane of thought, we urge on and grope into the outer darkness.
For the little time that faith supports we continue safely—and
blindly—enough, and then—fall down on the rocks, where we
proceed lame and disorderly—or like Peter, sink absolutely into
an offended sea—and are not saved.
You must allow that when you work yourself into such a state,
the effect on your feelings is far from pleasant, far from elegant
even. I should imagine that one in the grip of mental excesses
is not unlike the habitual user of drugs—the morphinomaniac,
opium-eater, or alcoholic. The mood is surely delirious, grotesquely
fanciful, spirit-ridden. Possibly you believe it is pitiful
to see a strong and normal man slowly gathered in by some subtle
influence to become a slave grovelling bestially before a false and
gilded—but an all-compelling—idol. Aye! this is pitiful. But
the pity of it is not the greatest part. Here are you, possessed
of abilities, ambitions, loving friends, philanthropy of the highest
kind, delighted with this world, and enchanted with the prospect
of the next. You hope everything and you fear nothing. By
some insidious trick of fate—a fate that preys upon an insignificant
weakness of yours—you feel yourself subdued slightly by
the nod of some dim gigantic animal. But you are not afraid.
For your interests are so worthily turned elsewhere that you know
the Thing to have little power compared to your own—and you
do not care. Oh, therein lives the fearful irony! You may
indulge in your morphine, your opium, or your thinking largely
to aid your powers and your works. The undermining influence
is not felt—until too late. Yes, too late.... The degraded wretch
moaning and whimpering, and shivering all over spasmodically
as he tries to get up on his feet, and his rotted nerves will not
respond—can you imagine the inner state of such a fellow? Do
you not conceive that one day he may have been as fine—or a far
finer—person than you? Imagine, then, the turbulence in his
heart! He dreams back to old days, perceiving the former
integrity of his character, the power of his mind and body—and
compares all with the present. Maybe he fashions images of
what to-day he might have been—beautiful glowing things, full
of the light of heaven and of loveliness! He starts from his vile
gutter, repelled by horror, and is about to rise magnificently—when
a fit of the passion seizes him, and you watch him grovel in
the nauseous mire. Happy beast he is—now. But the torture
of his mind will return.
The agony which thinking induces by such means as I have
outlined above leads me to consider for a trice its alternative,
because it is joyous and fruitful. Can you imagine a green and
yellow countryside, with a little white farmhouse amidst a cluster
of dark oaks? Willows are near a cove in the stream below,
which ripples its way coolly through the hot day. Do you hear
the dry voice of a locust, or a cricket? Perhaps the bird in that
isolated pine tree will be singing soon. Breathe deeply, for the
sun is low over the hill and a colder, fairer wind blows from the
dark woodland. You sense its fragrance, feel a thrill, and are
deeply delighted with the whole atmosphere. But stay, I hear a
slow cowbell and the barking of a collie.... The colors of the
sunset are delicate and marvelously blended.—And winding down
the path comes a small boy, with pails to fill at the brook for his
mother. So it goes on. However clumsy the little picture, I
have tried to indicate slightly the pleasure met with when you feel.
These emotions of yours are sacred because they are unfathomable.
And they are more beautiful than anything else you will
ever know. As for the fruitfulness of imagination, I must let
you judge more for yourself: I will only say that, when people
are wearied out, the beauty of nature has ever been found more
of a balm to their spirits than the futility of overheated thought.
Thought and emotion are living in eternal conflict within you.
As one fills your life you have less room for the other. Any
choosing....
The psychologist, that enigmatic rabbit born recently amid a
litter of new ideas, maintains thought to be the only respect in
which we differ from animals. Now in the light of this last
word I had better not have used the term “rabbit”; but, however....
I should like to suggest (though I am not sure whether you
will call me a squirrel or a guinea-pig) that we differ still more
from animals in our power of imagination. You certainly have
seen cartoons entitled “Wonder what a lobster thinks about,” but
it is always you who do the wondering and not the lobster (no
inference that you are one, sir). And you never see “Think
what a jellyfish wonders about”! Furthermore, if the psychologist
is entirely right, you who have followed so assiduously this
essay—which is largely devoid of thought—are at least for the
time being largely an animal. Are you?
L. HYDE.
Selima
There was a mystery about Captain Knox’s wife. Of course,
everyone in Gull Harbor knew there had been a Mrs. Knox,
but according to the best accounts no one had ever seen her. There
were a few facts, however, upon which one could rely. Some
thirty or forty years before, the captain, returning after a long
voyage to the East, had announced himself a widower of recent
bereavement. The existence of the captain’s spouse in Gull
Harbor had begun, therefore, simultaneously with the knowledge
of her decease.
A short time after the captain’s return, a neat gravestone was
erected on the Knox farm, in the old burial lot, in which had
already been laid to rest the bodies of the captain’s parents, two
brothers, and an uncle. Upon the stone, by the captain’s order,
was carved in plain lettering, “In memory of Selima, my beloved
wife.”
The captain himself would often refer to her. “She was a
pretty cretur, she was.” Beyond this, however, discussion of her
was not tolerated in his presence.
By the time I came to know Gull Harbor, the captain’s seafaring
career was over. The people of the village had long since
recovered from the first excitement caused by the mystery of the
captain and his wife, and conversation had drifted back into
familiar channels of interest as to why Mel Hibbard’s sister had
given up her flock of Plymouth Rocks, or speculations as to the
color Mrs. Lovell, wife of the minister of the Adventist Church,
would choose for her new front room carpet.
I had always felt a prejudice for the Maine coast and from the
moment the Portland boat rounded the big rocky cove, I knew I
should like Gull Harbor. There was a restful peace about the
place peculiar to the seaboard of New England. The smell of low
tide and drying codfish hung about the wharf. Almost immediately
one felt at home.
I had not been two weeks in the town before I knew all that
Gull Harbor had to tell about their distinguished captain. Didn’t
I know Captain ’Thiel Knox, the man who commanded the first
seven-masted schooner to sail the sea? Why, he had been to
“Chiny” half a dozen times, and the Lord knows how many he
has crossed the ocean. As a further mark of distinction he was
the proud possessor of two long-haired cats which he had brought
with him from Persia.
One day I happened to ask my landlady, Mrs. Simmons, an old
resident and a noted gossip, if the captain was a widower, and then
I learned of the mystery. “For it’s my opinion,” she added, after
telling me the story, “that she was a Chiny woman, or mebbe a
princess from Persy, though nobody’ll ever know. The captain
he would never say a word; quiet’s a mouse on the subject. You
oughter see him, Mr. Fitch. He’s real nice, and a great hand for
company; all kinds, it don’t matter to him,” she finished in a tone
which meant to include even the summer people.
A “fortnit” later (one can see how easily I slipped into the
vernacular of the place), I was out sailing in a borrowed dory.
It was a clear August morning; the sky, a healthy blue and cloudless;
the tall spruce trees, interspersed here and there by a monumental
pine, guarded the water’s edge.
By the time I had rounded the long point that lay between the
harbor and the back bay beyond, a stiff breeze had sprung up.
The churning blue stretched oceanward for miles, blotched by
myriads of foamy white caps. The little dory rocked and twisted
in the choppy waves. The sail, which was home-made, proved an
easy victim of the wind, and I soon found to my dismay that I
was drifting helplessly down the bay toward a stretch of shore
that I had not yet visited. The boat moved rapidly. The trees
along the shore were soon followed by a broad green field, which
stretched up from a tiny harbor almost surrounded by a protecting
arm of the sea toward which I was being driven. Gradually the
water became shallower, and the wind reluctantly let me slip from
its grasp. I was able to look about me. It was a very beautiful
harbor.
Suddenly I was conscious of an old man in a dory, rowing
towards me. He might have been Father Neptune risen from
the depths of the ocean for all I knew. Without a word he pulled
my dilapidated boat ashore. Safely landed, I thanked him. He
was an old man with a long white beard. He had on a tarpaulin
and looked like a sailor.
“Ay-es,” he said pleasantly, when he had moored the two boats
to the wharf (he gave me no opportunity to assist him). “I
thought you was a landlubber, the moment I set eyes on you. Ye
can’t tack without a center-board,” he added with a smile, the first
he had given me. I blushed feebly at my hopeless mistake.
“I thought,” I began weakly, but he didn’t wait for me to finish.
“Won’t you come into the house for a bit?” he asked kindly.
“You’re wet through, ain’t ye?” And he led the way to the little
low shingled structure, fronted by a long porch upon which sat a
large Persian cat, the handsomest I had ever seen.
“Thar, thar, Daisy bird, you’ve had enough pettin’ for one day,”
as he brushed her gently aside, adding, as he noticed my admiration,
“Got another, better lookin’ of the two, in the kitching.
Won’t ye come in?”
“You’re not Captain Knox, are you?” I asked.
“Right you be! Salathiel Knox, captain, retired you call it,
don’t ye?” and he smiled again.
While my clothes were drying, we sat around the fire and
talked, the captain still in his tarpaulin, while I languished in a
richly figured rug which he had produced from a locked cupboard
in the kitchen. “Bought it in Singapore twenty-four years ago,”
he added by way of dismissal of my compunction at wearing so
valuable a possession. The captain smoked mildly while I told
him who I was, making few comments, but when I tried to lead
the conversation around to his own life he proved a poor subject
for questioning. As Mrs. Simmons said to me afterwards, “The
captain can talk when he’s a mind to, but land sakes, when he ain’t,
it’s no use.”
The captain did remark, as I was leaving, that although he lived
alone he wasn’t a bachelor; his wife, he said, was dead. “She
was a pretty creatur, she was,” he added, half regretfully, as he
laid down his pipe.
On my way home, my path led not far from the burial lot. I
found the stone without difficulty and read the inscription.
The following summer, soon after we arrived, I paid my second
visit to the Knox farm. I found the captain sitting on his porch,
smoking. He didn’t remember me at first; but suddenly he burst
out with, “Wall, I swan! You’re the young man that was tryin’
to tack in a dory without a center-board. I remember you, o’
course. Pretty good stuff, eh,” he added, “to tackle such a wind
when you knew next to nothin’ o’ the sea. You’d make a good
one, I’ll warrant.”
After that I often went to see him. He became quite loquacious
at times and recounted some of his adventures. Always I expected
he would run up against the mystery, but he never did. Few
women were to be found in his stories.
One day I was surprised to see the captain at my door, seated
in a new motor car. He had come to take me for a drive. I
looked the machine over carefully.
“How does she go?” I asked.
“She sets all right,” he replied, cheerfully, “but she’s a bit wide
in the stern.”
As we drove off together, he seemed in the best of spirits,
although he admitted he was a “little nervous navigatin’ the new
craft.”
On the way back, the captain became confidential. His story
this time was concerned chiefly with a long sickness he had had in
the Far East, and his romantic experience with a Malay girl.
“She was a ripper, she was,” he added by way of comment.
“What was her name?” I inquired, with suppressed excitement,
but he was intent upon turning a corner and did not answer. The
next moment we were at the door of my house. He waved me
good-bye as he disappeared around a bend in the road.
“Another opportunity lost,” I thought, as I walked up the path.
“It’s the Malay girl, Selima, I’ll be bound. That’s the mystery,
Mr. Fitch. Didn’t he tell you she was a great beauty, all done
up in rings and jewels?”
“Yes,” I answered absently.
This conversation took place about a week after my drive with
the captain, while Mrs. Simmons was removing the breakfast
dishes. I was reading the paper in the next room and did not
like to be interrupted.
“I never heard him tell that story,” she continued, raising her
voice above the clatter of the dishes. “He has taken you into his
confidence, Mr. Fitch.”
“Then I fear I have more woefully betrayed it,” I replied
without looking up.
Later I took a walk to the post office. The thought of the mystery,
although I would have hesitated to acknowledge it even to
myself, was making me positively uncomfortable.
“Was she really the Malay girl, after all?” I pictured the
captain, young and handsome, walking up to the altar of a
Buddhist temple with a Malay princess, dazzling with rings and
jewels, leaning on his arm, her pale skin—no, the Malays were
brown. I cursed my superior knowledge. Perhaps their princesses
were not so dark. But my vision had faded; I was gazing
at the floor of the Gull Harbor post office.
I took the road back which led by the captain’s. There was no
sign of anyone as I passed. I wandered up by the burial lot. I
wondered if Malay princesses were ever named Selima. On the
way home I passed the captain. He waved to me pleasantly, as
he rattled by.
“I will go to see him to-night,” I said to myself. It was after
nine when I reached his house. The captain was still up. He
was sitting in front of the kitchen fire, a long-haired cat on either
side. He seemed glad to see me. We sat and smoked. The logs
crackled cheerfully. They reminded me somehow of my host.
An hour flew by; conversation was gradually relaxing into silent
contemplation. Suddenly I burst forth:
“Captain,” I said, desperately, “you remember the Malay woman
you told me of the other day. Was her name Selima?”
For a moment I was afraid I had offended him. All of a sudden
he began to laugh. Little by little his merriment increased,
until his whole powerful frame was shaking. He trembled so
that his glasses bobbed up and down on his nose like a cork. His
chair creaked. Even his beard looked merry.
“Selima! Selima!” and he went off into another gale. Then,
seeing my doubtful expression, he tried to pull himself together.
“Selima! Selima! She was a pretty creetur’, she was,” and he
laughed again. I was forced to join with him; his humor was
catching.
“I know what’s a-worrying you,” he said. “It’s the mystery.
There never was a boarder within twelve miles of this town whom
they haven’t filled up with the story of my mysterious weddin’.
They’re half curious themselves, though the Lord knows they’d
oughter have more sense. Selima!” He laughed, the tears filling
his eyes as he began again. “Selima! There never was any sech
person! To think I have fooled this town for fifty years! It’s
too much. I laugh about it nights.” Again catching my strained
face, “Still curious?” he inquired with a twinkle.
“I’ll tell ye, but you mustn’t spoil my joke. D’ye understand?
I guess I can trust ye,” he added confidentially, and settling himself
in his chair he began.
“It’s not a long story,” he said, glancing at his watch. “About
forty years ago, or mebbe more, when I was perhaps half as old
as I am now, I lived here alone, when I warn’t on the water,
which warn’t very much. It was close on to September, only a
day or two or mebbe three before I was to sail from ‘Porchmouth’.
She was a five-master, a beauty ef there ever was a handsome
vessel.” The captain paused as if to recall her more vividly.
“Gullnair was her name, brand new that year. Wall, it was a
day or two before I was to sail, as I was tellin’ ye. I was out
here in the pasture right over yonder by the old spring”—he
pointed with a sailor’s thumb—“I had been gatherin’ berries and
after a bit I lay down under a tree. I had been lobsterin’ all
mornin’ and was tired. When I woke up I heard two women
talkin’. They’re both dead now, but in their day they wuz the
gol-durndest busybodies that ever I heard tell on. They was
berryin’ and talkin’—about me, would you believe it? Speculatin’
as to why a nice lookin’ man (I hadn’t sech a bad complexion in
those days,” added the captain reflectively as he rubbed his hand
over his rough face)—“they was a wonderin’ why I didn’t get
married. Was it because I had a hidden life? Did the girls
object to my swearin’? Was I—the Lord preserve us, what didn’t
they say? They came to the conclusion that I didn’t marry because
no one would have me. I could have strangled them both
at that. I was hot headed in those days.” All the fun had faded
from the captain’s face.
“After they went away,” he continued, “I began to think it
over. At first I cal’lated I had better get married right away.
There were a dozen of ’em hereabouts that very minute who
would have taken me with a whoop. I had always tried to steer
clear of the women heretofore. Second thoughts, thinks I, why
not let the matter go driftin’ for awhile, anyway? So I did. But
all the time that I was at sea it bothered me. On the home’ard
voyage we struck a bad storm and the Gullnair went to the bottom
after a brave fight, sir, after a brave fight! Most of the crew
was drownded. I was saved by a miracle. Never mind about
that now! Wall, sir, after I was picked up—she was a freighter
bound for New York, as luck would have it—there come to me
a big idea.
“When I got home I let them know I was a widower, married
while I was away. Of course they understood she had been
drownded on the ship. I wore a black band on my arm for a
time. Seein’ as there as warn’t no suspicions in the wind, ‘I’ll make
a full job of it,’ I says to myself. ‘I’ll set up a stone in the burial
lot to her memory’. And that’s what I did. Wall, they come
to write the inscription; I told them the words, but when they
asked me for the name, I said kind o’ flustered like, ‘Selima’. It
was the first one that popped into my head. That’s all.” The
captain smiled, turning his gaze into the fire.
“Then you weren’t ever in love?” I said, with the faintest
inflection in my voice.
The captain blew out a great puff of smoke, looked at me over
the top of his glasses, and smiled.
MYLES WHITING.
Portfolio — Beauty — Fear of God — Ballade
Beauty! thy name were counted less than dust
That warriors’ tombs with sullen grace enfold,
Save that thou strip man’s arrant love of lust
And cloak his tarnished soul with sudden gold.
Beauty! thy price has been a nation’s spoil,—
A wizard’s epitaph, a child’s grim plea;
And yet a peasant bought thee with his toil,
A poet lived with thee in penury.
“I’ve never told anyone how I happened to become a priest
because, for the first few years after ordination I didn’t like
to recall the circumstances surrounding it, and afterwards, when
they had lost most of their sting, the whole thing was so deeply
buried in the past that I never resurrected it. But now, since
I’m reaching that point where the events of my life appear to me
more as interesting stories than anything else, I may as well tell
it to you from that point of view.
“To begin with, I had, at twenty, a pretty definite philosophy.
I thought of life and all its functions, as created by the divine
hand of God, to be essentially perfect. Man was created, according
to the teaching of the Church, in God’s image and likeness. The
very highest good, to me, was to live in an accord as close as
possible to the universal laws of nature. Man’s natural state is
good, and when he violates this state he undergoes a physical
reaction, called shame, over which he has no control whatsoever.
I had this underlying belief, which was clarified more or less by
reading Walt Whitman and Carlyle, though I added some ideas
of my own which I found in neither of these. But I can’t swear
that they aren’t there. I drew no such sharp lines as are generally
drawn between physical and spiritual love, but visualized, or
rather, believed in, an ideal love in which both are combined, and
which, by this combination raise each other to far higher levels,
both collectively and individually. I rejected a purely abstract
affection of the spirit as weakness, since it does accept and is out
of tune with nature. That was Carlyle. And there was the
only point of the whole matter that I have since come to question,
though I have not actually put it aside. I wonder if I could still
hold to it had I married. But if I reject this, the whole thing
breaks down, so I must cling to it, though it does waver. I had
always been a Catholic, and as far as I could see there was no
conflict between my doctrine and that of the Church. In addition,
though I realized that this was a personal viewpoint and couldn’t
be brought to bear too closely on the other, beauty was to me
rarely seductive. My moments of desire were, for the most part,
connected with the most intense ugliness.
“At this time I was in love with a girl who was exactly the ideal
of it all. She too was a Catholic and had been educated in a
convent for the greater part of her life. She had not the clarity
of feature that generally characterizes beauty, but possessed something
infinitely more subtle than this. If you’ve ever seen one of
those glorious green Irish hills that look as if they’ve been drawn
up fresh from the depths of the earth by the hand of God, you’ll
understand what I mean. She had the same original force of
beauty in the rough mold of her face, which was at the same time
miraculously soft, and free from cold line. Her whole head was
clothed in a sort of cloudiness, like Venus, the mother of Aeneas,
appearing to her son. Her body, and mind, and voice were so
harmonious an expression of good that goodness was with her
almost a physical quality. She had almost never come in contact
with wrong, but I know she would have been the same under any
circumstances. It’s easy to understand how I could hold to my
beliefs here; I loved her as much for her body as for her spirit.
She had the same sweet curves and moved with the same music
as a green, young tree bent in the wind.”
He was silent for a moment, and gazed into the thick purple
sky, underneath which the sea beat tirelessly at the rocks which
fringed the bottom of the cliff.
“Unfortunately, she didn’t love me, but had the same sort of
affection a girl has for a very good friend of the opposite sex.
However, as we were both quite young (she eighteen) I had
plenty of hope that as soon as I was in a position to ask her to
marry me, she would accept.
“Then, in the summer after her graduation from the convent, I
learned that she was determined to return there in the fall as a
nun! For two or three days after this discovery I was in a state
of almost continual mental anguish, that she, a creature so beautifully
alive, should keep the precious gift of herself from the
world, and especially from me,—though curiously enough I looked
at it from the general rather than the individual point of view.
I was completely stunned.
“I had never definitely settled in my mind the question of
priests and nuns remaining unmarried. This was through nothing
more nor less than overlooking it, which I cannot understand,
since it should have been so vital to me. But now I came out
dead against it. To me it seemed that, since those who served
God and were supposed to be leading the highest life possible to
man were not permitted to marry, the Church put a mark of
disapproval on the married state and the begetting of children.
It was not the actual celibacy of the priests and nuns that concerned
me most, but the disapprobation of what I considered the
most spiritual act of life. I suppose I should have gone to a
priest to learn the defense for it, but I became so prejudiced
myself that I imagined that his point of view or any explanation
he might make could be nothing else but prejudiced.”
He paused again, this time to light his pipe, which he pulled
on for many long seconds before resuming the story, while I held
my tongue and gazed into the vast plain of darkness.
“After a while the pain ceased, and I lapsed into a state almost
of indifference, though the day she was to leave for the convent
was pretty nearly always on my mind. Strangely enough I
can’t for the life of me think what it was now, though I shall
never forget what happened on the day itself.
“I went to her home, which was quite a large estate, to bid her
good-bye. I still had the indifferent feeling, though my mind
had that queer, detached sensation one gets in a fever, and felt,
somehow, as if it were outside of the rest of me. Her brothers
and sisters and I sat about talking constrainedly until the time
came for her departure. She was to go off in the carriage to the
station with no one accompanying her save the coachman. It
rolled up to the door and they all crowded out to see her off. They
were a rather grim lot, standing there, though no one was weeping.
As for her, her face had the strangest mixture of joy and sorrow,
which was exactly mirrored in her mother’s. The rest were all
frankly and achingly unhappy. I was relapsing more and more
and more into a dazed condition.
“When she said good-bye to me, I took her hand, quite unconsciously,
and kissed it. It was trembling, which pierced my heart
and made me gasp violently. I have no recollection at all of her
actual departure, but when she was gone I must have been overcome
by it, for I heard some one say, ‘He’s going to faint,’ and
then one of her brothers took me inside and gave me a drink. I
had several more, which increased my state of mental detachment,
but did not affect my mental processes in the least. After a while
I went outside the house and wandered about the lawn, until
finally I sat down on a bench bordering a wide patch of grass on
which there were no trees or shrubbery of any kind. I don’t
think I noticed it, but night had practically fallen, and darkness
was gradually enveloping the place. The thought of her trembling
hand kept coming back to me, making the blood in my head throb
violently, when suddenly, with a wrench that shook my whole
body, my head cleared absolutely. I realized then, for the first
time, that she was irretrievably gone, and the realization flung me
into a rage. I cursed God in unutterable vileness for taking her
from me, for making of life such a deceiving, rotten thing, and
for setting me down in the midst of it! I am neither a savage,
nor a superstitious idiot, but as I stand here, I wonder I wasn’t
struck down by His almighty hand for the filth and blasphemy
I put upon my tongue that night!
“Then, out on the very center of the lawn before me, appeared
a column of cottony-white smoke which, by indescribable foldings,
formed itself into a woman of the most unearthly and terrible
beauty. She was naked, and each particle of her white skin
seemed to be shouting the fact of her nakedness aloud. The
steely outline of her bare flesh cut the stuff of night away, and
flashed out its blinding brilliance.
“She commenced to sing. There is a certain way of striking
a harp which gives it a shuddering noise, and this, magnified
beyond measure, is the nearest thing to a description I can give
of the beginning of her song, which poured out of her lips in a
thick flame of sound. It pressed down on me with the volume
of a thousand storms, when suddenly I realized that she was
singing in a man’s voice! Without thought, the conviction flashed
on me that this was undoubtedly the devil, and that all her beauty
was false. With a shriek of awful fear I called on God to protect
me! Immediately the song caught in the throat of the thing,
man or beast, whatever it was, and the body commenced to distort
into sheer ugliness without form. I don’t know how it finally
disappeared, for I went into a raving delirium and swooned.
“The next two months I spent in a sanitarium on the verge of
insanity. All I can remember of this is an occasional flash of
miraculous fear, when I seemed to be vainly fleeing the avenging
hand of God. As soon afterward as I was able, I joined the
priesthood, and I don’t mind saying that it was through an actual,
original fear of God and nothing else.”
“What about your philosophy?” I asked.
“I still have that,” he answered. “And it required very little
reconciliation to keep it. The realization of the part of celibacy
in it came to me about a year after I was ordained, as a feeling,
or conviction. Of course the refutation of my argument is that
the Church makes marriage a sacrament. I suppose most men
have this explained to them before they become priests, but I
never found it necessary.”
“Is the girl a nun now?” I pursued.
“No,” he said, a faint smile lurking about the corners of his
mouth. “She never took the final vows, but left the convent and
married. She has five very beautiful children, one of whom, the
eldest, I’m marrying next week. In fact, he’s named for me.”
This time the silence was longer and seemed almost a conclusion,
until I broke it with one last question.
“Do you think that was actually the devil who appeared to you,
or an illusion brought on by the state of your mind?”
He answered me very quietly. “The hand of God is seen in
strange places.”
ROBERT CRUISE MCMANUS.
(Translated from a fifteenth century
lyric of Charles d’Orleans)
Once in the weary wood of dull Distress
Where Fate condemned my leaden feet to stray
It chanced that Venus, now my comfortress,
Besought to know where I did take my way.
Then I replied, “My fortune’s gone astray,
And I long exiled ’mid this wood’s repose,
It happens I am one of whom men say,
‘A man astray, uncertain where he goes.’”
Then she, all smiles and godlike graciousness,
“Tell me, my friend, the reason, oh I pray.
Why is it you are lost in black Distress?
I may have power to set you on your way.
Long have I sought love’s pleasures to display
Unto your heart—I knew not of your woes.
Nor can I bear to see you thus to-day,
A man astray, uncertain where he goes.”
And I, “Alas! Most sovereign Princess!
You know my state: shall I repeat it? Nay!
’Twas Death—who doth all men alike oppress—
’Twas Death that stole my darling love away.
She who so guided me upon my way—
My only love, more lovely than the rose—
That while she lived no one of me might say,
‘A man astray, uncertain where he goes.’”
For I am blind—I catch no spark of day—
Nor but with tapping staff can find my way.
So tapping here and there the wanderer goes.
It is indeed a pity they must say,
“A man astray, uncertain where he goes.”
Notabilia
The most important action of the University in its relation to
the student body is the Sunday chapel regulation, that eleven
o’clock non-sectarian Christian service and sermon is compulsory
for all Yale College undergraduates and members of the common
Freshman year. In this change of hour lies a change of issue.
Before, the ten-minute ten o’clock service was a bit of tolerated
hypocrisy to keep undergraduates in New Haven over the weekend.
This compulsory attendance at Divine Worship is an
intolerable religious offence.
Religion is a matter of individual opinion; compulsion is opposed
to individuality. Compulsory religion then by our own
inherited conception of that word is an impossibility. There can
be no religion for an intelligent person in Woolsey Hall. To
those who are not Christians it is intellectual persecution.
We are amused at the news that there was some discussion as
to whether there should be plants or members of the faculty on
the platform during the service. Plants seem to us the better
choice; being more inanimate, they are less hypocritical.
Really it is astonishing how Yale can be as much of an institution
of learning as it is, and still practice such stupidity in
administration.
We should like to bring to our readers’ attention the following
terse facts about Commons. Commons has a compulsory patronage
amounting to approximately 900 men. It can count on a few
hundred more men who are working their way through. After
its seating capacity has thus been filled once, it need not (and
does not) accommodate any more for that meal; it can therefore
calculate with perfect accuracy, so that no food need be wasted.
It requires cash in advance, or bills sent home; it has therefore
no credit to carry on its books. At the present writing, it will
allow no one to sign out: meals taken elsewhere are wasted money
for its customers. Its overhead is reduced to a minimum—far
more so than that of any other eating house in college. And,
added to this, it has the faculty to protect it.
Yet, what is happening? The charges for food are $9.00 per
week, without rebate for cash. The service is slow whenever the
hall is crowded. The food, while sometimes good, is by no means
always so, and if maintained at the present standard would be
intolerable as a year’s diet.
Considering the fact that, for nine hundred of its customers,
it requires no table runners, thereby saving approximately $800
per week ($25,000 per year); there it is only $1.00 per week
cheaper than some eating houses, and 50 cents cheaper than most;
that its food is not as good as any of the others—considering
these things, we suggest that an investigation be made. We are
anxious to be fair in the matter and not judge too harshly a
project which is as yet young. But the college seems to be of the
opinion that considerable improvement must be shown by the
Yale Dining Hall if it is to continue its somewhat shaky career.
Taking the same paternal stand as they have taken in the case
of Commons, the faculty has decreed that the Liberal Club must
ask “permission” before inviting speakers to address their meetings.
Just what the Liberal Club will do about this, no one as
yet knows. Certainly it conflicts with the very principles and
ideals of that club, and represents a trend, on the part of the Yale
faculty, to which the club is especially opposed.
Book Reviews — Tutor’s Lane. By Wilmarth Lewis . (Knopf.) — Young Peoples Pride. By Stephen Vincent Benét . (Henry Holt & Co.) — Books and Characters. By Lytton Strachey . (Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York.) — This Freedom. By A. S. M. Hutchinson . (Little, Brown & Co.) — Babbitt. By Sinclair Lewis . (Harcourt, Brace & Co.)
Imagine Yale College without appendages, and New Haven
without slums or business section, and life just as it is now
and you will have the setting for Mr. Lewis’ ’17 first novel,
“Tutor’s Lane”.
You are given as hero a young English instructor, a graduate
from about the same class as Mr. Lewis, probably with a Chi
Delta Theta charm, and a heroine not greatly sophisticated, of
good family, mildly fond of “doing good” to “the people.” These
two fondly follow a Quixotic scheme of uplift (which he doesn’t
even like, and about which she’s a fool), and come out of it
ashamed but at one in their shame. The inevitable marriage
ensues. The plot is the weakness of the book. It is a thin-spun
web, and disappointing.
But the non-plot characters, and the phrasing of the Syllabus,
and the satire scattered through the pages are features over which
no one can pass without delight. Mrs. Norris talks, the reader is
amused; Mr. Lewis talks, the reader is wholly captivated. It is
not the genial gay humor of Punch; it is something with a sharper
touch than that, more witty, more satirical. It is only when Mr.
Lewis becomes sympathetic with his character or with his reader
that he fails. He is superb when he is laughing at both
simultaneously.
If he ever gets hold of a plot, the result will be a fine novel.
He has the power of restraint and objectivity which most moderns
lack. He is refreshing in the midst of so much that is conspicuously
heavy and bent with the weight of the world. His product
is not marred by continual reference to the travail and labor its
creation caused. He seems to have enjoyed writing the book, and
not to have written it in order to save the world, or the destinies
of nations. To amuse himself and his friends seems to be his
only purpose in writing, which is probably why “Tutor’s Lane”
will also amuse so many other people.
M. E. F.
There are probably very few men now at Yale who are
destined to look back, after an equally short span of years,
upon a more enviable literary record than that already possessed
by Stephen Vincent Benét. And yet, we had to read a good deal
of “Young Peoples Pride” before we began to enjoy it. Perhaps
the reason was that we had expected another “serious novel” or
“character study” somewhat along the lines of Mr. Benét’s “The
Beginning of Wisdom”. The rather affectedly “super smart”
illustrations with which the present book is garnished annoyed us,
and the occurrence of passages like the following caused us to
fear that Mr. Benét, with an eye to the box office, had joined the
Fitzgeraldine ranks of tale-tellers-out-of-school.
“‘The trouble with Art is that it doesn’t pay a decent
living wage unless you’re willing to commercialize—’
‘The trouble with Art is that it never did, except for a
few chance lucky people—’
‘The trouble with Art is Women.’
‘The trouble with Women is Art.’
‘The trouble with Art—with women I mean—change
signals! What do I mean?’”
But there is not much of that sort of “cleverism”. In fact, in so
far as “We Wild Young People” enter, Mr. Benét holds the
mirror very sanely and skillfully up to nature.
However, “Young Peoples Pride” scarcely requires all this
analyzing. It is not an “important novel” anyway—simply a
rattling good yarn, and must be judged as such. For sheer sustained
excitement we have seldom read anything better than the
long scene in the apartment of Mrs. Severance and the gentleman
whom Mr. Benét so quaintly calls “Mr. Severance”. It is
a scene that we shall hope to see on Broadway later, when its
author becomes a playwright—if he ever does. Read the book
for that, by all means—and you’ll like a good deal of the rest.
L. S. G.
A reference, in the present volume, to Thomas Beddoes as
“the last Elizabethan” suggests, at once, Mr. Lytton
Strachey’s preëminent right to the title of “the last Victorian”—using
the word in its best sense, to denote an individual very far
removed indeed from any desire to go “tobaggoning down
Parnassus”. Mr. Strachey’s bland progress through the realm
of letters is, in fact, the very antithesis of that adopted by the
tobaggoning school of modern critics. To analyze the characteristics
of his style is to call up a host of adjectives long all but
forgotten amid the present scramble for pseudo-culture. He is
scholarly without being pedantic, erudite without being obscure.
And the queer, musing, almost anecdotal manner in which he
rambles from Johnson’s wit to Madame du Deffand’s, from
Shakespeare’s tragedies to Voltaire’s, is always giving way to
lightning flashes of true critical insight expressed with the netteté
of a Racine.
As might be gathered from the foregoing remarks, “Books and
Characters” is a volume of collected critical essays, which first
appeared individually between the years 1905 and 1919 in various
publications, such as the Edinburgh Review. Incidentally, it is a
book which should have an especial and peculiar appeal to the
college man. For the books and characters touched upon are,
one or two excepted, the very ones with which the reading essential
to a college course has made him most familiar. He will thus
have freshly in mind the background of literary acquaintanceships,
which the guileless Mr. Strachey apparently supposes is possessed
by everyone, and upon which he proceeds to etch his portraits
with the aid of a wit so delightful and so acutely sharpened as to
be quite irresistible. For it was true wit, in the Victorian sense,
mingled with a quaint, sly humor, which made Strachey’s “Queen
Victoria” the consummate master-portrait that it is, and which
reappears in “Books and Characters”. Perhaps a quotation from
the chapter entitled, “The Lives of the Poets”, may show what
we mean:
“Johnson’s aesthetic judgments are almost invariably
subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good
quality to recommend them—except one. They are never
right. That is an unfortunate deficiency; but no one can
doubt that Johnson has made up for it, and that his wit has
saved all. He has managed to be wrong so cleverly, that
nobody minds. When Gray, for instance, points the moral
to his poem on Walpole’s cat with a reminder to the fair
that all that glisters is not gold, Johnson remarks that this
is ‘of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had been
gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if
she had, would no less have been drowned.’ Could anything
be more ingenious, or more neatly put, or more obviously
true? But then, to use Johnson’s own phrase, could
anything be of less ‘relation to the purpose’?”
Well, we only restrain ourselves with difficulty from seeming to
commit sacrilege upon Johnson by proclaiming the rightness of
Mr. Strachey’s aesthetic judgments, as well as their wit.
The essays dealing with French life and letters, just prior to
the revolution, are equally a mine of interest. They are all brilliant
pieces of writing; from the flickering sidelights thrown upon
the undignified and incredible squabbles of Voltaire and Frederick
the Great, to the half-pitiful, half-comic details concerning the
salon of Madame du Deffande—Madame du Deffande, who was
for twenty years, at once, blind, hopelessly in love with Walpole,
and the cultural autocrat of Paris. Skeptics, all of them—and
skeptics essentially Gallic, before whose unabashed indifference to
God, and cynical contempt for man the Anglo-Saxon mind is apt
to recoil, gymnastically unable to assume the necessary shift in
point of view. For instance, there is Madame La Maréchale de
Luxembourg:
“‘Quel ton! Quel effroyable ton!’ she is said to have
exclaimed after a shuddering glance at the Bible. ‘Ah,
Madame, quel dommage que la Sainte Esprit eut aussi peu
de gout!’”
At least they seem to have been sincere, these most un-Victorian
French. And they round out Mr. Strachey’s book into something
which really must not be missed.
L. S. G.
A. S. M. Hutchinson’s latest novel, “This Freedom,” is
the life story of an English girl. Brought up in an old-fashioned
home where the duty of the women is but to serve the
men, she breaks from conventional ties and becomes a thoroughly
modern creature in thought and action.
Her ideal is man’s position of social independence. This she
attains to the fullest measure in the business world. But trouble
comes after she has experienced love, marriage and the duties of
a mother of a family. After a series of crushing disasters, she
discovers that modern teaching does not tend to make for that
home life to which she, in her youth, had been accustomed, and
from whose charm she had never really freed herself.
The book has the same weak point as its predecessor, “If Winter
Comes”. Mr. Hutchinson does not seem to have the courage to
write a tragedy. After he has masterfully created a heap of
wreckage, he vainly attempts restoration in a few concluding
paragraphs. It is as impossible for the reader to conceive of
recovery in the case of Rosalie and Harry as it was to imagine
a future happiness for Nona and Marco.
It is to be hoped that we shall soon have a real tragedy from
the pen of this popular author, for then we shall put down the
book perhaps sadder but at least more impressed.
M. T.
If “Babbitt” is a better book than “Main Street”, as its publishers
would have us believe, then Mr. Lewis’ improvement
is to be found in an even greater application to the details; the
minute cataloguing of commonplace incident. It is infinitely
painstaking. But for those of us who believe that “Main Street”
in itself showed an unnecessary virtuosity in that talent, this is
hardly to be rated as an advance.
“Babbitt” is not so much to be considered as better or worse
than “Main Street”, as a companion volume in Mr. Lewis’ series
of compendiums of all that is tawdry, and hypocritical, and typical,
in the contemporary life of the American middle class.
Babbitt is the “average” American business man; a real estate
dealer (“realtor”, as he pridefully insists on being called); a
Rotarian, Booster, member of the Athletic Club, and solid citizen.
He has a squabbling family; a wife whom he tolerates, and three
children whom he loves impatiently—because he cannot understand
them. Little attention is given to a plot; the development is rather
in exhaustive study and analysis. From the time when Babbitt
gets up to shave, until the time when he makes sure (for the
second time) that all the doors in the house are locked, no detail
of his life, personal, family, business, or social, is omitted. And
each detail is analyzed. Sometimes it is satirized; and often the
attempted satirization becomes an over-done burlesque.
Like Carol Kennicott, Babbitt is filled with dissatisfaction; and
a realization (more vague than hers, because he cannot understand
it) of the meaningless hypocrisy of his life. But his revolt
is not intellectual, and therefore the pain of frustration in the
inevitable defeat at the end is not so keen.
I do not hold with those critics who condemn Mr. Lewis for
presenting only one side of his picture. I agree that he does
present only one side—but are there not a great many times as
many authors who write only of the so-called “pleasant” side?
And are not Mr. Lewis’ characterizations far closer to the actual
verities?
I think that they are; and that historians of the future will do
well to turn to such books as “Babbitt” for their data on the
“typical” American citizen of the third decade of the twentieth
century.
C. G. P.
