BIRTHDAYS AND OTHER EGOTISMS
Charles Lamb, in his "Grace Before Meat," protests—very endearingly, it seems to me—against the custom of particular thankfulness for food. He suspects that it had its origin in the "hunter state of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing; when a bellyful was a windfall and looked like a special Providence.—"It is not otherwise easy to be understood," he avers, "why the blessing of food—the act of eating—should have had a particular expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence."
I find myself like-minded and similarly protestant as to birthdays. I cannot discover why the blessing of these should be hailed with any very particular delight, distinct from thatimplied joy with which we might be expected to welcome the many other various days of the year.
It cannot be said that it was because I was abnormally shy throughout my childhood that I found birthdays embarrassing, for I had no more than the usual shyness of the average child. Moreover, my surroundings and training gave me easy confidence in others and in myself. The tragedies of my little girlhood were not exceptional: dead cats or canaries, broken dolls, the inability to make myself always understood by grown-ups, and certain moral and spiritual failures and cataclysms known only to myself and what I took to be my fearfully disappointed Maker. But barring these things, incident and customary, my early years may be said to have been especially bright and reassuring. What was it, then, which could have caused this early distrust of birthdays?
If I am to trace the growth of what perhaps seems so unwarranted a thing, I shall have to ask indulgence for what may appear to be some of that very egotism I decry: I shall have to ask to be allowed a discussion of several ofmy own birthdays, and their celebration when I was a child.
My fifth is the earliest that I remember. I had been promised a cake with candles. Moreover, I had learned, by dint of the patience of Mademoiselle Cinque, our queer old French governess, a little French song, which I was to sing as my own share toward the festive celebration. From the shelter of my father's arm, I was to sing it for the rest to hear:—
"Frè-re Jac-ques! Frè-re Jac-ques!Dor-mez vous? Dor-mez vous?Son-nez les matines; son-nez les matines;Den, din, don!"
The cake, then, and the song were, from my point of view, the extraordinarily important and sufficient events of the day—these and the fact that on that day I would be five years old. It is certain that I chattered about these things a great deal, and laid deep plans. But, as it happened, it was neither the cake nor yet my ripe years that were to make that day so memorable. I can close my eyes and go back to it unerring, and find myself in the old surroundings, familiar yet strange—strange that day with an unwonted, unaccountablestrangeness. Where was everybody? The house was, indeed, still—as still as the February day outside, which lay quiet as death under a sheeted whiteness that had been drawn over it silently in the night.
I can seem to feel myself actually as little as I was then, and with my doll under one arm going up the silent stairs, laboriously but determinedly, pulling one leg resolutely after the other, up the length of them, with the aid of one hand on the banister spindles, to investigate for myself the strangeness.
An older sister of mine, whom I loved dearly, had been ill, and for several days past I had been cautioned to gentleness and had played apart, so that quietness of a certain kind I understood. But the quietness now was of a different order. In the upper hall some one opened a door, at the patter of my investigating steps, I suppose; held out a hand, stopped me in mid-search—stopped me and kissed me and told me. My sister had died in the early hours of that day, before the dawn was come.
I do not remember who it was who told me. I remember, however, pushing myselfaway from the embrace a little, demanding whether I might see my mother. I was told with great gentleness that this was impossible. My father? No; him, also, I might not see—not yet. All this sobered and puzzled me. I reached for the next, and perhaps on that day even dearer, possibility. Might I see the cook? Yes.
That, for a time at least, righted matters, and restored my world to me. I pattered down the stairs, down the lower hall, then more steps; found the cook and demanded my birthday cake; and in place of the cake received a most shocked look, delivered in the manner of unthinkable rebuke. When I insisted, words came to her tongue, but not concerning the cake. They dealt wholly with myself. They conveyed the impression that I had done some dreadful and wicked thing. They did not explain. I was expected to understand and repent.
I remember feeling only thoroughly outraged at having my reasonable request received in that manner. This wasmyday, and, in honor of it, there was to have been a birthday cake. As to larger matters, they were extraneous to the subject. Of death, it shouldbe remembered, I had absolutely no knowledge. I loved my sister to the full bent of my simple but ardent little nature, and she had been peculiarly devoted to me; but ask some one who has never seen the stars or spoken with one who has seen them, what he knows of the deep firmament: so much I knew of that night which had fallen upon our house—nothing!
What I did know presently—the information being conveyed to me in unmistakable terms by the cook—was that my birthday celebration was not to be; that it was not only jeopardized, it was clean wiped out, by an event of immensely greater moment. I have little doubt I wept sufficiently over my personal disappointment, and it may have taken especial tact on the part of the gentle person upstairs to pacify me; but by and by, with that easy forgetfulness which is the better part of childhood, I must have relinquished all hope of appropriating that day as my birthday, and accepted, in place of it, life as it was.
My parents, who twice before had been summoned to bear acute loss,—once when, before I was born, a little baby brother of mine died, and once when the life of a little babysister had flickered out before the flame got well started,—tasted now of what must have been a far deeper bitterness. She who had gone now was their "extreme hope."
She was twenty-one when she died, and within a few months of her graduation at the University. She was brilliant above any promise given by the rest of us. I remember her very clearly—her sensitive and beautiful face, her great delicacy of body, her ready, very gentle laugh, and her unfailing understanding of all a little child's desires and moods. She was exquisite, sensitive as a mimosa in a garden of sturdier growth. Above us all she seemed to stretch delicate and flowering branches, in which the wind moved more mysterious; and lovely winged and songful things, that we could never have hoped to harbor, seemed to have made their home in her. There was in her something rare and unlooked for (I do not exaggerate), like the sudden call of a thrush in the twilight, or delicate and darkling, as in starlight the song of the nightingale. She was the one reckoned to be most like my father, and by the generous, and, I think, even proud consent of all of us, was by him the mostbeloved. She was as devoted as Cordelia, and with lesser cause, bringing to the happiness and fullness of his life what Lear knew only in his desolation. Since I have grown into what is at least some slight realization of what her loss must have meant to my father, I cannot touch without a trembling of tears the memory of his taking me in his arms as he did, to look upon her as she lay, white and final, delicate and done with life, there in the still and shuttered room.
But, incredible though it seems to my present knowledge, I had then no feeling of sadness whatever. She might have slept. Nor did the days that followed lay heavy hands upon me. There was a quiet stir and hushed preparation toward what I did not know, and I was looked after by neighbors or relatives to the extent of believing that a certain pleasant distinction accrued to me. In all that followed, I know that I contributed no sadness, only a child's frank observation in the face of unusual behavior of its elders.
But to return to the birthday. It was a remarkable one, you see, linked with all these things, allied to such large sorrows—a sadone and disappointing enough, you will say, for a little child. Yet I did not find it so. I was, as I have told you, indignant as to the cake, and disappointed, no doubt, that there was no happy and devoted family now gathered to hear me sing my gay little song. But to offset these there was a kind of reassurance in the day which I find it difficult to describe very exactly. It was as if, at one and the same time, this were and were not my birthday. It was my day by the calendar, but in no other way. For a birthday is one whose dawn and sunset are one's very own, a day when one's importance is admitted very gladly by a certain intimate circle. But on no day of my life, I am sure, was I of so little importance as then—a very inconsiderable little person, playing alone in the sunshine and with my song unsung. Yet something in that day shines now across the years, as distant as a star, as silver, as satisfying. That something is not to be ascribed to any one mere incident: it was compounded, no doubt, of the best of every relationship which I felt that day for the first time. The extreme gentleness of the grown-up of whom I have told you was one element;for the rest, the companionship with my father in that strange still moment in the shuttered room; the wordless love given me by my mother, of a different sort from any she had given me before; the quietness, giving me an impression as of remote spaces never dreamed of before; and, over all, the sense of something strange and of a great dignity, as of presences that moved, dread, but not unkindly.
And the little song which I had practised so faithfully, and which I was to have sung! Little as I was, and without ever being told, I believe, as the day wore on, I must have had a dim realization of how inconsiderable it was in that house where Death had taken up Life's lute, and, brows bent above it, remembered the songs that Life had sung.
The birthdays that followed on this one were curiously unsatisfying, though they were celebrated appropriately enough, and with the fullest respect for my importance. The anticipation and approach of them, as nearly as I can remember, were clear joy. But the days, when they arrived, overwhelmed me unaccountably.There was something disproportionate in them, so that I was glad to escape from their too personal glory to the more comfortable commonplace of the impersonal. It was as if I guessed dimly, without being in the least aware, that this display in my honor had in it something almost a little cheap—an egotism (though I had not then so much as heard the word) which contrasted unfavorably with the large and gracious and forgetful ways of Life itself.
I believe my embarrassment, my wholly unanalyzed sense of disappointment and disproportion, may have been, on a very diminutive scale, something akin to that which I am sure Joshua must have experienced,—not, mind you, at the moment of his extraordinary and flattering command,—no, but afterwards, afterwards, in the disappointed watches of the night, when he must have reflected, with disappointed amazement, that, if his senses deceived him not, he, Joshua, had made the great luminary to stand still over Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon. Something, too, of what Joseph must have experienced,—not in the enjoyable dream ofhis brothers' sheaves bowing down to his sheaf, and the sun and the moon and the eleven stars making their obeisance to him; nor in those long anticipatory years, when his greatness was approaching, and the scroll of the future hung loose in his hands for his remembering eye to read,—no, but in the actual moment of overwhelming fulfillment, when, from Judah to Benjamin, his brothers actually did bow down to him as ruler over all those great granaries of Egypt, and, as we are told, his mature spirit could not consent to endure so much, but "he sought where to weep, and entered into his chamber and wept there."
These are, I believe, no mere extraneous or personal experiences, but are rather of the fine weave and fabric of humanity; and the uneasiness I felt in my complacent little soul, I now believe to have been a stirring of old things, of ancient memories under the moon, which linked my little inconsiderable life, as they link all lives, to Egypt, Nilus, Babylon, and the ages that are not.
But lest this seem but vague argument and debatable territory, I would like to speak of other childhood birthdays of my own which,it seems to me, bring to the case clear evidence and important testimony.
I have said that I was one of a large family. Happily we could not make too important a matter of birthdays in our home; it would have kept us celebrating most of the time, and would have tended to make the whole year frivolous. For obvious reasons, then, birthday parties were not many. But I remember one of a most lasting glory, which had as its excuse that one of my sisters was fifteen upon the fifteenth. My mother, who by mere warmth and gayety of sympathetic temperament was forever on the watch for a reason to celebrate something, could never have missed so valid an occasion. Furniture was therefore moved out, ferns were moved in, smilax was twined about the chandeliers and strung along the portraits, a linen dancing-cloth was stretched the length of the three rooms. I can still feel the smooth glide of my strapped slippers over it. Musicians were concealed in a bosky corner. At the top of the stairs was a room known as the conservatory, whose plants had been all winter in my keeping, their condition testifying rather sadly to that fact. But now, by alovely bounty, my sins of negligence were all wiped out. Florists came bearing pots of flowers in full blossom, and more of them and more of them. There were primroses such as my own care could never have hoped for, and fuchsias and candytuft and daffodils in full abundant bloom, even while the March winds outside yet blew so chill. In the day or two just before the fifteenth, how often I ran up into that little room and stood wordless and satisfied among them, or stooped and touched my cheek to them! Oh, the sweet heliotrope! oh, the mignonette!
On that wonderful evening there bloomed among the flowers little lights with dark red shades, and here and there comfortable seats were placed, where you could hear the music at a muted distance. We children all wore new gowns, my sister—she of the birthday—having of course, by generous consent, the filmiest and the loveliest.
That was a happy gathering if ever I saw one; and were I brought to believe that a birthday celebration is ever an affair of unmixed loveliness, I should perhaps be brought to say it concerning one for fifteen on the fifteenth.Fourteen on the fourteenth lacks flavor, is a little unripe, like fruit imported before the real season is at hand. Sixteen on the sixteenth is a little over-mellow, a little late; already childhood is gone, and youth, however lovely it may be in the receiving of homage and favors, should already have its hands outstretched rather to bestow them. But fifteen on the fifteenth! There is a golden mean and a time for all things, as the Scriptures and the fairy tales tell us. This was the time to dance, that King Solomon talks about. Like the "Tuney Bear's" soup in the old tale, this party to celebrate fifteen on the fifteenth seems to me as nearly right as things can be contrived in a world of chance like our own.
Through a maze of years and smilax I am still aware of the delicious mystery of concealed music wailing forth the Sirens waltzes (no dances were given then without the Sirens waltzes). I can see the children moving about, gay and a little fluttery; and the grown-ups, quieter, but still gay, who came to add the dignity and charm of their greeting to the celebration; and I can see my sister,—fifteen that day by a delectable distinction,—litheand poised and gracious, and flushed and very pretty, standing beside my mother, her eyes looking out like stars under her dark hair, and her flying eyebrows that had just the slight lift of a bird's wing; and my next younger sister and I, of a less vivid coloring, no more than attendant sisters, and rich enough in that, with our new sashes and our new delight in graciousness; and my oldest sister of all, moving about with a lovely homage to us younger ones, a gracious bending down of her life to ours for a little while.
And every one, old and young, even some with gray hairs, came and bowed over the hand of fifteen. That impressed me most. And some who were a little more than guests—intimates—brought my sister gifts—one that lies here now on the table as I write: a beautifully bound small copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, with the Dowden introduction. I did not know it then for what it was. I only loved it for its red and gold binding; but later, I grew up to it in my girlhood, as a young vine climbs at last to a trellis that is placed above it and awaits its growing. On its first leaf, in an exact hand, is written the date, my sister'sname, and that of the donor. Then follows this wish, suitable to the day:—
"May each succeeding birthday find you as light-hearted as you are to-day."
Oh, time! time! that brings us our blunders and our tears! Was he so inexperienced himself, he who brought her that? Or did he set that down in a mere spirit of carnival and bravado, just because shewasfifteen on the fifteenth, and nothing else was for the moment to be admitted of any importance?
I do not know how beautiful a birthday it was for her, but oh, for me! How I loved it! How good it was to bring her my homage! How glad and willing and eager I was that she should stand first! Play, play, concealed musicians! I can still catch the plucking of the harp-strings, and the sweet gay wailing of the violins, across the years.
One other birthday of my childhood stands out vividly in my memory: that one on which I was twelve years old. My mother had taken us all abroad, to widen our horizons and promote our education. After a preliminary fewmonths in England, we were established in Paris, in a comfortable apartment in a little hotel which they tell me is still there, and which went then, and still goes, by the name "Louis le Grand"—nothing less.
From the moment of our arrival, in January, I began to think even more of my birthday than was my wont. This was, no doubt, largely due to the fact that, at the distance of a few blocks one way or another, anything in the world, so it seemed, could be bought. Shops! Shops! The rue des Petits Champs, the avenue de l'Opéra, the boulevard des Italiens, were full of them. The rue des Petits Champs had innumerableboutiquesof all kinds—one given over to nothing, mind you, but honey and gingerbread, like a shop in a fairy tale. If you went across the Place Vendôme and followed the rue Castiglione, you came to the most romantic shops of all, there under the arcades of the rue de Rivoli, beginning with the most delectable pastry shop in the world on the very corner. You could walk there on a sunny day, disdainful of the weather, with the Gardens of the Tuileries opposite you, and feast your soul on the varied displays.
But when all was said, there was nothing that could be compared with the shops of the rue de la Paix. Here you came at once into a richer atmosphere. Here, mainly, were jewel-shops, displaying tiaras and necklaces—"rings and things and fine array." Dolls and gingerbread and honey were delightful—let me not seem to undervalue them; but to stand looking on while a master of his profession leaned over a velvet counter to show my mother brooches of jewels, and diamonds set in rings, was to know from the standpoint of childhood some of the true elevations of life.
While my mother considered jewels set thus or so, my eyes roved, speculative, among the rich wares. I had been brought up in too old-fashioned a way to make any mistake as to my limitations. Well-bred children, it was understood, wore neither rings nor ornaments, unless one or two of a most positive simplicity. But watches there were, a bewildering variety—for we were in the shop of one Victor Fleury, who, among other distinctions that I doubt not he had, was "Horloger de la Marine." You can imagine whether he had watches! I called my mother's attention tothe beauty of them, some very small ones in particular. She looked at them, but made no comment. I deduced that it was not well-bred for a little girl of twelve to wear a watch.
My birthday dawned at last. I was kissed and wished many happy returns, and was told that there was to be a dinner that night especially for me, and that I would then receive my gifts. The hotel was a small one. Dinner would be served for the hotel guests a trifle earlier, so that they might the sooner leave the way clear for me. This had been proposed by Madame Blet herself, the proprietress, and was intended no doubt for a fine piece of hospitality. For me the strict hotel rules were to be slackened; the fine democracy of hotel life, where one guest is as good as another, if he but pay his account, was to be overruled in my favor; for me the sun was to be advanced, and the moon set at a new pace in the heavens!
It was very grand in anticipation, I can assure you. To be twelve was of itself no inconsiderable glory, but to be twelve under such flattering conditions! I resolved to write an account of all this to my two chums in America.Little girls they were, of my own age, but of a less colored experience. They should have news of these matters. They should be enlightened as to the importance of her with whom they had commonly played visiting-lady and jackstones.
Yet, as the evening drew near, old stirrings of uneasiness made themselves felt dimly, dimly—something, I cannot tell you what, moving on the face of undiscovered waters; a distrust, a shyness and embarrassment that had nothing to do with timidity; a dim sense of disproportion, I take it to have been, and of ancient human questionings.
We waited a little past the usual hour, and then there came a knock. Joseph, our waiter, appeared and bowed gravely. "Mademoiselle, le dîner est servi."
My heart rose and fluttered. Presently we all went down the hall and down the red carpeted stairs, I with my hand in my mother's. I can still feel it resting there. Down the steps we went, my mother and I—I with a little delighted pause and poise at each step, the rest following like a court train. Twelve, and the youngest! Twelve, and the well-belovedand proud! Blow, bugles, fine and high! and let those who follow wear scarlet! What more could a little girl ask?
I do not know; I cannot tell you. I only know that, though I would not have admitted it for worlds at the time, when I found myself in the midst of the happiness it was no longer happiness exactly. Not, you understand, that I would have relinquished any of the splendor then. It fascinated me, of course.
Joseph held the door open; a fine heraldic gesture—the flat of his palm against it, the fingers spread, his head flung back, his eyes tributary ahead of him; his whole pose saying, "Stand back! She comes!" Several of the other servants were there, grouped to see and to attend. Madame Blet, in her black dress and perpetual shoulder-cape—a sad-faced, very dignified woman, with the sadness set aside in my honor for that evening and positive brightness shining from her kind eyes,—stood there too, with welcoming glances. She had decorated the table herself: there it was, a delight of soft lights and snowy linen, wonderful possibilities and flowers.
The dining-room was empty yet bright, asare the heavens for the coming of the moon. Joseph stood, not back of my mother's chair, as usual, but back of mine, to see me seated. Those faces, very beloved in the soft light, were turned toward me, a little gay, and happy wholly in my happiness. It was fulfillment of all the dreams of importance I might ever have had.
Then came the unfolding of the gifts. Any one who knew my mother must know that, in the smallest of a nest of lovely little boxes,—just enough of them to produce a certain curiosity and delay, to enhance the final delight,—lay the most lovely little watch, silver-cased (to render it more conformable to my age), and marked with the initials of my name; while on its inner casing it bore proudly, as it still bears, while it ticks here on my table, this inscription:Victor Fleury, Horloger de la Marine, 23, Rue de la Paix, 23, Paris.
After the other gifts were opened dinner was served, Joseph bringing everything first to me, whose place it was usually to be served last of all. There were special dishes, and the lamb chops had on particularly fine cravats, and thepetits poiswere so verypetitsthat itseemed nearly a shame to eat them—like "good little Tootle-tum Teh" in the ballad; and there were side dishes, very special, for the occasion.
Then, as a crowning glory, a dessert not baked in a hotel oven at all; no cabinet pudding of frequent occurrence, nothing that hinted of rice or raisins; no, but something fetched particularly from thepâtisserie. By the look of it, it might have been, and probably was, concocted by a pastry cook in full regalia, in that superlativepâtisserieon the rue de Rivoli, opposite the Louvre.
It was a tower made of a hard brown candy flecked with chopped nuts. It had a door in it, and windows with embrasures at the tops to make you think of King Arthur and his knights. It was decorated on its platter by saccharine approaches. The tower was open at the top and filled with a flavored whipped cream. Madame Blet, who had, I doubt not, been directing forces from the kitchen, stood now in the doorway beaming like another candle. This, which had the added flavor of being a surprise even to my mother, was Madame Blet's gift to the little Americanmademoiselle. Once more, on a most diminutive scale, France and America were exchanging courtesies.
But meanwhile,—oh, inevitable!—Joseph, that devoted ambassador, beaming unfeigned pride in the behavior of his country, held the tower at my left hand. I was to serve myself first. But how—I ask the heavens to answer me this!—how is one to serve one's self to a feudal tower? One desperate glance at my mother,—the quick dart of an alarmed swallow,—then I took up the large spoon and laid it hesitatingly against the tower's side. But the tower was nearly as hard as the rock it represented. The approaches, also, were of one piece. With a mere dessert spoon, what can be done as to a portcullis! Shall you, do you think, carry off a drawbridge with a slight silver instrument to be held in one hand? I was not meeting the emergency. I was not equal to the occasion. This I knew, with quick intolerable shame. What was to be done? At last, after what seemed to me ages, I accepted the only possibility. I scooped from the top of the tower some of the fluffy whipped cream, put this on my plate and the spoon back among theapproaches; and the tower, proud, unspoiled, unwon, was carried on to the others, who served themselves, as I had done; or, when the cream was at last too low for them to reach, suffered Joseph to scoop it out for them and put it on their plates.
I sat tasting the whipped cream on the end of my spoon, and oh, it was insipid, that faint froth; not of itself, but by contrast with what I would have wished—a portcullis at the very least. When we left the dining-room, it still stood solid and invulnerable, that so desirable tower, a delusion to the palate, a snare to the understanding, a subtle but strong disappointment to the heart! Now that I look back on it, it seems like an unintended symbol, an uninterpreted writing on the wall of my childhood.
These things called birthdays seemed for me to have been weighed that night in subtle scales, and found wanting. Froth on the tip of your spoon! The real anticipated glory, a chimera; the dreamed-of and so-much-desired happiness, a thing which could not be won, a thing left untouched while one slipped away unsatisfied, disappointed, into the later years.
No doubt I passed on to later years that very evening as I went out of the lighted dining-room; for more and more this centralizing of power and importance, even though it were for one day of the year only, became to me incongruous and out of the real order of life. As I began to gauge values and proportions better, it came to seem almost a gentle buffoonery. The mild distrust I had felt for birthdays in my little girlhood was beginning to take on the form of positive distaste.
Doubtless I was beginning to have a larger vision of life. For one thing, I had meanwhile seen dawns rise over the Alps, and day depart from the fruitful purple valleys to ascend the heights, beautiful, like the feet of those upon the mountains, who bring tidings of peace; and had watched them pause in their glory for a last look upon the work of their hands before going forth forever beyond the world's edge. And I had stood since then by the incredible sounding sea; I had known that sense of the waters in the hollow of His hand, and watched the night bend like the face of infinity over it.
Out of the birthdays I have known, I have recorded but three—the three made memorable, not so much by material as by spiritual gifts, and by some vision of life itself vouchsafed me. It was as if, with a touch upon my hand, Life summoned me to note, even though in some unrealized way, when I was but a child of five, how inconsiderable may be these our little personal joys and expectations and vanities of song, even as were mine, in the face of the large solemnities and griefs and remembered joys with which, that day, our home was visited. And on that second birthday, it was as if Life bade me note how satisfying to the heart is the gift of lovely and willing service. Not mine the day at all; but I can remember, all woven in with the ravishing music of harps and violins, a sense of my almost thrilled delight in the service that others brought my sister, in whose honor we were glad, and a high joy in my own eager and devoted homage. Dimly seen in all this, though I could not have named it to you then, was a larger vision, no doubt, of this same truthtranslated into lovelier and more solemn meaning; as if in those lighted rooms, gay with their smilax and their laughter, Life had suddenly laid a touch on my shoulder, and with her finger on her lips had bade me note how sweet is the odor of spikenard, and how thrillingly beautiful are the broken pieces of alabaster.
And the third birthday? Perhaps it was then that Life put into my hand a better gift than any—that larger knowledge, which all the coming years were to corroborate, that to have special gifts and benefits for one's self which are not for others, let the glamour be what it may, is after all but froth and disappointment; and that only the blending of one's life with other lives can ever really satisfy the heart.
Since then I have seen birthdays of my own and others not a few, and have looked on at those of many a child. Witnessing these, I have sometimes been troubled to note how—materialists ourselves—we insist upon making materialists of our children also. For who has not beheld a little lad, triumphant as Jack Horner, in the midst of his birthday packages, or a little Midas, among his heaped-up Christmastoys, appropriating to himself, with our delighted consent, the Other Child's birthday also. With what shameful abundance of material gifts do we heap the little eager hands; but how few, how few, for the young and growing spirit!
Yet it is to be noted hopefully that our too personal celebrations are apt to fall away, as it were of themselves, in our later years; and doubtless with them many of our central egotisms, life correcting with a patient hand our dull and ofttimes willful behavior. I cannot be persuaded that it is solely a sensitiveness to the loss of youth that prompts us to waive or disregard those birthdays which fall upon the nether side of twenty. Our neglect of them is more often, I like to believe, in the order of a gentle disavowal of old egotisms, as life ripens and takes on in our regard an aspect larger and less personal; even as to a nation or a religion which progresses, egotism and special privilege become increasingly distasteful, and the idea of a chosen people more and more intolerable to the pure in heart, as the world matures.
Mature life, like the mature heart, cannotendure a sovereignty over its brethren, but longs for the old original levels; sheds its singleness and its superiorities. We become, God be thanked, less considerable under the moon as time advances; more of a piece with life; better blended with the days; a part of all dawns and sunsets—we who before had but one of each to our credit.
"I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of a day besides my dinner," says Lamb. "I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts—a grace before Milton—a grace before Shakespeare—a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the 'Fairy Queen'?"
I own also to a disposition to celebrate many birthdays rather than one, and am inclined to be thankful on twenty other occasions in the course of the year besides that one which falls so personally for me—even if so negligible—on a certain February morning. I confess to a love of calendars that sometimes give me two or three great names to celebrate in a singleday; nor am I ashamed to admit that the sun rises for me the statelier if it be upon an anniversary which commemorates Camoens or Michael Angelo. It has long been my habit, to celebrate quietly in my heart, when all the birds are singing, that day in April when, it is said,—uncertainly enough,—Shakespeare came to the earth; nor have I failed often to note that other day also, when, impartially in the same April weather, it is said, he—and Cervantes on the same day with him—departed from it.
And if such remembrances as these may seem still to tend toward egotism, yet I think that claim can hardly be proved valid. For these,—celebrate them as personally as we may,—these are not men of one season but of all time, blended with all days, impartially a part of all weathers, and of the very fibre and lives of most of us; and, even though we should forget them, yet memorably forgotten in those unforgettable companionships that they have bestowed upon us. These are our stars and moons, differing in glory one from another, with which, in the midst of our mortality, we answer, not ignobly, the shining challenge ofthe stars; these are they innumerable whose beauties and nobilities, coupled with our own inconsiderable lives, lend at last some glory to our days so frail, so ephemeral.
As a child, I used to love to count the stars, beginning with the very first one that pricked its way through the twilit blue, and by a pretty conceit always called that first one my own, and put a most personal wish upon it. For a long time it always stood single in the heavens, and then another here or there, and there, and there, appeared, which I counted with delight. But always the moment came when the count was irretrievably lost; when stars bloomed, not by ones and twos, but by myriads, no more to be counted than the unnumbered sands of the sea; and over me was stretched the jeweled beauty of the infinite heavens, just breathing with the breathing of the night; and I, looking up glorified into that beauty, a little inconsiderable child, standing beside the soft dark shadow of the cypresses.
THE END