Ancient religion is of all subjects in the world the most difficult. Every religion, even at thetime it was in progress, was always completely misunderstood, and the misconceptions have increased with the ages. They multiply with every monument that is unearthed. If the Eleusinian mysteries were going at full blast to-day, so that we could attend them, as we do the play at Oberammergau, their interpretation would still present difficulties. Mommsen and Rhode would disagree. But ten thousand years from now, when nothing survives except a line out of St. John's Gospel and a tablet stating that Fischer played the part of Christ for three successive decades, many authoritative books will be written about Oberammergau, and reputations will be made over it. Anything which we approach as religion becomes a nightmare of suggestion, and hales us hither and thither with thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul.
TheAlcestisand theBacchantesare, in this paper, approached with the idea that they areplays. This seems not to have been done often enough with Greek plays. They are regarded as examples of the sublime, as forms of philosophic thought, as moral essays, as poems, even as illustrations of dramatic law, and they are unquestionably all of these things. But they were primarily plays—intended to pass the time and exhilarate the emotions. They came into being as plays, and their form and make-up can best be understood by a study of the dramatic business in them. They become poems and philosophy incidentally,and afterwards: they were born as plays. A playwright is always an entertainer, and unless his desire to hold his audience overpoweringly predominates, he will never be a success. It is probable that even with Æschylus,—who standshors ligneas the only playwright in history who was really in earnest about morality,—we should have to confess that his passion as a dramatic artist camefirst. He held his audiences by strokes of tremendous dramatic novelty. Both the stage traditions and the plays themselves bear this out. The fact is that it is not easy to keep people sitting in a theatre; and unless the idea of holding their attention predominates with the author, they will walk out, and he will not be able to deliver the rest of his story.
In the grosser forms of dramatic amusement—for example, where a bicycle acrobat is followed by a comic song—we are not compelled to find philosophic depth of idea in the sequence. But in dealing with works of great and refined dramatic genius like theTempest, or theBacchantes, where the emotions played upon are subtly interwoven, there will always be found certain minds which remain unsatisfied with the work of art itself, but must have it explained. Even Beethoven's Sonatas have been supplied with philosophic addenda—statements of their meaning. We know how much Shakespeare's intentions used to puzzle the Germans. Men feel that somewhere at the back of their own consciousnessthere is a philosophy or a religion with which the arts have some relation. In so far as these affinities are touched upon in a manner that leaves them mysteries, we have good criticism; but when people dogmatize about them, we have bad criticism. In the meantime the great artist goes his way. His own problems are enough for him.
The early critics were puzzled to classify theAlcestis, and no wonder, for it contains many varieties of dramatic writing. For this very reason it is a good play to take as a sample of Greek spirit and Greek workmanship. It is a little Greek cosmos, and it happens to depict a side of Greek thought which is sympathetic to modern sentiment, so that we seem to be at home in its atmosphere. TheAlcestisis thought to be in a class by itself. And yet, indeed, under close examination, every Greek play falls into a class by itself (there are only about forty-five of them in all), and the maker of each was probably more concerned at the time with the dramatic experiment upon which he found himself launched than he was with any formal classification which posterity might assign to his play.
In theAlcestisEuripides made one of the best plays in the world, full of true pathos, full of jovial humor, both of which sometimes verge upon the burlesque. The happy ending is understood from the start, and none of the grief is painful. Alcestis herself is the good-wife of Greek household myth, who is ready to die for her husband. Tothis play the bourgeois takes his half-grown family. He rejoices when he hears that it is to be given. The absurdities of the fairy-tale are accepted simply. Heracles has his club, Death his sword, Apollo his lyre. The women wail, Admetus whines; there is buffoonery, there are tears, there is wit, there is conventional wrangling, and that word-chopping so dear to the Mediterranean theatre, which exists in all classic drama and survives in the Punch and Judy show of to-day. And there is the charming return of Heracles with the veiled lady whom he presents to Admetus as a slave for safe keeping, whom Admetus refuses to receive for conventional reasons, but whom every child in the audience feels to be the real Alcestis, even before Heracles unveils her and gives her back into her husband's bosom with speeches on both sides that are like the closing music of a dream.
The audience disperses at the close, feeling that it has spent a happy hour. No sonata of Mozart is more completely beautiful than theAlcestis. No comedy of Shakespeare approaches it in perfection. The merit of the piece lies, not in any special idea it conveys, but entirely in the manner in which everything is carried out.
It is clear at a glance that theAlcestisbelongs to an epoch of extreme sophistication. Everything has been thought out and polished; everyornament is a poem. If a character has to give five words of explanation or of prayer, it is done in silver. The tone is all the tone of cultivated society, the appeal is an appeal to the refined, casuistical intelligence. The smile of Voltaire is all through Greek literature; and it was not until the age of Louis XIV, or the Regency, that the modern world was again to know a refinement and a sophistication which recall the Greek work. Now, in one word,—this subtlety which pleases us in matters of sentiment is the very thing that separates us from the Greek upon the profoundest questions of philosophy. Where religious or metaphysical truth is touched upon, either Greek sophistication carries us off our feet with a rapture which has no true relation to the subject, or else we are offended by it. We do not understand sophistication. The Greek has pushed aesthetic analysis further than the modern can bear. We follow well enough through the light issues, but when the deeper questions are reached we lose our footing. At this point the modern cries out in applause, 'Religion, philosophy, pure feeling, the soul!'—He cries out, 'Mystic cult, Asiatic influence, Nature worship,—deep things over there!'—Or else he cries, 'What amazing cruelty, what cynicism!' And yet it is none of these things, but only the artistic perfection of the work which is moving us. We are the victims of clever stage-management.
The cruder intelligence is ever compelled to regardthe man of complex mind as a priest or as a demon. The child, for instance, asks about the character in a story, 'But is he a good man or a bad man, papa?' The child must have a moral explanation of anything which is beyond his æsthetic comprehension. So also does the modern intelligence question the Greek.
The matter is complicated by yet another element, namely stage convention. Our modern stage is so different from the classic stage that we are bad judges of the Greek playwright's intentions. The quarrels which arise as to allegorical or secondary meanings in a work of art are generally connected with some unfamiliar feature of its setting. A great light is thrown upon any work of art when we show how its form came into being, and thus explain its primary meaning. Such an exposition of the primary or apparent meaning is often sufficient to put all secondary meanings out of court. For instance: It is, as we know, the Germans who have found in Shakespeare a coherent philosophic intention. They think that he wrote plays for the purpose of stating metaphysical truths. The Englishman does not believe this, because the Englishman is familiar with that old English stage work. He knows its traditions, its preoccupation with story-telling, its mundane character, its obliviousness to the sort of thing that Germany has in mind. The Englishman knows the conventions of his ownstage, and this protects him from finding mares'-nests in Shakespeare. Again, Shakespeare's sonnets used to be a favorite field for mystical exegesis, until Sir Sidney Lee explained their form by reference to the sixteenth-century sonnet literature of the continent. This put to flight many theories.
In other words, the appeal to convention is the first duty of the scholar. But, unfortunately, in regard to the conventions of the Classic Stage, the moderns are all in the dark. Nothing like that stage exists to-day. We are obliged to make guesses as to its intentions, its humor, its relation to philosophy. If the classics had only possessed a cabinet-sized drama, like our own, we might have been at home there. But this giant-talk, this megaphone-and-buskin method, offers us a problem in dynamics which staggers the imagination. All we can do is to tread lightly and guess without dogmatizing. The typical Athenian, Euripides, was so much deeper-dyed in skepticism than any one since that day, that really no one has ever lived who could cross-question him—let alone expound the meanings of his plays. In reading Euripides, we find ourselves, at moments, ready to classify him as a satirist, and at other moments as a man of feeling. Of course he was both. Sometimes he seems like a religious man, and again, like a charlatan. Of course he was neither. He was a playwright.
TheBacchantes, like every other Greek play, is the result, first, of the legend, second, of the theatre. There is always some cutting and hacking, due to the difficulty of getting the legend into the building. Legends differ as to their dramatic possibilities, and the incidents which are to be put on the stage must be selected by the poet. The site of the play must be fixed. Above all, a Chorus must be arranged for.
The choosing of a Chorus is indeed one of the main problems of the tragedian. If he can hit on a natural sort of Chorus he is a made man. In theAlcestiswe saw that the whole background of grief and wailing was one source of the charm of the play. Not only are the tragic parts deepened, but the gayer scenes are set off by this feature. If the fable provides no natural and obvious Chorus, the playwright must bring his Chorus on the stage by stretching the imagination of the audience. He employs a group of servants or of friends of the hero; if the play is a marine piece, he uses sailors. The whole atmosphere of his play depends upon the happiness of his choice.
In theAgamemnon'the old men left-at-home' form the Chorus. There is enough dramatic power in this one idea to carry a play. It is so natural: the old men are on the spot; they are interested; they are the essence of the story, and yet external to it. These old men are, indeed, thearchetype of all choruses—a collection of by-standers, a sort of little dummy audience, intended to steer the great, real audience into a comprehension of the play.
The Greek dramatist found this very useful machine, the Chorus, at his elbow; but he was, on the other hand, greatly controlled by it. It had ways of its own: it inherited dramatic necessities. The element of convention and of theatrical usage is so very predominant in the handling of Greek choruses by the poets, that we have in chorus-work something that may be regarded almost as a constant quality. By studying choruses one can arrive at an idea of the craft of Greek play-writing—one can even separate the conventional from the personal to some extent.
The Greek Chorus has no mind of its own; it merely gives echo to the last dramatic thought. It goes forward and back, contradicts itself, sympathizes with all parties or none, and lives in a limbo. Its real function is to represent the slow-minded man in the audience. It does what he does, it interjects questions and doubts, it delays the plot and indulges in the proper emotions during the pauses. These functions are quite limited, and were completely understood in Greek times; so much so, that in the typical stock tragedy of the Æschylean school certain saws, maxims, and reflections appear over and over again. One of them, of course, was, 'See how the will of the gods works out in unexpected ways.' Another,'Let us be pious, and reverence something that is perhaps behind the gods themselves.' Another, 'This is all very extraordinary: let us hope for the best.' Another, 'Our feelings about right and wrong must somehow be divine; traditional morality, traditional piety, are somehow right.'
Precisely the same reflections are often put in the mouths of the subordinate characters, and for precisely the same purpose. 'Oh, may the quiet life be mine! Give me neither poverty nor riches: for the destinies of the great are ever uncertain.' 'Temptation leads to insolence, and insolence to destruction'; and so forth. Such reflections serve the same purpose, by whomever they are uttered. They underscore the moral of the story and assure the spectator that he has not missed the point.
As religious tragedy broadened into political and romantic tragedy, the Chorus gained a certain freedom in what might be called its interjectional duty,—its duty, that is to say, of helping the plot along by proper questions, and so forth. It gained also a Protean freedom in its emotional interpretations during pauses. The playwrights apparently discovered that by the use of music and dancing, the most subtle and delicate, nay, the most whimsical varieties of lyrical mood could be conveyed to great audiences. In spite of this license, however, the old duties of the Chorus as guardians of conservativemorality remained unchanged; and the stock phrases of exhortation and warning remainedde rigueurin the expectation of the audience. Their meaning had become so well known that, by the time of Æschylus, they were expressed in algebraic terms.
No man could to-day unravel a Chorus of Æschylus if only one such Chorus existed. The truncated phrases and elliptical thoughts are clear, to us, because we have learned their meaning through reiteration, and because they always mean the same thing. The poet has a license to provide the Chorus with dark sayings,—dark in form, but simple in import. It was, indeed, his duty to give these phrases an oracular character. In the course of time such phrases became the terror of the copyists. Obscure passages became corrupt in process of transcription; and thus we have inherited a whole class of choral wisdom which we understandwell enough(just as the top gallery understood itwell enough) to help us in our enjoyment of the play. The obscurity, and perhaps even some part of what we call 'corruption,' are here a part of the stage convention.
Now with regard to theBacchantes—the scheme of having Mænads for a Chorus gave splendid promise of scenic effect; and the fact that, as a logical consequence, these ladies would have to give utterance to the usual maxims of piety, mixed in with the rhapsodies of their professional madness, did not daunt Euripides. Hesimply makes the Chorus do the usual chorus work, without burdening his mind about character-drawing. Thus the Mænads, at moments when they are not pretending to be Mænads, and are not singing, 'Away to the mountains, O the foot of the stag,' and so on, are obliged to turn the other cheek, and pretend to be interested by-standers—old gaffers, wagging their beards, and quoting the book of Proverbs. The transition from one mood to the other is done in a stroke of lightning, and seems to be independent of the music. That is, itseemsto make no difference, so long as the musical schemes are filled out, whether the ladies are singing, 'On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!' or, 'True wisdom differs from sophistry, and consists in avoiding subjects that are beyond mortal comprehension.' All such discrepancies would, no doubt, have been explained if we possessed the music; but the music is lost. It seems, at any rate, certain that the grand public was not expected to understand the word-for-word meaning of choruses; hence their license to be obscure. We get the same impression from the jibes of Aristophanes, whose ridicule of the pompous obscurity of Æschylus makes us suspect that the audiences could not follow the grammar in the lofty parts of the tragedy. They accepted the drum-roll of horror, and understood the larger grammar of tragedy, much as we are now forced to do in reading the plays.
It would seem that by following the technique of tragedy, and by giving no thought to small absurdities, Euripides got a double effect out of his Mænads and no one observed that anything was wrong. In one place he resorts to a dramatic device, which was perhaps well known in his day, namely, the 'conversion' of a bystander. After the First Messenger has given the great description of Dionysus's doings in the mountains, the Chorus, or one of them, with overpowering yet controlled emotion, steps forward and says, 'I tremble to speak free words in the presence of my King; yet nevertheless be it said: Dionysus is no less a god than the greatest of them!' This reference to the duty of a subject is probably copied from a case where the Chorus was made up of local bystanders. In the mouth of a Mænad the proclamation is logically ridiculous; yet so strange are the laws of what 'goes' on the stage that it may have been effective even here.
Some of the choruses in theBacchantesare miracles of poetic beauty, of savage passion, of liquid power. It is hard to say exactly what they are, but they are wonderful. And behind all, there gleams from the whole play a sophistication as deep as the Ægean.
There is one thing that we should never do in dealing with anything Greek. We should not take a scrap of the Greek mind and keep on examiningit until we find a familiar thought in it. No bit of Greek art is to be viewed as a thing in itself. It is always a fragment, and gets its value from the whole. Every bit of carved stone picked up in Athens is a piece of architecture; so is every speech in a play, every phrase in a dialogue. You must go back and bring in the whole Theatre or the whole Academy, and put back the fragment in its place by means of ladders, before you can guess at its meaning. The inordinate significance that seems to gleam from every broken toy of Greece, results from this very quality—that the object is a part of something else. Just because the thing has no meaning by itself, it implies so much. Somehow it drags the whole life of the Greek nation before you. The favorite Greek maxim, 'Avoid excess,' does the same. It keeps telling you to remember yesterday and to-morrow; to remember thepalæstraand the market-place; above all to remember that the very opposite of what you say is also true. Wherever you are, and whatever doing, you must remember therestof the Greek world.
It is no wonder that the Greeks could not adopt the standards and contrivances of other nations, while their own standards and contrivances resulted from such refined and perpetual balancing and shaving of values. This refinement has become part of their daily life; and whether one examines a drinking cup or a dialogue or a lyric, and whether the thing be from the age of Homer orfrom the age of Alexander, the fragment always gives us a glimpse into the same Greek world. The foundation of this world seems to be the Myth; and as the world grew it developed in terms of Myth. The Greek mind had only one background. Athletics and Statuary, Epic and Drama, Religion and Art, Skepticism and Science expressed themselves through the same myths. In this lies the fascination of Greece for us. What a complete cosmos it is! And how different from any other civilization! Modern life, like modern language, is a monstrous amalgam, a conglomeration and mess of idioms from every age and every clime. The classic Greek hangs together like a wreath. It has been developed rapidly, during a few hundred years, and has an inner harmony like the temple. Language and temple—each was an apparition; each is, in its own way, perfect.
Consider wherein Rome differed from Greece. The life of the Romans was a patchwork, like our own. Their religion was formal, their art imported, their literature imitative, their aims were practical, their interests unimaginative. All social needs were controlled by political considerations. This sounds almost like a description of modern life; and it explains why the Romans are so close to us. Cicero, Horace, Cæsar, Antony, are moderns. But Alcibiades, Socrates, Pericles, and the rest take their stand in Greek fable. Like Pisistratus, Solon, and Lycurgus, they melt intolegend and belong to the realms of the imagination.
No other people ever bore the same relation to their arts that the Greeks bore; and in this lies their charm. When the Alexandrine critics began to classify poetry and to discuss perfection, they never even mentioned the Roman poetry, although all of the greatest of it was in existence. Why is this? It is because no Roman poem is a poem at all from the Greek point of view. It is too individual, too clever, and, generally, too political. Besides, it is not in Greek. The nearest modern equivalent to the development of the whole Greek world of art is to be found in German contrapuntal music. No one except a German has ever written a true sonata or a symphony, in the true polyphonic German style. There aretours de forcedone by other nationalities; but the natural idiom of this music is Teutonic.
I am not condemning the Latins, or the moderns. Indeed, there is in Horace something nobler and more humane than in all Olympus. The Greeks, moreover, seem in their civic incompetence like children, when contrasted with the Romans or with the moderns. But in power of utterance, within their own crafts, the Greeks are unapproachable. Let us now speak of matters of which we know very little.
The statues on the Parthenon stand in a region where direct criticism cannot reach them, butwhich trigonometry may, to some extent, determine. Their beauty probably results from an artistic knowledge so refined, a sophistication so exact, that, as we gaze, we lose the process and see only results. A Greek architect could have told you just what lines of analysis must be followed in order to get these effects in grouping and in relief. It is all, no doubt, built up out oftonicanddominant—but the manual of counter-point has been lost. As the tragic poet fills the stage with the legend, so the sculptor fills the metope with the legend. Both are closely following artistic usage: each is merely telling the old story with new refinement. And whether we gaze at the actors on the stage or at the figures in the metope, whether we study a lyric or listen to a dialogue, we are in communion with the same genius, the same legend. The thing which moves and delights us is a unity.
This Genius is not hard to understand. Any one can understand it. That is the proof of its greatness. As Boccaccio said of Dante, not learning but good wits are needed to appreciate him. One cannot safely look toward the mind of the modern scholar for an understanding of the Greek mind, because the modern scholar is a specialist—a thing the Greek abhors. If a scholar to-day knows the acoustics of the Greek stage, that is thought to be a large enough province for him. He is not allowed to be an authority on the scenery. In the modern scholar's mind everything isin cubby-holes; and everybody to-day wants to become an authority. Every one, moreover, is very serious to-day; and it does not do to be too serious about Greek things, because the very genius of Greece has in it a touch of irony, which combines with our seriousness to make a heavy, indigestible paste. The Greek will always laugh at you if he can, and the only hope is to keep him at arm's length, and deal with him in the spirit of social life, of the world, of thebeau monde, and of large conversation. His chief merit is to stimulate this spirit. The less we dogmatize about his works and ways, the freer will the world be of secondary, second-rate commentaries. The more we study his works and ways, the fuller will the world become of intellectual force.
The Greek classics are a great help in tearing open those strong envelopes in which the cultivation of the world is constantly getting glued up. They helped Europe to cut free from theocratic tyranny in the late Middle Ages. They held the Western world together after the fall of the Papacy. They gave us modern literature: indeed, if one considers all that comes from Greece, one can hardly imagine what the world would have been like without her. The lamps of Greek thought are still burning in marble and in letters. The complete little microcosm of that Greek society hangs forever in the great macrocosm of the moving world, and sheds rays which dissolve prejudice, making men thoughtful, rational, and gay.The greatest intellects are ever the most powerfully affected by it; but no one escapes. Nor can the world ever lose this benign influence, which must, so far as philosophy can imagine, qualify human life forever.
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By Lucy Martin Donnelly
ITis everywhere the custom, in life, in literature, to celebrate the young girl; to praise her pink cheeks, her shining hair, her innocence, her gayeties—her muslins, even, and blue ribbons. She has become in these latter days a proverb, a type—la jeune fille. Yet, to the discreet observer how gaudy is her charm, how showy and unsubstantial, and of the day only, when matched with graces like those of the truly incomparable old lady! It is an antique convention that hurries off old age with decrepitude and care and quavering palsy. And it may be that the old gentleman is unamiable; that, his days of strenuousness fairly over, he becomes crabbed, a lover of snuff, and unpoetical. But the old lady is a creature of another quality. The refinements of age only enhance the femininity of her charm; to her, whimsicalities, delicate occupations, the fine lines that etch themselves expressively across her brow and about her mouth, are all vastly becoming. With what ineffable grace, moreover, she pronounces certain words in the elegant fashion of an age ago!How softly the old Indian shawls she wears fall about her shoulders! What strange, unlikely stories she tells of the beginning of the century!
I am indeed no novice to her charms. I have been victim to the enchantments of a long line of old ladies from my earliest years upward. When my frocks were still short and I still suffered under the ignominy of pinafores, I remember very well following a friend of my grandmother's about, and fetching big books for her. She was an exceedingly learned old lady, I take it; indeed, my grandmother always spoke of her as strong-minded, wherefore I am sometimes led to doubt whether she would so unreservedly have pleased my maturer taste. But in those early days my devotion impelled me even to the point of learning the alphabets of the curious languages she read. What constituted her peculiar, her romantic charm, however, was the fact that she had traveled in many far-away countries. I always understood it was their strange suns that had turned her skin the yellow color of old parchment, and stopped the whitening of her hair at a grizzly gray. This particular ugly gray I admired along with the rest: it suggested worldly sophistication and a cosmopolitan experience, as did no less her deep voice and blue-veined hands, and her habit of taking a vigorous walk in the morning, before breakfast. Her daughter, she told me, was named Aurore. How I wished that I myself had been favored with such a name!
My grandmother was very different—much prettier and gentler, no doubt; but her daughters bore such stiff, old-fashioned names as Anne and Emeline, and she herself had seldom left New England, and took only a short walk in the sun at noonday, under a tiny black silk parasol. At other times she sat beside her work-table, which had legs of twisted mahogany, and a crimson silk bag hanging down from the middle in a way I never understood. Out of this she occasionally brought scraps of faded old brocades,—pink and green they would be, with a rare yellow, or a blue still a little gay; and now and then, when the winter evenings until my bedtime were long, she even found bright-colored beads in a small drawer at the side. Although she had been 'a proficient' in music as a girl, I think she knew no language save English. Emerson she read chiefly; the prayers of Theodore Parker; black volumes of sermons by William Ellery Channing; and sometimes, to me, in a very soft voice, Whittier's poems. In the late afternoons she was accustomed to play at solitaire, letting me sit at a corner of the table to look on. Not infrequently, when excited by the odds against which we were fighting, I forgot to hold up my head, and my long brown curls, falling down among the cards, threw them into disarray, and obliged me to sit at a penitential distance. My grandmother did not choose to be interrupted. But all the games in turn she invariably won by a deft rearrangementof the cards when she saw them going wrong. 'With one's self, you know, my dear,' she would say, judiciously distributing diamonds among the spades,—'with one's self it is quite understood.'
Since the days of my grandmother and her friends I have known a hundred other old ladies, if none more charming. There are, I dare say, persons who, in going about the world, meet people of other sorts: actors, perhaps, or ladies of fashion, or diplomatists,—first of all, I fancy, to be desired,—or spiritualists, or musicians. Personally, I never fall in with any one except old ladies. In a railway train, for example, I am sure to find myself opposite or beside one, and of late years they have generally had birds with them.
The first I remember—with a bird, that is—was in a German railway carriage going from Berlin to Hanover. At least, my destination was Hanover; the old lady herself was on her way home to Düsseldorf. She had been visiting her nephews and nieces in Berlin; she had a great many of them, she told me. From her fingers, covered with old pearl and diamond rings, I gathered that she was very rich; and from the bouquets of many colors, ranged in the luggage-rack above her head, that the nephews and nieces were trying to persuade her to leave them her fortune. She wore, nevertheless, an air of extreme detachment, holding her long netted silk purse—through whose meshes the Prussian gold gleamed—tightlyclasped between two fat fingers. Altogether she was a very portly and regal-looking person, and gave you the impression of being dressed in black velvet, though in point of fact I do not think that she was. But her mantle was fringed heavily several times about, and her hat—for she wore a hat with a brim that dropped slightly, discreetly, all around—was also bordered by a black fringe that just cleared her faded eyebrows and her black beady eyes. She had a gouty foot, too,—she was quite complete,—that rested on a little folding stool she had brought with her; and she rang imperiously for the guard. When he came she ordered coffee, bullying the cream-faced Teuton into bringing a double portion of sugar to feed her bird, a little green creature, disposed among the flowers above her head. It was with a good deal of difficulty that she struggled up to reach him, but to have him handed down would, she said, excite him unnecessarily. 'Mein Männchen, mein Männchen,' she murmured in a deep, tender tone, as she fed him each successive crumb. After feasting the bird she turned her attention to me, and asking to see the book that I was absorbed in, she kept it until we arrived at Hanover. I had evidently read too much in trains, she remarked, alluding to my eye-glasses. Americans, she knew, were very foolish. Then she asked me the price of everything in the States, and of my traveling bag in particular, and quarreled with me as to the numberof marks in a dollar. 'You'll find that I am right,' she assured me, as I was squeezing myself and the brown leather bag she admired out of the narrow door of the German coupé. 'You'll find there are six marks in every dollar. Auf wiedersehen, Fräulein.'
The last of my old ladies with birds I met only a month or two ago, on the way from London down to Southsea,—the one place in all the world, I suppose, whither a thin spinster, accompanied by a ragged-tailed bird named Tip, should be traveling. She was, of course, very different from the German dowager; not so far on in years, and, as I indicated, exaggeratedly thin; shy, furthermore, and dressed in a worn black-silk gown, with a lace collar at her throat drawn together by a hair brooch. And she spoke only from time to time, to inquire if we must change carriages at Woking; meanwhile looking a little greedily from Tip to the seedcakes in the hands of three English schoolgirls, who, with shortish frocks and longish hair hanging over their shoulders, sat in a row on my side of the carriage, and scattered crumbs enough to have fattened a family of partridges.
Old ladies at sea, though there without the embellishments of flowers and birds, I have found no less attractive than on land. I fell in with a party of them in the early summer, on their way to Carlsbad to drink the waters; with the exception, that is, of two or three whose destination was Kissingen, and who disbelieved altogether, Ilearned when we were a few days out from New York, in the rheumatism of the Carlsbad-bound ladies. Carlsbad, they assured me,—punctuating their remarks with sniffs of their smelling-bottles as I tucked cushions behind their poor backs,—Carlsbad was all fine clothes and frivolity and band music (than which surely nothing has a more wicked sound), and was by no means the place a person really ill would dream of retiring to for her health's sake.
But it matters very little whether I travel in trains or in ships, or whether I rest quietly at home, my companions are rarely of my own age. If I am asked out to luncheon to meet the wife of a melancholy doubtful poet who died young, and on my way to the house in question dwell, not unnaturally, on her youthful tragic grief, on my arrival I find myself confronted by a fat, kindly old lady, crowned with a large black-beaded bonnet that shows a bunch of purple flowers above either ear. If I go to visit some beautiful house secluded in the country, it is an old lady who stands on the threshold. I remember such a mansion, built in Tudor times, and topped with chimneys calculated to make you sigh your soul away in longing; it had once been the dower house of an English queen, and in front of it two peacocks paraded proudly all day long. Others, I knew, went to admire it, and were entertained by the granddaughter, or at least by the middle-aged daughter, of its mistress. Not so on thesunny morning of my visit. Lady W—— herself was working among the flowers in her garden, and herself showed me back to the cascade and the tulip tree, stepping over the lawn with the spirit of a girl, and apologizing with a girl's vanity, too, for her garden hat and gloves.
She was the very flower and mirror of all the old ladies I have ever known; conscious, if you will, of her charm, and all the more charming for that. She led me into the drawing room—she knew she held my heart in her hand—to see her portrait, which, though painted by a celebrated artist, made her look very like any other old lady in velvet and a bonnet and furs. Her great gayety, her beautiful eyes, the sweet curving lines about her mouth, were all forgotten. 'I don't know,' she said to me a little stiffly, as she paused before it, and for a moment glanced across to her maternal grandmother done by Reynolds, with pink cheeks, and with a pink rose in her hand instead of a muff, 'I don't know, my dear, whether it is like or not, but certainly it is a very odd picture.'
More delightful though each one be than the last, it is but reasonable that the wealth of my experience among old ladies should have led me to certain discriminations. Old ladies, I am prepared to say, divide themselves into two classes: the thin, namely, and the fat. Nor is this discrimination so artificial as it may appear. Another equally expressive, equally conclusive,could not be made. And of the two—but this is a matter of prejudice—I prefer the thin, as having commonly more wit, more liveliness, brighter eyes, and a taste for anecdote generally wanting, I think it only right to say, in the fatter, kindlier class. My point of view is possibly ultra-modern, but what will you?La grande dame, so called, vanished with the days and ideals of Louis XIV. At the end of two centuries or so she is rarely to be met with. I have known her only once in all her traditional fairness, but then she was of the essence of perfection. She gave one the impression of having never for a moment been out of the great world; of having lived, though in New York, perpetually with princes—'les princes du sang, les princes étrangers, les grands-seigneurs façon de princes.' But what is my ungraceful pen that it should hazard a description of her, or attempt the splendor of her white hair and her white hands! Her graciousness, her elegance, her worldliness, are not to be compassed by a sentence.
Among modern old ladies, of whom I speak somewhat less diffidently, I affect the more frivolous sort. My own feeling is, very strictly, that in old age the world of affairs should be left behind, and one's hours passed pleasantly among pleasant things. Age should be impulsive, light-hearted—brilliant, if you will; it should fill its days with flowers and music and embroidery; it should drive in low carriages behind plump ponies; it should write a pretty, pointed, epistolary hand,and read nothing heavier than memoirs. Intellectuality may be all very well in youth, but in an old lady anything beyond a delicate pedantry is unlovely. I like old ladies with decided opinions, with a gift for repartee and some skill in the passions. Curiosities, strange modesties,—I knew of an old lady who brought her grandsons up never to look into a butcher's shop, deeming it indecorous, even indecent,—fantastic economies, eccentricities of various sorts, are delightful. And of all these things the insipidity and jejuneness of youth perforce know nothing. The very pattern of young girls is bound by a strait-lacing conventionality. Formalities, anxieties, uncertainties, sit upon her sleeve. She has no alternative, innocent creature, save to order her days and lay her plans in behalf of a charming old ladyhood.
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By Sharlot M. Hall
IHAVEalways shared the preference of the poet Swinburne for very old people and very little children, and, as it has happened, nearly all of my old people have been of that sex to which Shakespeare refers as coming eventually to the 'lean and slippered pantaloon.'
It began when I was a particularly roly-poly little girl of four, with brown braids carried through the back of my sunbonnet and tied fast in its strings, that the unwelcome shadow of that blue gingham might never be absent.
In compensation, I suppose, there was an equally roly-poly old gentleman who used to toss me up in the long swing under the big oak trees, singing in rhythm to my swaying self the chorus of a then popular song:—
The great, bending branches spread a canopy befitting a Druid temple, and the new little leaves, like crumpled bronze velvet, brushed my face asI held fast to the ropes, all a-tremble with the spirit of adventure and a little fear that the earth was so very far away, and was tossed up till I could peep into the nest out of which my pet blue jay had tumbled a week before. One of his brothers sat, a disconsolate fluff of faded blue feathers, on the edge of the nest, and the parent birds squalled noisy protest at the sturdy, red-stockinged legs invading their domestic privacy.
The oaks and the swing and the old gentleman were the first milestones on my way to Grown-Up Land. When my round fat arm had no longer to reach straight up to clasp my pudgy fingers around the thumb of my friend; when after many trials I caught the ropes and lifted myself without help to the wide board swing-seat; then I was truly 'big,' and trotted off to demand that a new mark should take the place of the one that had lately shown my height on the smooth gray trunk of my favorite tree. Smooth, for those wonderful oaks, centuries old, and each many feet in girth, had been repeatedly stripped of their bark as high as a man could reach; and now, as if tired of renewing the ever stolen coat, contented themselves with a thin, scarlike covering. Since their sapling days, perhaps, slender, conical tepees of buffalo skins had nestled in their shade, and number-less brown babies had swung 'Rock-a-bye baby in a tree-top' from their limbs.
There was a broad hearth of stones between the spreading roots of one where buffalo steakshad been broiled, and where other children had roasted the plump ripe acorns as I was fond of doing.
The buffalo robes for the tepees and deerskins for the gayly wrought moccasins had been tanned with the bark stripped from those very trees under which I played and swung. In the little grove behind my beloved trees, and bordered by the tiny creek where I waded and fished with a bent pin for small flat sunfish as bright as living sunbeams, were bare poles still standing in a circle, lashed together at their tops with strips of bark or thongs of raw-hide.
There were wild cherries in the grove, good in blossom and better in fruit, puckery-sweet wild plums, and a great black-walnut tree dear to myself and the squirrels; and here the spirit of adventure thrilled me again, for my fancy saw dusky faces behind every bush, and the feathery cherry blossoms were always nodding eagle feathers on the head of the warrior just waiting to seize me.
A good deal of this was due to my old friend who had just come from the East, a far-away, mysterious Somewhere to me, and who, I am inclined to think, secretly shared my dread of these brown people in whose home we were interlopers. But some of it came from the tales to which I listened after I was tucked away in my trundle-bed on winter nights, and the men gathered aroundthe fire to talk of Indian raids and hunting and trapping adventures.
Not a few of my old gentlemen at this time were gray-bearded scouts and hunters, with great caps of fur and long rifles that seemed to tower above my head as far as the oaks. Children were rare novelties to those men of the plains, and I was passed from shoulder to shoulder, delighted with tales of bear and buffalo, and fingering with awed hands the beaded shot-pouches and belts of embroidered buckskin, but feeling all the while almost as far above earth as when I swung over the blue jay's nest. Then we moved away, and my next old gentleman was the very antithesis of the first. Small and thin and morose, with a bitterness that almost hid the sadness in his face. A misanthrope, a miser, an atheist, said his neighbors; but, in truth, only a man over whom hung the shadow of a tragedy that had darkened his life. Sometimes for days his mind 'traveled a crooked road,' as he said, and then he would wander alone in the hills, or shut himself up with his books; and no smoke came out of the chimney, and no answer was given to curious people who knocked at the door. Most children feared him, but I did not; that and my love of books made the bond between us. He lent me quaint old histories and philosophies, full of big words that sounded very fine as he rolled them off in a sonorous voice. I learned to know Swedenborg from Kant, and Kant from Comte, and was in afair way to become a philosopher myself when again we moved—so far that we both knew the parting was final.
With fingers still pudgy I crocheted him a pair of marvelous green 'wristers' as a farewell gift, and he brought me a thick red volume, De Foe'sHistory of the Devil, with pictures that made my brown braids rise up visibly every time I looked at them, and a single German silver teaspoon, which he said was to form the nucleus of my wedding silver.
Years later some book thief of abnormal tastes robbed me of the treasured De Foe, but the spoon still reposes in solitary state, untroubled by additions, and most unlikely ever to serve the end for which my old friend designed it.
My last word of him was in an ill-scrawled, childish letter from a schoolmate: 'Mr. Cushion is dead; the doctor gave him some medicine and he died.' I was old enough to have a certain gladness mingle with my regret. The shadow was lifted; there were no more crooked roads to travel; my old friend was at rest.
It was my next old gentleman who introduced me to Shakespeare and the 'lean and slippered pantaloon.' A wicked sense of the appropriateness of the quotation flashed into my mind as he read it; I wondered, in fact, if the Bard of Avon had been shuffling around in dressing-gown and carpet slippers when it was written. Yet this untidy old man, who loved Shakespeare, reveled inShelley, and wrote heroic verse and Greek dramas by the sackful, had, they told me, been a brilliant soldier, the pick and pride of his regiment, the model in dress and deportment of all the fresh recruits. Surely the irony of fate is something more than rhetoric.
If he wrote in lighter vein, he had lived in tragedy; between The Skylark and Under the Greenwood Tree we had glimpses of bloody battlefield, of disease-reeking, famine-scourged Southern prisons, of narrow escapes, and men hunted like wild beasts.
Very proud was my old friend when my own blundering thoughts first shaped themselves in verse; I doubt if Hamlet on his first appearance received such an ovation. And then one night the sacks of manuscript were packed, the little trunk strapped, and the daylight train bore away, we never knew whither, one who left word to no one, but three books—the battered Shakespeare, Shelley minus his cover, and a first edition of Whittier—to a little girl.
No word has come out of the silence, but when I am making air castles I like to think that some summer night I shall visit the Parthenon and find my old friend writing Greek dramas in the moonlight.
After that my old gentlemen began to come in pairs and trios, so that they seldom threw such a clearly focused memory. The one whom I loved best was not really the best known; we were bothtoo shy to realize in time how much we might have been to each other. He was a gentle, quiet, courtly man; I remember that I always involuntarily looked for the pages holding up my court train of velvet and ermine when he bowed to me: a scholarly man, whom one would have taken for some gifted professor or polished diplomat: and he was in fact an Indian scout, known the length of the West for his courage and fidelity and unshakable honor. He would have stood with his life to a promise given the blackest renegade that ever harried his trail.
I knew in a vague way that his was a name in history; but we were always too busy with Sir Edwin Arnold and the Vedas and Mahatmas to talk of that. I can see him now throwing back the silver hair from a face as fine as some old marble Jove, and repeating the Sanskrit tales or the lines he loved best:—
Fit words for him who subdued himself with such gentle patience to years of blindness; never saying 'Is the sun shining?' but 'How beautiful the hills are in the sunshine!' It was always daylight in his soul, till he slept at last in the sunniest corner of his beloved hills.
There are many dear old gentlemen still; indeed, now that I think of it, I have known but one young man at all intimately, and him I have not met face to face. Homer and Odysseus have been such satisfying friends to me that I have not missed Paris and Adonis. The flavor of old wine has been too long on my lips for me to change now, and I shall be well content to have it said of me at last: 'Here lieth one who had the friendship of old men and little children's love.'
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A Study in the New Morality
By Richard Bowland Kimball
ISOMETIMESthink that our relations with our children, or our pets, are successful because we expect nothing in return. Yet, after all, the relations are reciprocal; and I have been thinking today of some of the things I have got from an old dog who has been in our family for years and years. I have learned several spiritual truths from her, and I have learned them more thoroughly, perhaps, because she never had the slightest idea that she was teaching me anything. Dogs, of course, show various characteristics—some are snobs, others take naturally to a low life, others again are aristocratic and reticent and self-controlled; but I have never known a dog yet that you could describe as exactly a moralist.
Viola came to us out of the primeval woods with an effect of apparitional beauty. Rather a poetic name for a dog, perhaps; but there was such a union of grace and timidity, such a charm of silken draperies and russet ruff and tail almost sweepingthe ground, that we were irresistibly reminded of a Viola we had seen recently. It was as if the dog said mutely, 'What should I do in Illyria?'
She had evidently been through a terrible experience. A broken rope was around her neck; she was as gaunt as a wolf; her eyes were almost iridescent with terror, like the wonderful eyes of some hysteriacs.
We did not adopt Viola; she adopted us. She followed us to the tent where we were spending the summer, and there she stayed with us, to remain on guard when we were away, to welcome us on our return with such a show of abject gratitude. I think a male dog could not have shown such a union of love and fear; her spirit had evidently been broken; it became our task to lure her confidence back again—and here began my own education. If I spoke with—well, decision to my wife, poor Viola slunk to the ground. She thought the tone was meant for her. I would never claim to be a model husband, but I did learn from Viola, theoretically at least, that one can have good manners even in the privacy of the family circle.
More rapidly than we could have expected Viola's terrors left her, and she resumed the normal canine outlook on life-like humans I have known who have managed to counteract the falsestarts of their early childhood—obsessions regarding dark closets, snakes, or an avenging Deity.
I am not going to dwell on the intelligence Viola manifested after she had freed herself from fear. All dogs are wonderful, even when they are not intelligent. The most stupid dog I know mopes around the house and refuses to eat whenever his master is away, thus evincing an emotional sensibility more valuable than the smartness of the most Frenchified of poodles that ever trod the vaudeville stage. Unlike a collie of my acquaintance, Viola did not keep the woodbox replenished; nor had she a vocabulary of several hundred words, like another collie that I know. Still, she had an aptitude to learn spelling. When it was inadvisable to take her out for a walk, we spelled the words, vainly trying to conceal the fact from her, as we would from a child; and often, to this day, people stop me on the road, and ask if I am the owner of the dog that knows how to spell.
What I want to dwell on is my own education rather than Viola's, and this began in earnest after we had moved to the real country, and lived in a little farmhouse without any farm. Viola was a lovely ornament to the dooryard; but it seemed a pity that there were no flocks or herds to evoke her ministering care. We didn't even keep chickens; we were ostensibly in the country to cultivate thoughts,—such as they were,—and while Viola might be said to inspire thoughts, they hardlygave her the necessary exercise. A collie should have a run of ten miles every day, and it was pathetic to see Viola lying in the dooryard, ears erect, eyes eager, watching, waiting, hoping for something to happen. I should not be surprised if her very eagerness attracted the thing she longed for.
Our next-door neighbor, a man fully as fond of dogs as myself, was early attracted to her. He had recently lost his own dog, and asked if he might borrow Viola to help him catch his chickens, and if she might accompany him on the long drive he took every day through the countryside. With perfect good will, and in utter innocence, I consented. Little did I dream, as they say in the novels, of what lay before me.
I had an idea that Viola would understand that she was merely loaned for these expeditions; that she would come back from them with undiminished loyalty, grateful to me for having given her a chance for exercise. But our friendly neighbor had a very taking way with dogs. Aside from the wonderful trips, which were enough to turn the head of any collie, he knew how to talk dog-language better than I did. He knew how to pinch a dog's ear in the most seductive manner. With him, doggishness was both an art and a science.
There was nothing lovelier than the sight of Viola rounding up the chickens, shepherding them into their houses, holding down a recalcitrant pullet with her paw, or bringing in her mouth adowager hen to her foster-father. If I had the gift of a sculptor and wished to carve a personification of pride, I think I should depict Viola bringing in a chicken—her tail aloft, like a plume of triumph, her eyes shining, stepping over imaginary obstacles like a high-manège horse with an air of dignity that was really ludicrous. If an unlucky chicken got away from her, away she went across meadows, and over walls, her beautiful voice vibrating through the landscape, sometimes breaking to an octave higher in her excitement.
It was fun to see her scour ahead of the wagon when her new master took her out to help him pick up eggs. It was charming to see her come home sitting on the seat beside him, tired but still eager, looking to right and left, sniffing the air, learning all sorts of smell secrets which are closed forever to our supposedly superior human consciousness. Is it any wonder that it was necessary for me to go next door to get her, and that she followed me along the path with a certain droopy air that was hardly flattering?
There is not much in the literary life that would interest an outdoor dog. I felt somewhat like a dry-as-dust professor married to a young and attractive wife who is being taken to all the routs and parties throughout the neighborhood by a disgustingly youthful and handsome cavalier. I know nothing quite so shriveling to the soul as jealousy, nor anything so hard to fight against.I reasoned that Viola's expeditions were doing her good, that I ought to be grateful for them, and I repeated the antediluvian fallacy that my jealousy was only indicative of my love. Nothing that I could say to myself made any difference; and if I were in danger of forgetting how I felt, there were plenty of other persons to remind me.
'Well,' said the fisherman, 'I guess you don't know whether that dog is yours or Lysander's!' And my most intimate friend remarked genially, 'If I had a dog, I'd want it to bemydog, or I wouldn't want to have any.'
It was bad enough to bear the sympathy of the community; it was worse to witness the triumph of my rival. Often, after I had brought home the drooping Viola, Lysander would follow after her. Instantly she revived like flowers in water. She smiled, she was even coquettish. They began a lengthy conversation I could not understand—little sounds from him, little grunts from her. If, by any chance, through a belated sense of duty, she happened to remain beside my chair, he surreptitiously snapped his fingers and made little sucking sounds that he fancied were inaudible, and then she sidled over to his chair.
If jealously is an index of one's love, it is strange that, the more jealous I became of Lysander, the less I loved Viola. 'Well,lether stay with him,' I said to myself. 'I guess he won't object to having me pay for the license.'
She did stay; she sometimes stayed all night;and few things in my life have been more humiliating than my visits to get her.
Lysander was glad to see me—oh my, yes! He welcomed me with a crooked sardonic smile that I understood thoroughly. Viola knew just as well as he did why I had come, and pretended to take an interest in the wall-paper. As we walked home along the path, I scolded her, and she slunk to the ground and asked my pardon. Was there anything in her life that could make her conscious of any evil? Of course not. Without realizing it, I was exercising a sort of spiritual coercion over her. I was really condemning her for what was a true expression of collie life; but she accepted my suggestion of evil. I have often wondered since, how many persons in the human realm are suffering from a sense of sin as false as hers was. Of course, I did not philosophize the situation at the time. I simply felt disquietude when I was with her. This disquietude increased rapidly until I apparently disliked her; and I suppose that in my feeling for her there was actually an element of hate.
'Very well,' I said to myself in effect, 'there are better dogs in the world than ever were licensed. The next one I get, I'll keep for my very own.'
I had now reached my low spot—a centre of indifference; and if this were fiction, the reader might expect an ever-increasing objective crescendo from this point onward, culminating in a stirring climax. Possibly Viola would rescue mefrom a burning building, thus showing that she really loved me, after all. Unfortunately I am dealing with facts of a rather intangible nature. I have noticed that in life coffee and pistols for two are not called for so often as in literature. We pass the time of day with an acquaintance, discuss the play, and what not, little dreaming that behind that smiling exterior a spiritual crisis may be taking place.
My crisis was rather interesting because it seemed almost physical. Not so much in the subconscious brain ganglia as in the sympathetic nerve-centres, the process was taking place—the reverse process of what had taken place during my period of jealousy. I could almost hear a spiritual clicking going on inside me, as if I were composed of children's blocks which had become disarranged and were being replaced in a symmetrical pattern. One by one, the filaments of possession were being broken—that sense which in its grossest terms is really a sort of fatuous pride. Say what we will, most of us feel that we deserve praise and tribute for having selected so attractive a wife, for having begotten such charming children. Having no longer any more of a proprietary interest in Viola than I had in the wild flowers, or the sea, or sky, I got a fresh eye on her. I could not help admiring her, and I could not help admiring her for herself alone. Having no longer any taint of possession, it was impossible for me to impose my will on her, so Iadopted unconsciously the courtesy one shows to some one else's wife.
'Well, Viola,' I would say, 'do you want to come home to-night? You don'thaveto.'
She would look up and listen, cock her ears, consider the matter. Sometimes she would decide to stay with Lysander, and sometimes, strangely enough, she would decide to go home with me. If she came, she came happily, because she was exercising the prerogative of an independent creature. Her sense of sin or shame left her; and somehow we were all gainers, Lysander, Viola, and myself. He no longer snapped his fingers or made little sucking noises. These had been psychical reactions from my jealous emanations when we were struggling for Viola's favor; but we were now united in doing what we could to make her happy; and our friendship, which had suffered previously, in this new office became confirmed. What expansive talks we had about her! How he rushed over to tell me the latest example of her wisdom or affection; and when one expects nothing from a dog, it is rather pleasant to feel suddenly, while struggling with a sentence, a damp delightful nose inside your hand.
Sometimes I fancy that Viola, in forming her friendship for Lysander, had a prevision; for the time came when we had to leave her, and in whose hands could it be better to leave her than Lysander's and his wife's?
Most dog stories end with the death of the dog,but I can assure the reader that Viola is still very much alive. Not agile any longer, she has become a privileged parlor guest, for the stairs are too much for her. Sometimes she even finds it impossible to bury a bone, and then she goes through the pantomime of burying it. She knows that we know that she has not really done it. Her assumption of achievement is ludicrous. Who says dogs have not a sense of humor?
She is beautiful as old ladies are beautiful. If she wore a lace stomacher, she would make a magnificent Rembrandt—rich browns, tawny gold, and, in the heart of the picture, the spirit of her personality as mellow and pervasive as a flame.
I don't see Viola often nowadays, but what I gained by renouncing a purely personal interest in her has extended itself somehow beyond what we know as the realm of time and space. This sounds rather esoteric, but what I mean is that I am very happy whenever I think of her, whether I am with her or not. I feel very near her though we are separated by a hundred miles; and I should not be surprised if, in the muffled 'Woof! Woof!' of her dreams, she often lives again what I happen to be thinking of at the moment—wonderful runs with Teddy, the cocker spaniel, or the homeric combat with the woodchuck beside Simon Brook.
As I sit thinking of Viola, there happens to come into my mind, by one of those odd associationsthat have so little logic in them, an apparently trivial incident that took place a day or so ago. A couple of little girls stopped me on Arlington Street, Boston, and asked the way to Marlboro Street. It chanced that I was going to Marlboro Street myself, and I offered to conduct them there, but they were walking in the leisurely way of children, taking in everything on the way, and I soon outstripped them. At the corner of Marlboro Street, however, I turned and waved to them to indicate that this was the street they wanted, and they waved back to show that they understood.
That was apparently the end of the incident; but two or three blocks up Marlboro Street, something impelled me to turn. The children had found the street, they were following safely, they were evidently watching me; for as soon as I turned, they waved again. As I went up the steps of the house where I had an appointment, I looked back for the third time. The children, now become almost fairy-like figures, were still watching me. Up went their hands and up went mine, and across the long length of city street, we waved in greeting and farewell.
I do not know why the incident should have seemed to contain an element of real beauty. I was reminded of George E. Woodberry's poem in which a somewhat similar incident is celebrated. A boy, you remember, while playing, ran heedlessly into the poet, and the poem ends,—
What struck me even more than the beauty of my adventure was the quality of permanence that it seemed to wear. In my under-consciousness, there was something immortal about it. Can it be possible that our casual relations, where love is,—our relations with children, or with strangers whom we shall never see again, or with the lower animals whose span of life is necessarily very limited,—can it be possible that these relations are less ephemeral than we think? Would it be too much to hope that the relation between Viola and myself is a small but permanent addition to the store of worth-while things?
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