I took from its glass a flower,To lay on her grave with dull, accusing tears;But the heart of the flower fell out as I handled the rose,And my heart is shattered and soon will wither away.I watch the changing shadows,And the patch of windy sunshine upon the hill,And the long blue woods; and a grief no tongue can tellBreaks at my eyes in drops of bitter rain.I hear her baby wagon,And the little wheels go over my heart:Oh! when will the light of the darkened house return?Oh! when will she come who made the hills so fair?I sit by the parlor window,When twilight deepens and winds grow cold without;But the blessed feet no more come up the walk,And my little girl and I cry softly together.
I took from its glass a flower,To lay on her grave with dull, accusing tears;But the heart of the flower fell out as I handled the rose,And my heart is shattered and soon will wither away.
I watch the changing shadows,And the patch of windy sunshine upon the hill,And the long blue woods; and a grief no tongue can tellBreaks at my eyes in drops of bitter rain.
I hear her baby wagon,And the little wheels go over my heart:Oh! when will the light of the darkened house return?Oh! when will she come who made the hills so fair?
I sit by the parlor window,When twilight deepens and winds grow cold without;But the blessed feet no more come up the walk,And my little girl and I cry softly together.
Ihaveone grave objection to the “new poetry”—I cannot remember it. Some, to be sure, would say that is no objection at all, but I am not of the number. It would hardly become me, in fact, since I have, in a minor pipe, committed “new poetry” myself on various and sundry occasions, or what I presume it to be, particularly when I didn't have time to write in rhyme or even metre. The new poets may object all they like, but itiseasier to put your thought (when you happen to have one) into rhythm than into rhyme and metre. If, indeed, as thevers librepractitioners insist, each idea comes clothed in its own inevitable rhythm, there can be very little trouble about the matter. The poem composes itself, and your chief task will be with the printer! I don't say the rhythmic irregularity is not, perhaps, more suitable for certain effects, or at any rate that it cannot achieve effects of its own; I certainly don't say that it isn't poetry because it does not trip to formal measure. Poetry resides in deeper matters than this. I recall Ibsen's remark when told that thereviewers declaredPeer Gyntwasn't poetry. “Very well,” said he, “it will be.” Since it now indubitably is, one is cautious about questioning the work of the present, such work as Miss Lowell's, for instance. Of course the mere chopping up of unrhythmic prose into capitalized lines without glow, without emotion, is not poetry, any more than the blank verse of the second-rate nineteenth-century “poetic drama,” which old Joe Crowell, comedian, described as “good, honest prose set up hind-side foremost.” We may eliminate that from the discussion once and for all. But the genuine new poets, who know what they are about, and doubtless why they are about it, I regard with all deference, hailing especially their good fight to free poetry of its ancient inversions, its mincing vocabulary, its thous and thees, its bosky dells and purling streams, its affectations and unrealities, both of speech and subject. But I do say they miss a certain triumphant craftsman's joy at packing precisely what you mean, hard enough to express in unlimited prose, into a fettered, singing line; and I do say that I can't remember what they write.
At least, nobody can dispute this latter statement. He may declare it the fault of my memory, which has been habituated to retain only such lines as have rhyme and metre to help it out. But I hardly think his retort adequate,because, in the first place, the memory is much less amenable to training and much more a matter of fixed capacity and action than certain advertisements in the popular magazines would have the “twenty-dollar-a-week man” believe, and in the second place, because my case, I find, is the case of almost everybody with whom I have talked on the subject. The solution, I believe, is perfectly simple. Nearly anyone can remember a tune; even I can, within limits. At least, I can do better than Tennyson, who could recognize, he said, two tunes; one was “God Save the Queen” and the other wasn't. But when music is broken into independent rhythms, irregular and oddly related phrases, it is only the person exceptionally endowed who can remember it without prolonged study. The very first audience who heardRigolettocame away humming “Donna e mobile.” And the very last audience who heardPelléas et Mélisandecame away humming—“Donna e mobile.” It is the law. Needless to say, I enjoyedPelléas et Mélisande, but I cannot whistle it. What I recall is a mood, a picture, a vague ecstasy, a hushed terror. It was James Huneker, was it not, who, when asked what he thought of the opera, replied that Mary Garden's hair was superb.
“But the music?” he was urged.
“Oh, the music,” said he, “—the music didn't bother me.”
But the new poetry does bother me, because I strive to remember not the mere mood or picture of the poem, but the actual words which created them, and I cannot. I want to compel again, at will, the actual poetic experience, and I cannot, without carrying a library in my pocket. The words hover, sometimes, just beyond the threshold of my brain, like a forgotten name (“If you hadn't asked me, I could have told you”—you know the sensation); but they never come. I have no comfort of them in the still hours of the day when I would be whispering them to myself. Instead, I have to fall back upon the old-fashioned Golden Treasury. I cannot remember a single line that Amy Lowell has written about her Roxbury garden, but I shall never forget what Wordsworth said about that field of gold he passed; I repeat his lines, and then my heart, too, with pleasure fills and dances with his daffodils.
It is an immemorial delight, this pleasure in the lingering line, in the haunting couplet, in the quatrain that will not let you forget. By sacrificing it, the new poetry has sacrificed something precious, something that a common instinct of mankind demands of the minstrel. It will not suffice for the new poets to deny that they are minstrels, to assert that they write for the eye, not speak for the ear, that it is not their mission to emit pretty sounds but so to present their vision of the world that it shall etch itself on men's minds with the bite of reality. Such a creed is admirable, but defective. It is defective because, in the first place, if the new poets did not write for the ear quite as much as the old poets, there would be no excuse even for rhythm. Any reader who is sensitive enough to care to read poetry is sensitive enough to hear it with his inward ear even as he sees it with his outward eye, and his after-pleasure, as it were, his lingering delight, will be in proportion as his ear retains the echo of the song. All poets are minstrels, still. Such a creed is defective, in the second place, because it has always been the mission of genuine poets to impress their vision of the world vividly on mankind, though their vision included more, sometimes, than what the realists choose to consider reality. There is nothing new in such an effort. In slack ages of poetic inspiration, however, the versifiers have no vision of the world, but only of its pale mirrored reflections in visions dead and gone, and some jolt is needed to bring the poets back to first-hand observation. Such a jolt are the new poets.Spoon Riveris a medicine, a splendid tonic. But the form ofSpoon Riveris not conditioned by eternal needs, only by temporary ones. Its complete absence of loveliness, of lines that linger, will be its greatest handicap to immortality—for poetic immortality to-day asmuch as ever is not in the pages of a book on a library shelf, but on the lips of men and women. A poem from which nobody ever quotes is a poem forgotten.
Tennyson was something of an Imagist at times, presenting his mood or picture with a Flaubertian precision of epithet that even Amy Lowell could not criticise. Consider, for example, his famousFragmenton the eagle:
He clasps the crag with crooked handsClose to the sun in distant lands,Ringed with the azure world he stands.Beneath, the wrinkled ocean crawls,He watches from his mountain walls,And like a thunderbolt he falls.
He clasps the crag with crooked handsClose to the sun in distant lands,Ringed with the azure world he stands.
Beneath, the wrinkled ocean crawls,He watches from his mountain walls,And like a thunderbolt he falls.
The precision of wording here, the tremendousness of scene evoked with stark economy of means, the triumphant vividness of the adjective “wrinkled,” transporting the reader at once to a great height above the plain of the sea, the complete absence of any touch of the “poetic” (surely the beautiful wordazuremay be admitted in modern company), make this poem a masterpiece without date or time. It is as “new” as the latest Imagist anthology. And, be it noted, I have quoted it correctly, I feel confident, from memory. My copy of Tennyson is in storage, and I have not read the fragment probably in ten or a dozen years. Yet wheneverI wish to relive its mood, to see again its incomparable picture, I have only to move my lips, even only to repeat the lines inwardly, in silence, and the poem is mine again.
But I have just been reading the latest Imagist anthology, especially theLacquer Printsby Amy Lowell, not ten years, but hardly ten minutes ago—and I cannot repeat one of them. I could learn them, of course, by an effort. But that is not the way man desires to remember music and poetry. It must come singing into his head and heart—and remain there without his effort. Here is a “Lacquer Print” calledSunshine. It is indeed vivid, though (quite properly, of course) a little garden pool to Tennyson's vast ocean.
The pool is edged with blade-like leaves of irises.If I throw a stone into the placid waterIt suddenly stiffensInto rings and ringsOf sharp gold wire.
The pool is edged with blade-like leaves of irises.If I throw a stone into the placid waterIt suddenly stiffensInto rings and ringsOf sharp gold wire.
Here is a vivid picture, here is economy and scrupulous selection of epithet, here is no “poetic” diction of the despised sort. But something is lacking, none the less. It does not haunt you, it does not ingratiate itself with your ear, you do not find yourself repeating it days and months later. Close the book—and the poem perishes, even as those rings subside on the pool.
It would be only too easy to find much more striking examples in the new verse. Take, for instance, the opening stanza of Ezra Pound's poem,The Return:
See, they return; ah, see the tentativeMovements, and the slow feet,The trouble in the pace and the uncertainWavering!
See, they return; ah, see the tentativeMovements, and the slow feet,The trouble in the pace and the uncertainWavering!
It is doubtful if any reader will fail to see the trouble in the pace of these lines! No doubt it was exactly the effect the poet desired, but it will forever effectually prevent the repetition of his poem by anybody without the book. When a woman once boasted that she could repeat anything on a single hearing, Theodore Hook rattled off the immortal nonsense, beginning, “She went into the garden patch to get a cabbage head to make an apple pie, and a great she bear coming up the road thrust her head into the shop and cried 'What, no soap?' and so he died—” and the woman was floored. Such a poem asThe Returnwould have floored her quite as completely. I find, after reading carefully all the twenty pages assigned to Ezra Pound inThe New Poetry Anthology, edited by Miss Monroe (a greater space, I believe, than was awarded to any other poet), that I can now repeatjust one line—or, rather, two lines, such is Mr. Pound's odd way of phrasing his rhythms. Here they are:
Dawn enters with little feetLike a gilded Pavlova.
Dawn enters with little feetLike a gilded Pavlova.
There is a certain humorous charm of epithet here, and a rhythmic suggestion of metrical beat to follow. That, no doubt, is why the line has stuck in my memory. But the metrical beat did not follow, and the rest of the stanza has gone from me. I am sure even a gilded Pavlova would be at some difficulty to dance to Mr. Pound's rhythms.
But Miss Monroe is catholic in her choice of new poets. She includes, for instance, Walter de la Mare, if in less than two pages. She selects his wonderful poemThe Listeners, and the quaint, haunting,Epitaph. It is a little hard to see just whyThe Listenersis new poetry, except chronologically. Its odd, apparently simple but really intricate and triumphantly fluid metrical structure, so unified that there is no break from the first syllable to the last; its lyric romanticism of subject; its obvious delight in tune; even its occasional lapses into the ancient “poetic” vocabulary (the traveler “smote” the door, the listeners “hearkened,” and so on), are all a part of the nineteenth-century tradition of English verse.It is no more modern thanLa Belle Dame Sans Merci—which, to be sure, is quite modern indeed to some of us. And it has lyric beauty, it has lines of unforgettable musical loveliness, it creeps in through the ear and echoes in the memory. You surely remember the close:
Never the least stir made the listeners,Though every word he spakeFell echoing through the shadowiness of the still houseFrom the one man left awake:Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,And the sound of iron on stone,And how the stillness surged softly backward,When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Never the least stir made the listeners,Though every word he spakeFell echoing through the shadowiness of the still houseFrom the one man left awake:Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,And the sound of iron on stone,And how the stillness surged softly backward,When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Is there really any loss of sharpness in the imagery here because of the rhyme and metre? Could any phrase, of any rhythm, however free, render any better and more economically the peculiar noise of a horse turning on a hard drive and starting away in the night, than “the sound of iron on stone”? The last two lines, surely, are close to perfection. A genuine new poet would probably have hunted long for a less hackneyed word than “plunging,” but though it would possibly have sharpened his final image, it would, at the same time, in all probability, have robbed it of that very vagueness sought and captured. No, the passage pictorially and emotionally is as near perfection as it is oftenpermitted mortals to approach, and it lingers and echoes in the memory, it will not be forgotten. It has the lilt of music, the chime of tune, the immemorial loveliness of song. If the precise image, the desired emotional effect, the intellectual content can be imparted in fettered verse, and, in addition, the ancient loveliness can be retained, which the new verse lacks, can it be possible that the world will long endure to readvers librewhenvers librehas done its work of bringing poets back to first-hand reality for their subjects, relating the minstrels to the spirit of their age? I cannot think so. I cannot but believe that any poetry long to endure must be memorable, in the literal sense, and that is just what the new poetry is not. Already, it seems to me from my acquaintance with under-graduates and the just-graduated,vers libreis a little the cult of the middle-aged, while youth, the future, is swinging back gladly to the fetters of metre and rhyme, and probably forgetful that the public which awaits their effort has been prepared anew for poetry by this revolt from what was stale in tradition. I believe that memorable poetry always has been, and always must be, irradiated by
The light that never was on sea or land,
The light that never was on sea or land,
which is but another way of saying that it must have elevation and the haunting mysteryof beauty. The trouble is, of course, to catch this authentic radiation, instead of some pale reflection from Patmore or Rossetti. It was against the sham of second-hand mood and subject, rather than the great truth of music and loveliness, that the new poets broke into unmetrical protest. They have done a brave and needed work,—but they have produced astonishingly little quotable poetry, they have sung their way not far into the hearts of their listeners. The lingering, lovely line is not for them. No, for still,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
The soul of Adonais, like a star,Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
Theworld for a great many years has accepted the dictum of the poet, that—
Of all sad words of tongue or pen,The saddest are these: It might have been.
Of all sad words of tongue or pen,The saddest are these: It might have been.
Even those people who refused to accept the rhyme have accepted the reason. But the fact is that the reason of this copybook couplet is as bad as the rhyme. It would be much nearer the truth to say that of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: He's succeeded again. Here, too, the rhyme may be questioned, but the reason is sound. An entirely successful man is the most pitiful object in the universe. Not only has he nothing to look forward to, but he has nothing to look back upon. Having no regrets, no shadows, in his life, he has no chiaroscuro, no depth, no solidity in his picture. It is painted in the flat. “Regret,” says George Moore, to change the figure a little, “is like a mountain top from which we survey our dead life, a mountain top on which we pause and ponder.” He has no point of view, then, either.So after all the words, “It might have been,” do bear a sadness about them in his case; his life might have been a success if it had only been a failure. “It might have been” thus becomes sad when it reflects back upon itself, when it means there might have been a might have been but there was only a was. So life whirls into paradox!
Let any man in honesty retire into the solitude of his soul and reflect on his joys that might have been and those that were, and let him then answer whether any of his realizations were the equal of his anticipations. Therefore, if he had achieved the anticipated but lost delights which form the burden of his “Might have been,” they, too, would have been as ashes in the mouth. The truth is that the essence of delight is in the anticipation, the best of life is the vision, not the reality. It is pathetic not to have entertained the vision, but more pathetic, perhaps, to have attained it. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said that there is only one thing more tragic than failure—success?
Did our regretful poet dream at twenty-one of being the perfect lover? In his dreams he was the perfect lover, then. Yet actually what was he? What was she? What was their courtship, their marriage? You, prosy, contented, forty and forgetful, by your prosy hearth or shaking down the furnace fire, while the childrenare being put to bed, you dare to call “It might have been” the saddest words of tongue or pen? Those now almost forgotten dreams of what might have been are the best you ever were. Remember them as often as you can, as bitterly, as happily, for your soul's salvation. Without them you are the lowest of God's creatures, a mere married man.
Or take the case of Maud Muller herself, and her judge. We learn that the judge—
Wedded a wife of richest dower,Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
Wedded a wife of richest dower,Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
Maud, on the other hand,—
Wedded a man unlearned and poor,And many children played round her door.
Wedded a man unlearned and poor,And many children played round her door.
Probably in both cases this was for the best. Only the wildest sentimentalist could in seriousness urge that Maud would have made a good wife for the judge. Being a man who “lived for power,” the probable unpresentableness of Maud in a town house would have been a constant thorn in his flesh. She could not appear barefooted at his receptions, and the feet that have gone bare through an agricultural girlhood do not readily adapt themselves to the size of shoe which urban fashion dictates. Moreover, the vague yearnings of a young girl for an alliance with a handsome stranger above her station, donot fit her to speak the speech and think the thoughts and meet the social demands of that station. No, Maud would have been a constant thorn in the judge's side. Summer sunshine, the smell of hay, a drink of cold water, a pretty, barefoot girl—the mood is compounded. An uneducated farmer's daughter for a wife—the reality is accomplished.
And as for Maud, who will say for certain that she would not eventually have eloped with the coachman because he praised her pies instead of criticising her grammar?
So to each of them—barefoot girl and bald-headed judge (he probably was bald-headed, though the poem omits to say so) did what was best, and the school children for several generations have been taught to waste unnecessary sympathy over their fate, have been inculcated with a false view of the whole matter. Both of them found far more happiness in dreaming of what might have been than ever they could have found in the realization; for each of them this dream brought undoubted sadness, but the sadness which is really pleasure, the sadness, that is, which comes over all of us when “we realize that though we have missed certain ideals in our lives we are still able to recall those ideals, we are still not like all the dead, forgetful clods around us, our wives and husbands and neighbors and friends. We live with these people asone of them, of course, but we might have been so much better than they! Such reflections as these are a great comfort. They bring a sadness which makes us mournfully happy. They reconcile us with the scheme of things. They are the outcroppings of that secret vanity which the best and the worst of us nourish, and of which is born our self-respect, our happiness, our heroism.”
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a town called Abdera. The good people of the town were so much upset at seeing a performance of theAndromedaof Euripides that they caught a sort of tragic fever. This began with bleeding and perspiration and was followed in about a week's time, according to the course of the disease, by an uncontrollable desire to recite. The effect upon Abdera was surprising. The people walked about in the streets day and night reciting pages of Euripides until the epidemic was cured by a return of the cold weather. Well, Tolstoy would have us believe that the European and English-speaking world to-day is about in this condition regarding Shakespeare, and that there is little hope of a cold spell. A second-rate fellow, this Bard of Avon, according to Tolstoy, whom by a gigantic process of hypnotic suggestion we have been taught to think great, till we go about quoting him as the law and the prophet, while he fills some hundred and seventeen pages of Bartlett.
There is undoubtedly something in this view of the matter. Without holding a brief either for the alleged immortal William or the author ofWhat Is Art?, it may safely be hazarded that at least fifty per cent of the “familiar quotations” we children laboriously copied into ruled blank books in our school days and have ever since regarded as nuggets of truth and gems of poetry are neither true nor, beyond the fact of rhyme, poetic. Something as a wave of suggestion passed over Europe and sent thousands of little ones down to their deaths in the Children's Crusades, thousands of youngsters in our schools to-day are hypnotized into a lasting belief in the poetic value of numberless couplets of second-rate verse, and never come to know real poetry at all. Having been forced to swallow rhymed platitudes in the belief that they are poetry, a permanent and perfectly natural repulsion for the very name of poetry is too often the children's only acquisition. In fact, it is a pretty question if the decline of poetic appreciation cannot be directly traced to the rise of the memory-gem book.
How well I remember my own sense of weariness and repulsion when I was compelled at the tender age of ten to copy out the whole ofThe Psalm of Life, unconsciously committing it to memory as I did so.
Life is real, life is earnest,And the grave is not its goal;Dust thou art, to dust returnest,Was not spoken of the soul.—
Life is real, life is earnest,And the grave is not its goal;Dust thou art, to dust returnest,Was not spoken of the soul.—
My infant lips muttered the meaningless words while my poor little brain and imagination tried to find some joy, some picture, some tangible delight, some inspiration in the mournful, oppressive poem. If I had then been assigned intelligible verses to copy, an Elizabethan lyric, a song that sang because it had to, a bit of imagery, my childish fancy would have been fired, and I should not have had to wait till I was eighteen years old before I read a single poem voluntarily. And I should not have detestedThe Psalm of Lifeall the rest of my days—at least I don't think I should. Longfellow when I was a child was a particularly prolific mine of memory gems, running as high as three thousand quotations to the ton. I never had a teacher who didn't know her Longfellow with an intimacy almost as great as her ignorance of Keats, Shelley, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Herbert, Campion, Coleridge, Burns and the rest of the kings who lived before Agamemnon. Longfellow was a lovely soul, and, within his limits, a very true poet. But I was fed on his platitudes. I was daily informed that—
The heights by great men reached and keptWere not attained by sudden flight.—
The heights by great men reached and keptWere not attained by sudden flight.—
Just as if I cared, at ten, whether they were or not. I was told in tripping measures of the village chestnut tree, to the total exclusion of the linden and ilex; and as for the land where the citrons bloom, and golden oranges are in the gloom, and the long silences of laurel rise—“Kennst du das Land?” Not I! The spreading chestnut tree alone cast its oppressive shadow across my childish fancy.
Another memory gem that I remember with a lasting grudge was—
Kind hearts are more than coronets,And simple faith than Norman blood.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,And simple faith than Norman blood.
This I knew was false, and to be forced glibly to chatter the words before the class shamed and angered me. Had not a maiden aunt of mine, after many trips to the library of the New England Genealogical Society, traced back our line to William the Conqueror? Was there another boy or girl in the school who had descended from William the Conqueror? No, sir! Several of them had kind hearts, and doubtless simple faith—whatever that was—but side of my Norman blood this counted for nothing. It is a vastly superior thing to have Norman blood, and as for coronets—well, it may be that the new age will wipe them literally out in a surge of Democracy—some of us hope so—but to the romantic heart of childhood they are a symbolnot of caste and oppression but of dignity and beauty and the heroic. Certainly they are not to be eliminated by throwing at the child's head such adult platitudes in rhyme as these, and telling him it is poetry. Alas! he believes you, and that is why he hates the very word poetry all the rest of his days.
My memory-gem book lies before me as I write, saved I know not how out of the wreck of boyhood. I have searched it in vain for a single quotation of lyric song, a single scrap of verse that paints the world in rosy colors and lets moral platitudes go hang, a single strain of “Celtic magic.” Instead, I learn that as a boy I was taught that—
We are living, we are dwellingIn a grand and awful time.
We are living, we are dwellingIn a grand and awful time.
I find that at eleven years of age—
I held it truth with him who singsTo one clear harp of divers tones,That men may rise on stepping-stonesOf their dead selves to higher things.
I held it truth with him who singsTo one clear harp of divers tones,That men may rise on stepping-stonesOf their dead selves to higher things.
Indeed, I must have been a very remarkable child, how remarkable I had not hitherto suspected! Evidently, too, I displayed an early tendency to melancholia, for I find I was admonished in the following words, with their incontestable statement of fact:
Be still, sad heart, and cease repining,Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.
Be still, sad heart, and cease repining,Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.
Whether my sadness was caused by too much reflection on the fact that life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal, or on the fact that Bill Carter's air-gun cost more than mine, I cannot now recall. Either cause would have been sufficient. At any rate I apparently braced up and smiled once more, for the next page is blank. That means I went fishing!
Poor kiddies! Shall we grown-ups never learn that their minds don't work as ours do, and what may be poetry for some of us is cod-liver oil for them? Why must we be forever nagging them at home with “Don't do this” and “Don't do that,” and forever preaching at them in school with ponderous prose platitudes cut up into lengths? How much wiser than we they are, who know that life is free and pleasant and full of melody and beautiful things, and dreams more real than reality, and reality born of the dream! Yet we try our best to convince them that they are wrong. We see to it that Longfellow lies about them in their infancy.
But perhaps all this is changed since my day, and the nightmare this battered memory-gem book recalls to my mind is no longer a load on the children of the present. I profoundly hope so. Can it be that the present revival of poetry is due to the passing of the memory-gem book? At least, no teacher would have the courage to set her class the task of copying Amy Lowell orThe Spoon River Anthology!
Allmy life I have suffered from politeness—not my own, but the politeness of other people. So far as I know, nobody has ever accused me of being polite. I suspect that I must be, however, for hitherto I have borne the politeness of other people without a protest. But I must protest now, if only to vindicate my lack of politeness; in other words, to prove my good manners.
For what I object to in polite people is their bad manners. It is this I have suffered from, as, I suspect, have many thousands of my fellows, to whom life is real and earnest, and gabble not its goal. As a rule, the politer the person the worse are his (or more often, perhaps, her) manners. The limit is reached when the amateur is sunk entirely in the professional, and that curious product of “Society” is developed, the professional hostess. I cannot better illustrate my theme than with a description of the professional hostess.
I call her professional because all the joy of entertaining for its own sake has gone out ofher work. She does not invite people to her parties because she is glad to see them, because she is interested in them, or wishes to give them pleasure. She invites them because to entertain them is a part of her day's work—whether her work be to get into a certain social stronghold, to keep that stronghold against assault, or merely to kill time, her arch-enemy. And, in performing this task of hers, she has developed a technique of politeness which is to the amateur's technique what the professional golf-player's style is to the form of the mere bumblepuppy. Her politeness is astonishingly brilliant, flexible, resourceful. It is aspired to by the lowly and aped on the stage. And yet her manners are the worst in the world.
Let us suppose her about to give a dinner. She is trimmed down to the fashionable slenderness (perhaps), and brilliant with jewels. Cannel coal snaps pleasantly in the drawing-room grate, and the lights are gratefully shaded. A guest or two arrive, whom she greets with affable handshake. The man moves over to the fire, warming his back; his wife talks to the hostess rapidly, in the way women have when they seem to think it better to say anything than not to speak at all. But the hostess is quite at her ease. Her politeness is triumphant. Presently she turns to the man, who is, perhaps, an author.
“Your new book,” she begins, as if she had been waiting all day to ask that question, “—what is it going to be about? I'm tremendously eager to know.”
Already the genial fire has warmed the noted author after his chilling ride in a street car to this mansion of luxury. The kindly question positively expands him. He launches eagerly into his answer.
“You see,” he begins, “the great modern question is—”
But suddenly he is aware that he has no listener. His hostess has gone toward the door with outstretched hand, and his own wife is gazing at the gowns of the women entering. The author turns and prods the grate with his toe. Perhaps, if he is new at being “entertained,” he fancies that his hostess will presently return to hear his answer. He holds it in readiness. Poor man!
The newcomers are brought into the circle. When introductions are necessary, they are made with studied informality. And then the author hears the hostess say to a big, energetic woman, who is among the arrivals, “Oh, dear Miss Jones, I have heard so much about your perfectly splendid work down there among the horrid poor! I didsowant to hear you talk about it at the Colonial Club, this afternoon, but I simplycouldn'tget there. Won't you tell me just a bit of what you said?”
The tone of entreaty betrays the utmost interest. The big, energetic woman smiles, and begins, “Well,” she says, “I was just trying to get the members interested in our new health-tenement for consumptives. You see, we need—”
Then she, too, becomes aware that her audience has departed toward the door. She turns about to see if anybody else was listening, but nobody was. The other women are engaged in inspecting the newcomers. The men are looking uncomfortable, or chatting with one another. Only the author's sympathetic gaze meets hers.
The guests have all gathered by now, but dinner is not yet announced. The hostess moves easily among them, stopping by each with a winning smile, to ask some carefully chosen personal question. Each as politely replies, only to find himself talking to the empty air.
There is soon a confused babble of voices, a whir of windy words—and no one hears.
The author watches her, still curious to know whether she will remember that she has not yet heard his answer. But she has quite forgotten. She moves, the incarnate spirit of politeness, about the room, rousing trains of eager ideas in her guests, and as speedily leaving them to run down a side-track into a bumper.
She has no real interest in any of them, probably she has no real understanding of them. She thinks her manners are above reproach, thatshe is treating her guests in the most exemplary fashion. In reality, nothing could be worse than her manners, and she is treating her guests most shabbily. By being polite, she ends by being rude. For nothing is so rude in this world as to ask a man a question about some subject close to his heart when you have no intention of listening to his answer, nor any interest in it. The hostess thinks to feed his vanity; she ends by wounding it. She thinks to make her guests comfortable; she ends by making them uncomfortable.
The best manners I have ever seen were possessed by the most impolite man I have ever known. As a result, nobody that he ever invited to his house felt uncomfortable there. He was interested in all kinds and conditions of people, all kinds and conditions of activities. If he asked you a question, it was because he wanted to hear your answer. He paid you the compliment of assuming that it was worth listening to, and other people waited till you were through. At his table you weren't supposed to confine your talk to the sweet young thing on your left, who was more interested in the gay young blade onherleft, nor to the sedate, elderly female person on your right, who was more interested in the bishop onherright. Talk was largely for the whole table; and if you hadn't some definite contribution to make, you were usually glad to keep still.
I say nobody ever felt uncomfortable in his house. That is not quite true. Occasionally the person who expressed an opinion on a subject he knew nothing about must have felt uncomfortable. For, though he was listened to gravely while speaking, conversation was at once resumed as if nothing whatever had been said.
Nothing could have been more conventionally impolite. And yet the act was so utterly free from sham that it seemed the only decorous and decent thing to do. Thus was the dignity of conversation maintained; thus was each man and woman made to feel his or her worth along personal lines of endeavor; thus was a true democratic spirit preserved, which is the real essence of good manners. True democracy consists in bringing each man out, not in reducing him to a common level of inanity. Good manners consist in showing him respect for what is worthy of respect in him, treating him as a rational human being, not as a mere social unit who deposits his hard-won opinions, along with his hat and stick, in the care of the butler when he enters the house.
That is why men have, as a rule, better manners than women, though they are far less polite. A man respects the judgment of a specialist on any given subject, and he is rather intolerant of the snap judgments of the dabbler or the dilettante. He listens, if forced to, with unconcealedimpatience to the babbling of his pretty neighbor at table about art, perhaps, or engineering, or some other topic concerning which her ignorance is as profound as her cocksureness is lofty. But, after all, to be polite to her is to insult a whole race of engineers or artists! Put one of them beside him, and see how readily he will listen.
Politeness too often consists of shamming. Good manners are the absence of sham. It is not the gentleman's place, certainly, to insult the lady. Good manners seldom go quite so far as that. But even politeness cannot expect him to endure the torture for more than a limited time, especially if the topic chosen chances to be his own specialty. It is his place to lead the conversation, as gently as possible, back upon more neutral ground, where he may find what consolation he can in sprightly personalities—while praying for the coffee.
I enjoy the privilege of acquaintance with a very charming person, who has never paid a compliment to her sex except by being a woman. Some of her sex say that she is a delightful hostess and very beautiful. Others say that she is atrociously rude, and they “can't see what it is people admire in her.” Most men adore her. She herself says that the only people she cares to entertain are those who have earned their own living. Her reasons are, I believe, interesting and significant.
She earns her own living, I may state, and a very considerable one, for she is famous and highly successful in her branch of artistic endeavor. Socially, one may say of her, in that atrocious phrase which implies a queer jumble of values, that she is “very much in demand.” But, though a man in livery opens her front door, the street-cars bring quite as many guests to her house as do expensively purring motor-cars.
“For,” as she puts it, “I can stand the talk of the average woman in 'Society' just about fifteen minutes, and then I have to scream. I don't know how the fiction arose that American women of the leisure classes are so superior mentally to the women of other nations. The fact is, they are not. The fact is, that they are so superficial that a person who has reallydonesomething—I don't mean who has played at it, but who has really under the spur of necessity got to the bottom of some one subject—can hardly endure their conversation. They chatter, chatter, chatter, about everything under heaven, and if you happen to know anything about any of the subjects, it is simply torture to listen.
“Life is too short, and too interesting, and the world too full of real people, to bother with the folks who don't know their business. The man or woman who has had to be self-supporting has got to the bottom of some branch of activity, however small, and learned humility. Tolearn that mastery of even a tiny subject requires effort and concentration and skill, is to learn respect for other subjects; and it is to learn, too, how to listen.
“Nobody can listen who isn't truly interested, and who hasn't the grasp of mind to appreciate the complexities of a craft not his own, who doesn't know enough to know when he doesn't know anything. If I'm going to talk my shop, I want to talk it with folks who've been in it. If I'm going to hear some other shop discussed, it must be by someone who is familiar with that, not by directoired dabblers who, you feel after three minutes have elapsed, don't know a thing about the subject. If politeness consists in letting them suppose that I take any stock in what they say, then I plead guilty to being a boor.”
Probably no one who has experienced the awful ordeal of listening to some female chatter about his chosen subject, or who has undergone the even worse ordeal of dropping great thoughts of his own into the deep, deep pools of her incomprehension, will fail of sympathy with my friend.
“But I tire you,” said an incessant gabbler one day to the great Duc de Broglie.
“No, no,” replied the duke; “I wasn't listening.”