IADMIT that (though, indeed, I can claim a very fair collection of authors as acquaintances) I share the popular interest in the idiosyncratic nature of the literary profession. I am as curious as to the occult workings of the minds of authors, the esoteric process by which subtle insinuations of inspiration are translated into works of literary art, as though I had never seen an author—off a platform. I would read the riddle of genius. I am fascinated by its impenetrable mysteries. I would explore the recesses of the creative head.
Therefore, in the presence of the treasure of such incalculable value which is before me, I experience tense intellectual excitement. In the thought of its possession by myself I find the uttermost felicity. What it is is this: it isa humorous writer's note-book.
I must tell you the wonderful story—how thiscame into my hands, and how, romantically enough, it is, so to say, by the bequest of the author himself, your own possession. The strange circumstances are as follows:
Something like a week ago I received through the post at my place of residence an oblong package. It was similar in shape to an ordinary brick; not so heavy, and somewhat larger. I had ordered nothing from a shop, and so, as the parcel was plainly addressed to myself, I concluded that it must contain a present. As I am very fond of presents, I was, with much eagerness, about to open the package, when I suddenly recollected the newspaper reports of the recent dastardly Bolshevist bomb plots; the sending through the mails, by some apparently organized agency, to prominent persons in all parts of the country these skillfully disguised engines of death and destruction. They were outwardly, I recalled, innocent looking parcels, which when opened blew housemaids to bits, demolished dwellings and, in some instances, accomplished the murder of the personage who had incurred the enmity of the criminals.
I bounded some considerable distance away from the object before me. Though, after a moment,I did, indeed, reflect that I was not what would probably be regarded as an eminent citizen, and had never felt a sense of power in the government of my country, I could not dissolve a decided distaste toward my undoing this mysterious parcel. Also I did not enjoy seeing it remain there on my table. And, further, I had no inclination to carry it from the room.
In this dilemma it occurred to me to summon the janitor of the apartment house where I reside. When I had explained to him that, because of my having a sore thumb (which made it painful for me to handle things), I wished him to open this package for me—, when I had explained this to him, he told me that he was very much occupied at the moment mending the boiler downstairs, and that he must hasten to this occupation, otherwise the lower floors would shortly be flooded. And he withdrew without further ceremony.
I sat down to consider the situation. I realized that it was a bothersome moral responsibility—placing the lives of others (even if janitors) in jeopardy. But something must be done; and done soon—perhaps there was a time fuse in this thing. A thought came to me (the buzzer of our dumb-waiter sounded at the moment); I decidedto go further down the scale in the value of human life to be risked. So I communicated down the shaft to our iceman (one Jack) that I desired his presence in the apartment. Well, the upshot of the matter is that Jack showed no hesitation whatever about coolly putting the package in a pail of water and afterward undoing it.
The parcel proved to be an ordinary cigar-box (labelled outside, in the decorative fashion of cigar-box labels, "Angels of Commerce"); within was a letter resting upon a note-book, and beneath that the manuscripts of two short stories. The submersion of the box would have (most disastrously) obliterated, or gone near to obliterating, the message of the letter and the writing in the note-book and the manuscript, had not (happily) these things been packed tightly into the box by surrounding waste paper.
The letter was from Taffy Topaz, known to us all—a humorist if there ever was one. I cannot say that I had been on intimate terms with Mr. Topaz; indeed (to admit the truth) all my acquaintance with authors is slight. I admire authors so much that it is the joy of my life to be acceptable to them in any degree. I put myselfin their way at every opportunity. I regard it as a great privilege (as, certainly, it is) to spend freely of my income in entertaining them at meals. And in this way and that it is that I have attained the honor of hobnobbing with a number of writers, when they are not otherwise engaged.
As I say, I had not been on intimate terms with Mr. Topaz; and so I was no little surprised (and, I admit, no little flattered) at this decided attention (whatever it might mean) to me. The letter was not (oh, not at all!) a humorous letter. It was a very solemn letter. It said that Mr. Topaz was just about to go to the war. I was, naturally, puzzled at this: the war is (theoretically) over. I hunted round and found a piece of the wrapping paper which had enclosed the box. On it was the postmark (the paper had dried somewhat); and the stamp bore the date of October 1, 1917. I was still more puzzled as to where the box could have been all this while. Then, I recollected the heroic labors of the post-office in maintaining any kind of a schedule of delivery during the war. My poor friend's box had been goodness knows where all this time!
The letter stated (as I have said) that Mr.Topaz was about to go to the war—as a newspaper correspondent. It said (oh, it almost made one weep, so solemn was it!) that he might never return from "over there." In case he did not come back (the letter continued), he (Mr. Topaz) wished me to undertake the charge of placing the enclosed manuscripts with some magazine or magazines; the money got from them, though it was inadequate he knew (so he said), he prayed that I would accept as payment for the advances which I had made him from time to time. (Alas! my poor friend, what were those miserable loans compared to the wealth of his society! How I remember that proud day when he called me, so pal-like, a "poor fish"!) But this is not a time to indulge one's grief; I must press on with my story.
The remainder of his literary effects, he said (meaning, of course, the note-book), he desired me (as he knew I had some connection with a certain magazine) to present to the editor of that journal. Little more remains to be said here of Mr. Topaz (my friend). He was not called upon to lay down his life for his country (or his paper); after the armistice he went valiantly into Germany; and there (as the papers have reported) he contracted a marriage; and is little likely again to be seen in these parts.
The first page of the note-book contains these entries. It is headed
JOTTINGS
"Good name for a small orphan—Tommy Crandle.
"Fat person—shrugged his stomach.
"Name for a spendthrift—Charles Spending.
"Aphorism—Fear makes cowards of us all.
"Billy Sparks—Fine name for a lawyer.
"Nice name for a landlady—Mrs. Baggs.
"Humorous Christian name for a fat boy—Moscow.
"Name for a clerk—Mr. Fife.
"Good name for someone to cry out on a dark night—Peter Clue! Peter Clue!
"Good name for a sporting character—Bob Paddock.
"Aphorism—A fool and his foot are soon in it.
"Good name for a tea room in Greenwich Village—The Bad Egg.
"Epigrammatic remark—Though somewhat down in the mouth he kept a stiff upper lip."
* * * * * * *
Then follows this on umbrellas, evidently the opening of an unwritten essay:
"Among all the ingenious engines which man has contrived for his ornament and protection none, certainly, is more richly idiosyncratic than the umbrella. Literary genius has always instinctively recognized this; and doubtless the esoteric fact has been vaguely felt even by the unthinking; but it is a profound truth which, I fear, has had but slight popular appreciation.
"The use of this historic and peculiarly eloquent article of personal property, the umbrella, illustrates pictorially a proverbial allusion to the manifestation of intelligence: it shows that a man has 'sense enough to go in out of the rain.' It reveals not only the profundity of his judgment but the extraordinary play of his cleverness, as it exhibits him as the only animal who after crawling into his hole, figuratively speaking, pulls his hole in after him, or, in other words, carries his roof with him. Further than this, in the idea of carrying an umbrella you find the secret of man's striking success in the world: the intrepidity ofhis spirit in his tenacious pursuit of his own affairs defies both the black cloud's downpour and the sun's hot eye."
* * * * * * *
There is this, headed
HUMOR
"There was once a man who was nearly dead from a disease. One day while taking the air a friend cried to him encouragingly, 'Well, I see that you're up and about again.' 'Yes,' replied the sick man good-naturedly, 'I'm able to walk the length of the block now.' This notion was so irresistible that both the quick and the dying burst into laughter."
* * * * * * *
Among the longer entries in this note-book is the following remarkable psychological study, having as its title
TEMPERAMENT
"That morning Kendle had seen himself famous. As he worked he began to feel good in his brain and in his heart and in his stomach. He felt virile, elated, full of power, and strangelyhappy. The joy of creating a thing of art was upon him. Thrills ran down his spine and into his legs. As he looked at his work he admired it. He knew that this was good art. He felt that here was genius. He saw himself in a delectable picture, an idol applauded of the multitude, and loved by it. For he believed that the multitude was born, and ate and slept, and squabbled among itself, and acquired property, and begot offspring, but to await the arrival of genius. And the only genius he knew was genius in eccentric painting. The only genius worth while that is, for there is a genius that invents labor-saving machines, telephones, X-rays, and so forth; but nobody loves that genius. It occurred to him that he was a very lovable man, with all his faults (his faults were the lovable ones of genius), and he would soon have achieved a distinction that would make any woman proud of him. He determined to renew his addresses to——.
"Somehow in the evening his intoxication had died down. He felt very sad. His work lay before him with so little eccentricity to it that he was ashamed. His sense of power had quite departed. And now he dismally felt that he would never amount to anything. He was a failure.An idle, wicked, disgraceful fellow, no good in the world, and not worth any woman's attention. His heart felt sick when he thought this. He was very miserable. He despised himself. So he sighed. It would have been better, he thought, if he had apprenticed himself to the plumber's trade in his boyhood. He would in that case have grown up happy and contented, remained at home and done his duty, respected by his neighbors and himself, though only a plumber. A plumber is a good honest man that pays his debts.
"At home! Why was he not there, anyway? What good was he doing away from there? There was his mother, in her declining years. Was his place not by her side? He would never desert his mother, he thought. And Sis! there was Sis. He would never desert Sis. How good they had been to him! How they believed in him! (he squirmed) how they believed in him still. He imagined them showing his most sensible pictures around to the neighbors. 'My son is an artist,' he heard his mother say. His flesh crawled. How mad he had been! How contemptible he was! Still a man was not hopeless who had a soul for such feelings as he had now. He would reform. He would henceforth eschewthe company of such as Walker. He enumerated his vices and renounced them one by one. He began life over again. He would bask in the simple domestic pleasures of his mother in her declining years, and Sis. He would get up very early every morning and go to his humble toil before it was quite light. He felt himself walking along in the chill of dawn—the street lamps still lit. He would work hard all day. He would always tell the truth. Every Saturday night he would come home tired out, with fifteen dollars in his pocket. This he would throw into his mother's lap. 'Here, mother,' he would say in a fine manly voice, 'here are fifteen dollars.' His mother would put her apron to her eyes, and look at him through tears of pride and joy. He would wear old clothes and be very honest and upright looking, the sort of young man that Russell Sage would have approved, that Sis might dress. He would not mind the sneers and gibes of the world, for he would beright.
"He looked defiantly around the room for a few sneers and gibes."
THE other day it was such a pleasant April day I thought I'd take the afternoon off. It was such a very pleasant day that I didn't want to go anywhere in particular. Do you ever feel that way? I mean like you just wanted to be by yourself and sit down and think awhile.
Later on, you have an idea, you'll come back into things much refreshed. But the thought of answering these letters now, or of doing this or doing that, kind of lets you down inside your stomach. Your brain seems to have dropped down somewhere behind your ears. If that fellow across the office comes over to pull another of his bright ideas on you you think you'll probably scream, or brain him, or something. He's getting terrible, anyhow.
You have any number of excellent friends, and (ordinarily) you are quite fond of them. Perhaps you will go to see one of them. There's Ed, you've been wanting for you don't knowhow long to go round and see him. Never seemed to have time. But no; you don't want to see Ed—today. Same way with all the others, as you go over the list of them in your mind. Couldn't bear to see any of 'em—not this afternoon. For one thing, they're all so selfish.... So interested in their own affairs.
As I was straightening up my desk an idea came to me about jobs. Seems to me that when I have a job I'm all the while worrying about how to break out of it. I think: Well, I'm tied up here until the first of the year; but I'll sure shake it after that; too cramped and limited. And then when I am out of a job I immediately begin to worry about how to get another one. That's Life, I guess.
I turned uptown and floated along with the current of the Avenue throng. It was a glittering April throng. The newest stockings were out. I had not seen them before. The newest stockings (you will have noted) are so very, very thin and the pores (so to say) in them are so large that they give the ladies who wear them the agreeable effect of being bare-legged.
At Thirty-fourth Street the traffic policeman on post at our side of this corner, by an outwardgesture of his arms pressed back the sidewalk stream for a couple of moments of cross-town vehicular traffic. He stood within a few inches of the front row of the largely feminine crush. Whenever an impatient pedestrian broke through the line he had formed and attempted to dart across the street he emitted a peculiar little whistle followed by the admonishment, "Hold on, lady!" or "Hey there, mister!" Thus having returned the derelict to cover, he would smile very intimately, with a kind of sly cuteness, at the more handsome young women directly before him—who invariably tittered back at him. And thus, frequently, a little conversation was started.
Now as a vigilant historian of the social scene this matter of the gallant relations of traffic policemen to perambulating ladies of somewhat fashionable, even patrician aspect, I find highly interesting. It is a subject which does not seem to have been much examined into.
Why, exactly, should flowers of débutante-Bryn-Mawr appearance look with something like tenderness at policemen? Seems to me I have read now and then in the papers strikingly romantic stories wherein a mounted policeman in the park (formerly a cowboy) saved the life of anequestrienne heiress on a runaway mount, and was rewarded the next day (or something like that) with her hand. Such a story my mind always gladly accepts as one of the dramatic instances where life artistically imitates the movies. Crossing Thirty-fourth Street, however, seems to me another matter.
And what system of selection operates in the Department whereby this officer or that is chosen from among all his brethren for the paradisaical job of being beau of a fashionable crossing? And would you not think that a more uniform judgment would be exercised in the election of men to such Brummellian duties? Adonises in the traffic force I have, indeed, seen (there is one at Forty-second Street), but this chap of whom I have just been speaking (the whimsical whistler) certainly was not one of them. He was what is called "pie-faced." Hunched up his shoulders like an owl. Yet his ogling of loveliness in new spring attire was completely successful, was in no instance that I observed resented, was received with arch merriment. Indeed, his heavy, pink-tea attentions were obviously regarded as quite flattering by the fair recipients! As he let the tide break to crossthe street it was plain, from bright glances backward, that he had fluttered little hearts which would smile upon him again. And so, in such a Romeo-like manner, does this bulky sentimentalist, armed with concealed weapons, have dalliance with the passing days. What you 'spose it is about him gives him his fascination in flashing eyes haughty to the rest of the masculine world—his bright buttons, or what?
Yes; these curious and romantic little relationships between traffic cops on social duty, so to say, and their dainty admirers are not (in some instances at least) so transient as to be merely the exchange of roguish words and soft glances of the moment. There is that really august being of matinee-idol figure at—well, let us say at Forty-second Street. Sir Walter Raleigh could not with more courtliness pilot his fair freight across the Avenue. So it was the day after Christmas I saw not one but several of his young friends blushingly put dainty packages into his hands.
Is there not an excellent O. Henry sort of story in this piquant city situation?
Well, floating like a cork upon a river I drifted along up the Avenue. I passed a man I hadnot seen for several years. Yes; that certainly was the fellow I used to know. And yet he was an altogether different being now, too. The sort of a shock I got has perhaps also been experienced by you. Only a short time ago, it seemed to me, this friend of mine had been robust and ruddy, masterful and gay, in the prime of his years. I had somehow innocently expected him always to be so. Just as I find it very unreal to think of myself in any other way than I am now. Don't you? As to yourself, I mean. He was quite grey. His shoulders hung forward. His chest seemed to have fallen in on itself. His legs moved back and forth without ever altogether straightening out. He had a whipped look. Wrinkled clothes and dusty black derby hat, he was conspicuous in the peacockean scene. And yet on a time he had been, I knew, as much a conqueror of hearts as any policeman. So would it sometime be with me—like this?
What do you know about that! In the next block another acquaintance of old I saw. But when I had known him he was stooped and little and thin and dried up and cringing. He worked in a basement and did not wear a collar, at least by day. He used to look very old. Now herehe was swinging along looking very much like Mr. Caruso, or some such personage as that.
How may this phenomenon be accounted for, what was the misfortune of one of these persons and the secret of the other? I know a man who has a theory which, at least, sounds all right. It is not buttermilk nor monkey glands, he contends, which will keep a man young and stalwart so much as (what he calls) an objective in life—a distant rampart to take, a golden fleece to pursue. That is why, he declares, scientists and artists frequently live happy and alert to such a great age: Thomas A. Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Jap chap (what's his name? Hokusai) who at a hundred and ten or thereabout was called "the old man mad about painting."
Maybe it was thinking of that idea, maybe it was the fearsome thought of that dusty derby hat of my friend's which haunted my mind, or maybe my competitive instincts had been aroused from spring slumber by the spectacle of my Caruso-like friend careering along, anyhow a decidedly bugged-up feeling began to flow through me; I wavered in my loitering, I turned, my sails (so to speak) caught the wind, and I laid mycourse abruptly back to the office. I had suddenly a great itch to get at all those letters.
I was very glad to see that fellow across the office from me. He is a good fellow and very helpful. I said to him, "Look here, what do you think about this idea for getting business?"
"Oh, my goodness!" he said; "it's altogether too fine a day to think about work. I'd just like to go out and wander up the Avenue with nothing on my mind but my hair."
AFRIEND of mine (and aside from this error a very fine friend he is, too) not long ago published a book which he declared, in his Preface, should be read in bed. He insisted, to such an extent was he the victim of a remarkable and pernicious fallacy which I find here and there, that this book could not otherwise be properly enjoyed.
Now the difficulty about this particular book, that is the circumstance wherein my friend has got me in a position where it is not so easy for me to overturn him all at once, is this: one, not knowing any better, might take the author's advice, and find pleasure reading the book in bed, not being aware that this simply was because here was a book that one would find pleasure in reading anywhere. But because you have got hold of a book which it is possible to enjoy reading in the wrong way, it naturally follows (does itnot?) that you'd enjoy it much more reading it in the right way. That, I should say, was simple and logical enough.
I know, I know! I'm coming to that: there are plenty of other people who have this ridiculous reading-in-bed idea. There, for instance, is Richard Le Gallienne. I had a letter from him awhile ago, in which he remarked that it was his practice to do most of his reading in bed. Then I had a letter recently from Meredith Nicholson, in which there was some such absurd phrase as "going to bed and reading until the cock crows." Also I one time read an essay, a very pleasant essay outside the mistaken notion of its main theme, by Michael Monahan, which was largely about the pleasure of reading in bed. Spoke of the delights of being tucked in, with what satisfaction you got the light just right, and all that.
It must, of course, be acknowledged that all these gentlemen are, if perverse in their method, persons of some reading. However, a fact such as that, an accident as you might say, cannot be permitted to upset the course of a profound argument. Why! as to that, a suspicion just occurs to me that maybe someone could dig up Lamb, Hazlitt, Mark Twain, Coleridge, LeighHunt, Cowper (perhaps all of them, and more) to the effect that it is pleasant to read in bed. Didn't Thackeray have some nonsense about "bedside books"?Ihaven't time to refute each of these persons separately. It is sufficient, I take it, to roll into one point of attack all this bed-reading heresy, from whatever quarters it comes, and put an end to that.
Understand me; I have no complaint against the reading in bed of persons confined there through physical disability. The world war which brought more people to bed for indefinite periods than any other matter since time began thereby probably got more souls into the way of reading than seventeen times several hundred schools ever did. All of them, however, would find that they were much better off in the matter of reading when they had got out of bed. What I say is that, in a manner of speaking, there is no use in taking the air in a wheel-chair if you can take it on horseback. Why do a thing in a halfway fashion when you can go to it right?
Another thing. There are people (I've seen them at it) who read on porches. Sometimes in swings, rocking to and fro. Even in hammocks, slung above the ground from trees. On trains,too. I have (with my own ears) heard people say that they would "take a book" and go out into the park, or into the woods, or out in a boat, or up on the mountain, or by the sea, or any conceivable place except where one should go to read.
All of these ways of reading are worse, if anything can be worse than that, than reading in bed. Because in bed you do, at least, have your mind sandwiched within doors. You do not feel the surge and rumble of the world—the sound and movement of the things of which literature is made; but any contact with which (at the moment of reading) is destructive to the illusion which it is the province of literature to create.
For literature (reading it, I mean here) is, in this, like love: Richest are the returns to that one whose passion is most complete in its surrender. And a man lapping his frame in soft indolence, though he have a book in his hand, is indulging in sensuous physical pleasure at least equally with intellectual receptivity or aesthetic appreciation. No. Reading should not be taken as an opiate.
The way to read, then—but, a moment more; a couple of other points are to be cleared up. There is much babble of slippers anddressing-gowns, easy chairs and "soft lights" in connection with the comments about the pleasures, the "delights" as I believe some people say, of reading.
What is wanted toknowthe relish to be got from reading is, first (of course), an uncommon book. And by that term is meant merely one uncommonly suited to the spirit of the reader. (The only perfect definition, that, of a "good book.") Some people still read Stevenson. Well, there's no great harm in that. Providing you read him (or anybody else) as follows:
You should read as you should die—with your boots on. You take a wooden chair, without arms, such (this is the best) as is commonly called a "kitchen chair." It has a good, hard seat. You sit upright in this, crossing and recrossing your legs as they tire. Nearby you is a good, strong light, one with a tonic effect, a light that keeps your eyes wide open. You sit facing a dull, blank wall. No pictures or other ornaments or decorations should be on this wall, as, in case such things are there, and you happen to raise your eyes for an instant, in ecstasy or in thought, your vision lights upon one of these things; and the heart which you have given yourauthor is, certainly in some measure, alienated from him. Maybe, indeed, you go back to him almost at once. But then harm has been done—you have not read with supreme abandon.
THERE is no figure in the human scene which makes so unctuous an appeal to our relish of humanity as the landlady. When the landlady comes upon the stage at the theatre, we all awaken to an expectation of delight in the characteristic manifestations of her nature, and seldom are disappointed. The genius of the greatest of authors always unfolds with particular warmth in the presence of their landladies. A moment's reflection will recall a procession of immortal landladies. Whether it is that the colorful calling of landlady cultivates in one a peculiar richness of human nature, or whether landladies are born and not made—those with characters of especial tang and savor instinctively adopting this occupation,—I cannot say, but the fact is indisputable that landladies are not as other persons are. No one ever saw a humdrumlandlady. A commonplace person as a landlady is unthinkable.
Now I think I may say that all my life, or nearly all, I have been an eager and earnest student of landladies. I am, indeed, much more familiar with the genus landlady than with courts and kings, or with eminent personages generally such as supply the material for most of those who write their recollections. Thus I am competent, I think, to speak on a subject curiously neglected by the memorist.
One who makes a culture of landladies comes in time to have a flair for these racy beings, and is drawn by a happy intuition to the habitats of those most resplendent in the qualities of their kind. Of course, one never can tell what life will bring forth, but it seems to me that my present landlady marks the top of my career as a connoisseur, an amateur, of landladies. She is strikingly reminiscent of an English landlady. And England, particularly London, is, as all the world knows, to the devotee of landladies what Africa is to the big game sportsman—his paradise. There the species comes to luxuriant flower, so that to possess with the mind one or two well-developed London landladies is never to bewithout food for entertainment. My present landlady, to return, is of course a widow. While it may be, for aught I know, that all widows are not landladies, with very few exceptions all landladies worthy of the name are widows. Those who are not widows outright are, as you might say, widows in a sense. That is, while their husbands may accurately be spoken of as living, and indeed are visible, they do not exist in the normal rôle of husband. The commercial impulses of the bona-fide husband have died in them, generally through their attachment to alcoholic liquor, and they become satellites, hewers of wood and drawers of water, to the genius awakened by circumstances in their wives.
I one time had a landlady of this origin in Norwalk, Connecticut. She was a woman of angular frame, with a face of flint, a tongue of vinegar, and a heart of gold. This, I have found in my travels, is the type of the semi-widowed landlady. I had another such an identical one in Topeka, Kansas. The asperity, doubtless, is occasioned by biting disillusionment in the romance of long ago, but it is external; frost on the window; at the heart's core wells the sense of universe-embracing maternity which makes the character ofthe landlady by vocation sublime. All semi-widowed landladies have (it is their divine inspiration) large families of half-grown sons. My landlady of Norwalk grumbled continually; she could be heard out in the kitchen complaining in a shrill, querulous tone that, with things as high as they were, people would be crazy to expect meat twice a day. Yet she had at her board the meanest, most low-down, ornery, contemptible, despicable cuss in human form I ever knew, and the only fault I ever heard her find with him was that he didn't eat enough.
The erudite in landladies have, of course, cognizance of a class which are in no degree widows. Those of this department of the race, however, frequently are not landladies in fibre, but merely incidentally. They are young wives who for a transient period seek to help out in the domestic economy by taking a few lodgers who come with unexceptionable references. As wives doubtless they are meritorious; but no monument need be erected to them as landladies. Though I should like to see in the principal public square of every town and city a monument designed by an artist of ability placed to the enduring glory of the landladies of that place. For are not landladiesancient institutions fostering the public weal, and in their field not a whit less deserving of homage than governors and soldiers? I would say to a nation, show me your landladies and I will tell you your destiny. I should be remiss, however, in my chronicle did I not note that among these partial and ephemeral landladies occasionally are to be found pronounced landlady potentialities. I recall a landlady I had on Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, whose passion for cleaning amounted to a mania. This young person's housewifery frenzy always put me in mind of another soul who could not rest—Hokusai, who at about a hundred and ten was spoken of as "the old man mad about painting."
Hovering about, tortured by a desire to begin, when I left for my breakfast, she was still at it upon my return from my morning stroll, my door barricaded by articles of dismembered furniture; still at it when I came back a bit impatiently from a second walk; still at it while I read the paper in her dining-room. And so without surcease throughout the march of days and seasons. She unscrewed the knobs of the bed to polish the threads thereof; she removed penpoints from penholders and made them to shine likeburnished gold. I had another landlady moved by the same springs of feeling, on Spruce Street, Philadelphia. Later, I heard, her husband died, and she espoused her latent career.
There is in the galaxy of landladies quite another type, an exotic plant in the wondrously competent sisterhood, specimens of which may be found blooming here and there like some rare orchid. I mean the fragile, lady landlady, the clinging vine bereft of the supporting husband oak. Such was Mrs. Knoll, of Central Avenue, Indianapolis, a little, plump, rounded body, exceedingly bright, pleasant, intelligent, amiable, and helpless; all of which qualities shone from her very agreeable face and person. In her youth no doubt she was a type of beauty, and she remained very well preserved. "Life and vanity and disappointment had slipped away" (in the Thackerian words) from Dr. Knoll some years before; and his widow and only child, Miss Knoll, were left in possession of the old family home, and nothing more. They could not bear to leave it, that would "break their hearts," said good, ineffectual Mrs. Knoll; so it was viewed by them, unfortunately somewhat fallaciously, in the light of a possible support.
The Doctor evidently was a man of books, and his widow had sought, more and more, companionship in reading. Life—the actual world about her, that is—, and vanity, but not disappointment, had, in a manner of speaking, slipped from her, too. And she had turned to that great world of shadows. "In books," she said, "I can choose my own company." She had plighted her troth in youth to Dickens and to Thackeray, and to these she had remained ever faithful. In a world of false books and unsafe friends she knew that she had by the hand two true spirits. Jane Austen she loaned me with tremulous pleasure. And she was very fond of Mr. Howells, with whom, she said she lived a great deal; and the Kentons, the Laphams, and the Marches, were characters better known to her "than her next-door neighbors." But it must be confessed that the tender perfume of Mrs. Knoll was not altogether an equivalent in the sphere of her passive efforts to the homely vegetable odor of the authentic landlady.
In great cities, amid the sheen of civilization is to be found just adjacent to smart quarters of the town the tulip in the variegated garden of landladies—the finished, polished stone gatheredfrom the mine, the bird of plumage of the species; I mean, of course, the landladydu beau monde, the modish landlady, or perhaps I should say, the professional hostess, as it were. For it seems rather vulgar, a thing repellent to the finer sensibilities, to touch this distinguished figure of immaculate artificiality with the plebeian term of "landlady." The personages of this type are, so to say, of the peerage of their order. Such a Lady Drew it was whose guest I became for a time on Madison Avenue, New York. With silvered hair like a powdered coiffure; softly tinted with the delicate enamel of cosmetic; rich and stately of corsage—this expensive and highly sophisticated presence presided, in the subdued tone of the best society, over the nicely adjusted machinery of her smart establishment by the authority of a consciousness of highly cultivated efficiency and an aroma of unexceptionable standards.
This consummate hostess type of landlady is, of course, one which the passionate collector will preserve in the cabinet of his mind with tremulous happiness in the sheer preciosity of it. I cannot but feel, however, myself, that this type fails of complete perfection as a work of art inthis: that in every work of the first genius, it cannot be denied, there is always a strain of coarseness. And perhaps I should confess that my own taste in landladies, though I hope it is not undiscriminating, leans a bit toward the popular taste, the relish of the Rabelaisian.
Stevenson has observed that most men of high destinies have even high-sounding names. And anyone who has reflected at all upon the phenomenon of landladies must have been struck by the singularly idiosyncratic character of their names. Indeed, an infallible way to pick out a competent landlady from an advertisement is by her name. Is it a happy name for a landlady? Go there! As her name is, so is her nature. I one time had a landlady on Broome Street, New York, whom the gods named Mrs. Brew. I one time had a landlady (in Milligan Place, Manhattan) of the name of Mrs. Boggs. One time I had a landlady just off the East India Dock Road, London, whose name was Wigger. I shall always cherish the memory of the landlady I had down in Surrey, Mrs. Cheeseman. One and all, these ladies, as landladies, were without stain.
Regarded as a bibelot, Mrs. Wigger was, I think, of the first perfection. In her own genre,so to say, she was as finished, as impossible of improvement, as an Elgin marble, a Grecian urn, a bit of Chinese blue and white, a fan of old Japan, a Vermeer, a Whistler symphony, a caricature by Max Beerbohm. She was of massive mould and very individually shapen. Her face was very large and very red and heavily pock-marked. In her bizarre garments, in some indefinable way she imparted to the character of the born slattern something of the Grand Style. Her utterance was quavered in a weird, cracked voice, which had somewhat an effect as of the wind crying high aloft in a ship's rigging. She slipslod about, always a bit unsteadily. Her movements and her manner generally, I felt, made it not unreasonable to suppose that she had in secret certain habits no longer widely approved by society. The apple of her eye was an unkempt parrot which spent its days in vainly attempting to ascend the embracing sides of a tin bathtub.
Landladies, beyond all other persons, have the esoteric power of becoming for one the geniuses of places. It would, for instance, be quite impossible for anyone to visualize my Mrs. Cheeseman torn from, as you might say her context.If you were asked to describe Mrs. Cheeseman you would naturally do it in this way: You would say, "Well, I wonder what has become of the sweetest, quaintest, fairest old inn in all England!" And into your mind would come a rapid cinematograph picture:
A highway winding out of Dorking, stretching its way between hills to the sea. You round a turn and see before you long, low, glistening white stables—the stables, evidently, of a coaching inn. And presently you come into view of an ancient, white, stone building with a "Sussex roof." From a tall post before the door swings the board of the "King's Head." White ducks ride in a pond at the roadside there. Round this inn which you are approaching is the greenest, handsomest hedge ever seen. And along the road beyond you perceive the cottages of a wee village.
"We know that all things work together for good to them that love God." The romance of destiny which in its inscrutable way has been leading you all your long life long to the bosom, if I may so put it, of Mrs. Cheeseman, reveals its beneficence now by carefully graduated steps. At the other side of the main bulk of the "King's Head," which it was given youfirst to see, you come upon a delicious little flagged yard leading to another arm of the house, older still, very venerable, with a high roof low descending, a roof which tucks under its projecting wing many oddly placed little latticed windows gayly sporting innumerable tiny panes. Like a miniature cathedral spire, a tall, quaint chimney stands sentinel at one corner, and several chimney-pots peep over the roof's dark crown.
Up this little yard, bounded on one side by a multicolored flower garden whose fragrance bathes you in a softening vapor of perfume, you enter, by a door which requires you to stoop, the wee taproom. Here: a cavernous fireplace, settles are within against its sides, a gigantic blackened crane swung across its middle, and a cubby-hole of a window at its back. Above it is swung an ancient fowling-piece. The stone floor of the room, like the ancient flags without, is worn into dips and hollows. Along the window-sill of an oblong window measuring one wall is a bright parade of potted plants.
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that there is something psychic about landladies. As you look about you at the environment in whichyou find yourself, you experience a premonition that you are nearing an affinity in the landlady world. It is strange, too, that there are places where you have never been before (in the life which you consciously remember) that give you at once completely the feeling of your having arrived at the home familiar to your spirit. And there presently occurs here an event in your career predetermined (I doubt not) æons and æons ago. A buxom body with the most glorious complexion (you ween) in all England—which is to say in the world—enters the ancient room: a lass whose rosy, honest, pedestrian face and bursting figure are to become forever more for you the connotation of the name "Maggie." The daughter, this, (you later learn) of your Mrs. Cheeseman.
Soon it is all arranged, and you are having your tea—a "meat tea"—in the sitting-room of the "King's Head," your sitting-room now. A bucolic slavey—a person whose cheerful simpleness is like to that of the little creatures of the field—attends you. In this commodious apartment of yours is a great scintillation of chintz; flowers, in pots and vases, everywhere caress the eye; and the fancy is kindled by the spectacleof many stuffed birds in glass cases. On the heavily flowered wall hangs a handsome specimen of the "glass" (invariably found in England) for forecasting the weather; a "pianoforte," as piquantly old-fashioned as a cocked hat, crosses one end wall; and venerable paintings (which time has mellowed to the richness and the general color effect of an old plug of tobacco), bright sporting prints, and antique oddities of furniture to an extent that it would require a catalogue to name, all combine to give an air of true sitting-room opulence to the chamber.
But of landladies, and the connotations of landladies, one could write a book of several volumes; and it being a very fair day, and a Sunday, and the first cool breath after a very hot summer, I do not think I shall write those volumes this afternoon; I shall go out for a bit of air and a look at the world.
THEN there's the matter of these dedications. Several weeks ago I received a communication. I think it was sent by Miss Katherine Lord, or maybe it was Hamlin Garland. Anyhow, it was an invitation. The upshot of this invitation was that the annual exhibit of the "best books of the year" held at the National Arts Club, New York City, under the auspices of the Joint Committee of Literary Arts was now going—or was just about to go. Further, it was conveyed that the opening evening of the exhibit would be devoted to a reception for the authors of the books exhibited. Also, that on this evening speeches would be made by a number of distinguished persons acquainted with this matter on the subject of the idiosyncrasies of authors and editors. Further than this, this invitation made clear beyond all manner of reasonable doubt that the pleasure of the evening wouldbe generally felt to be sadly incomplete without the presence there among the speakers of myself.
The reasons why I was (I am sorry to say) unable to rise to this occasion were two. For one thing, I have known long and intimately a considerable number of authors and editors. Also, I have had the honor of having been several times to the National Arts Club. And (such is my tact and delicacy) I could not feel that this was any fit place for me to discuss the (as the term is) idiosyncrasies with which a decidedly checkered career has acquainted me. Then, as to one of my own idiosyncrasies: I am like George Moore in this which he says, that he is "the only Irishman living or dead who cannot make a speech"—except that I am not an Irishman.
All of this, however, is merely picking up the threads of my thought. What I have in my eye is an idiosyncrasy of authors which doubtless I could have discussed with some propriety. That is, if I were able to discuss before an audience anything at all. Though with this subject, as many of those present were authors (who had their toes along with them) I should have had to exercise more than a little caution, and considerableskill in maintaining a honeyed amiability. Maybe this theme wouldn't have done at all either.
You see, it's this way: Many people, I believe, do not read the introductions, prefaces, forewords (and whatever else such things are called) to books. I always do. Perhaps this is a habit formed during a number of years spent as a professional reviewer. If you read the introduction, preface (or whatever it's called), to a book you can generally pick up pretty much what the author thought he was about when he wrote it, the points he intended to make in the work, the circumstances in which he wrote it, and so on. This is a great time and labor saving procedure. All you've got to do then is to read a bit in the volume here and there to taste the style, pick up a few errors of fact or grammar, glance at the "conclusion," where the author sums up, to see whether or not he got anywhere—and so far as you are further put out by having this book on your hands it might just as well never have been written. But I am drifting. That's one reason I can't make a speech. Never can recollect what it was I set out to say.
Oh, yes! About these dedications. Less peoplethan read prefaces, I fancy, read the dedications of books. I always read 'em. I read them when I have no intention whatever of reading the volumes which they—well, dedicate. They are fine—dedications. Better, far better, than old tombstones. But never judge a book by its dedication.
I one time knew a man, of a most decidedly humorous cast of mind, who was a great spendthrift, an A 1 wastrel. He ran through everything his father left him (a very fair little fortune), and then when he had run through, in advance of that gentleman's death, everything his wife was to inherit from his father-in-law he had no means whatever. He had a daughter. Without, it was clearly evident, the least suspicion of the pleasant humor of this, he named her Hope. She was a small child. And—it's absurd, I know; but 'tis so; there was not a particle of conscious irony in it; this child's name was the one blind spot in her father's sense of the ridiculous—her parents frequently referred to her affectionately as "little Hope."
So, quite so, with dedications. Whenever, or perhaps we had better say frequently, when a man writes a particularly worthless book he laysthe deed (in his dedication of it) onto his wife, "without whose constant devotion," etc., etc., etc., "this work would never have come into being." Amen! Or he says that it is inscribed "To—my gentlest friend—and severest critic—my aged Grandmother." Or maybe he accuses his little daughter, "whose tiny hands have led me." Again he may say benignantly: "To—my faithful friend—Murray Hill—who made possible this volume"; or "the illumination of whose personality has lighted my way to truth."
Doubtless he means well, this author. And, in most cases, highly probable it is that his magnanimous sentiments are O. K. all round. For to the minds of what would probably be called "right-thinking" persons is not having a book dedicated to you the equivalent, almost, of having a career yourself? I know a very distinguished American novelist—well, I'll tell you who he is: Booth Tarkington—who has told me this: Time and again he has been relentlessly pursued by some person unknown to him who, in the belief that did he once hear it he would surely use it as material for his next book, wished to tell him the story of his life. This life, according to the communications received by the novelist,was in every case one of the most remarkable ever lived by man. It was, in every case, most extraordinary in, among a variety of other singular things, this: the abounding in it of the most amazing coincidences. And so on, and so on, and so on. One of these romantic personages nailed the novelist somewhere coming out of a doorway one day, and contrived to compel him to sit down and listen to the life story. He was an old, old man, this chap, and firmly convinced that the tale of his many days (as simple, commonplace, dull and monotonous an existence as ever was conceived) was unique. Now he did not want any pay for telling his story; he had no design on any royalty to come from the great book to be made out of it; no, not at all. All he asked—and that, he thought, was fair enough—was that the book be dedicated to him. And so it was with them all, all of those with the remarkable, obscure, romantic, humdrum lives. So much for that.
Dedications run the whole gamut of the emotions. A type of author very tonic to the spirit is that one whose soul embraces not merely an individual but which enfolds in its heroic sweep a nation, a people, or some mighty idea. What,for instance, could be more vast in the grandeur of its sweep than this—which I came upon the other day in a modest little volume? "To the Children of Destiny." The Great War, which has wrought so much evil and inspired so much literature, is responsible for a flood of noble, lofty dedications. The merest snooping through a bunch of recent war books turns up, among a multitude more, the following: "To the Mothers of America." "To—the Loyalty and Patriotism—of the—American People." "To the Hour—When the Troops Turn Home." "To All the Men at the Front."
I should not affirm, of course, that there is anything new under the sun. And it is very probable that ever since this psychic literature began (whenever it began) authors resident beyond the stars have, naturally enough, dedicated their manuscripts submitted to earthly publishers to folks back in the old home, so to say. But with the War, which has so greatly stimulated literary activity on the other side of life, the dedications of these (to put it so) expatriated authors have perhaps become (in a manner of speaking) loftier in tone than ever before. As a sample of the present state of exalted feeling of authorsof this sort I copy the following dedication from the recently published book of a writer "gone West": "To the heroic women of the world, the mothers, wives and sweethearts who bravely sent us forth to battle for a great cause:—we who have crossed the Great Divide salute you."
I wish, I do wish, I had at hand a book which I saw a number of years ago.... As examples of persons to whom books have been dedicated may be specified The Deity, The Virgin Mary, Royalty and Dignitaries of Church and State, "The Reader," and the author himself. Many of the pleasantest dedications have been to children. Besides armies and navies, countries, states, cities and their inhabitants, books have also been dedicated to institutions and societies, to animals, to things spiritual, and to things inanimate. An attractive example of a dedication to Deity is furnished by one John Leycaeter, who, in 1649, dedicated his "Civill Warres of England, Briefly Related from his Majesties First Setting Up his Standard, 1641, to this Present Personall Hopefull Treaty"—"To the Honour and Glory of the Infinite, Immense, and Incomprehensible Majesty of Jehovah, the Fountaine of all Excellencies, the Lord of Hosts,the Giver of all Victories, and the God of Peace." He continued in a poem, "By J. O. Ley, a small crumme of mortality."
But about that book I saw some time ago. You, of course, remember that prayer in "Tom Sawyer" (or somewhere else in Mark Twain) where the great-hearted minister called upon the Lord to bless the President of the United States, the President's Cabinet, the Senate of the United States, the governors of each of the states, and their legislatures, the mayors of all the cities, and all the towns, of the United States, and the inhabitants—grandmothers and grandfathers, mothers and wives, husbands and fathers, sons and daughters, bachelors and little children—of every hamlet, town and city of the United States, also of all the countryside thereof. Well, this book of which I am speaking,—this minister in the august range and compass of his prayer had nothing on its dedication. It was published, as I recollect, by the author; printed on very woody wood-pulp paper by a job press, and had a coarse screen frontispiece portrait of the author, whose name has long since left me. What it was about I do not remember. That is a little matter. It lives in my mind, and should live in the memoryof the world, by its dedication; which, I recall, in part was: "To the Sultan of Turkey—the Emperor of Japan—the Czar of Russia—the Emperor of Germany—the President of France—the King of England—the President of the United States—and to God."
But it was in an elder day that they really knew how to write sonorous dedications. If I should write a book (and the idea of having one to dedicate tempts me greatly) I'd pick out some important personage, such as Benjamin De Casseres, or Frank Crowinshield, or Charles Hanson Towne, or somebody like that. Then I would take as the model for my dedication that one, say, of Boswell's to Sir Joshua Reynolds. I am afraid you have not read it lately. And so, for the joy the meeting of it again will give you, I will copy it out. It goes as follows: