The Observations of Professor Maturin
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Title: The Observations of Professor Maturin

Author: Clyde Furst

Author of introduction, etc.: William H. Carpenter

Release date: May 4, 2021 [eBook #65249]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OBSERVATIONS OF PROFESSOR MATURIN ***

The Observations of Professor Maturin

Columbia University Press Sales Agents

·   ·   ·

New York: Lemcke & Buechner
30-32 West 27th Street

London: Humphrey Milford
Amen Corner, E.C.

The Observations of
Professor Maturin

By
Clyde Furst

New York
Columbia University Press
1916
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1916, by Columbia University Press

Printed March, 1916

∵

Reprinted, by permission, from
The New York Evening Post

D. B. Updike · The Merrymount Press · Boston

Dedicated to
Professor Maturin’s
Oldest and Best Friend
R. E. M.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER | | PAGE
I. | The Staff of Life | 3
II. | The Sindbad Society | 17
III. | Foreign Travel at Home | 25
IV. | Country Life | 35
V. | Food for Thought | 44
VI. | Beside the Sea | 54
VII. | Christmas | 65
VIII. | The Sovran Herb | 75
IX. | Men’s Faces | 85
X. | Mental Hygiene | 94
XI. | The Mystery of Dress | 109
XII. | Questions at Issue | 117
XIII. | The Fountain of Youth | 122
XIV. | The Contemporary Fiction Company | 130
XV. | The Old Doctor | 137
XVI. | Breakfasting with Portia | 147
XVII. | Summer Science | 157
XVIII. | Measuring the Mind | 168
XIX. | The Club of the Bachelor Maids | 183
XX. | A Small College | 192
XXI. | Old Town Revisited | 202
XXII. | The County Fair | 215

Introduction

IT was never my good fortune actually to meet Professor Maturin, or even to see him, although in the latter case I should instantly have recognized him, so familiar have I been through my mind’s eye, at least, with his personal appearance—his slender figure somewhat stooping with the bodily inclination of the scholar, the clear-cut features that could only have fitted his clear-cut mind, and the thoughtful eyes that were their necessary concomitant. I had known, of course, of his predilection for the Athenaeum, and his habit of dining at that club of intellectual and gastronomic repute, and I was aware of his membership in the veracious Sindbad Society whose meetings he frequently attended; but here, too, and principally from the fact, no doubt, that I was a member of neither, I had never been able to bring about the much desired personal acquaintance with him.

Of acquaintance, however, and even of a fairly satisfactory sort, there has nevertheless been no lack, for I have read much that Professor Maturin has written, and I have remembered, although inadequately enough, many of the things that he has said with such understanding and insight of the real bearing of individual experience, along quite extraordinarily extended lines, upon the wide problems of human existence.

It is so much the more a pleasure, accordingly, to me, and as it will be to all those who have read Professor Maturin before only sporadically and at intervals, at length to have the opportunity to read him consecutively, and thus to get those side-lights and reflections of understanding that can only come with a reasonable contiguity of statement.

In the present book, moreover, we shall be able to read the sayings of this philosopher of the cheerful mind as they have been remembered and recorded by one who, better than any one else at all, knew Professor Maturin as he thought, and as he spoke, and as he had his being. It is a record, as it will be very easy to discover, of one who has thought much and thought well, for there is a great difference, as we all know, in the quality as well as in the quantity of thinking. In it all there is an intellectual optimism that inevitably follows the thought wherever it roams—and it often roams far afield—which is one of the thrice blessed things of life. If through it all there runs, as again may clearly be seen, the visible thread of the conscious pursuit of happiness, Professor Maturin is no mere eudemonist whose belly is his god and whose goal is pleasure, but rather one who sees in the attainment of personal happiness the rightful accessory of a rounded and rational living. And with it all, and notwithstanding his calling, and in spite of the fact that he himself must have been conscious of an unusual knowledge which leads him at times even into the imperilled field of epigram, it is all done, not with a pedantic air of professorial sophistication, but with genuine human sympathy. And in this spirit he is commended to that wider circle of readers who are now to be able to know him.

William H. Carpenter

Columbia University
February 14, 1916

The Observations of Professor Maturin

I
The Staff of Life

MY friend Professor Bedelar Maturin exercises the right of a bachelor and a man of fifty to a considerable number of eccentricities. All of these are harmless, since he is by nature a gentleman; and, his habit being that of a scholar, some of them are of more than ordinary interest. I very well remember my first learning of that one I am about to describe. My family having left town for the summer, I found him dining at the Athenaeum, as I knew him frequently to do for the sake of detachment from the bachelor ménage he maintains—as much for his books as for himself—in a house near the river, not far from the university.

He beckoned me to take my already ordered dinner at the particular corner table for which his preference is always respected by his fellow Athenians, and, after a smile of greeting, he passed over to me the book he had been reading—“The Physiology of Taste,” by Brillat-Savarin—with the quiet comment, “The standard and gauge of modern civilization.”

I had never before seen the work of that high-priest of gastronomy, but before examining it I looked my surprise at the apparent enthusiasm of the scholar whose abstemious habits were well known to his friends, and whose slender figure, thoughtful eyes, and clear-cut features made it impossible to associate him with the pleasures of the table. For reply he merely indicated several of the “Fundamental Truths of the Science,” on the open page before me:

“But for life the universe were nothing; and all that has life requires nourishment.”

“The fate of nations depends upon how they are fed.”

“The man of sense and culture alone understands eating.”

I was familiar with Dean Swift’s tracing the origin of certain essays to the consumption of particular varieties of cheese, and I had read Maturin’s own whimsical paragraphs explaining the peculiarities of certain national literatures by the characteristics of their national beverages, and paralleling the growth of humanitarianism with the increasing use of tobacco, of which he is sparing; but he seemed now to be serious, so that I merely asked what he made of such a statement as the following, which I read from his author: “The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a planet.”

Explaining that he would have the author convince me, rather than himself, he indicated yet another paragraph: “What praise can be refused the science which sustains us from the cradle to the grave, which entrances the delights of love and the pleasures of friendship, which disarms hatred, makes business easier, and affords us, during the short voyage of our lives, the only enjoyments that both relieve us from fatigue and themselves entail none!”

“Take it, and read it,” he said, as I looked up. “I know it by heart.” I gladly accepted the volume, for there was here evidently more than appeared; but I also expressed the wish that he would, himself, first tell me more about it; and this, retaking the book, his own dinner being now finished and mine but about to begin, he proceeded to do.

“I should not need to remind you,” he began, “that I am no friend to indulgence, much less to so gross a form as over-feeding, nor to speak of my known antagonism to every form of ignorance—except to explain that it is for these reasons that I have become an earnest advocate of gastronomy, which endeavors to transform eating from the ignorant indulgence it usually is to a reasonable science of nutrition and a refined art of enjoyment. Whatever popular disesteem the science and the art still suffer is due either to ignorance of its serious endeavor, or to a Puritanic attitude that is both inconsistent and irreverent. The fabric of nature is so constituted that all of our essential processes are accompanied by pleasure; a thoroughly consistent ascetic would necessarily cease to exist.

“Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, although of course not the founder of gastronomy, is its most admirable modern champion. He lived from the first half of the eighteenth century through the first quarter of the nineteenth, first as mayor of his native town of Belley in France; then, during the Revolution, an exile in Switzerland and in America; and, finally, during the last third of his life, a judge in Paris of the highest national court. The fame of his professional wisdom and justice was great, but that of his personal benevolence and geniality was far greater. The choicest flavor and charm of many years of social life he preserved in the book he apparently intended to leave, at his death, as a legacy of good cheer to his friends. The record of his love of good living was to serve him, a bachelor, as a posterity.

“His fears that so genial a production might seem inconsistent with his judicial dignity were overcome by arguments which are given in a prefatory dialogue, and the volume was published anonymously in 1825, a year before his death. Even in so short a time the book was crowned with extraordinary popularity. Although one would hesitate, perhaps, to call it ‘adorable,’ as Balzac did, it is certainly one of those rarely spontaneous and charming outpourings of personality that belong apart with White’s ‘Selborne’ and Walton’s ‘Angler.’

“In addition to the Prefatory Dialogue and the Fundamental Truths, already mentioned, the little volume includes a Preface, thirty ‘Meditations,’ or chapters, and, in conclusion, a dozen narrative and descriptive ‘Varieties’ bearing upon the subject. The whole amounts to less than three hundred small pages.

“The earlier chapters on the senses of taste, appetite, and thirst are largely physiological or psychological, but even here the author carries out with charm his intention of touching but lightly subjects likely to be dull. Throughout he practices the preaching of the mad poet Blake,—‘To particularize is the great distinction of merit,’—and everywhere he introduces original anecdotes, witticisms, and similar side-dishes. Although Savarin separates the functions of taste into direct, complete, and reflective, he finds himself unable to classify its results further than to suggest some such gradation as,—positive, beef; comparative, veal; superlative, pheasant. For its greatest satisfaction one should eat slowly and in minute portions—all that is valuable of ‘Fletcherism’ in a sentence. Anything else would be unworthy of our perfected organism, ‘the structure of the tongue of all animals being analogous to the reach of their intelligence.’ Under ‘Thirst’ there is a similar, but even more daringly imaginative observation: ‘The desire for fermented liquors and curiosity about a future state are the two distinctive attributes of man as the masterpiece of nature.’

“Perhaps the most valuable, certainly the most pleasing, of the chapters are those on ‘Gastronomy,’ ‘The Love of Good Living,’ ‘People Fond of Good Living,’ ‘Gastronomic Tests,’ and ‘The Pleasures of the Table.’

“Gastronomy is defined as ‘the scientific knowledge of all that relates to man as an eater;’ being founded upon natural history, physics, chemistry, economics, and cookery, as well as on the sciences already touched upon; and affecting physically, mentally, and morally, every individual, of every class of society, every moment of his life. Some knowledge of it is therefore indispensable to all, and the more as one ascends the social scale; it being well known that the most momentous decisions of personal and of national life are made at table.

“‘The Love of Good Living’ is shown to be not merely a physical, but an intellectual and a moral quality as well, ‘almost deserving to rank as a virtue;’ opposing excess, developing discrimination, promoting physical health, and aiding moral resignation to the laws of nature. In addition, it is an easily and constantly available source of natural and innocent pleasure in a world of pain.

“People fond of good living, especially physicians, men of letters, churchmen, and people of sense and culture in general,—others being incapable of the necessary appreciation and judgment,—always live longer than ordinary men. Napoleon’s worst defeats were due to his injudicious diet. The wise in regard to food may usually be known by their mere appearance, but for cases of doubt Brillat-Savarin suggests a series of ‘Gastronomic Tests,’ or dishes, of such indisputable excellence that those who do not instantly respond may immediately be declared unworthy. Thus: For a small income, filet of veal larded with bacon, or sauerkraut bristling with sausages; for a moderate income, filet of beef with gravy, or boiled turbot; for a generous income, truffled turkey, or stuffed pike with cream of prawns. It is important in these tests that generous portions be provided, for quantity as well as quality has its effect.

“The conclusion of the meditation ‘On the Pleasures of the Table’ must be quoted entire, so worthy is it of a place in ‘The Golden Book of Hospitality:’ ‘Let the number of guests be small, that the conversation may be constantly general; of various occupations, but analogous tastes; the men of wit without pretension, the women pleasant, but not coquettish. Let the dishes be few but choice, and the wines of the first quality; the order from the more substantial to the lighter, the simpler to the finer flavors. Let the meal proceed without hurry or bustle; the coffee be hot, the liqueurs chosen with care. Let the room to which the guests retire be large enough for cards, for those who cannot do without them, while leaving ample scope for conversation; the guests animated with the hope of still further pleasure. Then let the tea be not too strong, the toast artistically buttered, the punch skilfully made. Finally, let nobody leave before eleven, and everybody be in bed by twelve.’

“After reaching such an elevation, Brillat-Savarin wisely follows the dramatic principle of relief, by introducing anecdotes of the halts of a hunting party, and chapters on digestion, rest, sleep, and dreams. His observations and illustrations are always interesting and picturesque, frequently very suggestive, and sometimes strikingly modern—as when he says, ‘Digestion, of all the bodily functions, has most influence on the morale of the individual;’ when he recommends for sleeping an airy room, no bed curtains, and light but warm coverings; or when he discusses foods that produce sleep, and those that induce pleasant dreams.

“The theme of the meditation ‘On Corpulence’—‘The great majority of us eat and drink too much’—is of such general and permanent applicability that it is rediscovered every decade and announced with trumpets. The chapter ‘On the Prevention or Cure of Corpulence’ outlines the diet by means of which for thirty years the author kept that tendency in himself ‘to the limit of the imposing’—a statement that his portrait well bears out. After a counter meditation on leanness, some felicitations over the decline of fasting, and an excursus on ‘Exhaustion and Death’—‘Death itself being not unaccompanied by pleasure when it is natural’—the author is again ready for a higher flight.

“This occurs in the longest chapters of the book, in the form of ‘A Philosophical History of Cookery, Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern,’ with an appendix, ‘On Parisian Dining-Houses.’ Here, indeed, is richness: the advantages and disadvantages of eating raw meat; the primitive feasting in the ‘Iliad;’ the advent of boiling in the Old Testament; how Cadmus brought the alphabet and good cooking to Greece; the elaborate and sometimes strange taste of the Romans,—as for dormice and assafoetida,—and a survey of the ancient literature of the subject, from the fragmentary poem on gastronomy by Archestratus, to the convivial poetry of Horace and Tibullus. The whole story is told, although briefly, excepting only the peculiar taste of the Greeks for mingling sea-water and turpentine with their wines.

“The mediaeval and modern development of the art is sketched, although of necessity more rapidly, from the rescue of cookery from barbarism by Charlemagne; through the introduction of spices from the East, garlic from Palestine, parsley from Italy, coffee from Turkey, and the potato from America; to the ages of pastry and of sugar, and the final culmination of the art in political gastronomy. Every line of this section contains such good things as ‘coffee should be crushed, not ground;’ and, ‘It was Talleyrand who first brought from Italy the custom of taking Parmesan cheese with soup.’ But to select would be to quote the whole.

“Restaurants—unhappily Savarin could not know the modern derivation from res and taurus—appear to have been invented in Paris in 1770. There is a fascinating picture of the best of the author’s time, with three hundred dishes and a hundred wines; a height of eloquence over the cosmopolitan sources of a good dinner; and yet higher soaring over the Parisian missionaries of the doctrine throughout the civilized world.

“Nor does inspiration wane in the chapter on ‘Gastronomic Principles Put into Practice’—‘the treasures of nature were not created to be trodden under foot ... a good dinner is but little dearer than a bad one ... a man may show himself a distinguished connoisseur without going beyond the limits of his actual needs.’

“The last chapter, ‘Gastronomic Mythology,’ is pure creation—of Gasterea, the tenth muse, her nature, habit, aspect, and worship; and then—for like Donne, ‘when he is done, he is not done, for there is more’—comes a ‘Transition:’ ‘In writing I had a double object ... to lay down the fundamental theory of gastronomy, so that she would take her place among the sciences in that rank to which she has an incontestable right. The second, to define with precision what must be understood by the love of good living, so that for all time that social quality may be kept apart from gluttony and intemperance, with which many have absurdly confounded it.’

“Finally follow the generous dozen of short ‘varieties’—anecdotes like ‘The Curé’s Omelette;’ personal experiences of ‘The Gastronome Abroad,’ some in America; original recipes and original verse; and an ‘Historical Elegy,’ in pity for the gastronomic ignorance of the past, and in prophetic vision of the full gastronomic glories of the year nineteen hundred.

“But, alas,” said Professor Maturin, slowly closing the book, “I cannot wish that he were here. The world is not yet ready for his message; he should have added another hundred years. It was fifty years before his work was well enough known outside of France to be translated; and even to-day, in spite of all its delightful qualities, not one in a hundred, even among reading men, know it. And yet, there has never been anything quite like it. Such a rare combination of race, time, and personality; of experience, cultivation, and taste, seldom occurs more than once. But no other is necessary; nothing can be better than the best, and Savarin has handled his theme with unapproachable wisdom and charm, once for all.

“The science has, of course, progressed immensely since his day. You may fill your shelves with portentous tomes on food and dietetics, and with experimental pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture. Educators have introduced instruction concerning food into the curriculum of the modern school. And I understand that there are magazines of practical cookery for such ladies as look to the affairs of their households. But as for Brillat-Savarin’s hope that the science and the art of gastronomy, as he elaborated it, would soon become a part of the faith and practice, the delight as well as the duty, of all cultivated people,—that is yet far from fulfilment.

“But, my good friend,” and here Professor Maturin rose, shaking his long forefinger, “the truth will undoubtedly prevail, ‘though long deferred, though long deferred,’ as Lanier says. Take the book, and keep it—I make a practice of distributing copies—read it; you cannot help doing so at a single sitting; talk about it; become, like me, a propagandist, and the blessing of Gasterea will go with you. Good-night.” And he was gone.

My friend Professor Maturin spoke the very truth. I finished the book before I left my seat, and then and there became a fellow equestrian to Banbury Cross. Deliberately and with prepensive aforethought, I invite the reader to do the same, and thereby to gain not only personal pleasure and profit, but, in addition, the greater satisfaction of contributing a lasting good to others.

II
The Sindbad Society

THE writer recently enjoyed the great privilege of being the guest of his friend, Professor Maturin, at a meeting of the Sindbad Society, an organization for the enjoyment of informal discussion concerning the theory and practice, the graces and the usefulness, of foreign travel.

Similar in purpose to the Travellers’ Club of London, but lacking anything like the equipment of that body’s sumptuous Pall Mall home, the Sindbad Society endeavors to fulfil its function by means of occasional dinners in the private rooms of other clubs. Indeed, I was given to understand that the members were unanimous in considering a local habitation, or immovable property of any sort, to be most inappropriate for a club the very essence of which was peregrination. My neighbor at the large round dinner table averred that to own even a portrait of Sindbad the Sailor, the mythical founder and patron of the club, would be to embody in a concrete object sentiments of value only so long as they animated the mind.

As we took our places at table, it became evident, in spite of the recreative character of the club, that here was no body of amateurs, to whom travel meant merely London and Paris, the Rhine and the Riviera. I recognized a former director of the American School in Rome, an artist and a craftsman who had just returned from Japan and India, an importer of things Persian, and a biologist who spent half his time in the South Seas. Professor Maturin described the other members to me as an engineer who had developed oil wells in China, an archaeologist who directed excavations in Syria, former secretaries of legation at St. Petersburg and at Constantinople, an army officer from Manila, and an explorer who had climbed everything but the mountains of the moon.

The dinner, although entirely without pose, was intentionally and interestingly exotic. Russian preserved cucumbers and a soup of chestnuts from the south of France were followed by an entrée of lamb, prepared according to a Constantinople recipe, and by boned capon. The colonel mixed a Filipino salad-dressing, and with it the archaeologist supplied cigarettes made of coffee leaves. Finally, the engineer introduced a South American dessert of ripe red bananas, guava jelly, and sharp cheese, and with this was served Carlsbad burnt-fig coffee. The wines, although poured sparingly, were as interesting as the food. The cigars were Cuban vegueras. The endeavor, which was surely realized throughout, had evidently been to seek the unusual, not for the sake of mere strangeness, but for an excellence unattainable through the ordinary.

The same might be said of the talk which accompanied the meal. It was anything but conscious or formal, and yet I noticed that leading questions were not only allowed but expected, and that it was the custom of the entire company to listen when any conversation became generally interesting. In this way I enjoyed a whole series of descriptions of forests and mountains, rivers and deserts, of barbarous and unfrequented countries, of harbors and fortifications, cities and courts, cathedrals and colleges, libraries and museums; with anecdotes of experience and adventure, of state and society, of beautiful women and distinguished men.

The near distance of Europe was by no means forgotten, but it was discussed in a way that made me feel that I must, in Bacon’s phrase, have gone there “hooded,” or, at least, as the mythical American who checked off each city in his Baedeker after a hurried glance about him from the top of some tall building. In particular, I was possessed with successive desires to make good my deficiencies by going at once to live at a wonderful small hotel across the river in Paris, visiting a certain sculptor’s studio in Madrid, dreaming on the terraces of Lake Maggiore, and hearing the opera by telephone at Budapest. When the talk ranged more widely, as it did for the most part, I longed to observe a volcano and experience an earthquake in action, and determined to journey without delay to Damascus for the sake of its baths and cafés, “the most exquisitely luxurious in the world;” that is, if I did not decide, instead, for Shepherd’s hotel at Cairo, or, perhaps, the vale of Thingvalla in Iceland.

With the cigars, the conversation shifted from details of observation and experience, by way of penetrative comment on men and manners, until it reached what seemed, at least to me, profound conclusions concerning national and social characteristics. The classical scholar, with a majority of the other members, opposed the craftsman and the engineer, in ascribing a certain monotony and shallowness to Japanese life, in spite of its old aestheticism and its new efficiency. Both of the diplomats endorsed the Persian specialist’s statement that “the hope of the East is in Western inoculation; it will never regenerate itself.” “Nor be regenerated,” growled the colonel. “From my point of view,” replied the artist, “it has no need to. Nature is the absolute artist, and nowhere else do people live so close to her. Rare natural beauty, a constant sun, and a mellow atmosphere give existence there such an intensity and richness that mere living becomes an art—‘pure pomegranate, not banana,’ as they say in Egypt.” “It takes the eyes of love to see angels,” concluded the archaeologist. “Natural savages may be noble, but effete races are not, and such most of the Eastern peoples seem to me. However, I may be wrong, or at least narrow; toleration is the great lesson of travel.”

After a number of such discussions, which were listened to by all, the company returned by general consent to more specific topics—plans, principally, for future journeys. These had but a melancholy interest for me, who had not the remotest hope of realizing any of them, until the conversation became once more general in outlining an ideal rapid journey around the world. This whirled me past Honolulu palm trees and craters, amid Japanese cherry-blossoms and wistaria, along the Great Wall of China, through Canton gardens and bazaars, into Calcutta palaces and Delhi temples, by dahabeah in Egypt and camel in Syria, until I caught my breath once more in the midst of the Mediterranean.

But the most valuable part of the evening, and to me the most enjoyable, if satisfaction is to be measured by what one remembers longest, was the concluding half-hour, when every member of the group, quite unconsciously I am sure, fell to felicitating every other member on the success of the evening, the value of travel, and the pleasure and profit of thus discussing it.

I had, myself, experienced vicariously some of the delights of filling in the blank spaces on the map of the world with picturesque scenes and animated figures. I had noted with interest how the habit of observation seemed to lead inevitably to comparison, and that to generalization and conclusion. It had been no small satisfaction to learn how adequately the human frame and mind had met and withstood the severer experiences of the more daring—how small, after all, were the world’s greatest difficulties and dangers to the unconquerable spirit. But it was most gratifying of all to realize that the general experience had resulted not in distrust, but in belief in the fundamental kindliness, if not goodness, of general human nature; and in a firm conviction that the world as a whole was visibly advancing in material, mental, and moral well-being.

I had, naturally, never questioned the charm of travel as a recreation, but this evening gave me a new sense of its superior value as experience and education. I knew, of course, that travel required no ordinary equipment of perception, knowledge, and judgment—of sensitiveness to impressions, with material to compare and ability to value; that indifferent travel would serve only, as Rousseau said of indifferent reading, “to make presumptuous ignoramuses.” But, although I had long believed that the observant and thoughtful home-keeping man might attain an understanding of himself and even of his nation, I came now to doubt that there was any means other than foreign travel for developing a realization of what is really fundamental to the general human spirit.

In voicing to Professor Maturin my gratitude for the pleasure and profit of the evening, I found that he had observed me growing a trifle stale, and had designedly administered this meeting as a remedy. He expressed his opinion that I was already out of danger, judging from my evident appreciation, with Shakespeare, that “a good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner.” And he beamed on me as mellowly as the moon when, at parting, I expressed my intention of continuing the medicine, homoeopathically, through books of travel, until my wonted tone was entirely restored. The whole prescription worked such wonders as a tonic that I strongly recommend it to others.

III
Foreign Travel at Home

“I  THANK you,” said Professor Maturin, laying aside the manuscript he had been reading me, in order to test its appeal,—“I thank you. I am only afraid that you are too generous. But, in any case, I am very grateful, and I hope that you will allow me to be at your service during the remainder of the evening. Do I not see you looking somewhat dispirited again? Are you not neglecting your mental hygiene?” and, leaning forward from his circle of lamplight, he peered at me anxiously.

I replied with one affirmative for both queries, but pleaded misfortune rather than fault. I knew that I was in serious need of variety, but I had found that the specific he had recommended—the atmosphere of foreign travel—no longer satisfied the demand. On the contrary, it aggravated my distemper, by adding to an already overpowering sense of monotony an impossible desire to fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. Books of travel and my friends’ discussions of their coming journeys merely increased my distress.

“So-o?” said Professor Maturin. “So-o-o?” leaning back in his huge leather chair, and putting his finger and thumb tips together. “Well, I suspected as much, and I fear that I am at least partly to blame for your condition. I prescribed a remedy that you have come to find worse than the disease, and, apparently, you have come at the same time to a new realization of Stevenson’s saying that ‘books are all very well in their way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life’—not that I would be disrespectful to my best friends,” and he smiled at the well-filled shelves which extend around his admirable library.

“You will not think me unsympathetic when I say that I have been waiting for this symptom,” he continued. “It is an important part of your cure. Some day I will explain to you my entire system of mental hygiene, but there is not time for that to-night, nor are you quite ready for it until you act upon my next and final recommendation.

“You will remember that Emerson said, ‘Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. The truest visions, the best spectacles I have seen, I might have had at home.’ He did not himself practice his preachment, but that does not invalidate it. Kant, however, I believe, never travelled more than forty miles from Königsberg; and Sainte-Beuve for fifty years seldom left Paris. What, of course, one wants is not to subject himself to the miscellaneous and often distracting impacts of foreign travel, but to realize What essential elements he needs, where to find, and how to apply them. As one of our poets has put it:

Who journeys far may lack the seeing eye:

Stay, thou, and know what wonders round thee lie.

“At one time in my life I travelled continually. But now that I am older and wiser, I know that I can find practically everything I want here at home. At different times I want an almost infinite variety of things, but they are all here in New York. This city is the true cosmopolis: eighty nations are represented in its public schools; four-fifths of the parents of its citizens came from the ends of the earth; there are more than a million Germans; more than a million Irish; more, and vastly more fortunate Hebrews than in all Palestine; and so on—you know the figures.

“Now, I need not insist that what is most important in foreign travel is not the novel sensations to which it gives rise,—the sense of a different climate, the flavor of new dishes, the fragrance of strange flowers, the sound of unfamiliar music, even the sight of ancient buildings or famous pictures—pleasurable and profitable as all of these are; and, fortunately, most of them may be enjoyed here, directly or indirectly. The fundamental value of travel is in the realization that it gives of ways of feeling, thinking, and acting, other than our own; and these, along with many of their outward manifestations, our new Americans bring with them.

“Thus, for example, if you are weary of the physical and mental traits of a land where all things are yet new, you may find the inscrutable calm of the immemorial East in Chinatown, where life flows as it did before Confucius. The ceremonial prescribed by Moses is still carried out here in many synagogues, and I can introduce you to more than one turbaned swami who will talk like Buddha. Unfortunately, our best illustration of the rigid solidity of the Egyptian spirit vanished when the old Tombs prison was torn down, but there is still the obelisk in the Park; and if you read Rossetti’s poem in the midst of the New York Historical Society’s Assyrian marbles, you will surely feel yourself in ancient Nineveh.

“If material crudities or social unrest distress you, you have but to reopen your Aeschylus or your Cicero to recall the balanced strength and fineness of Greece, the early law and order of Rome. Our nearest approaches to Greek architecture are perhaps the porticoes of the Sub-Treasury and the Columbia Library, or the choragic Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Riverside Drive. But from time to time the local Greeks revive their ancient games and enact their classic dramas—for particulars, see their newspaper, Atlantis, if you read modern Greek. As for Rome, High Bridge might fitly stand on the Campagna, or Washington Arch by the Forum; and for both, the Metropolitan Museum is full of casts of sculpture and of actual remains, from the Etruscan chariot to whole walls from Pompeii.

“Would you reap anew the fruits of the Teutonic invasion, you need only observe how it has brought force and endurance, solidity and creature comfort, family affection and social sentiment, good humor and good sense, to New York, as it did to Rome. The city would not be itself, without its delicatessen shops or its Christmas trees; much less without German scholarship or German music—Wagner and Beethoven having become ours even more than Berlin’s.

“Or, if you prefer oil to butter,—that is, are Latin rather than Teutonic in temper,—you may cultivate your mood by a morning with the tower of Madison Square Garden, which is a copy of the Giralda at Seville, and an afternoon in the new Hispanic Museum in Audubon Park. For mediaeval Italy you need but read your Dante in the Church of the Paulist Fathers. For the Renaissance, as for the Gothic, you may study the architecture of any one of a score of our public buildings, or the sculpture and painting in the Metropolitan Museum. Rome itself has now no more Italian citizens than New York, and it hears far less Italian music. While as for French music, French art, French cookery, and French amenity—we have appropriated them as thoroughly as we have the name Lafayette. Our rich men imitate French châteaux; the rest of us bless or revile the French invention of the apartment house.

“Or, if you hold rather to the Anglo-Saxon temper: the English satisfaction in the serious, the solid, the useful; the English habit of accumulation, experiment, and certain conclusion; and the English ideals of physical and mental health and exercise—these traits and their tangible results are happily still so native to us that they can in no sense be considered foreign.

“But even should your need or desire be for the mere sensations of foreign travel, these also may be had in New York. You may taste strange dishes and hear strange music in more foreign cafés in New York than in any other city in the world. In the local shop of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tobacco monopoly you may smoke a water-pipe, calling it hookah, chibouque, or nargileh, according to the place in which you would like to be. You may eat real spaghetti and see marionettes enact the story of Roland on Macdougal Street. You need go no farther east than the East Side to buy Damascus inlaid metals, or Chinese medallion ware, or Japanese flowered playing-cards. It is possible, even, to become an importer in a small way, by buying for five dollars, on Allen Street, Russian brasses that cost seven dollars and fifty cents when transported to Twenty-second Street, or ten dollars and seventy-five cents when they arrive on Fifth Avenue. You may hear the service of the Greek Catholic Church, celebrated by an archbishop, in a cathedral on Ninety-seventh Street. Bohemians, Syrians, and even Egyptians have made whole sections of the city practically their own, so far as manners and customs are concerned. Nearly one hundred newspapers and periodicals are published in New York in more than a score of foreign tongues. Perhaps you would care to read a New York daily that is printed in Arabic?”

Rising, Professor Maturin drew from a drawer and held before me a copy of Kawkab Amerika, a goodly-sized sheet, in strange characters, but with a pictured heading eloquent to all. There I saw the desert, with mosques to the right, and pyramids and Sphinx to the left. Between were hosts of desert-dwellers, on foot, on horseback, on camel, but all gazing and pointing to the central sky, where appeared a radiant vision of our harbor statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.

“And it is no mirage to them,” said Professor Maturin, after a pause, “and that is the best of it all to me. The strangeness of these newcomers is, indeed, refreshing, but I like better to think of them as most of them really are, or soon will be—the most genuine of Americans. They are so through choice and, often, hard endeavor; you and I, perhaps, only through accident. You know the fundamental loyalty of the typical German-American. The Spanish press of the city was staunchly American during our last war. The Turkish periodicals applauded our demonstrations against the Porte; and Hungarians, Servians, Syrians, and Persians have each formally organized for the purpose of influencing their fatherlands to become more like the land of their adoption.

“And so we come to the most valuable of all the ends of travel—the greater realization and appreciation of home. We return from other nations with relief—for there are few American emigrants—to a yet new land of fertile soil and mineral wealth; to a people varied, yet homogeneous, energetic, aggressive, ingenious, and self-reliant. We face, it is true, problems such as the world has never known before, but with unprecedented belief in idealism, morality, order, and education; not apprehensive of danger, but quick in recognizing and decisive in meeting it. Our successes in transportation, in architecture, and in material well-being in general; our achievement of the welfare of the whole people over that of section or class, of equality of opportunity for each and of benevolence toward all, have already taught the whole world new lessons of peace, tolerance, and faith in the average man. Nor do I see any reason, as we become more and more a new race, blended of many, why our good fortunes should not continue and increase. Anything else would falsify our trust in a wide and a wise humanity—and that is unthinkable.

“But, I beg your pardon,” said Professor Maturin, as I rose to say good-night, “I did not mean to take the stump; and yet, I believe that it is good sometimes to give utterance to these things which all of us feel. Nothing revives the vigor of one’s spirit like the conscious realization of being in harmony with fundamental law.”

IV
Country Life

I  HAVE never seen my friend Professor Maturin in better health or spirits than he was when I met him the other evening at the Athenaeum. He had just finished dinner, and indicated that he was in the mood for talk by ordering two of the Cuban vegueras that he keeps in a private box at the club, for use on special occasions.

“I am just back from the best vacation I have ever had,” he began. “I have been spending a month with a friend up the river, at a most delightful place, built and planted about fifty years ago by his father, from memories of the villas about Florence, where he once lived. The house has window balconies, a tower, a loggia opening west and south, and a red-flagged terrace with a stone balustrade, all complete. Below this slopes a wide lawn, then many flowering shrubs, and finally splendid groupings of trees between and over which you may see the river, here at its widest. The hills beyond and the highlands to the north complete the picture.

“After breakfasting alone, at any time my fancy chose, according to the happy custom of the house, I spent whole mornings on the terrace, looking through the aisles of ancient oaks at the river, or at the heaped-up summer clouds as they drifted south. I have heard the Hudson called epic, because of its breadth and power. It is no less so in its incidental embellishments of sunlight and shadow. I often watched it from its morning silver, through all shades of reflected blue, until at night it looked like a texture of royal purple into which the moonlight and the stars were being woven. The clouds were better than any Alpine mountains. Their mass and light and dark were as definite, and they had other clouds about their peaks and oceans of vapor at their feet. In addition they changed constantly, and turned to gold and opal at evening.

“At luncheon, or shortly before, I met my host and hostess. If before, we often strolled through a catalpa avenue to a semi-circular stone seat overlooking the river, or along a pine walk to a lookout toward the highlands, or past an orchard back of the house to a certain sunset hill, for the widest view of all, where we could see the river for twenty miles. Sometimes the hostess led us to sections which she called ‘nature’s gardens,’ because of the wild flowers, of which she was particularly fond.

“About such flowers I knew so little that I would have been tempted to revive my ancient botany had I not a good while ago learned the necessity of limiting the number of one’s avocations and of resisting the temptation to rob them of time, to spend on this new thing and that. I felt the same way about the trees, which, I was told, represented every indigenous variety. I knew by name only oak and elm, beech and maple, and a few others; but I made the most of the compensations of my ignorance, by noting, with all the freshness of discovery, the characteristic angle or curve of the different boughs, the varied form, texture, and characteristic movement of branch and leaf, the innumerable greens of the foliage, and their infinite modulations under light and shade.

“I am sure that we often know too much to get the full value of our impressions. For a long time painters could not represent trees because they remembered what each leaf was like; Claude painted his landscapes from what he knew, rather than what he saw, Constable from what he loved, Turner from what he imagined. It was not until the Barbizon men lived in the forest that Rousseau caught the actual form and Corot the fragrance of nature, and Monet could paint true light and air. It is said that the most interesting writing is done by generally cultivated people concerning subjects that are new to them. The greatest enjoyment of nature often comes in the same way. It is quite possible to be ‘connoisseured out of one’s senses.’

“At our luncheons the talk was always delightful, for my friend’s ample fortune gives him both occupation enough to keep him contemporary, and leisure enough to allow him to be Coleridge’s ideal man of letters, reaping only the choicest and most spontaneous growths of a richly cultivated mind. After luncheon we usually sat awhile in the large, although simple, conservatory, which adjoined the dining-room—if the word ‘simple’ may properly be applied to a place where orange and lemon trees attained their natural size, roses bloomed by the hundred, and where we picked ripe pomegranates and figs for our dessert. This, too, was due to the genius of the founder of the house, whose works my friend delighted to honor and cherish.

“When we separated again I usually retired to my room for a book and a nap, which lasted I know not how long, one of the charms of the place being that artificial timepieces were absent, or, at least, invisible and inaudible, everything, apparently, being regulated by the sun. This source of light and heat usually led me in the late afternoon to the loggia to watch the earliest anticipations of the evening glow, and to listen to an orchestra of mocking-birds in an open-air cage, accompanied by their wild neighbors, of whom there seemed to be multitudes. English sparrows were ruthlessly banished, but every other sort of bird was protected, with the reward of the almost familiar companionship of orioles, cardinals, wrens, and humming-birds, and the constant song of warbler, thrush, and meadow-lark. In nothing, I think, is the country more delightfully different from the town than in its sounds. Even the winds and the rains sound different there.

“My friend has so long lived his life with nature that it has become the theme of his chief study. He outlined this to me one evening when the rain caused us to transfer our coffee from the terrace to the conservatory, where his ideas became permanently associated with the impressions of azalea bloom and jasmine fragrance which I acquired at the same time.

“‘I am slowly accumulating,’ he said, ‘facts and ideas for a history of the relations between nature and man in the United States. The conditions have been peculiar, and the results more than ordinarily interesting. Nowhere else, for example, have people possessing all the arts of civilization made their homes in the midst of absolutely primitive nature. With such a beginning, three thousand years of history have here been epitomized in three hundred. Nature as an enemy was soon conquered, and nowhere else has she afterward shown herself more friendly in surface fertility and underground resources. Our vast and relatively undiversified territory has brought men of the coast, the mountains, and the plains; of the rugged North and the languorous South, into closer and more constant contact than ever before. And to this unparalleled interplay we have welcomed myriads from every other climate and condition on the earth, and have set up for the whole theories of government which allow almost perfect freedom to all racial, local, and individual traits.

“‘I intend to deal but briefly with the physical results of such inhabitation. The wisdom of experience is beginning to check the perhaps natural tendency to spoil ruthlessly the conquered forest; and even the most materially minded are beginning to act toward the universal mother no more harshly than they would toward a captive or slave whose usefulness is increased by considerate treatment.

“‘The peculiar relations between nature and the human spirit in the United States, however, seem to me worthy of extended study. Thus, it is undoubtedly because of our unique environment, that so just an observer as Emerson found American perceptions keener than any he met with elsewhere. Our poets have certainly recorded other and more varied aspects of nature than their English brethren, who in comparison seem to deal chiefly with the “common or garden variety.” Nothing is more mistaken than to consider Bryant a kind of inferior Wordsworth. There is more truth in the remark that Wordsworth himself was not primarily a nature poet, since nature was to him chiefly the source of certain stimuli to the mental life, which was his fundamental interest. Bryant not only feels this stimulus, along with nature’s suggestive and representative qualities, and its physical benefits; but he also apprehends nature as an independent world of physical life and order, of which man is a citizen so far as he is a creature, and of which he may be a ruler so far as his mind works in harmony with natural law, and partakes of the power behind it.

“‘This aspect of nature was not, I believe, apprehended by Wordsworth at all. He at least gave no utterance to it. Similarly, in the treatment of the water-world, in which English poets have usually excelled, the English critic Henley has shown how Longfellow, through a simple self-forgetfulness in his impressions, found eternal beauties hitherto unnoticed. Emerson’s nature-teaching is fairly well known, but the depth and breadth of Whitman’s sympathy for land and sea has yet to be generally appreciated; and these poets are only a few of many examples.

“‘American painting, too, has found itself in landscape; our sculpture and music have drawn inspiration from aboriginal life; and our natural science is second to none in its careful, accurate, and tireless study.

“‘The special field in which we may learn from the older world is in the employment of nature as the material of art; and for this with our advance in wealth and leisure, we are now ready. Roman, Italian, and English examples have already been followed in making real for us some of Poe’s visions of cultivated landscape; and I am daily expecting those delightful intellectual and aesthetic results which have always come when men, wearied with the cultivation of cities, retire to the contrasting peace, simplicity, and beauty of nature.’

“There were, of course,” continued Professor Maturin, “many other general ideas in my friend’s system, and he has accumulated a vast hoard of particular facts to illustrate them. The last aspect of the subject, however, continued to interest me most; for I was experiencing hourly the truth of what he said concerning the thaumaturgic, healing power of nature. I never felt such gentle and cumulative refreshment in my life. The varied sensations of travel, which is perhaps the favorite form of recreation, merely whip the jaded spirit into new activity. But these peaceful, natural scenes and sounds allow the senses to relax, and the mind to renew its texture and recover its tone. As Browning puts it,

my soul

Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll.

I have experienced a real re-creation.

“Therefore,” concluded Professor Maturin, as we finished our cigars, “you must not be surprised if, within the next few weeks, I compose a pastoral symphony, or become a new Theocritus, or—what is less unlikely—retire to a villa, as Horace did.”

V
Food for Thought

I  WAS just ordering dinner at the Athenaeum when Professor Maturin entered the room and peered about over his spectacles in search of a congenial corner. Happily for me, his glance encountered mine, and his smile accepted my invitation. I settled myself for an hour of rare conversation.

“And what are you planning to have?” he queried. I passed him the order I was signing, but noticed, as he read it, first surprise, then incredulity, and finally sorrow in his expression.

“My friend, my friend,” he said, mournfully shaking his head, “and you a literary man!”

“Won’t you, then, order for me instead?” I responded, cancelling the slip, outwardly meek, but inwardly rejoicing that my friend’s energy had created a situation which his kindliness would require him to explain at length.

“In the cause of the advancement of learning, sir, I will!” he replied. And taking a new blank, he began to write from the bottom upward, remarking: “In the first place, I always feel, in order that a dinner may have unity and consistency, it should be planned like a poem, from the end toward the beginning; all the more, since there is no chance for revision. There,” he resumed, finishing, “I think that will do, as simple, nourishing, and suggestive.”

And he read: “Oysters, with a few Platonic olives, for the sake of Dr. Holmes and criticism; a bit of tenderloin, in memory of Mary Lamb’s beefsteak pudding; asparagus, which, according to Charles Lamb, inspires gentle thoughts; cauliflower, which Dr. Johnson preferred to all other flowers; Vergil’s salad; apple pie, according to Henry Ward Beecher’s recipe, with a bit of Dean Swift’s cheese; and, finally, a little coffee. I have considerably increased my usual ration in order that you may not miss what the French call ‘the sensation of satiety.’

“I find it difficult,” sighed Professor Maturin, as he passed the order to an attendant and leaned back in his chair, “to absolve men of letters from what has been called the crime of unintelligent eating. Of all men their need of and their opportunity for wisdom in such matters is the greatest. And yet you have Gray wondering at his ailments and his melancholia, when he was eating chiefly marmalade and pastry, taking no exercise, and dosing himself with tar water and sage tea.

“Shelley did scarcely better in a more enlightened age. Byron’s habitual flesh-reducing mixture, potatoes and vinegar, is chemically indigestible. And Thoreau literally consumed himself in following and advocating a diet which so prepared him for tuberculosis that living half his time in the open air could not prevent it.

“The opposite extreme, which is yet more common, is even less attractive in men of genius. Who likes to remember that Spenser and Milton had gout, or that Goethe drank in his time fifty thousand bottles of wine? As for Pepys, what do you think of having one’s ‘only mayde’ dress such a home dinner as this, copied from his ‘Diary:’ ‘A fricassee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton, three carps, a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie, a dish of anchovies, and good wine of several sorts’? No wonder that his better qualities are obscured in our memories of him.

“Philosophers, men of action, and, interestingly enough, men of the world, have usually set a better example. ‘They that sup with Plato,’ said Aelianus, ‘are not sick or out of temper the next day.’ Socrates, Epicurus, and Kant, all preached and practiced judgment and restraint. Horace and Catullus insisted that their pampered guests should bring their luxuries with them. Montaigne highly disapproved of elaborate cooking, and Pope refused to dine with Lady Suffolk so late in the day as four.

“Then there is that admirable story of Cincinnatus, whom the venal senators knew they could not bribe after they found him preparing his own dinner of turnips. It is quite in keeping that King Alfred should have burned the cakes, and that Napoleon should have spilled the omelet; and it is to Lady Cromwell’s credit that she would not allow the Protector oranges that cost a groat apiece.

“Even aside from health and morals, a man’s relation to food is always significant. Who can think of Tasso without remembering that he loved sweetmeats? Is there not literary suggestion in the fact that Vergil loved garlic and Horace hated it; that Horace preferred his Falernian and his Sabine farm to the dinners and Persian apparatus of Maecenas, but that Cicero loved to dine with Lucullus and bought himself a seven-thousand-dollar dinner table?

“Is it not illuminating to know that the favorite food of Burns was oat-cake, that of Byron truffles? De Quincey’s reports that Wordsworth used the same knife for cutting butter and the pages of books; and that Scott, when Wordsworth’s guest, repaired secretly to an inn for chops and ale—these are not gossip, but literary criticism. It is as surely interpretative of Dickens to know that he disliked Italian cookery as that he was fond of playing an accordeon.

“Carlyle’s pessimism is usually attributed to indigestion. It ought, I think, to be as usual to explain Emerson’s optimism by a digestion that could cope successfully with his favorite pie. We habitually associate tea and coffee with Johnson and Balzac, and their work. Should we not as often remember that Milton produced ‘Paradise Lost’ on coffee, and ‘Paradise Regained’ on tea? Of course, such physical criticism of literature must be limited by other judgments. I can well agree with Dr. Gould that many writers show the effects of eye-strain, and it is difficult to upset the diagnosis of anaemia in Hawthorne; but I hesitate to think, with Dr. Conan Doyle, that Shakespeare had locomotor ataxia.”

“Why did you associate oysters with criticism?” I inquired, as Professor Maturin paused.

“Do you not recall,” he replied, “the Autocrat’s remark that literary reputations are largely a matter of administering oysters in the form of suppers, to gentlemen connected with criticism? Veuillot similarly claimed that men were elected to the French Academy chiefly because they gave good dinners. Sydney Smith applied the principle to religion when he said, ‘The way to deal with fanatics is not to reason with them, but to ask them to dinner.’ On the other hand, Swift used deliberately to test men’s tempers by offering them bad wine.”

“And did Plato like olives?” I continued.

“He often made a meal of nothing else,” was the reply.

“And what was Vergil’s salad?” It arrived at that moment.

“It is made of cheese and parsley, with a bit of garlic, rue, and coriander, salt, oil, and vinegar. A little of it is, I think, very pleasing. I much prefer it to Sydney Smith’s. I never understood how he could write ‘Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day’ about a salad made of potatoes. For the truly esoteric doctrine you must read John Evelyn’s ‘Discourse of Sallets.’

“Indeed, I am inclined, on the whole, to think that Sydney Smith was what Carlyle called ‘a blethering blellum,’ when he wrote about food, as he so often did. It was perfectly proper for him to express a desire to experience American canvasbacks, and to be glad that he was not born before tea; but to say that roast pheasant and bread sauce was the source of the most elevated pleasure in life, and that his idea of heaven was eating pâté de fois gras to the sound of trumpets—that was both posing and trifling with serious subjects. Charles Lamb’s comments on roast pig and frogs’ legs, and his kindred table talk, are much more genuine, and, of course, charming; but even they scarcely touch the deeper aspects of the subject.

“Thackeray had all of Lamb’s appreciation of food and, I think, something more. He enjoyed his own and accepted others’ idiosyncrasies of taste,—witness his treating boys to apricot omelet, which he hated,—but his plea for simpler and more varied dinners, for more hospitality and less ostentation, indicates, I think, that he realized at least something of the profound moral and social significance of food.

“This, as you know, is one of my hobbies, and I unconsciously add it to my other criteria of judgment in my reading. That Scott invented a venison pasty, Dickens a sandwich, Webster a clam chowder, and Henry Clay a stew is interesting; just as it is that Buckle was discriminate and Heine indiscriminate in choosing tea. But it is far more significant that Dr. Johnson considered writing a cook-book, and that Dumas’ last work actually was such a volume of more than a thousand pages.

“That is the kind of thing we need: sound doctrine from influential writers, but it is not easy to get. The intemperate use of food, which is always with us, causes many to turn with prejudice from the whole subject. Here, as elsewhere, conservatism often opposes the good. You know, for example, how long the clergy decried the use of forks; and I never cease to regret that the man who was opened-minded enough to introduce umbrellas into England should have been furiously opposed to tea.

“Many writers, too, treat the subject fancifully, without regard to its inherent truths—witness the conventional praise of the indigestible turtle. Often those who intend well lack knowledge: Pythagoras made it a principle of morality to abstain from beans, an almost perfect food; the ideal diet of Plato’s republic, barley pudding and bread, does not contain the elements necessary to sustain life properly. Democritus inaugurated the still repeated heresy that any food that is pleasant is wholesome; and even Dr. Johnson defended his doubtful practice of eating whenever he was hungry, without regard to regularity. For all these reasons and many others I hold it, in this enlightened age, doubly the responsibility of intelligent men, and particularly of those who influence popular opinion, to acquire a sound knowledge of such matters and to do all that they can to disseminate it.”

“You have previously convinced me of this,” I replied, “but I have not found it easy to attain to such knowledge.”

“The important thing,” continued my mentor, “is a conscious attitude of serious attention to contemporary investigations in the field. One should welcome every item of reliable information, observe much, and, whenever possible, experiment. Of course, our special problem, as persons of sedentary habit, is to obtain a large quantity of blood and brain nutriment without taxing an organism which gets comparatively little physical exercise. The problem is not simple, indeed it is very complex, but it can be so completely handled by knowledge and care that the process of solving it adds another satisfaction to life.

“Cheerfulness, by the way, is an invaluable agent in the whole business. I know of a physician who cured a persistent dyspeptic by requiring him to tell at least one amusing story at each meal. We are apt to forget that the taking of food is not only a necessity, but also one of our most constant sources of pleasure.

Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,

Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?

Sometimes, even, as Voltaire says, ‘the superfluous is a very necessary thing.’

“That high thinking does not require that all our living be plain, is admirably illustrated by this quotation from Mr. Howells’s reminiscence of the ‘very plain’ suppers which followed the meetings of Longfellow’s memorable Dante Club. They consisted of ‘a cold turkey, or a haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a plate of quails, with a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect vintages which Longfellow loved and chose with the inspiration of affection.’

“From such pabulum came our most poetic version of the world’s most spiritual poet.”

VI
Beside the Sea

HEARING that Professor Maturin was back again in town, I made an early call, and found him hale and hearty, bleached and bronzed, and even more than usually clear-eyed.

“Behold me returned from a summer beside the sea,” he said in greeting. “I see that you note the visible indications of my sea-change. Whenever you are in the mood for a tide of talk, I believe I can convince you that my experience was as rich as its outward signs are strange.” I reminded him that there was never any time like the present, and added such further solicitation that he began at once.

“You know the locality of my preference: a place frequented just enough not to be lonely, a region of bays and sounds as well as of open sea; where the waves batter at the cliffs only to return their spoil to the sands—where, in short, the unity of the element appears in endless variety. My favorite station was a dune-guarded beach of sand, which swept on either hand into pebbles and stones, until lost in the rocks heaped below the boulder cliffs that formed the horns of a crescent cove.

“At first I spent unmeasured hours looking over the expanse toward the terminal haze, and watching, as far out as I could, the great ridges rolling with the motion of wind and tide and open sea. At the farthest, they looked like mountain ranges, one behind the other; nearer, they were dark green hills with grayish summits. Nearer yet, one could see them reflect the sky, and sometimes the shore. Nearest of all, there was a visible upgathering before the rush, plunge, and sweep on the beach—all endlessly repeated and infinitely varied.

“The same perpetual repetition and variety appeared in the surge, as it flooded up the sands in a wide curve of plash, ripple, and foam; paused, retreated slowly, and then swept out, only to join with the drag of the bottom in opposing an incoming wave, until it rose high, plunged forward, and broke into the churning shallows, which were quickly covered by the main body of the wave as it flooded in.

“The outermost margin of almost every surge lingered long enough to make its record in a tiny ridge of sand and to reflect the light and color of the sky; then it sank into the sand, leaving a burden of pebbles and shells, stubble and seaweed, and the like. This flotsam and jetsam is so constantly swept up, drawn back, and tossed to and fro that I was not surprised to find the sands, under a microscope, composed entirely of such materials worn to powder. Behind me, the sea and the wind had heaped the sand into hills, that shore grasses burrowed into and held together. To left and right, the cliffs, although high and precipitous, were so scarred and worn by storm and wave that they looked almost primeval. Their tops were bared by the winds and corroded by the alternate action of heat and moisture; their granite sides were seamed and stained by the surge; and their feet were encumbered with fragments of their own wreckage that must have thundered down like avalanches. These rocks, whether flung forward in reefs like sculptured waves, or heaped like ruins, were naturally of a rich old rose, but they were often also gray with barnacles, or green with sea growths, and they showed even deeper in tone when submerged beneath the many pools that similarly mellowed and enriched the coloring of pebbles, shells, and weeds.

“My observation of the almost infinitely varied flora and fauna of the sea was, naturally, but superficial. Yet I saw many delightful plant and flower-like forms of dark or light green, yellow, brown, and red, all ceaselessly retinted by the ever-changing sky lights, and the reflection and refraction of the water. Sometimes they rioted in thick tangles among the rocks; again they softly swayed, outspread toward the rising and falling surface.

“The fauna I preferred to look at under water, for, on the whole, I found them grotesque, although I was bound to admire their adjustment to their environment, and to respect them as possible images of our remote ancestors. I was especially impressed with the constant warfare beneath the surface, as exemplified in the regular manœuvring of whole armies of tiny fish, only to have company after company routed by the dash and gulp of some larger enemy.

“The bottom of the sea I have never seen, save through the glass-bottomed boats of the Bermudas, but some day I hope for a diver’s view of the depths. It is easy to understand why the imagination of the poets should be stimulated by the idea of that cool, dim quietness, disturbed only by the swaying of verdure and the movement of great fish; of the richness of color, and the long, slow passage of time, measured only by the up-building of the coral.

“The open sea is, of course, familiar to us all, and yet its apparent boundlessness and immeasurable depth are ever new as the most immense thing in our knowledge—the sky belonging rather to the realm of the intangible. Mid-ocean always makes me feel the infinite continuity of time, the omnipresence of natural law, and a stimulus to greater harmony with its workings. Nowhere else are my ‘cosmic emotions’ so stirred. One gets something of the same impression on land wherever one can mark the ceaseless rising, pausing, and falling of the tide, under the mysterious governance of the moon. I am more than fond of the regular, gentle quality of the tide’s behavior, even if it does sometimes seem stealthy in its creeping toward and around the half-oblivious observer.

“I cannot similarly commend the behavior of the wind, when it opposes the tide in bluster on the sea or pushes it in tumult on the shore. The tide is a serene and responsible world power; the wind almost always performs its indispensable functions with all the eccentricity of genius. A breeze is positively attractive when ruffling the surface or sweeping spray from the wave-crests, and the wind itself is unobjectionable when it consistently urges the waves in one direction. But when it plays havoc with the clouds, or ‘ruffians on the enchafèd flood’ until it fastens upon the eluctant sea a behavior as bad and a reputation worse than its own—then I am by no means for it.

“It was my fortune this summer to witness several storms of such intensity that I became impressed with the routine of their procedure. The sea—grown dark, heavy, and oily—is first flicked and spotted, and then strangely lighted, all over, with the dash of rain and hail; the sun is made lurid, then shrouded, and then hidden by a metallic sky; the clouds grow gloomy and sullen until they are shattered by peals of thunder and riven by livid lightnings. Then the wind rushes, howls, and roars; tearing and hurtling the clouds and tumbling and lashing the waves until they leap and plunge, reel and writhe, flinging up hissing foam and whirling spray ‘shrewd with salt.’ It is undoubtedly glorious—but I like it best when it is over, leaving the torn waves heavy with foam as a reminder, by contrast, of the quieter beauties of a calmer sea.

“Even the sky, the most beautiful thing that we know, seems to multiply its beauty by the sea. One day I saw night gradually lapsing into dawn. The sea glimmered as though the stars had come down, and then flashed until, in the language of Swinburne, it blossomed rosily and flowered in the sun, floating all fiery upon the burning water. I saw many long mornings of sapphire sky and lapis-lazuli sea, and many noons when the waves glittered until their spray became diamonds. Through long afternoons the sea reflected sky and clouds in every shade of silver, blue, and green. The amber fire of the setting sun not only made the heavens splendid, but poured both direct and reflected rays upon the sea until nothing but the idea of a stupendous opal could suggest its coloring. Later, all would fade until land was lost, the sea grew deep and dark, and the only light was the foam and the reflections of the stars. With the moon, all grew new again. Rising low and large, it threw a broad, undulating pathway as golden as that of the sun was silver. Where it reached the shore its glitter extended along the surf, gleaming over the sands, and twinkling wherever spray or dew had fallen. Later yet, as the moon quietly sank, the general illumination grew dim, until obscurity covered land and sea alike, and the sea seemed to merge into infinite space.

“Then, as at no other time, one hears the sound of the sea. I spent many hours listening, endeavoring to analyze it, and to interpret its effect. Its continuity and variety are perhaps its most striking characteristics. It is so ceaseless that it suggests the everlasting. Within this perpetuity it rises and sinks, leaps and falls, gathers and dissolves; it sweeps and rolls, sways and trembles; it seems to approach and withdraw, to flow and overflow; it sounds and resounds, repeats and changes. And well it may do all this and more, considering that its source is a countless number and variety of waves, surging, breaking, and seething among themselves; rushing, plashing, lapping on the shore, chafing sand, rattling pebbles, grating shells, grinding rocks:—all of the resulting sound being constantly varied as well as augmented by breeze, wind, and storm; by the configuration and reverberating qualities of the shore; and by the varying acoustic properties of the atmosphere.

“Analysis being thus nearly baffled, I turned to analogy, and found the sound like the rumble of thunder, the crash of falling rocks, the rush of cataracts; like the quiver of green branches and the rustle of dry leaves; like the bellow and roar of animals; the clash of arms and armor. It is very much like music in its elements of monotone, chord, cadence, melody, and harmony; its relations of continuity, rhythm, repetition, and variation; in its sounds as of cymbal, tympani, bell, trumpet, viol, harp, or organ; its suggestions of symphony or chorale. It is, perhaps, most of all like the human voice, half audible in whisper or murmur; inarticulate in sigh or sob; muffled in mutter or moan; hushed in lullaby or croon; blended in a unison of song or supplication; confused in the hum and rumor, the call and shout, the clamor or tumult of great crowds.

“From such prosing of my own I turned to the record and interpretation of sea music by the poets. From them I collected an alphabetical list of characterizations, and by the time that I had accumulated about one hundred I fell so into their spirit that I, myself, produced the following—as yet unnamed—poetic fragment:

Always attunéd, its anthem billowing, breaking is blown;

Ceaseless, its cadenced complaining deepens to dirge or to drone;

Ever its eloquent echo falling, again flies free,

Till it gathers and grows in grandeur like heaven’s high harmony.

“I stopped there, because ‘kissing’ was the next striking epithet and that seemed rather too fanciful, although the Swinburnian spirit aroused by the composition yearned, so to speak, to go on to ‘mightily murmured the main’ and ‘sonorously sounded the sibilant sea.’

“Seriously, however, the problem of adequately recording and interpreting the aspects of the sea is as fascinating as it is difficult. The best media are, of course, sculpture for its form and substance, painting for its light and color, music for its movement and sound. Poetry and prose reflect something of all of these, poetry more suggestively, prose more accurately. The poets, however, turn so quickly from actual aspects and impressions to their mental and emotional accompaniments, that they seem devoted rather to exploiting their own poetic gifts than the richness of their subject. Their observation is usually sensitive and keen, but it is quickly checked and often distorted by the action of fancy. Accuracy of expression is frequently disturbed by spontaneous or deliberate search for the picturesque or figurative utterance, made so easy by the enormous vocabulary that the sea has impressed upon our language. Poets who are gifted with rhythmical or harmonic power habitually exceed in those directions also. Happily there are some sea poems that are true as well as beautiful, but it seems quite too bad that such masters as Shelley, Arnold, and Emerson should intellectualize, and Coleridge, Rossetti, and Poe should dream, about the sea until they make it appear merely a minister to their moods rather than the immense, unspoiled, cosmic thing it really is.”

“Man overboard?” said Professor Maturin suddenly, as he halted abruptly before me in the perambulation he had begun after rising to secure the manuscript of his poetic fragment, and had slowly continued ever since back and forth along the long rug that he calls his “beat”—“I have flowed in good earnest. Your submerged appearance indicates that you agree with me that my experience was well-nigh overwhelming.”

Accepting his helping hand, I pulled myself out of the depths of the huge leather chair into which I had sunk, and expressed my genuine appreciation by saying, along with my good-nights, “The next time we meet, I should like just such another dip.”

VII
Christmas

IT is always possible to divine something of the state of Professor Maturin’s mind from the order or the congestion of his books and papers. When, therefore, the other day, I found him behind a perfect rampart of volumes bristling with paper-markers, I knew that he was loading with some new knowledge or other, and meditated how I might draw his fire. But he anticipated my efforts by sallying from his fortification, dishevelled but beaming, with the salvo:

“God rest you, merry gentleman;

Let nothing you dismay!—

“What will you give for the Christmas spirit?” he continued. “I have been seeking it, seasonably, and believe that I have found it.”

I capitulated immediately, and we sat down by the fire for a parley, which he began promptly.

“The Christmas spirit appears to be inherent in human nature, in the climatic change from summer seed-time, through autumn harvest, to hearty winter relaxation and cheer over the garnered fruits of husbandry or art. In the South it began as the winter feast of Saturn, celebrated with masking and gifts. In the North it was Odin’s, with log fires and feasting. Then the early Christian fathers chose it for celebrating their Founder’s new teaching of peace and good-will.

“Gradually all of this blended into the most interesting mingling of the material and the spiritual that we have in all our manners and customs. The traditions of the shepherds and the star, the nativity, and the wise men of the East became the centre of the celebration. But the mediaeval popularity of Macrobius’s book on the Saturnalia perpetuated its carnival and games, its candles and garlands, and its giving of gifts, especially to children. The descending Teutons brought their wassail and their tree ceremonials. Germany added Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus, and the filling of stockings. France seems to have furnished the carols. England elaborated the season’s food and drink, and America contributed the turkey.

“With the growth of church and state the day became one of pomp and circumstance. Westminster Abbey was consecrated on Christmas in 1065, and William was crowned there the next Christmas. Other episcopal and royal functions followed, until more was spent on this season than in all the year beside. There were special buildings, elaborate pageants elaborately set, and feasts of five hundred dishes with sixty oxen for one course and eight-hundred-pound plum puddings. There were jousts at which three hundred spears were broken, and the presentation of as many as thirty plays. Earlier, the plays were religious; later, Shakespeare provided the court play for Christmas, 1601, and Ben Jonson for 1616. Milton’s ‘Comus’ was presented at Ludlow Castle during the Christmas season of 1634.

“The universities and the inns of court were likewise keen for plays and for ‘the boar’s head served with minstrelsy.’ The aristocracy and gentry kept open house, for sometimes as many as three hundred persons. Sir Roger de Coverley sent a string of puddings and a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish; and rich decedents left Christmas dinners and gifts to the poor. The peasantry entered heartily into seasonable mummery and games, dances and songs, so industriously thumbing the many early printed books of carols that almost none of them remain.

“Everywhere indoor leisure and the seasonable mood gave rise to all sorts and conditions of legendary lore—of spirits, of trees that flower and animals that speak on Christmas eve, and of weather wisdom, like:

If Christmasse day on fryday be,

The frost of wynter harde shal be.

“From the beginning, the spirit of the celebration had to wage war with the flesh. The fathers of the church never ceased to remonstrate that festivity endangered the solemnity of the season. There were constant failures to remember the peaceful character of the feast. The Danes fell on King Alfred while he was celebrating Christmas in 878, and William the Conqueror got into York on Christmas in 1069 by sending in spies with good-will gifts of food. The mediaeval Lords of Misrule, originally established to control festivity, became themselves uncontrolled, and had to be abolished.”

“Even though they made some very good laws,” I interrupted, “against eating two dinners in one day, and kissing without leave.”

“The Pilgrim fathers at Plymouth frowned on current excesses by working on Christmas day in 1620 and by later prohibiting its celebration. Cromwell’s Parliament sat every Christmas day from 1644 to 1656, and sermonized and legislated against the celebration as a carnal feast, ordering churches shut, shops open, and decorations down. But this was too extreme, and the people smashed the shop windows and put up more evergreens than the Lord Mayor’s men could burn; and Evelyn delighted in being arrested for going to church on Christmas in 1657. In five years all was so changed that Pepys could for once combine preaching and practice, by hearing a Christmas sermon on joyousness and having plum pudding and mince pie for dinner.

“From the beginning, too, the spirit of benevolence has had its difficulties. Watchmen left verses at doors, wanderers sang carols, and children chanted, ‘I’ve got a little pocket to put a penny in,’ until such suggestion to benevolence became a little too definite, and it was legislated against. In 1668 Pepys says tipping ‘cost me much money this Christmas already, and will do more.’ Half a century later Swift writes: ‘By the Lord Harry, I shall be done with Christmas boxes. The rogues at the coffee house have raised their tax, every one giving a crown, and I gave mine for shame; besides a great many half-crowns, to great men’s porters, etc.’

“Of other giving Swift writes: ‘Making agreeable presents ... [is] an affair as delicate as most in the course of life,’ and he never fails to caution Stella against a new danger, that of losing her money in Christmas gaming. Concerning this custom Walpole wrote on twelfth-day in 1752: ‘His Majesty, according to annual custom, offered myrrh, frankincense, and a small bit of gold; and, at night, in commemoration of the three kings or wise men, the King and royal family played at hazard ... his most sacred Majesty won three guineas, and his R. H. the duke, three thousand four hundred pounds.’

“Concerning gifts, Walpole instances the charming presents devised for a little girl of ten by the Duchess of Suffolk and Lord Chetwynd, aged seventy-six and eighty, respectively; and he prescribes the theory, ‘Pray remember not to ruin yourself in presents. A very slight gift of a guinea or two obliges as much, is more fashionable, and not a moment sooner forgotten than a magnificent one; and then you may cheaply oblige the more persons.’”

“Such being the earlier history and tradition of the festival, what should be its modern spirit?” I inquired.

“For that, too,” continued Professor Maturin, “there is no lack of leading. Charles Lamb is frankly for ‘the good old munching system ... ingens gloria apple-pasty-orum,’ and does not hesitate to prescribe for Christmas, 1800, ‘snipes exactly at nine, punch at ten, with argument; difference of opinion expected about eleven, perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve.’

“Thomas Love Peacock makes his Rev. Dr. Opimian say, about 1860: ‘I think much of Christmas and all its associations. I like the idea of the yule-log. I like the festoons of holly on the walls and windows; the dance under the mistletoe; the gigantic sausage; the baron of beef; the vast globe of plum pudding; the tapping of the old October; the inexhaustible bowl of punch.... I like the idea of what has gone, and I can still enjoy the reality of what remains.’

“Dr. Opimian further prescribes for the season such merry tales as his contemporary ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ provide in the distinguished career, but inglorious end, of ‘The Spectre of Tappington,’ which nightly made away with the trousers of the guest who occupied the haunted room at Christmas. All of these same hearty traditions are perpetuated by Fenimore Cooper in his description of Christmas festivity in ‘The Pioneers.’”

“Does not Washington Irving,” I asked, “have an important place in the tradition?”

“Precisely so,” continued Professor Maturin; “it was reserved for him, from his knowledge of Dutch and English customs, to make a new selection and recombination of Christmas ideals so appealing as to have set the standard ever since. His half-dozen Christmas papers dwell, with his characteristic love of the past, on the superior honesty, kindliness, and joy of the old holiday customs. No refinement of elegance can replace, he maintains, the family gatherings, the perfecting of sympathies, the realization of mutual dependence, and the increase of mutual affection, instinct in the ancient hospitality. To his own question as to the worth of Christmas observances, he gives the most characteristic answer in his philosophy—there is plenty of wisdom in the world, but we need more sound pleasure to beguile care and increase benevolence and good humor.

“It was this ethical intention to reëstablish the old tradition of kindliness that Dickens followed, with the result of again endearing the season, as Mr. Howells has said, ‘to the whole English-speaking world, with a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before ... the chief agency in universalizing the great Christmas holiday as we now have it.’

“There is no need to remind any one how the whole baker’s dozen of Dickens’s ‘Christmas Stories’ delightfully champion hard work and good cheer, sympathy and benevolence, affection and self-sacrifice, and even the softening effects of suffering and sorrow—sometimes by directly illustrating these blessings, again by picturing the misery of their opposites. His satires at pretended benevolence and commercial greed, and his championship of the common man, answer in advance all later criticisms concerning the burden and the cost of Christmas and current complaints over popular ingratitude.

“‘I have great faith in the poor,’ Dickens once wrote. ‘To the best of my ability I always endeavour to present them in a favourable light to the rich; and I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances of their condition, in its utmost improvement, will admit.’

“Thackeray called Dickens’s ‘Christmas Stories’ a national benefit, and to any man or woman who reads them a personal kindness; and Thackeray, too, served the season with Christmas pieces of sympathy, humor, and pantomime, and with his famous onslaught on pretentious misanthropy. You recall how the Times slated one of his Christmas stories as worthless on the very day that the publishers asked for a second edition; and how Thackeray, in the preface to the second edition,—‘An Essay on Thunder and Small Beer,’—made such delightful fun of the review’s futility, its absurd superciliousness, its inflated language, and its false figures of speech, that snarling criticism learned at least a temporary lesson.

“Thackeray waged his war differently from Dickens, but, on the whole, I have found nothing more compactly adequate on the Christmas spirit than Thackeray’s

I wish you health, and love, and mirth,

As fits the solemn Christmas-tide,

unless it be the conclusion to old Nicholas Breton’s ‘Fantasticks,’ written in 1626: ‘In brief I thus conclude it: I hold it a memory of Heaven’s love and the world’s peace, the mirth of the honest and the meeting of the friendly. Farewell.’”

VIII
The Sovran Herb

“YOU are come most opportunely,” said Professor Maturin, as I was shown into his study. “Just in time for coffee and a cigar and some good talk with my friend the Vicar of All Souls.” And he presented me to a gentleman whose clerical dress graced a more than ordinarily handsome figure. His chair and Professor Maturin’s being on opposite sides of the fireplace, I drew mine between them, and noted, during the pouring of the coffee, the fine seriousness and serenity of the clergyman’s face. He made no remark, however, until he said, “None, I thank you,” slightly raising his hand when I proffered the cigars that Professor Maturin had passed. But, after I had made my selection and had returned the box to Professor Maturin, the Vicar reconsidered and joined us.

“Smoking rests me greatly when I am tired,” he continued, after we had lighted, “but I am thinking of giving it up. I am moved to do so by such statements as this from my afternoon paper”—and extracting a clipping from his pocket and adjusting his eye-glasses, he read: “Medical opinion and statistics unite to prove that smoking irritates the respiratory system, decreases lung capacity, prevents the purification of the blood, depresses the nerve centres, checks heart action, impairs digestion, retards growth, reduces weight, strength, and endurance; restricts the therapeutic effects of medicines, delays the healing of wounds, and impairs, if it does not destroy, mental life—all of which effects, inevitable although perhaps hidden for years, would make tobacco one of the gravest dangers of the century even if it did not harm the eyes, excite thirst, and induce intemperance.”

“If we believed that,” said Professor Maturin, getting out of his chair, “we should not only abandon tobacco instantly, but organize a crusade for its total prohibition. But my medical friends inform me that the statistics are still quite too scanty to generalize from, and that there have been no scientific experiments, except a few which have apparently proved that smoking aids digestion.

“As for personal opinion, it has long been equally violent on both sides of the question. Here,” he continued, opening a volume of pamphlets which he had drawn from one of his bookcases, “is a three-century-old illustration,” and he read: “There cannot be a more base, and yet hurtful corruption in a country than this barbarous and beastly habit borrowed from wild Indians, a habit unnatural, urgent, expensive, unclean—loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs—and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

“That,” resumed Professor Maturin, “is the personal opinion of James the First of England in the ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco,’ which he followed up by imposing a duty of six shillings eightpence a pound in addition to the modest tuppence previously demanded.

“But here also is a counterblast to King James’s, by one of the most learned physicians of his time, William Barclay. He proclaims tobacco to be a heavenly panacea of wondrous curative power, the fuel of life divinely sent to a cold, phlegmatic land. He characterizes all other opinions as ‘raving lies, forged by scurvy, lewd, unlearned leeches.’” As Professor Maturin put the book up and returned to his chair he concluded: “I cannot feel that personal opinion on the subject to-day has any sounder basis.”

“Possibly not,” replied the Vicar, after a short pause,—“possibly not. But can we not conclude something from the standing of the witnesses? Is there not some significance in the cordial affiliation between the weed and alcohol? How shall we answer Horace Greeley’s offer to give two white blackbirds for one blackguard who did not use tobacco?”

“The collocation of Bacchus and tobacco is, of course, historic,” responded Professor Maturin, “but, on the other hand, as a substitute for alcohol, tobacco is certainly on the side of temperance. If, moreover, it is to be judged by the company it has kept, we must reckon with the practical advocacy of many good men and true from Milton to Emerson, as well as of all the smoking roysterers from Ben Jonson to Burns.”

“I must admit that I can recall only Sir Isaac Newton and Horace Walpole, Dr. Holmes and Mr. Swinburne, in specific opposition,” said the Vicar, “although I venture to think that the Greeks would have opposed it.”

“And the Romans have approved it,” rejoined Professor Maturin. “There is an immense mass of literature on both sides. I agree neither with King James nor with his counterblasters. But I do believe with Cowper that smoking quickens thought, with Lowell that it mellows conversation, with Dr. Johnson that it induces tranquillity, and with Molière that it prompts benevolence.”

“But Dr. Holmes held that it muddled thought,” retorted the Vicar, “and it certainly silenced two eloquent talkers on that occasion when Carlyle and Emerson smoked together a whole evening with never a word. I fear that only too often it relaxes divine discontent into ill-timed resignation, turns thought to reverie, and lulls the stir of action into dreams.”

“That, surely, is the defect of its quality,” admitted Professor Maturin; “yet it did not cloud Kant’s thought, dim Milton’s poetic vision, or relax the will of Frederick the Great or of Bismarck. It may, perhaps, have somewhat clouded Lowell, dimmed Thackeray, and relaxed Lamb. But who can tell? We cannot determine the ideal combination of the strenuous and the contemplative life until we solve the personal equation.”

“Very true, very true,” acknowledged the Vicar; “therefore, let us begin again. Is not smoking an essentially selfish, or at least an anti-social, habit?”

“It does, I believe,” responded Professor Maturin, “incline one to prefer the company of other smokers, and to reduce the number even of those that one desires at a time. However, if that be the case, we must commend it for inciting such conversation as the present, such intimate games as chess, and such profitable solitude as that with books. It was no accidental combination that made Buckle say he never regretted the money spent for books or tobacco. King Alfred and his ancient candle are succeeded by the modern scholar, measuring time by the rings on the ash of his cigar, or by the succession of his pipes. Is not tobacco, therefore, an encourager of domesticity? What makes one more content to stay at home?”

“Or away from home?” smiled the clergyman, consulting his watch. “As for domesticity, you know the saying that ‘tobacco is woman’s only successful rival;’ and you recall those shocking lines of Kipling’s. I think I never knew a woman who was not, secretly, at least, distressed by the odor of tobacco—no matter what the younger ones may say to the contrary. Remember poor Mrs. Carlyle!”

“There were two Mrs. Carlyles,” chuckled Professor Maturin, “and you must restrict your sympathies to Jane, for the dowager and son Thomas used to smoke their pipes together. Of the feminine reaction to tobacco, however, I am no judge, although I do recall George Sand’s pipe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s snuff, and the cigarettes of contemporary empresses and suffragettes. Have I not heard that women physicians prescribe the latter—cigarettes, I mean—for feminine nervousness?”

“I have no doubt whatever about cigarettes,” replied the Vicar. “I would unhesitatingly banish them as the bane of the young and the foolish. Snuff, also, we are done with, and happily, for it was the most slovenly form of an indulgence which is unclean at its best.” Here the Vicar flicked some imaginary ashes from his waistcoat. “We can never be too grateful that our contemporary Sir Joshua Reynoldses are not snuffy. But I must confess that a good Havana now and then”—and the Vicar spoke slower and slower, until his sentence became an eloquent silence as he drew upon his cigar, expelled the smoke, and watched it fade away.

No one spoke for some moments, and as neither the Vicar nor Professor Maturin seemed inclined to do so, I ventured a brief panegyric upon pipes, preferably briars—their intimate, companionable, cumulative qualities; the preference for them on the part of Spenser and Tennyson, Locke and Fielding, Lamb and Lowell; and the varied range of their offering as illustrated by Cowper’s Virginia, Thackeray’s Canaster, and Aldrich’s Latakia.

“Nor may we forget Southey’s ‘Elegy on a Quid,’” added Professor Maturin. “Seriously, however,” he continued, “smoke is beautiful to the eye, pleasing in flavor and odor, smooth to the tactile and comforting to the temperature sense, the occasion of a tranquil muscular rhythm—the last not the least important. Thus it gratifies six senses at once—no wonder its use has become universal, intimately incorporated into national life east and west, south and north.”

“Alas, too intimately,” sighed the Vicar. “It costs half a billion a year. It is another artificial habit that the world finds it difficult if not impossible to do without. So few have Newton’s fear of adding to the number of their necessities. Think how Thackeray missed his cigar and how Prescott, when but one a day was allowed to him, ranged Paris over for the very largest procurable! Did not Stevenson write, ‘Most men eat occasionally, but what they really live on is tobacco’? Did not Charles Lamb say he toiled after tobacco as other men toiled after virtue? Was not his struggle to stop smoking as severe as De Quincey’s with Opium?”

“I suspect,” replied Professor Maturin, “that both Lamb and De Quincey made the literary most of their sufferings, and as for force of habit, who can tell? I am sure that I never smoke merely from habit, but always because of a conscious desire for the kind of satisfaction that smoking gives.”

“Yes, yes,” sighed the Vicar, finishing his cigar, “but I am truly distressed about the matter. I wish that your scientists would make a comprehensive and conclusive investigation into the effects of tobacco, as they have recently done into those of alcohol. Is it a stimulant or a sedative? What is its effect on perception, comprehension, association, combination, on general efficiency, on general health? Is it a poison or a panacea?”

“It is certainly time that we knew surely,” replied Professor Maturin gravely, “and it is our obligation to urge our scientific friends to inform us. Until then, however, I must confess that my own experience chiefly corroborates Carlyle’s judgment that ‘sedative, gently clarifying tobacco smoke, with the obligation to a minimum of speech, surely gives human intellect and insight the best chance they can have.’ The general situation is well summed up by old Burton, when he says: ‘Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, ... but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ’tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco.’ Have another cigar, dominie.”

“Until we really know about tobacco,” concluded the Vicar, firmly closing the box, “we, at least, will practice moderation.”

IX
Men’s Faces

“COME in, come in,” said Professor Maturin, as I was shown to the door of his study. “I am very well, indeed, thank you—‘pursuing the even terror of my way,’ as the proofreader said. I have just been trying,” he continued, taking some papers from his writing-table, “to triangulate Shakespeare’s nose according to Sir Francis Galton’s plan for classifying profiles. But it appears that the shape of Shakespeare’s nose is as uncertain as the spelling of his name. Here in the Ely House portrait it is long and rounded, in the Droeshout it is rather flattened, in the Zoust quite irregular, in the Trinity Church monument a very vile nose indeed. You may observe, moreover, among these plates, a similar disagreement concerning every one of his features, although the general expression is like enough. All of which was renewing in my mind, as you came in, certain observations concerning men’s faces.

“If you were to go over with me my collection of literary portraits here,—I have about two thousand,—you would note immense differences in line and mass, light and shade, depth and delicacy. The prints are from all sorts and conditions of statues, paintings, engravings, and photographs; taken at all sorts of angles from profile to full face, and at various elevations. The actual color and texture of the originals, to say nothing of the artists’ ideas of them, would make the variation much greater. And yet I believe you will agree that, in spite of all detractions, almost every plate gives a surprisingly expressive and individual characterization.”

Professor Maturin waited in silence while I looked over enough of the portraits to convince myself of the justice of his observation. Then he continued: “While possessed of that idea I amused myself by picking out doubles. Here are some surprising similarities in the faces of most dissimilar persons—Tolstoy and Verlaine, Bishop Heber and Byron, Ronsard and Lincoln. All of these portraits of Spenser make him look like Mephistopheles, and Seneca here is the exact counterpart of our friend the sporting editor. In general, however, a resemblance in appearance—like that, for example, between Shakespeare and Calderon—represents a considerable correspondence in nature. Sometimes this may be attributed to identity of race and nationality, as in the cases of Renan and Sainte-Beuve, Taine and Zola. But most often the resemblance shows true to temperament and character in spite of race, time, and circumstance. Notice, for example, these prints of Horace and Herrick, Bürger and Burns, Heine and Chopin, Maurice Jokai and George W. Cable. Such resemblances hold even between very unusual faces, such as those of Uhland and Goldsmith, and there are sometimes triplets like Fouqué, Hoffmann and Poe. It appears, decidedly, that appearances are not deceptive.

“Personality cannot, of course, entirely transcend all rules: Dumas père shows unequivocally his negroid blood; you can generalize concerning the bent Russian head, the arched Spanish brows, the full German nose, the common irregularity of English features. Accident broke Thackeray’s nose, cost Camoens an eye, and at least threatened De Foe’s ears. Distress left its mark on Cervantes and on Poe. Lamb said, you remember, that Coleridge looked like an archangel, a little damaged. Pope and De Quincey show their imperfect health. The posture and the pose of occupation leave traces, like the knitted brows of philosophers and men of action, the narrowed eyes of historians and explorers, the open nostril of the naturalist, the worn mouth of the orator. But these are minor matters—the general expression remains.

“The character of this general expression is perhaps most determined by the size and shape of the head. These vary enormously—as one may see in the Hutton collection of masks at Princeton—all the way from the greatness of Thackeray’s to the smallness of Byron’s, from the shortness and breadth of Luther’s to the narrowness and length of Lope de Vega’s, from Darwin’s deep sloping dome to Scott’s ‘Peveril of the Peak.’

“A single feature frequently dominates, like Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘imperial head with fair, large front,’ or Jean Paul Richter’s strangely bulging forehead. The eye is often the most striking feature. Scott said, literally, that the eyes of Burns glowed; the same thing was said about Keats and Hawthorne. Scientists are notable for eager eyes, mystics for dreamy ones. I have noticed that stylists, like Flaubert, Catulle Mendès, d’Annunzio, John La Farge, and Charles Eliot Norton, are heavy-lidded. Large noses connote power, if we may judge from the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans; from Dante and Savonarola, Wordsworth and Newman. We have the testimony of Lowell that Emerson’s nose was so large that it cast a shadow. Socrates and Plato, Herbert Spencer and Dr. Holmes, however, were but illy favored in this respect. Satirists’ noses are long, and, as we might expect, often pointed,—witness Erasmus, Swift, and Voltaire.

“Mouths are only less expressive than eyes. Sterne’s mouth shows him a satyr, De Quincey’s marks him an imp. In general the mouths of authors, and of clergymen, too often show self-importance or complacency. Julius Caesar’s square jaw and Bismarck’s thick neck are also full of meaning, although such features and the always significant poise of the head are often obscured by the countless forms of ruff, band, stock, or collar that men have affected from time to time.

“The hair and beard are even greater transformers. Personally, I like somewhat wayward hair such as Scott’s, Hazlitt’s, and Tennyson’s. All red-haired writers from Ben Jonson to Bulwer-Lytton attract me, while I am repelled by Byron’s glossy and Shelley’s silky hair. Many heads are improved by the thinning of their thatch, although Emerson’s was not; some, like Irving’s, are enhanced by a wig. But in general wigs are great levellers,—imagine Dr. Johnson in Addison’s! Alexander Hamilton’s queue makes a fine balance for his profile, and a tonsure is not always unbecoming. One may say the same for beards: Fitzgerald always objected to Tennyson’s, but Bryant and Longfellow and Ruskin were all bettered by theirs, the last immensely so. Freeman, however, rather overdid it, and Flaubert’s walrus moustache was a monstrous thing in such a stylist. Baudelaire’s beard and Swinburne’s are to me much more shocking than anything in their verses. But the doctrine of beards is really very subtle. Mr. Henry James’s removal of his apparently reacted upon his style.

“After conspicuous single features, arrangement most influences expression, and it is surprising to note how irregular this is. Such correlation and symmetry as that of George Meredith is quite exceptional. There are disagreements in color even between eyes—one of Lamb’s was hazel, the other gray. The eyes and brows of Chatterton, Balzac, and Douglas Jerrold are on a different plane, back of the rest of their features. The right side of Thoreau’s face and of Whitman’s is lower than the other, while the left side of Poe’s face is smaller. Disproportion in mass is most frequent, the lower half of the face being often too large for the remainder. Alexander von Humboldt and Matthew Arnold are the only examples I have noted of disproportionally large brows and eyes. The chins of Hegel, Gray, and Pater, on the other hand, are at least one size too large; the nose and mouth of Tyndall and Emerson are certainly two sizes too large; Hans Christian Andersen displays an even greater lack of harmony. Dr. Johnson combined a fine head and eyes with a coarse nose and mouth; Landor’s mouth was as weak as his head was powerful. Goldsmith presented the extraordinary combination of a low, bulging forehead, with almost no head behind the ears, handsome eyes and nose, a swollen upper lip, and a receding chin—all much pitted with smallpox. Goldsmith is a striking example, for in spite of his singularly unfortunate appearance, his intrinsic charm is yet obvious.

“Thus, while the details of men’s faces are a source of curious interest, their greatest significance is the way in which a general expression transpires through them. We are not in the least repelled by the ugliness of Aesop and Socrates, the ‘dumb-ox’ look of Thomas Aquinas, or what Edward Lear called ‘Wordsworth’s desire for milk appearance.’ When Petrarch appears cheerful and Montaigne sad, Smollett mournful and Spinoza merry, we yet feel that there is more than meets the eye. I believe, Tennyson to the contrary notwithstanding, that a man’s character is usually clear in his countenance; here I take up at random Confucius and Calvin, Cicero and Franklin, Rabelais and Chaucer—who could misjudge them? It is as Hazlitt said—you get from a great number of details a general impression which is true and well founded, although you may not be able to analyze or explain it.”

“It is certainly most interesting,” I said, as Professor Maturin put his portraits into their cabinet. “I wonder why the subject has not been investigated more fully and scientifically.”

“It has been thought about a good deal,” replied Professor Maturin, “ever since the Greeks. Renaissance rulers thought it of use in selecting their courtiers. Goethe kept a painter busy recording faces that interested him. About a century ago Lavater devoted a score of handsome folios, with splendid plates, to the study of faces, but his treatment was very desultory—discussions of ‘deep, designing, envious villains as represented by Raphael,’ and so on. Some of his successors went to the opposite extreme of definiteness, concluding that long noses denote courage, high cheek-bones honesty, large lips sociability, and the like. There have been, however, various scientific studies, such as Darwin’s on the expression of the emotions, Galton’s composite photography, and Bertillon’s accurate system of measurement and classification. Yet for some reason the subject still remains one of those that bibliographers catalogue as merely ‘curious.’ I like to dip into it now and then because of its general human interest, and always find it a stimulus to freshness and directness of observation; a caution, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, against distrusting imagination and feeling in favor of ‘narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories.’”

I remained silent while Professor Maturin looked over his cases for a book, and then stood leafing through it, until he found his place, and said: “Hazlitt sums the matter up in his essay ‘On the Knowledge of Character’ with these words: ‘There are various ways of getting at a knowledge of character—by looks, words, actions. The first of these, which seems the most superficial, is perhaps the safest, and least liable to deceive:... A man’s look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay more, by the hand of nature.... This sort of prima facie evidence shows what a man is, better than what he says or does.’”

X
Mental Hygiene

AS the Vicar, the Physician, and I entered Professor Maturin’s study, after dinner, the Vicar sank into his chair with a deep sigh. “Is it so bad as that?” queried Professor Maturin, as he passed the cigars. “I beg a general pardon,” replied the Vicar. “To-day has quite tired me out, although I am just back from a vacation.” The Physician gazed at him professionally for a moment, and then said: “A clear case for the Book of Mental Hygiene.” As we turned, expectant, Professor Maturin, after some hesitation, took a portfolio from his desk, saying: “The Physician refers to a collection of memoranda, drawn from my experience and reading, during a series of years, but recently put into something like order. They are semi-personal in substance, and quite staccato in form, but I am very willing to read them if you will agree to stop me when you have had enough.” Accepting our assent, he began:

“Now that science can cause the Ethiopian to change his skin and the leopard his spots,—that is, can modify the color of rabbits and multiply the toes of guinea-pigs, or graft new characteristics on cattle or on grain,—it is high time to take thought for the efficient and economic working of that intellectual machinery which is not only the means to all such progress, but the fundamental condition of our mental being. Even if we do not accept Professor Lankester’s view that man has produced such a special state for himself that he must either acquire firmer hold of the conditions, or perish, we must agree with Professor James that the problem of access to different kinds of power is a practical issue of supreme importance.

“Physical conditions, of course, are the basis of all mental hygiene. Whatever may be the relation between body and mind, no one can doubt its intimacy. Many persons, like Wordsworth and Lowell, suffer physical prostration after mental exertion; nor does Dr. Johnson need to tell us that ‘ill-health makes every one a scoundrel.’ Habits of confinement or exercise mean so much that we might almost know from their work that Balzac and Poe wrote in closed rooms; but that Wordsworth and Browning composed in the open air, Burns and Scott on horseback, Swinburne while swimming. It is true that, as Roger Ascham said, ‘walking alone into the field hath no token of courage in it,’ and that the horsemanship commended by Erasmus is expensive; but there are countless forms of physical exercise, some suitable to each. George Sand set a standard of wisdom in increasing her exercise when under especial strain. Food and sleep also influence mental life tremendously. Whether we eat one simple meal a day with Kant, or many varied ones with Goethe, we must remember the laws of nutrition and Carlyle’s warning that indigestion comprises all of the ills of life.

“The criteria for sleep likewise are wholly individual so long as we do not drowse on other people’s hearth-rugs like De Quincey; or, like Rossetti, entertain our callers by taking naps. Some think it impossible to get too much sleep. Kant limited his for the sake of soundness; he, moreover, carefully tranquillized his mind before going to bed, not by a total exclusion of ideas but by a selection. Some forms of analysis and combination appear to continue during sleep. Gray had a friend who made verses in his dreams, and Bancroft’s bedtime problems were often solved when he awoke. The time to sleep and the time to wake must be left to individual instinct and social sanction. The doctrine of deliberate rising—dear to Lamb and Hazlitt, Thackeray and Lowell—has recently been reinforced by a French savant’s declaration that getting up quickly leads to madness.

“Again, mental life is so conditioned by sensations that every man should ask himself Professor Dowden’s list of questions concerning them. What did not Tennyson owe to his hearing, Keats to his taste and smell? Has anything ever affected human character more than the present eye-mindedness due to printing and artificial lighting? We have recently been shown the relation between thought and the jerks of the eye in reading, and even between pessimism and eye-strain. What might not be explained by nervous tension or arterial pressure, in Dr. Holmes’s ‘bulbous-headed men’ or Donizetti’s creative headaches. The very posture of the body is important in mental labor—many books are cramped from being bent over. Writers in bed have scientific endorsement for their approach to the horizontal. Yet, as this is hard on the eyes, a reclining-chair like Milton’s seems better. But no habit should be too rigid. It is unwise to risk Kant’s distress at the loss of the weather-vane he gazed at While pondering; and one doubts whether Schiller’s odor of rotten apples, or Gautier’s cat in his lap, or Marryat’s lion-skin table were worth the trouble.

“Accommodation must be practiced also with regard to youth and age. Whether through cellular differentiation or bacteria, age so profoundly affects the mind that books might almost be classified according to the productive ages of their authors.

“The influence of climate on mental life is beyond control, except as we may choose our place of residence and vary our occupation according to the season or the weather. Days vary according to the ebb and flow of the vitality stored at week-ends—Monday often wasting energy that is much missed by Friday. Deliberation and determination can do much to increase efficiency and well-being by employing one’s best times appropriately: prizing the cumulative value of unbroken hours,—of morning concentration, afternoon acquisition, and evening meditation. Those who cannot control the day must use the night—a French scientist even advocates a watch in the middle of the night. There are no rules of universal applicability, but study of the characteristics and circumstances of our best moments may make possible their easy and frequent duplication. That was Pater’s recipe for successful living.

“In the matter of environment, congenial surroundings means spontaneous action. Yet lack of harmony may stimulate: pastoral poetry and landscape painting are the work of men weary of towns. Both town stimulus and country composure have corresponding values. Many realistic and introspective writers agree with Poe that circumscription of space aids concentration of attention: Pope worked best in his grotto, Montaigne in his tower, and many great books have been written in prisons. Many romanticists and philosophers, on the other hand, prefer wide views from hills or mountains, or to be beside or upon the sea. There are similar differences with regard to tidiness or disorder among scholarly paraphernalia and personal belongings. Both efficiency and happiness depend upon a nice individual balance of habit and variety, freedom and restraint. Flaubert used the same study for forty years, and Lecky could think only when perfectly tranquil; but William Morris and Anthony Trollope liked to write on railway trains.

“As for mental society or solitude, there has been, as Edmund Gosse puts it, ‘a strong sentiment of intellectual comradeship in every age of real intellectual vitality.’ Philip Gilbert Hamerton was probably right in saying that intellectual traditions persist more through coteries than through books. Some general society is necessary to cultivate tolerance and sympathy. One must also come to some adjustment with democracy—its freedom and unrest, its ideal foundation and materialistic structure, its lack of prejudice and its inexperience—we cannot rest in Socrates’ opinion that the majority is merely a heap of bad pennies. After the demands of social service are arranged for, however, the intellect must look through and beyond popular standards, and purchase independence at whatever cost. Much seclusion is essential for knowledge, some solitude for wisdom. Both independence and sympathy are attained through an inner circle of select companions, kept in what Dr. Johnson called repair, by Emerson’s plan of allowing the less interested to fall away and be replaced by choice additions.

“Mental health, moreover, demands some conscious agreement with one’s income, and some mastery of expenditure. Too much money is as bad as too little. A generous amount insures free activity and rich material, but it relaxes determination and demands discrimination. Wealth is essential for works of great accumulation in history, or of fine appreciation in the arts. But humanists appear to be none the worse for poverty—Cervantes was a public letter-writer, and his family took in washing. It is well, in any case, to learn with Socrates how many things one does not need, and to remember that there are uses even for adversity.

“From physical foundation and social setting we approach personality:—that something peculiarly our own which, in the words of Petrarch, ‘it is both easier and wiser to cultivate and to correct than to alter;’ that something within us which, in the words of Emerson, ‘accepts and disposes of impressions after a native, individual law.’ We grow in wisdom as we grow in the knowledge of such inner laws. They are fundamental and inevitable. They control mental life and are not to be controlled save through much self-realization. Is a man instinctively active, or does he love contemplation and the forsaking of works? Is he single-minded, identified with his occupation, or does he work merely for bread and live, for himself alone, in some dear avocation? The single-minded may look forward to the perfection that comes from practice—and toward becoming subdued to what he works in. Hence Charles Lamb on the melancholy of tailors and Dr. Robertson Nicoll on Matthew Arnold as ever the inspector of schools. Other men show their spontaneity and genuineness in their avocations—witness Michael Angelo’s sonnets and Victor Hugo’s sketches. Little intentional literature has charmed the world like the amateur quatrains of Omar the astronomer, translated by Fitzgerald the dilettante.

“Is a man an idealist or a realist? Let him ponder Don Quixote’s impracticality and Sancho Panza’s aimlessness, following inner impulse or outward stimulus, denying the world or losing his own soul. Let him ponder, moreover, Rembrandt’s struggle to serve both at the same time. The pitfalls of the realist are proverbial, but ideals, also, may be dangerous, through mistaken selection, partial generalization, or imperfect adjustment to the facts in hand.

“What, again, are our innate or acquired interests and desires? Does their vision of the future help or hinder our realization of the present? Do we aspire after the impossible, expecting precision or clarity, brevity or completeness, where they cannot or should not be? Do we apprehend the unlikely? ‘If anything external vexes you,’ says Marcus Aurelius, ‘take notice that it is not the thing which disturbs you, but your notion about it, which notion you may dismiss at once if you please.’ Disappointment, says Dr. Johnson, ‘you may easily compensate by enjoining yourself some particular study, or opening some new avenue to information.’ If we cannot attain, like Lamb, to hissing our failures, let us, like La Motte, retire to a Trappist monastery, and drown consciousness in study. Let us not expect ideal conditions—Spencer and Huxley could work but three hours a day. Let us look, if necessary, to our compensations. Napoleon had satisfactions in spite of his standing forty-second at military school. Darwin’s inability to master languages and his loss of pleasure in poetry, painting, music, and natural scenery were more than made up for. Let us hope for no ‘simple, plausible, easy solution of life that will free us from all responsibility;’ but endeavor to apprehend and ennoble our practical religion, that scale of values according to which we spend our hoard of life.

“Mental action varies with individuals, yet Emerson’s general statement is true—‘thought is a kind of reception uncontrolled by will; we can only open our senses and clear away obstructions; suddenly thought engages us; afterward we remember the process and its results.’ Attention, however, may be led, if not driven; sensibility may become dirigible; it is possible to learn how to keep a fresh eye. Observation of our reactions will make possible a wise selection among stimuli; so Gray learned to seek music, Darwin to avoid it, and many have come to some conscious relation between reading and writing. Experience will teach us how to free the mind from haunting suggestions by fixing and holding their values; how to recollect emotion in tranquillity; how to begin work slowly, and steadily, and then accelerate; how to value the process as well as the product of acquisition. We may learn, through the slowness of accumulation, that we retain only what we use, that a bad memory may be the best, because selective, that even leisure may be well employed. ‘Whatever I do or do not do,’ said Sainte-Beuve, ‘I cease not to learn from the book of life.’ Lope de Vega, sailing with the Armada, sacrificed all his manuscripts for gun-wads, but landed with eleven thousand new verses.

“With such realization of ends and calculation of means, production reduces itself largely to a matter of method. ‘The difference between persons,’ said Emerson, ‘is not in wisdom, but in the art of classifying and using facts.’ Each mind has some ways in which it works most easily and efficiently; let us discover and arrange for these, and reap the rewards. Then it is time to remember Dante’s saying that ‘sitting upon down one cometh not to fame,’ and Whistler’s that ‘drudgery leads to felicity,’ and Emerson’s that ‘inspiration is the sister of daily labor.’ Newton made his discoveries ‘simply by always thinking about them.’ Darwin’s method was as elaborate as it was successful—with portfolios of abstracts, memoranda, and references; detailed, general, and classified indexes for books; brief, then full, then minute outlines before beginning to write. Concentration and intensity of thought come almost of themselves through such a system. Darwin’s practice, too, of writing rapidly and later correcting deliberately, reaped the reward of both states of mind without suffering the loss involved in continually changing from one adjustment to another,—that drain of energy which makes interruptions so wasteful, even to minds that focus quickly. Wisely controlled change combines the benefits of continuity and variety. The scientist, whose study requires muscular as well as mental activity, tires less easily than the scholar busied wholly with books. Varying the adjustment of the same part, or successively occupying different parts of the mechanism, is more refreshing than total relaxation.

“While thus adapted to the mental mechanism, a successful system must also be adjustable to the material in hand. Observation must be receptive, reading selective. Poets may harvest their dreams; historians must winnow their documents. Goethe’s ‘vast abundance of objects that must be before us ere we can think upon them,’ and Hawthorne’s ‘immense amount of history that it takes to make a little literature,’ must be provided for, along with Pater’s selection and rejection—‘all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.’ Every system ought to provide, at any time and in any place, some form of record, careful enough to be permanent, yet so simple as not to be wasteful if never used—an envelope that can contain data or be written upon itself meets these needs. A system for preservation and arrangement must be comprehensive enough to include everything, accurate enough to make everything available, flexible enough to vary with any need, yet so simple as not to become a tax. Few devices are better than Darwin’s labelled portfolios, or smaller envelopes arranged alphabetically or logically. Note-books are useful only when abstracted or indexed. There are clergymen whose sermons write themselves as particular texts accumulate references in the interleaved Bibles in which they note what interests them. For coördination and organization few things equal a tabular abstract on a single sheet of paper large enough to show at a glance the nature of all the material. Such implements influence intellectual efficiency more than we suppose. Much crabbed writing is due to bad pens, much journalistic ease to soft pencils. Self-realization and the sense of life depend upon some form of diary; style varies with dictation and the typewriter.

“The chief criteria of mental efficiency, then,” read Professor Maturin, with a glance at the clock, “lie between Matthew Arnold’s definitions of genius—‘mainly an affair of energy’ and ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains.’ Professor James, holding that the average man uses only a small part of his energy, would have us persist through fatigue and ‘second wind,’ perhaps to a third and a fourth. Even if experiment, however, did not show that working beyond the fatigue point yields a rapidly decreasing product at a rapidly increasing cost, it would be uneconomic to attempt to increase our flow of energy so long as we waste so much of what we have in inefficient and unhygienic methods of work. Let us rather study the conditions of our best moments, clear away hindrances, and provide helps. Let us prize the spontaneous activity of each state, using fortunate moments for concentration, less efficient periods for accumulation and selection, looking to future coördination. Let us follow natural rhythms of activity, relaxing primary activities by secondary functions useful also in themselves. Thus regularity and routine will develop speed; accumulation and economy end in ripeness. Quantity condenses into quality; selection and arrangement grow into judgment and intuition that may bear inspiration and vision. ‘A man’s vision,’ says Professor James, ‘is the great thing about him.’ The natural history of such vision, however, indicates that it is scarcely more than the synthetic apex of long and careful accumulation. The moment of the aperçu is so memorable that the conditions precedent are usually forgotten, but the precious brilliance of the diamond is merely the result of a happy crystallization of common elements.

“For all of which,” concluded Professor Maturin with a smile, as he closed his portfolio, “I bespeak your most esteemed consideration.”

XI
The Mystery of Dress

PROFESSOR Maturin was leaning sidewise on his cane, gazing at the river. I stood by his side several moments before he came out of his reverie, greeted me warmly, and proposed a walk along the Drive.

“I was thinking,” said he, “of Fitzgerald’s falling overboard and coming up serenely, still wearing his top hat. This morning, while reading Scarron’s sonnet on the decay of the pyramids and his black doublet, I noticed that I too needed a new coat. Later, I lunched with one colleague who is as dressy as Disraeli, and another who goes almost as much out at elbows as Napoleon when he entered Moscow. I have just left a third, who is devoted to Lowell’s favorite combination of short coat and top hat. That brought me, by way of Old Fitz, to a general contemplation of the custom of wearing clothes. Hast any such philosophy in thee, shepherd?”

“But little, I fear,” replied I, “unless Carlyle’s will do.”

“Scarcely, if you mean ‘Sartor Resartus,’” was his answer. “Do you believe that man, by nature a naked animal, is demoralized by clothes, and that a return to nudity would dissolve society? On the contrary, when Humphrey Howarth, the surgeon, went to a duel naked for fear of the infection of cloth in a gunshot wound, his antagonist came to his senses and withdrew his challenge. Of course, I agree that whatever represents spirit is a kind of clothing, and that wisdom looks through vestures to realities. But clothes in ‘Sartor’ are merely the beginning of a philosophy of things in general. Carlyle’s irritation when Browning called on him in a green riding-coat, and his own refusal to carry an umbrella are more to my point. It is obviously appropriate that George Borrow should always have carried an umbrella, I understand how Goethe could ignore waistcoats and Coleridge forget his shirt, but why did Dickens dress like a dandy and Swinburne like a farmer? What do clothes mean?”

“They sometimes represent the state of their owners’ finances,” said I. “Lack of suitable clothing made Poe decline dinners and Johnson dine behind the screen—if he really did.”

“And Lovelace vary between cloth of gold and rags,” continued Professor Maturin meditatively, “much as Rembrandt varies his dress in his portraits of himself. But that was when one man would wear the worth of a thousand oaks and a hundred oxen, when mantles were conferred by royal patent, and orders grew rich out of hat monopolies. To-day, however, in spite of adulterations that I am told call for a pure textile law, few of us are in need either of Pepys’ prayers to be able to pay his tailor, or of Lord Westminster’s thrifty making over his servants’ liveries for himself.

“Habit influences us more than cost, but what influences habit? Why did Milton always wear black, Pope gray, and Lamb snuff color? Why did distributing his cast clothes ‘disconsolate and intender’ Montaigne? Why did Tennyson send his old clothes to be measured for new ones? Why do I find myself repeating an outfit I once chose because it suggested what naturalists call protective coloration—when an animal, like a squirrel on a tree-trunk, is scarcely distinguishable from its background? Do I make a good principle gloss a dull habit?”

“Such a habit,” I replied, “like George Fox’s suit of leather, does deprive you of the interest that accompanies even unsuccessful effort for variety. The fairer sex is never wearied in its quest of beautiful garb, nor sated with the rapture of attainment.”

“How curiously we have changed all that,” replied Professor Maturin, “in the three centuries since James Howell said that a letter should be attired simply, like a woman; an oration richly, like a man. I would not, like him, have putting on a clean shirt an occasion for special prayer; but perhaps we have gone too far in our neglect of finery. Dr. Holmes’s counsel, ‘always err upon the safe side,’ may be too cautious. Allingham says that Leigh Hunt was old in street costume, but young in his dressing-gown. Perhaps Goldsmith’s satin, or Jefferson’s plush, or Mark Twain’s white flannels would renew my youth.”

“Are you elated by your scarlet gown on Commencement Day?” said I.

“By no means so much as the boys are,” he replied with a chuckle. “But that suggests another aspect of the matter. Outward and visible signs move those who are blind to inward graces. Since Protestantism is retrieving some of its banished ceremonial, it might advance learning to clothe it with more circumstance. Yet, we seem to hesitate at symbolic clothing. Police and military uniforms help law and order, but we tolerate ecclesiastical, judicial, and academic costume only during the performance of specific functions. We are so far from intellectual blue-stockings and political sans-culottes, that we smile at musicians’ hair and painters’ cloaks, and banish yachting and golf clothes from every-day wear.

“Simplicity seems the only unwritten law that has succeeded so many written ones concerning clothes. Tradition itself is weak. We wear the Roman orator’s neck-cloth, the wrist-bands that marked the gentleman’s freedom from manual labor, the nobleman’s black evening clothes, the courtier’s sword-belt and gauntlet buttons, and a sailor king’s long trousers—but all because we wish to, or, at least, do not mind. Names are naught, whether of mackintoshes or cravenettes or bluchers or tam-o’-shanters. We ignore even fashion, with its ever varying promise of equality to the uncomely and its powerful economic urge. We are emancipated by a common sense in clothes that would have jailed a man in Addison’s day.

“We may dress as we like, so long as we are inconspicuous, but we must be that. We will no longer tolerate clothes-advertising like the Admirable Crichton’s. The man who lost his lawsuit for damages because his horse ran away when he saw the first top hat in England, would recover at least costs to-day. Gautier deserved the mobbing his pink doublet cost him. Tennyson was right to charge a young woman with creaking stays, and to apologize when he found that the sound came from his own braces.”

“What other principles would you adduce?” said I.

“A modicum of care,” he continued, “in agreement with Plato and Ruskin, that ‘clothes carefully cared for and rightly worn, show a balanced mind.’ I would have clothes appropriate, too, to climate, use, and the individuality of the wearer. I was once advised, most profitably, by a friendly portrait painter as to what was appropriate to my figure, features, and coloring. He objected especially to my hats.

“It is curious how difficult hats are,” continued Professor Maturin, after a pause that I forbore to break. “I doubt if any one, except Fortunatus, ever had a perfect one. The Greeks were wise in having little to do with them—suppose all Greek statues had their straw bonnets tied under the chin! Indeed, hats are chiefly developments of the last five centuries, and, it is said, baldness with them. Yet, Synesius wrote ‘In Praise of Baldness;’ Caesar prized the privilege of continually wearing a laurel crown because it hid his, and I do not know why else the academic mortar-board comes down so far behind. I will not wear a ventilating hat like Rossetti’s, although I long for summer and the straws that America has done so much to popularize.

“I am too thin for the comfortable Tennysonian sombrero. I enjoy, as a dressing-gown, a cowled Capuchin robe that I once had made on Lake Orta, because of my theory that the flowering of the monastic mind in the Middle Ages was due to the germinating heat of hoods. But, generally, I would emulate an acquaintance who usually carries his hat in his hand, or another who actually owns none, were that not too conspicuous. Even Leigh Hunt’s charming essay on ‘Hats, Ancient and Modern’ has no help for me—although I believe I might like a cocked hat or a chapeau.

“I can take comfort in a coat,” he continued, “if it is loose; and in overcoats, if they resemble Socrates’ cloak, or the cloak that Petrarch bequeathed to Boccaccio. Indeed, I should welcome a return to shawls. I am uncomfortable in any neckwear but black, or in any but reindeer gray gloves. I should disesteem trousers had I not once inadvertently worn a striped pair with evening clothes—since then I have respected their power. In shoes I emulate Wellington’s care, for, like William Morris, I need rather large ones. And I enjoy canes as much as Wellington did umbrellas.”

“All of which,” said I, as we reached Professor Maturin’s door, “even if unvaried, is sufficiently sober, appropriate, and individual.”

“And simple enough,” concluded he, “for Frederick the Great or Newton. But, most of all, I wish that the Germans would extend their investigations in the hygiene of clothing. If we knew more about that, we might trust its architecture and ornamentation to any discriminating tailor.”

XII
Questions at Issue

THE Sindbad Society at its last meeting—on the night of the full moon, according to custom—met within the hospitable doors of the Ollapod Club. There, in the room with the roses on the ceiling, we had for dinner caviare with limes, a thin mushroom soup, duck roasted over spice-wood, Turinese pepperoni of chilies and preserved grapes, Leghorn coffee, and Turkish sweetmeats.

The archaeologist was hot against such modern abuses as motor boats in Venice, and motor cars on what he called the finest roads in the world—those from Nice to Genoa, Amalfi to Sorrento, and Ragusa to Gravosa. But when the diplomat begged him also to ban the ancient and dishonorable dogs from Constantinople, he became resigned to life’s little ironies, and, in response to a general request, described quite wonderfully how, after years of fruitless digging, he had found a royal tomb in Egypt, and entered its hot silence, to find its stately presences, its furniture and linen, its sacrificial bread and incense and flowers, all with their sense of yesterday enduring through the ages.

This prompted the musician, who was reared in Turkey, to tell how an Arab sheik he used to visit in the desert always bore with him the same atmosphere of untold centuries. The colonel followed, queerly enough, by saying that in his aeroplane tests he always had the same impression of the endless duration of time. Then some one broke the happy spell, as people will, with something clever and distracting, although the joke was good enough—James Howell’s on people who “travel much but see little, like Jonah in the whale.”

At that the talk scattered, the colonel describing Coromandel and Malabar, the biologist a boat he was building, the mountain-climber planning for Alaska, and the painter for Japan, until the psychologist asked the last why he was going there.

The painter bent his head sidewise for a moment, as he does when he is thoughtful, and then said: “Partly for the natural beauty, but chiefly to study an art that does not disturb the truth of its impressions by conscious theories like our perspective; that honors color and emotion as well as line and thought.”

“Your psychology is sound,” commented the other. “Color vision is very organic, which is to say, emotional; being apparently caused by minute chemical changes in the eye, under the action of light. The appreciation of line, on the other hand, seems to be due to mental association with touching and feeling, and therefore is rather a matter of attention and judgment.”

“Will you kindly explain me also?” asked the musician, who had been telling how no one knows his own voice in a phonograph, because every one hears his own speech reverberate through his inner, as well as his outer ear.

“Music is the most emotional and the most rhythmical of the arts,” continued the psychologist, “because the auditory nerve keeps close company in the brain with nerves from the heart and lungs. Melody is merely a series of answers to the body’s expectation of its usual rhythm. As one of your own critics has said, when music seems to be yearning for the unutterable it is only yearning for the next note.”

The musician quelled the psychologist with an imaginary baton, which he then pointed at the biologist, saying, “Pray prove to the psychologist that he is nothing but pulp.”

“He is surely little else,” smiled the biologist, “built by evolution and run by a chemical engine.”

“Out on you scientists and your evolution!” broke in the archaeologist. “Can your mechanism make a Raphael, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven? Can your evolution show any architecture, sculpture, statecraft, drama, or philosophy equal to those of the age of Pericles? The world will produce nothing fine or permanent so long as you fellows tinker with its machinery. Your heresy of universal progress is merely a contemporary mythology that is falser than—”

“Softly, softly,” said Professor Maturin, shaking his long forefinger at the disputants. “The true philosopher, with Dante, loves every part of wisdom. Why can we not all enjoy knowing that cats hear better than dogs, and, at the same time, appreciate Blake’s saying that the sun is not a round ball of fire, but the glory of the universe?”

Everybody prepared to be mollified until Professor Maturin undid his peacemaking by asking the astronomer to tell us all what a comet looked like. When the astronomer replied that he had not looked through a telescope for years, but spent his time entirely in making calculations, the archaeologist threw up his hands and moved over to the painter and the musician, growling that he was going to spend the rest of the evening talking to somebody he understood.

I heard the two eagerly agree with him that the Nile was the finest river in the world, if you were there in November, but that you ought never go to Japan except in summer, and then I moved to other groups, where the mountaineer was comparing the view of the eternal snows from Darjeeling with that of valley, river, and sea from Mount Wellington, in Tasmania; or the diplomat was telling about Bulgaria; or the importer describing the Taj Mahal by moonlight; or the psychologist quoting, with a twinkle toward the archaeologist, Sir Francis Galton’s saying, that men who are too bad for Europe go to Constantinople, those who are too bad for Constantinople go to Cairo, and those who are too bad for Cairo go to Khartoum.

Everybody talked for a long while, since this was the last meeting for the year, and in spite of the earlier disagreement, which was, perhaps, more apparent than real, I remember the evening as one of especial illumination.

XIII
The Fountain of Youth

PROFESSOR Maturin’s study lamps were dimmed to the mellow glow that makes good talk. But his coffee and cigars were so worthy of the dinner we had just ended that we continued to smoke in silent content, until our host asked about the Vicar’s vacation.

“My plans are about as usual,” answered that worthy, naming his sea-shore place without enthusiasm.

“Mine, too, are about the same,” added Professor Maturin, naming his similar place, with a similar lack of interest.

The Physician hemmed severely and shifted in his chair. “Let us have it,” smiled Professor Maturin.

“Why will you act as though you were a hundred years old?” said he.

“Perhaps we feel so, sometimes,” replied Professor Maturin, while the Vicar nodded. “I fancy we would not ignore the fountain of youth, if we knew where it was.”

“It isn’t far,” retorted the Physician; “it’s merely open air and exercise.”

“I love open air,” said Professor Maturin, “but I hate what is usually called exercise.”

“Naturally,” replied the Physician, “being a man of mind. The cult of muscle is ridiculous in intellectual people. Muscle and vitality are by no means the same, and you cannot do much for either through unnatural gymnastics. But I mean by exercise the maintenance of harmony between one’s specialized functions and what may be called fundamental activity, so that the whole works together happily and spontaneously. Such a balance is as easy to preserve as it is important. We evolved as we are through a series of large general movements, and we need to continue enough of those to preserve a coördination that complements and supplements the particular functions that we most practice. Thus, we walk upright, instead of on all fours, probably as the result of long reaching and climbing. Climbing is not always convenient, but one may practice setting up exercises anywhere until he feels as upright and as sprightly as a primate. I grant you it may not seem dignified,” admitted the Physician, as the Vicar smiled at the picture, “but it means health and happiness, and perhaps life itself.”

“Your suasion is seductive,” said Professor Maturin, “but how is one to know precisely what he needs, and when?”

“Take, for illustration,” resumed the Physician, “those moments when you feel the need of exercise. A little analysis of the sensation will make you aware of a kind of hunger for activity in some particular muscle. A little ingenuity will devise some appropriate exercise, and its moderate practice will both meet the particular need that was felt and diffuse a general tone of well-being.

“Conversely, a general or a local sense of well-being will seem to demand expression in action. A little abandon at such moments will suggest exercises that are both pleasant and profitable to the body and interesting and enjoyable to the mind. Similarly, mental and emotional states will often suggest free and exuberant bodily expression.

“Any thoughtful man, moreover, may deduce from the nature of his ordinary occupations what larger vital activities he should have. Thus, trunk and chest exercises would complement your special functions as professional speakers, and your sedentary study calls for supplemental arm and leg exercises in the open air. Professional singers illustrate the successful development and maintenance of special functions through related and supplemental activities.

“In short, if exercise is spontaneous and rational, qualitative rather than quantitative, for the nerves rather than for the muscles, it will improve the efficiency and facility of one’s habitual occupation, will establish a general vigor and stability of body, and maintain mental balance and alertness; and, I repeat, such varied and recreative activities will suggest themselves to any thoughtful person, although it is wise, occasionally, to secure professional approval or amendment of them. In general, any moderate exercise that interests or stirs enthusiasm is good. Games, especially, correct nervousness and banish self-consciousness through their impersonal aim or coöperative effort, and they improve bodily structure and function by the way. Bowling, boxing, fencing, and billiards are good. Tennis and golf are better, because they are out of doors. Golf is almost the best, because it is interesting, moderate, and available throughout life.”

“I could never become interested in any game,” said Professor Maturin; “their artificial rules are irksome to me, and to acquire the skill necessary to make them enjoyable oppresses me as a waste of time.”

“Even so,” rejoined the Physician, “there are plenty of health-giving pursuits that have also some utility in themselves. Among such are the handicrafts and gardening; walking, riding, and all sorts of excursions; swimming, rowing, and sailing. Swimming, especially, is natural and interesting; it employs many members harmoniously, it quiets and invigorates nerve action, and gives strength and grace, self-control and confidence. I should prescribe for you both this summer a daily swim, with plenty of floating on a quiet shore, and then, if you become as refreshed as you should, something more, like learning to sail. What, by the way, is your avoirdupois?” Neither Professor Maturin nor the Vicar had been weighed in years.

“Weight is an important indication of health,” continued the Physician. “Every man, I think, should have a complete health examination and record at least once a year. Defects can then be promptly remedied, and occupation and recreation be properly adjusted to individual capacities or limitations. One’s family and personal history and tendency should be considered in everything. More than a third of us have remediable defects in sight, about a tenth in hearing, and so many people neglect their teeth that they cause, Dr. Osler says, more deterioration than alcohol. Digestion has a way of announcing its disturbances, but the heart and spine disorders that one-tenth of us have are usually allowed to spread their deterioration unheeded; while almost nobody considers the structure and function of the feet as important as they are.”

“I remember,” said the Vicar with a smile, “your first prescription for me—a looser hat, firmer shoes, and a belt instead of braces.”

“But does not such self-knowledge make one morbid?” queried Professor Maturin. “Have I not heard of a physician who had to abandon practice because he fancied himself afflicted with every disease that be diagnosed?”

“Surely,” responded the Physician, “you refer to Ferguson—the less we think about our own anatomy and physiology the better; but your physician must know them to keep you in health, as well as to extricate you from disease. Knowledge about sanitation and hygiene, however, is both intelligible and helpful to a practical belief in personal and social health and good living. I wish that every one would preach as well as practice my favorite prescriptions of less heat and more humidity indoors, gray-green wall-papers and furniture to fit the individual, vacuum cleaners and patent filters, and, ever, more fresh air. Outdoor air is the most valuable therapeutic that we know, just as it is the cheapest and the most neglected. Forty per cent of our mortality is due to neglect of fresh air.

“If, in fine, every aspect of life were considered first from the point of view of health; or if food and sleep and exercise and good air were put even on a par with other interests, we would have so much vitality that we might practically dispense with effort and enjoy all the profit and pleasure of spontaneity. Instead, we so neglect the entire physical basis that we allow a hurried breakfast, a heavy coat, an uncomfortable chair, or a bad light to spoil a whole day’s work, and, perhaps, permanently to damage the worker. Sedentary students ignore the need for activity until interest and perception grow sluggish, memory dims, and minds that should produce snap-shots require long time-exposures. If, on the other hand, we would only practice a complete, instead of a partial, economy, we should all be twice as efficient and happy.”

“You are surely right,” said Professor Maturin thoughtfully. “Plato was called so because of his broad shoulders, Xenophon and Erasmus loved horses, and Ronsard gardening. Christopher North walked from London to Oxford after dinner. Fitzgerald sailed half the year. The Physician does well to lecture us, dominie. Let us both reform, and go in for Greek sanity and the joy of the age of chivalry. The times have changed since the Bishop of London was the licenser for physicians. But,” he continued, as we rose to go, “if the Vicar and I promise to practice your preachment this summer, what shall we do when we come back to town? My walking up and down and the Vicar’s riding evidently need something more, by way of paprika.”

“I hope eventually to convert you both to golf,” smiled the Physician, “but until then, observe your needs and invent exercises to meet them, as I have indicated. Write me out a list of your inventions this summer; in the autumn I will go over both you and them, and perhaps suggest others. Next year I may prescribe mountains and motor cars for variety. Meanwhile, use the fountain of youth and prepare to live long and prosper.”

“Good-by, good-by,” said Professor Maturin. “Many thanks. You have surely suggested a great perhaps.”

XIV
The Contemporary Fiction Company

“EXCELLENTLY well met,” said Professor Maturin, as we nearly collided on a down-town sidewalk,—“excellently well met. Come with me to the Contemporary Fiction Company.”

“And what may that be?” I inquired.

“I do not yet quite know,” he replied, “but with your kindly aid I hope soon to learn.”

The visible part of the Contemporary Fiction Company proved to be a private corridor in an office building, surrounded by half a dozen rooms occupied by young men and women and typewriters. Its master-mind was evidently the youthful but most business-like president, who included me in his welcome to Professor Maturin, and described his company as a semi-mutual corporation engaged in the production of fiction for the trade.

“Our staple,” said the president, “is short stories, and in the present state of the market we can scarcely keep even with our orders. Last week we delivered one dozen each of aviation, automobile, rural and suburban, settlement and sociology, power-boat and yachting, and two dozen heart-interest stories. To-day we ship a dozen near-Mexico army and navies, a rush order. We are now at work on a gross of adventure stories for a syndicate. The magazines are delighted to find that we may be depended upon to supply precisely what they want just when they want it, and save them the infinite annoyance of dealing with individual authors; and they also find that our rates for quantity save them a good deal of money. Therefore we are working up to our capacity of about seventy stories a week, and, incidentally, accumulating a tidy little surplus. Our system is very simple. I and the secretary-treasurer control the company, and draw up the specifications for all work. The sketching, filling in, and finishing are done by heads of departments, who hold smaller blocks of stock, and by junior assistants, whose salaries are a share of the profits—a plan that insures their best interest and efficiency. But I fear that I bore you—” he hesitated.

Being assured of our very great interest, the president led us to a long table beside which stood several drawers from filing-cases on a kind of rolling truck. “I have been working here on the specifications for the adventure stories I spoke of,” he continued, taking up a sheaf of printed blanks. “Here are some beginnings from the Action file. This newspaper clipping headed ‘Fireman rescues four’ is not uncommon, but you can see the story grow when you combine it with this one—‘Little girl gets pass to feed fire horses.’ This next clipping is sufficient in itself—‘Freighter sails to Africa to barter beads for wild animals.’ These others—‘Palace ablaze,’ ‘Island sinks,’ and ‘Whole town destroyed’—are also promising. Here is an item from the Anecdote file—‘A young fellow in a supper restaurant stares rudely at a lady, and flicks his cigarette-ash in the face of her remonstrating escort. The latter picks up the offender, shakes him like a bottle, and returns him gently to his chair. The escort happens to be Sandow.’ In dull seasons we make up action outlines from lives of filibusters and explorers, from opera librettos and plays, and, finally, from nursery rhymes. You are perhaps surprised at the last, but they contain a great deal of fundamental human interest.

“Having selected a number of such Action-starts, as we call them, we turn to Situation. Here are some items from that file—‘Saw Flying Dutchman,’ ‘Racing against ship fire,’ ‘Chinese crew burns joss-sticks to comet.’ Cut out the comet, and all of these items go with the African barter ship. ‘Religious sect awaits the end of the world’—that may combine with ‘Island sinks’ or ‘Whole town destroyed.’ These others furnish Situation-starts—‘Smuggling by aeroplane,’ ‘Foreign officers caught spying on forts,’ ‘Colonial returns displeased with home,’ ‘Has custom house search her social rival,’ ‘Fashionable women see prize-fight.’ That last gives a welcome variation from the conventional Monte Carlo gambling-hall opening. Many stories, of course, we begin with ‘Character-starts.’ Some of these come from clippings, like the following—‘Man who feeds nuts to squirrels,’ ‘Dead laborer was wealthy sociologist,’ ‘Former waiter becomes hotel manager.’ Members of the staff, also, turn in suggestions, like the following—‘The man with the wardrobe trunk,’ ‘Doubles in appearance but not in character,’ ‘Hero and centre of story who never appears.’ Gradually we are making up a canon of contemporary characters like the famous stock characters of the Roman or the Restoration comedy. Butlers and sailors, engineers and explorers, are staple. Bosses and spies are a bit stale, and we are going slow on commercial travellers and advertising managers. But we are featuring the army-woman, and we expect a good response to our new ticket-chopper series. Live new characters are always in demand.

“The last general specification is ‘Setting and Scene,’ like—‘Oil fire fogs the river,’ and so forth. We consider scene so important that we have in every office Stevenson’s words, ‘Culminating moments, epoch-making scenes, that strike the mind’s eye, put the last mark of truth upon a story.’”

After again hesitating and being again assured of our extreme interest, the president continued: “Theme, character, action, incident, situation, and scene being thus stated on the specification blanks, we write in hints for Treatment. Thus we keep the characters as simple as possible, trying for individual examples of conventional types, for definite persons that develop sharply, in small groups, with strong contrasts. The presentation we elaborate as much as possible—how the characters affect one another and display themselves in deeds and words. We cut out analysis and comment, but expand on appearance, manner, dress, and speech. Similarly, in action we make the pulsation of interest primary: emphasizing expectation, uncertainty, surprise, and quick solutions. With these various suggestions the specifications go the rounds of the heads of departments, each of whom makes further additions representing his special field. When the blanks come back we finally approve or amend them, and assign the stories for writing. Each junior assistant writes about one story a day, directly on the typewriter. When each story is written to the specified length, the writer adds a title, and the piece goes the round of the heads of departments once more, for approval or amendment. All details of character, or action, or setting that are questioned are either omitted, or verified from sources in the office, or referred to people outside who know. A slight seasoning of humor is also written in wherever the characters would express or display it. We are, however, very conservative about humor, since it is impossible to know how readers will take it. Irony and satire are so generally misunderstood that we exclude them altogether.

“Finally, our style man supervises all dialogue and diction. He is learned in every form of literary speech from Platonic symposia and mediaeval disputation, down to mid-Victorian table talk and contemporary slang. He sees that all conversation is clear and consistent. In style he suffers nothing that is not expressive of the matter or instantly intelligible to the average reader, and yet, under his criticism, the style of our output is on a very high level. He hates adjectives, and has an eye even for syllables and letters, being severe with explosives and gutturals and cordial to liquids and labials. He has a collection of fine lines of verse to be memorized by any assistant whose diction grows commonplace. It was he who devised our system of naming characters from places, in order to avoid the possibility of annoying actual people, although he does sometimes invent names to suit characters—like Mrs. Grandy, or Miss Miniver, or Monsieur Galantin. It was he, also, who devised our system of signing each story with a name appropriate to its variety, so that these signatures become trade names. Many of our best titles, too, are his. He named ‘Mary-Go-Round’ and ‘Helping Harrington,’ ‘Yellow Jacket’ and ‘The Golden Goose,’ ‘The Rule of Three’ and ‘One Hundred and One,’ and our ‘Half-portion’ and ‘Tales of To-day’ series. He becomes an officer of the company shortly, investing some of his large outside earnings from naming apartment houses, sleeping-cars, and manufactured articles like the ‘Fair-price products.’”

“But what will be the effect upon literature?” I wondered, when we were again upon the street.

“It will have no effect upon literature,” said Professor Maturin.

XV
The Old Doctor

“THE Old Doctor is dead,” said Professor Maturin, holding up a marked newspaper, as he led the way to two easy chairs before the fire. “He was a very individual man of power and integrity, a philosopher as well as a physician—one of those rare people who love and tell the naked truth. So far as I know, he never blinked a fact nor shirked a danger. I feel as though I had known him all his life. For the last twenty years I have seen him only occasionally. But I saw much of him when I was a boy and a young fellow home from college, and my family knew him intimately before I was born.

“As a small boy on some family errand I used often to wait in his outer office, looking through its window to the street, or gazing at its one engraving of a lion staring at the sun, or its portrait of an Italian physician who gave his life to conquer the plague. I always jumped when the doors of the inner office slid apart and the old doctor stood, one hand on each door, with his large head bent and his gray-blue eyes intent upon me from their ambush of tumbled yellowish hair and bristly beard. His rapid questions, in a rich but husky voice, always upset me, and although I knew him to be kindliness itself, I always responded shakily to his summons into his sanctum.

“I can see him, vividly, now, as he sat there writing prescriptions, his tall, thin form bent over his desk, his left hand, white and shapely, holding the paper, his right, heavier and stained, tracing the words with nervous jerks and a lavish expenditure of ink. I see at the same time both the thinning thatch of his broad forehead and the much creased silk skull-cap that crowned his wrinkles later.

“That inner office was crowded with cases that reached to the ceiling and overflowed with books and papers and glittering instruments that proclaimed their owner surgeon as well as physician. The old doctor seldom allowed his servants, whom he chose and kept with more kindliness than discretion, to enter it. And it was so full of all sorts of things that it seemed quite disorderly, although its owner could put his hand instantly on anything that he wanted. The whole place was redolent, moreover, of many drugs and, I regret to say, of horse-blankets. Sometimes, for exercise, the old doctor walked on his rounds—paying little heed to the road, moving fast or slow, upright or bent, according to the thought that abstracted him. But mostly he drove in a much-splashed chaise, a handsome, well-blooded, but ill-groomed horse, to which he was devoted. He was faithful all his life to such speedy but shaggy steeds, just as he was to pepper-and-salt suits and large, soft black hats, each precisely like its predecessor. At the conclusion of each of my early visits he would show me, through a window, some dog or cat or bird that he kept in his back yard, for he ranked pets among the consolations of life.

“Even then I was interested in him as a personality, for I had been told how, as a boy, he used to carry a bag of papers and do similar services for his father, a stately and irritable old judge, who was so formidable that few people could see any fatherly pride and affection in him. But as people used to say that the old judge could see in the dark, there is no reason to think that he was blind to his son’s exceptional character and promise, especially as he sent him to college, which was then very unusual in the town. There, after a time, the young fellow decided to go in for medicine. His reasons, which he did not tell his father, were that law was a selfish and soulless career, which contracted, instead of expanding, the mind, but that medicine was an opportunity for both social service and, through its sure and universal truth, an apprehension of the divine disposition of affairs. This last belief he retained throughout his life, his spirit and imagination never capitulating to the fatalism of his profession.

“The old judge died while the boy was in college, leaving an estate composed chiefly of loans to poor people who could not pay, and rich men who were slow to do so. Still, there was enough, with considerable sacrifice on the part of the mother, to enable the young man to complete his college years and go on to a metropolitan university until he earned his degree in medicine. With this, for the time, most exceptional training, and the approbation of his best professors, he returned to the old town to enter upon general practice, so enamored of his profession that he wondered why all men were not physicians.

“He soon won back the intimacy of a few close friends, but soon came, also, to be disappointed in the force and genuineness of most of his townspeople. On the other hand, his own carelessness in dress and indifference to small formalities confirmed the general local suspicion of any one who had been so long ‘away.’ He disconcerted people, also, by his superior knowledge and directness, and his unfailing attack upon whatever savored of weakness or insincerity. Considering the family finances and his own lack of physical ruggedness, he definitely put marriage aside from his calculations, and when this, like most of his conclusions, became known, it further discounted his social availability. Hence, his life soon became restricted almost wholly to his home, his small circle of intimates, and his profession.

“At his profession he continued to work tremendously, giving exhaustive study to each case that came his way, inquiring into local epidemics and sanitation, tirelessly investigating new ideas, and organizing his entire technical knowledge. He cheerfully turned night into day when he was needed, as he did later, when I knew him to get up in the middle of the night to visit a seriously sick patient whom he had already seen before and after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and just before going to bed. Birth and death loomed so large in his horizon that he was far from ever considering what it was in his place to do. Self-forgetful as he was, however, he made no sentimental sacrifices, but was the first to introduce trained nurses into the town, and to urge, everywhere and always, the need for the local hospital that came only long after. He had, even, some dreams of preventive medicine.

“His father’s successor and the group of able lawyers, bankers, and business men that controlled the town, looking upon all of this with favor, determined him, although still young, to be one of themselves, and made him health officer and physician to the county jail and poor-farm. This confirmed his identification with his work until he thought of it all the time, riding, walking, at his desk, at meals, or lying awake at night. In this way, without relaxing his following of the latest professional knowledge, he came to believe increasingly in direct observation and experience, and acquired a discriminating respect for the traditional lore of old men and women. Gradually, more and more people began to see in him the true physician—working for work’s sake, giving time and labor to the poor without reward, a tireless guardian of the lives entrusted to him, a devoted champion and example of all sanity and wholesomeness.

“Some of his traits, however, still delayed his complete success. He was often restless, sometimes impatient in argument, and not always considerate of his opponents. Once he even slapped a recalcitrant patient. He was deeply humiliated over that, and candid and regretful over his other defects, but he held that one could do but little by special effort to change one’s character. He was, moreover, too learned and quick-witted and plain-spoken to be a comfortable colleague for most of his fellow practitioners. They felt obliged to look with disfavor on his preference for simple medicaments and his emphasis on hygiene, and they were publicly pained and privately severe concerning his carelessness of appearances and his open pooh-poohing of what he called ‘the hocus-pocus of the profession.’

“But after his marriage, which was an inconspicuous one, the softer and finer sides of his nature took the permanent ascendency, and the community, although it knew little of his family life, felt a new gentleness behind the firmness of his growing power of command. It was then that he began the practice, which he would have scorned earlier, of carrying in his pockets cheerful and humorous quotations as means for enlivening depressed patients. Thus, slowly but steadily, through some conspicuous successes and many sure ones, his reputation became more and more established, until, at about forty-five, he was accepted by all as unquestionably the chief physician of the town.

“His frankness, however, by no means decreased as his fame advanced, but people increasingly understood his eccentricities as they increasingly honored his intellect and revered his character. He never hesitated to say, for example, that his successes were due more to experience and common sense than to any scientific knowledge. This was, perhaps, a limitation of his location so far from the centres of scholarship, but he would have followed reason rather than authority anywhere. When the chief apothecary caught cold and died from a consumption that the old doctor had long pronounced cured, he lamented that this mistaken judgment had brought him more reputation than any real cure he had ever accomplished, and he would sometimes regretfully compare the tremendous exertions that had gone unrecognized in his earliest practice with the late unreasoning praise of almost everything he did—‘So hard it is,’ he would say, ‘to establish unpopular truth or check popular error.’

“In spite of the fact that his penetration so far exceeded the ordinary that his wit often led him beyond knowledge to track nature to her lair, he used to grieve that so many things were hidden from him. He trusted much to the wisdom of the natural course of things, watching his cases and all their surrounding conditions closely, sweeping away many of the cobwebs of current practice, and emphasizing chiefly prescriptions of hygiene. Most diseases, he held, were either hopeless or would cure themselves if people would be reasonably careful. After his income became adequate for his modest needs he disliked to take money for his services, preferring to get whatever he wanted from the local tradesmen, and to care for them and their families without charge on either side.

“Gradually, without decreasing his labors—I have heard that he made fifty thousand professional calls—he became the community’s philosopher and friend, as well as its physician. This was especially the case after he came home, a citizen of the world, from a late European journey, during which, apparently, he had ignored landscape, architecture, and art in order to converse with all sorts and conditions of men. As his earnestness and meditation increased with age, and his utterance, always unexpected and pithy, grew ever more apt and forcible, his sayings became widely quoted and accumulated into a body of doctrine.

“He was by no means chiefly a critic, for, as he said, there were always more unfortunate men needing encouragement than fortunate men needing reproof. He maintained that a clean mind and busy hands were proof against any tribulation, and that happiness lay not in the world, but within the mind. ‘Whoever would live wisely,’ he would say, ‘must know what he wants,’ and ‘Good humor bears half the ills of life.’

“It will be long, indeed, before his place and his friends forget ‘the Old Doctor.’”

XVI
Breakfasting with Portia

“PROBABLY few persons who are not professionally interested,” said Professor Maturin, “realize how earnestly the schools of to-day are endeavoring not only to conserve the proved excellences of traditional knowledge, but also to provide new varieties of training that are made imperative by present-day conditions. Hence the subjects in the curriculum that appear fads to the fathers—nature study, manual training, physical education, household science and art, music, and the fine arts. Probably fewer yet know that American experiment in one of these fields, especially, has been so notable that the British Board of Education sent a special commission to study and to report to Parliament on the teaching of domestic science or household economics in the United States.

“It was the scientific and comprehensive character of this report, sent me by a young friend, that first informed me of our distinction in this difficult field. This same young person had previously overcome my doubt as to the propriety of making such matters the subject of academic study by learnedly quoting Xenophon’s Socrates, to the effect that ‘domestic management is the name of an art, as that of healing or of working in brass, or of building.’

“It should be understood, to be specific, that she, whom we may call Portia, as a present student and a prospective propagandist of domestic science, is about to receive her degree from that part of one of our metropolitan universities which conducts research in education and trains teachers both of the ancient liberal arts and of such modern practical sciences as Portia’s own. After several years devoted to the usual college subjects, her attention is now concentrated upon educational principles and procedures in general, and on the practice and presentation of her chosen subject in particular. For a considerable period she has overflowed with such interesting information concerning the chemistry and biology, the production and manufacture, and the preparation and the assimilation of foods, that I was more than delighted one day to be invited to partake of a breakfast prepared by her and an associate, as one of the numerous practical tests of knowledge and efficiency demanded by her curriculum.

“On my arrival, the Princess Ida who presided over this department of the modern Athenaeum exhibited the equipment for the study and practice of her science,—a technical library of many volumes; elaborate collections of current reports and monographs; photographs, charts, and records of investigations; especially equipped offices and lecture and conference rooms,—and then presented me to the half-dozen instructors under her direction. The laboratories for the biological and chemical study of food materials were not unlike others that I had seen; but those devoted especially to food preparation uniquely combined the facilities of an elaborate club kitchen with the scientific immaculateness of a surgery. The whole I was told, by the way, was merely preparatory to a really perfect set of laboratories which were building.

“A tile-topped laboratory table, with a skeleton gas-stove above, and various drawers and cupboards beneath, stood in the centre of the room for the demonstrator. About this, arranged on three sides, like a banquet table, were perhaps thirty similar but connected desks at which the students sat in trained-nurse uniform, facing their instructor.

“The right hand drawer of each desk contained such familiar small utensils as knives, forks, and spoons, along with certain others that would have seemed strange to our grandmothers; all carefully listed, their condition and arrangement being subject to military inspection. Each drawer at the left contained flours, sugar, spices, and condiments in laboratory precision. The cupboard below each desk, closed by a sliding shutter, contained measuring-cups, bowls, platters, pans, and the like; each equipment being adequate for all ordinary cooking processes. Around the sides of the room were stoves and ranges of various designs heated by coal, charcoal, electricity, steam, gas, and oil, not forgetting the professor’s Aladdin oven, or the peasant’s hay-box cooker.

“Here were also immaculate porcelain sinks where uniformed maids cleaned the larger utensils. Each student kept her own equipment neat. Cases and frames held special implements and supplies drawn from a nearby stock-room, or from library or files. Here and there were bulletin boards displaying tables for computing dietaries, and newspaper clippings concerning the cost of living. In one corner, as an interesting reminder of the needs and possibilities of the simple life in the midst of this intentionally ideal equipment, stood an outfit that might be made and used in the remotest rural school—a cheap but good oil stove, mounted on the zinc-covered top of a packing-box, that included inexpensive examples of the fundamental implements, and had an upturned fruit crate for a seat. This entire outfit cost about four dollars.

“In one of these laboratories, students were making a comparative, experimental study of breads; halting occasionally to hear from the demonstrator and ponder the doctrine of the progression of batters and doughs from corn bread, through waffles, to twin mountain muffins—‘which are the beginning of cake.’ In another room, fruits were being preserved separately and in combinations, and in all mediums from distilled water to heavy syrups. In a third, the visitor was given, as specimens of material for distribution, a mimeographed recipe; a blue-print diagram of the conventional cuts of beef, lamb, veal, and other meats; and a sheet of small photographs showing how typical cuts of good meat should look.

“Meanwhile, Portia and Nerissa had been busy with the breakfast in a separate kitchen and dining-room, as like as possible to those in ordinary homes, yet planned with the best wisdom and taste of the departmental staff. To this dining-room the pilgrim was now summoned by his young friend, costumed as a maid and appearing slightly anxious, for she and her ally were also to serve the meal that they had prepared. The Princess Ida’s premier acted as hostess, and a masculine professor and a feminine instructor joined to make a party, typical, the hostess announced, of sedentary men and of moderately active women—a statement that apprised me of the fact that I was considered not merely as a guest, but also as scientific data. The simple goodness of the linen and china, however, was only that of the discriminating home, and the growing plant on the table was there, I was told, for purely aesthetic reasons.

“But superior knowledge and skill entered with the food—stewed prunes and apricots, astonishing in size, delicious in flavor. Although I am unaccustomed to breakfasting at noon, and although years of housekeeping have been unable to blot out the remembrance of previous prunes, I fell to with avidity. My memory of the ensuing conversation is somewhat mingled with later talks with Portia, but then or afterward, I learned that our total consumption of this dish was only about four ounces, at a cost of approximately three cents for four persons. A home, of course, must also count the cost of all the food prepared, but not consumed.

“The delectable quality of the cereal that followed was due, along with its superior digestibility, I was informed, to its first having been briefly boiled in order to open the grains, by bursting, to the action of the gentler after-cooking. The cost of cereal, I was reminded, was small when compared with that of its accompaniments. We ate one cent’s worth of cereal, but the sugar upon it cost an equal amount, and the cream five times as much. But the professor justified the combination because of the constituent elements of the three; cream being largely fat, sugar largely carbon, cereal largely protein.

“When later I asked Portia what this protein was, she replied in a sort of chant, as though she were assisting at some mystic rite: ‘Next to water, protein is the largest ingredient in the human body, forming about eighteen per cent. It is similar to the white of egg, the lean of meat, the curd of milk, and the gluten of wheat.’ This and other intimations gave me to understand that protein is the sine qua non of dietetics.

“As we enjoyed the admirable omelet which followed—eight ounces: one of proteid, one of fat, one-half ounce of carbo-hydrate; cost ten cents for four—the professor informed me that the nutritive value of food is measured by the heat it gives off in combustion, the unit of computation being the calorie, or the amount of heat which would raise one pound of water four degrees Fahrenheit. Protein and carbo-hydrate yield eighteen hundred to the pound, fats about four thousand. The necessary number of calories per day for a professional man is somewhere between the thirty-two hundred averaged by American and the thirty-three hundred averaged by Japanese university professors. The standard is placed at twenty-seven hundred by the special agent in charge of the United States Department of Agriculture’s investigations in nutrition. Hard muscular labor requires half as much again. These figures are the result of measurements, by means of a so-called respiratory calorimeter, of the entire receipts and expenditures of the human body, under varying conditions and for periods of from three to twelve days. These and similar experiments are described in bulletins published and distributed without charge by the Department of Agriculture. Recent experiments by other investigators make the ideal number of calories considerably less.

“Toasted rolls and drip coffee ended our meal; the former weighed four ounces, two-thirds carbo-hydrate, the remainder equally proteid and fat; the ingredients costing only two cents, or as much as the butter used on them. Throughout, of course, no estimate was made of the cost of labor, an element which, together with rent or interest on equipment, usually more than equals the cost of food. Fuel costs, approximately, one-tenth of this amount.

“Coffee was assigned no nutritive value in the tabular statement of our breakfast that Portia worked out and brought me some days later. But as a mild stimulant, it does more good than harm, very much less harm than tea, which, when not freshly made, contains chemicals difficult of digestion. The coffee we four enjoyed cost approximately three cents.

“When Portia told me that she was also to give a luncheon, with soup, entrée, salad, and a sweet, I fear that I was too precipitate in my commendation of her work, my prophecies for her future, and in implying my willingness again to serve the cause of science. I tried my best, however, to be discreet, for I am very anxious to be invited again, and I was rather pleased at my adroitness in presenting her with an individually bound volume of Ruskin, with the red silk marker at that page of ‘The Ethics of the Dust’ which says of cooking:

“‘It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Calypso and of Helen and of Rebekah and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices; and of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savory in meats; it means carefulness and inventiveness and watchfulness and willingness and readiness of appliance; it means the economy of your great-grandmothers and the science of modern chemists; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality; and it means, in fine, that you are to be perfectly and always “ladies”—“loaf-givers;” and, as you are to see, imperatively, that everybody has something pretty to put on, so you are to see, yet more imperatively, that everybody has something nice to eat.’”

XVII
Summer Science

“MY young friend, Portia,” said Professor Maturin, “was plainly dubious when I suggested making a week-end visit to the scientific colony where she planned to spend the summer doing research work in biology. She did not believe that I would be interested in observing a hundred college professors and students listening to lectures and looking through microscopes. She implied that occasional visitors were felt, by their holiday moods, somewhat to distract the attention of the serious workers. And, finally, she suggested that I was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to lead the very simple life that prevailed, the place being as unlike as possible to the typical summer resort. However, when I pleaded my sympathetic interest in all things human, modestly called attention to my reputation for discretion, and gently reminded her that I had proved an acceptable and even welcome guest among the peace agitators of Lake Placid, the literati of Onteora, and the artists of Cornish, she ceased to protest. I might do as I liked; she, of course, would be glad to see me.

“So it was that I found myself, one calm Saturday evening, en route for her ‘Marine Biological Laboratory.’ During my sail along the Sound I found myself amusedly wondering whether Portia’s professors would prove to be anything like the important mate who gave so many more and so much louder orders than were necessary, in warping the boat from the dock. I was pleased to find them rather more like the lights that later appeared along the shore—some clear and steady, some brilliant but intermittent, others a trifle spectacular in coloring, all plainly enjoying a comfortable sense of their importance to the community; but all of them interesting, and some performing services really indispensable to human progress.

“The realization of high thinking and, presumably, plain living began with a six o’clock landing next morning and the writer’s earliest breakfast in years, watching, meanwhile, coming events cast their shadows before in the person of a slender spectacled gentleman in blue, who slowly consumed one roll and a cup of frequently diluted coffee, while he rapidly assimilated the contents of a thin, black, scientific-looking volume with round corners and red edges.

“Within an hour, on a smaller steamer, we sighted the red brick, yellow shingle, and green slate buildings of a station of the United States Fish Commission. It was because of this station, devoted to everything that affects our fisheries, and of its especial facilities for collecting and preserving marine life, that a group of college scientists established the biological laboratory by its side, some twenty years ago. Their leader was still the director, and although most of the administrative details were now delegated to younger men, he was still regularly in residence, in a cottage erected by his appreciative colleagues to replace one destroyed by fire, and surrounded by hundreds of carefully reared pigeons, which for years he had made the basis of minute studies in heredity, with the aid of two Japanese artists, who painstakingly recorded the contour and coloring of every peculiar bird.

“The slow and careful entrance of the steamer into the landlocked harbor, through passages so tortuous as to make a local pilot often necessary, indicated the peculiar geographical character of the locality. So great has been the sea’s erosion that it is difficult to say whether the rocky shore line most resembled the margin of a cake at which youthful teeth had been at work, or the end of a flag whipped into tatters by the wind. It is this intricate character of the region that makes it the congenial home of many sea creatures elsewhere obtainable only with difficulty.

“Portia met me at the pier, explaining her somewhat tempered summer bloom by the fact that she was spending the sunniest hours of the day indoors in the laboratory. She conducted me through a typical, old-time New England village of perhaps five hundred inhabitants, through streets almost as devious as the waterways, and similarly appropriated by science. Next to the village church, which displayed the usual placard that the ladies of the congregation were about to hold a fair where refreshments and a large assortment of aprons might be had, the village store made the unusual announcement that pure paraffin and proof alcohol were always on hand, and that microscopes with all attachments might be ordered. This emporium was even the subject of a biological joke, which Portia kindly explained to me: ‘Why was Portrope’s shop like an amoeba?’ ‘Because it was a single cell with all the functions.’ This comforted me with the feeling that even if the scientists did take themselves seriously, they yet preserved the saving grace of humor.

“I was led to the most remarkable lodgings that I have ever occupied, kept by a publisher’s reader, who had elected to spend her summer in this way for the sake of variety. I am convinced that she got it, or at any rate, that she gave it. Her furnishings were of the simplest, and the strangest, having been leased from the amoeba at ten per cent of their cost for each month of use—an arrangement which, like the furnishings, would scarcely have been acceptable to any but an imagination that had been subjected to the severest strains.

“The roof also leaked, but in such a desultory fashion that it was about the only thing in the place that impressed me as free from the influence of scientific efficiency. But the house was directly on the harbor, my room overlooking that and the laboratory, which occupied a compound next to the commission. Portia departing to finish a drawing before the bathing hour, I was left to observe with interest, at a window opposite, an assiduous young man intently bent over his work, which, Portia informed me later, was a study of the coagulation of lobster’s blood. Subsequent observation of a few of his neighbors convinced me that at least some of the investigators were not unacquainted with academic leisure. Down by the shore an officer of our regular army nurses was living in a specimen hospital tent, for the purpose of testing the capabilities of its construction, texture, and color for service in the field.

“The taste of the publisher’s reader was equal if not superior to her imagination. If the house reminded me that she was in the habit of receiving many strange things, the food was proof that her standard of acceptance was very high. Steamed clams, real chicken, and delicious vegetables, where they must have been by no means easy to procure; lobster in a chafing-dish, fruit sherbet, and thoroughly sophisticated coffee, formed our Sunday dinner. The conversation was no less interesting, my opposite at table being a distinguished biological painter. It had never previously occurred to me that of course there must be such. Usually busied in evoking the outward form and semblance of prehistoric creatures from their remains in museums, he was here for semi-recreation, painting marine life from the aquaria of the Fish Commission. I was later presented to the object of his current admiration, a creature with the anatomy of a frying-pan and the manners of the Bowery, popularly known as a ‘stingray’ because of a dangerous weapon in its tail. His next sitter was to be a rare specimen of parasite fish, which, although nearly two feet long, was deriving all its locomotion about the tank from a much-embarrassed but helpless shark, to the under side of which it was complacently attached by means of a suction arrangement on the top of its head.

“Portia, like most of the other students, had lodgings in a private house in the village, there being not more than half a dozen cottages exclusively devoted to summer guests. She took her meals at the laboratory mess, where the plain but adequate food was flavored with abundant talk of distribution, variation, regeneration, mutation, and the dynamics of protoplasm. Having once fixed these catchwords in mind, I rapidly acquired the local language, and could shortly ask simple questions without difficulty.

“In addition to the long, low mess hall, the laboratory occupied three other square, two-story buildings of gray shingle, set off by dark green paint. The largest, with several wings, contained class-rooms and laboratories for two of the three regular courses of instruction in physiology, morphology, and embryology. On the upper floor was an excellent technical library with Agassiz’s motto, ‘Study nature, not books.’ Around the sides of both floors and in the other buildings were individual working rooms, in which the more advanced investigators sentenced themselves to solitary confinement during the major part of each day. These rooms and the students’ tables in the several larger rooms were at the disposal of the colleges from whose annual contributions most of the working funds of the laboratory are derived.

“During the six weeks of regular class instruction in July and August, there are two or more public evening lectures each week, in which visiting scholars present the more generally interesting aspects of their special fields of study. I did not share Portia’s enthusiastic anticipation of the coming of a lecturer who had just returned from hunting a particular variety of snail in the South Sea Islands, but the lecture changed my apprehension to appreciation, and, finally, to admiration.

“Other lectures dealt quite as attractively with the development of habits among birds, the detection of the minute organisms that cause many human diseases, the study of heredity in families of rabbits and guinea-pigs, and the creation of new forms of plant life. Every considerable investigation of which I heard had definite relation to some generalization that was capable of practical application—a striking contrast to similar work in certain other sciences.

“Portia’s problem, which I was interested to find important enough to deserve a private room, was the regeneration of planarians, minute marine parasites which have the power, when divided, of developing new heads or tails. Her endeavor was, by means of a microscope, magnifying some twelve hundred times, to observe and trace the earliest differentiation of the cells that were to form the several new organs. Of the hundred or more students in residence, about half of them young women, perhaps one-half were carrying on similar studies, of varying degrees of difficulty. Among these were college professors and instructors who were conducting researches that had extended over many years. The volumes of the laboratory’s monthly publication, containing records of the processes and results of such work, made more than ordinarily interesting reading, even for the layman.

“The recreations of the place were as interesting as its labors. The social life was that of a highly selected college community, where everybody knows everybody else and his wife, and finds them well worth knowing; and everywhere, always, there rose and fell a tide of excellent talk.

“In short, I had so good a time that I visited Portia not three days, but ten, and then departed with a regret that was not dispelled even when she formally approved my conduct by inviting me to come again. She was so smiling and sympathetic at the pier that I found myself asking a question that had repeatedly suggested itself, but which had as often been spontaneously repressed.

“What, if any, was the definite or practical value of her summer’s work, as compared with that which she had previously been doing in the field of domestic science? That, she replied, was for me to determine. Perhaps, when I thought it all over, some such bearing would occur to me. I was afraid that she was going to be disappointed in me, after all, and hastened to change the subject by inquiring why, since the afternoon was so fine, she was wearing her long oilskin coat and sou’wester hat. It was certainly a becoming costume, although it too much concealed her trim figure—her color was now all that could be desired.

“‘Oh, I don’t work in the laboratory all of the time,’ she answered. ‘I—that is, we—are going sailing.’ Just at that moment the importunate mate’s ‘All aboard’ precluded further leave-taking. But as I watched her from the deck of the receding steamer, after a farewell wave of the hand, turn expectantly toward a jaunty sail-boat that was skimming in the direction of the pier under the guidance of one of the younger professors, I began to have glimmerings of at least one answer to my question.”

XVIII
Measuring the Mind

WHEN Professor Maturin discovered that his young friend Portia had become a student of psychology, he expressed no surprise, having learned where she was concerned to expect the unexpected. But he did voice his impression that the science was one that had, as yet, but an imperfect appreciation of the feminine mind. “Precisely,” replied Portia; “listen to this,” and opening one of her note-books, she read: “Our modern knowledge of woman represents her as primitive, conservative, nearer the savage than man. She is lighter, weaker, slower, less dexterous, less accurate, less individual. She is more nervous, more emotional, more superstitious, and more often insane. In short, her lack of accomplishment is due not to subjection, but to fundamental inferiority.”

“Now that,” concluded Portia, “was undoubtedly written by a man, and is therefore probably as mistaken as what men have usually written about women in novels and poems. At any rate, I intend to see for myself.” Professor Maturin immediately commended her intention, and subsequently followed her progress with an interest which, after a time, she rewarded by an invitation to visit the laboratory where she was working. It was not long, by the way, before she discovered that, although the particular statements of the German scientist she had quoted were in the main correct, an obsession of the Kaiser’s “church, children, cooking, and clothes” doctrine had made him ignore equally striking facts on the other side. Her other discoveries shall be given in Professor Maturin’s own words. “As we started on our expedition she read me a counter quotation, from an even more famous authority: ‘Woman is more observant, more assimilative, more sympathetic, more intuitional, more aesthetic, and more moral than man. She is more typical of the race and nearer the superman of the future. Man in comparison is senile, if not decadent.’

“My burst of admiration for a science that could solve the same problem in such opposite ways, was checked by Portia’s remarking that she attributed scarcely more importance to the latter than to the former statement. She was quite in accord with the directors of her laboratory, in considering much of what calls itself psychology to be based on philosophic deduction or popular generalization, rather than on scientific observation and experiment. As a matter of fact, scientific psychology, as a development of the present generation, was just beginning to find its accumulated facts sufficient for any generalization. This statement gave me a sense of entering a theatre just as the curtain was going up.

“After a glimpse at the general arrangement of the department’s score or more of rooms, Portia proceeded to lead me systematically through the suite devoted to physiological psychology. Concerning the sense of smell, little seemed to be known, except that it is sufficiently sensitive to detect a thimbleful of odorous gas diffused through a very large room. Not much more is known concerning taste, except that it can be stimulated electrically, as smell cannot be, and that sweet and sour are distinguished chiefly by the tip of the tongue; bitter and salt by the back.

“But discoveries in physics have made possible extensive studies of sound sensation. The average ear has a compass for sounds of from twenty-eight vibrations a second to twenty-two thousand, and can detect differences caused by a variation of sixty. The figures for sight are even more surprising. The sensation of red is caused by rays of light which vibrate from four hundred and forty to four hundred and seventy billion times a second. At this stage of my observations, I abandoned my memory for a pencil and note-book. Increasingly rapid vibrations produce the other colors, up to violet, which is caused by about seven hundred and twenty-two billions.

“It is not surprising, therefore, that the sense of sight displays considerable inertia. It takes a perceptible time for the eye to see what is before it, and its images persist after the object is removed or the eye is closed. Such after-images are at times like the object, but show its complementary color if the sense is fatigued. This last fact is said to be taken advantage of by department-store salesmen, who change fabrics of which their customers are wearied for others complementary in color. Pressure and temperature are felt only at certain spots on the body, very close together, but quite unevenly distributed. The forehead and the back, for example, are more sensitive to cold than to heat. Some spots are sensitive to heat or cold alone, seeming to indicate separate sets of nerves for these sensations.

“The lower limits of any sensation may be determined by gradually diminishing a stimulus until its effect is not noted, or by increasing a smaller stimulus until a sensation is produced. Delicacy of perception is measured by noting the smallest increase or decrease of stimulus needed to produce a change in sensation. Some persons can distinguish, by touch, a difference of half an ounce in a pound weight. Measured by the distance apart at which the points of a divider can be separately felt, the cheek is but half as sensitive as the finger, the finger but half as sensitive as the tongue. Hence, it is probably in order to touch as well as to taste that infants carry everything to the mouth. The direction of sounds is determined by the difference in the relative intensity of the sensation in the two ears; the position of the body, when the eyes are closed, is somehow felt by means of semi-circular canals in the ear. Measured by moving a candle away from an object until its shadow seems the same as that produced by a fixed candle, or by rotating disks bearing black lines on white, the eye can distinguish a difference of one one-hundredth in a quantity of light. Judging distance by sight is said to involve at least ten separate operations of perception and judgment, vision being really mental interpretation, based on association and memory as well as on sensation. Hence, errors in visual perception are so common that painters, sculptors, and architects always take them into account. Estimates of distance with one eye alone are usually inaccurate; vertical seem longer than horizontal distances. The size of small objects and the speed of larger ones are usually underestimated; the speed of small bodies and the size of larger ones, exaggerated. Yet, in judgment of space, sight is more accurate than touch.

“The most interesting rooms of this series were those devoted to measuring the time of nervous and mental processes, by means of complicated and delicate machinery, electrical for the most part, and arranged so as to cause certain sense impressions, and to record the time between these and a response in some form of motion. Each experiment is repeated many times, with the same person, and with many persons, in order to eliminate errors due to inertia of after-impressions, to expectation or practice, to surprise or fatigue. In even so simple a procedure as pressing an electric button with one hand on feeling a touch on the other, nearly a dozen distinct elements were considered—stimulus of the sense organ, conduction through nerve and through brain, reception and transformation of the impulse, reconduction through brain and through nerve, and, finally, muscular action. The speed of nerve transmission being known as from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet a second, it is possible to deduce the approximate rate of mental reception and action. It is not flattering to learn that electricity is about one thousand times as quick. The total reaction from hand to hand occupies from one-tenth to one-fifth of a second; the ear has approximately the same rate of action; the eye is about one-fourth slower. The mind’s interpretation of sensation averages about one-twenty-fifth of a second; its determination to act, a shade less.

“It takes less time to perceive color and form than letters or words, and all of these differ among themselves. The number three seems a sort of natural unit, it being almost as easy to perceive three objects at once, as one; it is much harder to perceive four. The imaginative reproduction of an image requires about one-fourth of a second; the association of abstract ideas, about three times as long—all according to the previous alteration or multiplication of the six hundred million or more brain cells which are the average individual’s stock in trade.

“The numerical records of all such experiments are transformed graphically into diagrams, whose bases represent the number of experiments, and whose heights represent the varying accomplishment. Such surfaces of frequency, as they are called, show at a glance the entire performance of the trait studied, and are therefore much superior to the ordinary method of averages. The intellectual average of a town that contained a university and an insane asylum would be about that of a town that had neither. A diagram, however, would show not only the average, but the much more significant distribution. Attention is also paid to the ‘mode,’ or measure that occurs most frequently, and to the ‘median,’ or record above and below which half of the measurements lie. Then, by calculating the average deviation from the average, and certain similar ratios, it is possible finally to obtain a small group of figures which contain the essence of the entire distribution. This, in turn, makes possible the measurement and the comparison not only of particular mental functions, but of the characteristic ability of individuals and of groups. In this way, for example, it has been found that mental activities vary in much the same manner as do the functions of most of the natural organs that have been measured by biologists, anthropologists, and physicians. In general, two-thirds of all mental performances lie within the middle third of ability. Average efficiency is very near to the most common, and both lie about half-way between the two extremes.

“Perhaps the most striking result of such study is the discovery, by means of a large number of measurements, that mental functions are much more independent of one another than is usually thought, and that a change in one function alters another only so far as the two have identical elements. There is, for example, only a slight correlation between remembering numbers and remembering words, and no perceptible relation between perception of time and perception of rhythm, or between sense perception in general and memory. Judged from the grades given by instructors to several thousand school and college students, the natural sciences are closer to Latin, in the kind of ability they require, than they are to mathematics. Algebra and geometry are almost as different from one another as mathematics in general are from non-mathematical subjects.

“Such facts certainly seemed to warrant the conclusions of the professor to whose guidance Portia now consigned me: ‘The mind is not a functional unit, nor even a collection of general faculties which work irrespective of particular material. It is rather a multitude of separate functions, each closely related to only a few of the others, and to most in so slight a degree as to elude measurement. It is impossible to infer success in one field from success in another, or success in an entire subject from success in a part of it. To estimate the general ability of any individual requires the separate measurement of traits sufficiently numerous and well-chosen to represent fairly all of his capacities. By means of such specific measurements, however, we can determine pretty definitely an individual’s capability for any of the highly specialized activities, such as music or painting.’

“The rooms devoted to the study of genetic psychology, or mental development, contained much interesting data concerning the mental life of children, collected usually through very simple tests, such as estimating the size of geometrical figures, the length of lines, or the duration of sounds; arranging in graduation a series of weights, or the shades of a color; or recalling series of related or unrelated letters or words. While the material thus obtained seems to indicate the existence of certain general laws of mental growth, it is not yet considered sufficient to establish them. The implications are that the masculine mind is slightly more variable, the feminine slightly better in perception; and that the relation between early and later ability is one not of antagonism, but of resemblance.

“I wished that I might linger over the studies of rapidity of movement, tested by tapping; and of precision, tested by drawing lines in a narrow, intricate path, or by tapping in a small circle without touching the sides; and I would gladly have spent a day examining the ingenious contrivances for recording and measuring the attention demanded and the emotions aroused by different sorts of reading. But our time was growing so short that I was hurried on, after only a glimpse at a mass of material that would have delighted or distressed—I had not time to learn which—the heart of a spelling reformer—the records of the spelling of thirty-three thousand children! In this connection the professor remarked that his own experiments had convinced him that good spelling depended not on memory or on observation in general, but upon a certain specific ability to notice small differences in words, by means of sight, hearing, or, in the case of the blind, through touch.

“In the next, so-called ‘heredity room’ were records showing that children of the same parents are slightly more like one another than they are like the average, in height, color of eyes and hair, and in all the mental traits that have been studied in this connection. The physical traits of parents tend to alternate, their mental traits to blend, among their children. Eminent men are almost always found to have near relatives of eminence. Family resemblances are most marked in traits, like musical ability, that are least affected by environment. Here, too, were the life histories of many twins, showing that those closely alike at birth and in early rearing usually remained so in spite of later changes in environment; and that those unlike at birth remained so in spite of identity of nurture. From such and similar facts the department drew the conclusions that nature predominates greatly over nurture, that inheritance is specialized rather than general, and from the original nature of the parents rather than from acquired traits.

“Individuals who are subjected to the influence of a particular environment are usually so much more influenced by the forces that select them for that environment, that accurate knowledge in this field is obtainable only with difficulty. The fact, for example, that most Congressmen are college graduates is probably due not so much to their education as to their early giving evidence of ability that demanded such training. In the words of the professor: ‘The factor of selection is commonly neglected, the influence of environment commonly overestimated. Environment does not create, but merely selects and stimulates natural abilities. About all that education can do is to supply facilities for and remove obstacles to the growth of the brain, encourage desirable activities by making them pleasurable, and inhibit their opposites by making them uncomfortable. Mental hygiene, opportunity, and incentive are the foundations of the teacher’s Blackstone.’

“I was prepared to be impressed most of all by what Portia called the ‘human-nature room,’ for here were printed records of many studies based on answers to widely circulated ‘questionnaires.’ From one set it was deduced that half of us have favorite sounds, open vowels and liquid consonants leading; one-fourth are fond of particular words, ‘murmur’ being the choice of the majority; most people are fond of particular names, ‘Helen’ being the prime favorite. Similar records showed that women read more than men, but reach the period of maximum reading sooner, the greatest reading age being about twenty, the average amount small after thirty-five, most people reading for emotional rather than intellectual reasons. Yet others indicated that muscular power increases and attention decreases in summer, the mind being at its best from December until April.

“I was concluding that here was a very mine of richness for the novelist, when the professor remarked: ‘We attribute small importance to this sort of thing. Conclusions based on reports from artificially selected and incompetent observers and combined in an unscientific manner have no general validity. Only direct expert observation of representative cases, and accurate statistical study of all the factors involved, can bring reliable results. We may base our educational ideals on philosophic or popular theories, but our study of the nature of mind and the ways of affecting it, to be at all valuable, must be rigidly scientific.’

“Well, I had learned enough and to spare without these suggestive, if inaccurate, observations of general human nature, and without even looking into certain rooms, where zoölogists and psychologists united in studying the development of mind in the animal world.

“‘I presume,’ I remarked to Portia as we left the building, ‘that when you come to consider suitors for your daughters, you will inquire into not their social and financial standing, but their personal equations of perception and motor-activity, and request statistics concerning the central tendency and variability of each of their mental and moral traits?’ ‘Undoubtedly,’ she replied, ‘and I should want to know similar facts for their parents, and also the details of their reaction to humidity and to heat.’

“‘Shall you require similar data concerning the prospective father of those daughters?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps,’ she concluded; ‘but considering the present undeveloped state of the science, I should insist on conducting those investigations myself. Just now I have no time for such experiments. I must to a lecture. Good-bye.’

“Thus Portia left me to proceed to my lunch and to cogitate alone, a more confirmed perfectibilian than ever, marvelling at the achievement of this generation, and half prepared to accept as true an inscription that I had seen in the last room we visited: ‘Psychology has a message to the world, richer and more original than that of the Renaissance.’”

XIX
The Club of the Bachelor Maids

PROFESSOR Maturin told me that he was convinced, after very brief cogitation, that no one but his young friend Portia could have caused him to receive the impressively simple card which lay before him, reading: “The Pleasure of your Company is requested at the First Annual Gentlemen’s Day at the Club of the Bachelor Maids.” Therefore, before dispatching his acknowledgment to the house committee, he wrote to Portia that he should be more than happy to accept the invitation if she would be good enough to accompany him and see him safely through. To this she acceded with a promptness that implied her anticipation of the suggestion; and so the designated afternoon found them entering the portal together. I quote the account of his experiences as exactly as I can remember it.

“The house, which had been remodelled out of two dwellings in the fifties near the avenue, was very interestingly although simply furnished, in colonial fashion for the most part. There was a spacious public room with tapestried walls and wicker furniture, a library and a reading-room with home-like fireplaces, and an extensive lunch and dinner-room in mahogany and cream. I understood that there were also Turkish baths in the basement, and a sun parlor and a garden on the roof, but these were not shown.

“When I turned my attention from the furnishings to the company which had assembled in the larger rooms, I realized the truth of a recent observation that our American women are steadily improving in personal appearance. There was never, to be sure, any crying need for such improvement. Yet, after examining the portraits of early American women by Copley, West, and Stuart, hung in the dinner-room, or the loan collection of Malbone and Staigg miniatures in the library, it was impossible not to be forcibly struck by the living faces about them. Whether due to the operation of natural selection or to our national crossing of races, to modern intellectual advancement or to contemporary social emphasis on better air, food, and exercise, I cannot say. But the superiority of the modern women in symmetry and grace, delicacy and modulation of coloring, and in variety and individuality of expression, was beyond question. The splendid carriage of many of the guests and their refined voices, Mr. Henry James to the contrary notwithstanding, were a delight at the moment, and have been a pleasant memory ever since.

“Portia was so much pleased at my pleasure, that she was quite willingly drawn to a recess whence I could look and where she could elucidate without interruption. There she told me what she could concerning the possessors of such aesthetic mouths, lustrous eyes, and autumn-tinted hair as especially fascinated my gaze.

“I ventured also to inquire about the wearers of particular gowns, for even my masculine eye could perceive, here and there, certain rare harmonies of costume with appearance and bearing, and I was flattered to be told of almost every person who thus attracted my attention that she was generally thought to be especially interesting. Whereupon I jotted down in my pilgrim’s scrip the observation that, in spite of fashion, dress may yet sometimes become a subtle expression of personality. Portia, indeed, told me that fashion troubled some of these ladies so little that one of them had made an aphorism to the effect that ‘Individual women are seldom in fashion; they are usually in advance of it.’ Which saying I remembered instead of my own.

“This phrase and its maker, a gifted designer of jewelry, deflected our conversation to the subject of occupations, it being a qualification for membership in the club that ‘one must be somebody or do something for one’s self,’ as Portia put it; a requirement more strictly enforced than that of the celibacy implied by the name of the organization. As one member and another appeared or passed with her guests, Portia singled out for me the architect and the decorator who had planned and furnished the house, and then the florist who had arranged the decorations, and the caterer who had provided the unique refreshments of the day. There were also numerous librarians and settlement workers, two successful real estate operators, and the manager of an important branch of the office work of a huge life insurance company. One handsome, middle-aged woman, that I took to be one of the philanthropic patrons who had made the club’s equipment possible, Portia singled out as a practitioner of what struck me as the most interesting profession of all—a department-store critic. It was her function to make a daily survey of every part of one of our immense emporiums in order, from her observation, her knowledge of other shops, and of their patrons’ tastes, to make suggestions for improvements in stock, display, or service. I saw also a number of artists and authors, reviewers and publishers’ readers. In one of the rooms an excellent programme was being rendered by several members representative of a musical group, which alternated with similar literary, artistic, and dramatic coteries, in providing entertainment for a series of weekly club evenings throughout the winter.

“Upon my making particular inquiry concerning such of the club’s members as were graduates of our colleges for women, Portia for a time devoted her attention to representatives of that class. A number of these, naturally enough, were college instructors. Several were physicians and hospital officials; one, an attorney, was probation officer in a juvenile court; two were on the editorial staff of newspapers. Many found regular employment in religious or philanthropic enterprises; only one was in business—as assistant to the secretary of a large electrical company.

“When I was unoriginal enough to ask the conventional question concerning the general attitude of college women toward marriage, Portia gave what I instantly recognized as the only possible answer, inconclusive as it was: the college woman was as yet too recent a phenomenon for any generalization about her to be safe. The particular question of her attitude to marriage could be solved only by the well-nigh impossible process of comparing equal groups of college and non-college women of the same social kind. Such indications as there were showed no great differences, except perhaps that college women were likely to marry somewhat later.

“Indeed, I found that the club was intended, for one thing, to be a sort of outpost for studying and, if need be, aiding the solution of just such problems in the economic and social life of women, ‘especially of such as would go a-careering,’ in the words of the phrase-maker. Among the many announcements on a bulletin board, I saw that a well-known litterateur—or should one say litteratrice?—was to speak on Madame de Staël, George Sand, and Mrs. Browning; a philanthropist on Madame Roland and the Countess Schimmelmann; a psychologist on Marie Bashkirtseff and Mary MacLean. And there were lists of conferences on physiology and hygiene, sociology and economics, and religion and philanthropy, in addition to announcements of the weekly entertainments already mentioned.

“Another bulletin bore an equal number of announcements of all sorts of outside recreations, from the opera and selected theatres to golf and Adirondack camps.

“In all of its activities the organization displayed not only the same energy but also the same breadth of view. The cant of sentimentality and the anti-cant of grievance were alike conspicuously absent. The club picture gallery included Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’ and Alma-Tadema’s ‘Cleopatra,’ as well as portraits of Susan B. Anthony and the Countess of Warwick. Its library contained social studies as unlike as Aristophanes’ ‘Ladies in Parliament’ and Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women;’ and philosophic deductions as opposed as Comte’s ‘Worship of Women’ and Schopenhauer’s ‘Woman as Insufficient Reason.’ The only piece of militant feminism anywhere to be seen was one of a series of inscriptions on oaken panels:

Women have risen to high excellence

In every art whereto they give their care.

On closer inspection, I found this to be a quotation from Ariosto. Beside it was an inscription from Herbert Spencer which read: ‘If women comprehended all that is contained in the domestic sphere, they would ask no other.’ That the club realized the humorous as well as the serious suggestion of such juxtaposition was proved by one of the mantelpieces, where rested side by side an effigy of Egypt’s great queen Hatasu, and a fragment of a Roman matron’s epitaph, reading, ‘She stayed at home and span.’

“When I asked Portia to what conclusions, if any, her club life had led her, she confessed to only a few, and those very tentative. As compared with the married women of her acquaintance whose cultivation was equal to that of her fellow club members, most of the latter appeared over-serious, self-distrustful, or inconsistent. A few seemed to find full activity and satisfaction in careers for which they obviously possessed decided gifts. But the majority, after a certain eagerness for experience and self-realization had become satisfied, seemed to be but half-heartedly filling in their time while anticipating or desiring something else. This attitude, together with the census statistics, appeared to indicate that the chief career for the great majority of women was still through marriage. Whether it was becoming less so for the kind of women the club comprised, and if this were the case, what was the alternative—these were among the questions upon which the organization held itself open to conviction.

“For herself, Portia was happy still to be in the mood of acquisition: there were many things that she was eager to learn and to experience before it became time to inquire what she was going to be. As yet she had got no further than realizing that, while being a bachelor woman seemed to have obvious limitations, it was surely extremely pleasant to be a bachelor maid.

“I very honestly replied that, considering her youth and her opportunities, I would not have her feel differently—certainly not at present.”

XX
A Small College

PROFESSOR Maturin has always questioned the somewhat popular belief that the small college, once so important, is about to disappear between the portentously rumbling upper and nether millstones of the universities and the public schools. He was therefore more than glad to accept, in the form of an invitation to visit a professorial friend at a country college, an opportunity to see for himself.

During two hundred express-train miles away from the metropolis, and twenty more deliberate ones away from the main line, he thought a good deal about the matter, not without regret that the German ideal of specialized scholarship should completely overcome the English ideal of general culture. After the professor’s cordial greetings, conversation at once turned to this topic. The professor, however, was so unapprehensive that he claimed attention rather for the attractive situation of his town, after remarking that, as a matter of fact, the small colleges were increasing in attendance and resources much more rapidly, in proportion, than the great universities. His own college, in the last five years, had enlarged its endowment from three hundred thousand to nearly a million dollars, and its attendance from two to nearly four hundred students. Five hundred was to be the limit, the president and his faculty being unanimous in believing that no college should be too large to give attention to every student every day in every class. “This was sufficiently reassuring,” said Professor Maturin, as he told me about it, “to permit my attending comfortably to my surroundings, which were indeed charming.” I continue the account in his own words.

“The college campus stretched along the main street, at the southern end of the town—a large rectangle of wonderful greensward, resulting from the English recipe of watering for a hundred years, and guarded by a small army of enormous elms that must have been already in occupation when the tract was bought from the provincial proprietors, in the early years of the republic. Here stood the two buildings that accommodated all the academic and domestic life of the college during its first half century. Both of native limestone, with softer brownstone trimmings, the older was a notable example of the best American public architecture of an hundred years ago. The dozen other buildings nearby were similarly landmarks in the later history of the institution.

“The brownstone and dark brick chapel gave its lower floor to the libraries of the college and the literary societies, which made a total of about forty thousand volumes, some of them purchased and imported in bulk by the founders of the college. For student use the collection seemed quite adequate, not indeed for specialization, but certainly for the fundamental, general training for which the college stood. The work of the freshman and sophomore years consisted largely of required subjects, the junior and senior years largely of electives. This system, long in vogue, proved most acceptable, particularly to such graduates as my friend the professor, who had taken in college, Latin, Greek, French, and German; much English, some history, and a little economics; geology, physics, chemistry, physiology, and hygiene; mathematics up to and including calculus and astronomy; logic, psychology, ethics, and an introduction to philosophy—surely a broad foundation for his subsequent specialization in history. Later experience made him wish that he had studied also biology, sociology, and something of music and the fine arts. The first two of these were now provided by the institution.

“I had long heard of the president of the college as a distinguished clergyman and a more than kindly man. My first meeting with him left an impression of rarely mingled strength and fineness that every subsequent conversation but confirmed and deepened. I saw most of the professors, next morning, ranged on the chapel platform, and I subsequently learned to know all of them, either personally, or through my friend’s characterizations. This acquaintance was entirely in rebuttal of the charge that all professors belong to the mutually exclusive classes of those who know their subjects and those who love their students. These professors, almost to a man, managed to do both. The amount of wise and kindly personal consideration given to every student was little short of incredible, and had notable results in both character and culture. A better-mannered set of undergraduates I never saw, and this in spite of the fact that the freshmen indicated, for the most part, that the college had to work with more than ordinarily raw material. Something in the atmosphere added a fineness to the prevailing vigor, which delighted the eyes of a visitor accustomed to city anaemia, and produced a host of generous customs like doffing the hat to professors and standing in chapel while the president passed.

“I could not see that my friend’s very considerable scholarship was hindered by the obligation that he felt to know the name and something of the nature of each of his students. Indeed, I think that it was rather helped. His intellectual life had a freedom from dreaminess, on the one hand, and from pedantry, on the other, that I could attribute to no other cause. Such constant and intimate contact with youthful immaturity and ignorance would probably cause deterioration in a man of inferior ability and training, but my friend was both able and well trained, and so were most of his colleagues. His college course had been immediately followed by a year at one American university, and two years at another. Then, after an interval of teaching, he had had six months in England and a year and a half on the Continent, finishing in Germany with a doctor’s degree and a dissertation of real historical value. The others had had similar experiences, the language men, particularly, having enjoyed prolonged foreign residence.

“I was interested to learn that the head of the department of English, although an inspiring teacher and a writer of originality and distinction, had never been to college at all, but had gained his training and had amassed his really notable scholarship entirely through private instruction, individual reading, and extensive travel, and had come to his professorship only after a successful career as a critic and an editor. I was sufficiently impressed by this to inquire of the president how he avoided the requirement I had heard more than one university officer make, that every instructor should be the possessor of a doctor’s degree. He answered almost abruptly: ‘In selecting our staff, as everything else, we try to ignore the union label. It is always the sign of the conventional, and the conventional, especially in the humanities, too often means the mediocre.’ And then he changed the subject. That was surely radical educational doctrine, but in this case, at least, it was certainly justified by the results.

“In fine, the faculty seemed to me quite equal to the average of a university staff, and, because of their constant accessibility, appeared to be considerably more influential as teachers of immature students.

“Most of the professors lived near the college. My friend was the owner of an attractive small house, with a bit of ground, opposite the campus, computing the entire carrying cost at less than three hundred dollars a year. Adequate food and service were equally available and cheap. ‘Indeed, I have,’ he said, very earnestly,—I take pains to quote him exactly,—‘I have the smallest quarrel that it is possible to have with the academic income. Ours is not the ill fortune of those professors who suffer privation because ambitious presidents and business-like trustees agree that advertising is better than instruction, and spend on unessential but showy buildings funds that would relieve the men on their staff from financial anxieties distracting in themselves and occasioning those efforts to earn from outside sources which so often seriously undermine a professor’s academic usefulness, if not his intellectual and physical health. We manage to live on the two thousand dollars which is the professorial stipend here, knowing that proportion of the income of the college to be a generous proof of its belief in the primary importance of instruction. We decrease the numerator to suit the denominator. We seek the simplest food, clothing, and furnishings; reduce service to a minimum; buy fewer books; take shorter vacations; give less to charity, and nothing to public causes. Not being able to have what we want, we succeed pretty well in enjoying what we have, sustained by the intellectual and moral satisfactions of our calling—except sometimes. We, of course, become accustomed to the humiliating knowledge that the public does not consider our labor and devotion worth paying highly for. But the realization that the meagreness of our incomes, by more and more separating our lives from those of other men, is steadily decreasing our usefulness and influence—that is at times hard to bear.

“‘So far as living in a small town is concerned, save for the spice of variety which one may store up in vacation, it furnishes ideal nourishment for the intellectual life. The time at one’s command seems almost inexhaustible, and there are practically no distractions. Our social circle is limited, but interesting. Lacking the opera, our ladies become fair pianists. In place of museums of art, they have a club that studies art appreciation and history. Instead of going to the theatre, we read and talk of books, of which we know a few well rather than many slightly. Being devoid of the opportunity and hence free from the obligation of winnowing the current ephemera of my specialty, I am constantly occupied, instead, with the monumental, permanent contributions to the subject. One cannot do both things, and I am content with my enforced choice.’

“The students were unquestionably gainers by their rural environment. They evidently studied a great deal, that being the most interesting occupation available. The cheapness of the place enabled many of them to obtain for a low tuition and a ridiculously low cost of living, a training they would elsewhere have been unable to pay for. For recreation they spent much time in the gymnasium, on the athletic field, and wandering far through the charming surrounding country. There was a not unhealthy amount of what is known as college and class spirit, with the numerous traditional customs thereto attendant.

“I could not see that the fraternities, which played a large part in the student life, did anything more than give to natural tastes and tendencies an organization that helped the student to see qualities, and the faculty to watch defects, in the mass. The religious life of the place impressed me as abundant and powerful, but in no way overstrained. When I saw some of the young ladies whose habit it was to be at home to students on Friday evenings, I wished myself a youth again. The boys repaid their kindness in many ways, not the least pleasing of which was the serenading which invariably followed the closing of the fraternity meetings, which were held from ten o’clock to midnight on the night preceding the weekly holiday—a custom that seemed to satisfy the youthful desire to act very much grown up, at the small price of consequent sleepiness. The healthy spirit of the place frowned on actual dissipation.

“Thinking over my visit, during the return journey, I realized that the whole question of the relative usefulness of the metropolitan university and the rural college reduces to an estimate of the comparative values of the large and the small, the near and the remote, of efficiency and culture. Our national environment and history have emphasized the importance of the large, the immediate, the efficient. But there is always much to be said on both sides of every question, and it is at least possible that enough importance has not been attributed to the small, the distinctive, the fine.

“On the whole,” concluded Professor Maturin, “I am inclined to disagree with my friends in the universities, and to believe that the future of the small college is bright rather than dark.”

XXI
Old Town Revisited

I  FOUND Professor Maturin, the other evening, recently returned from a visit to the home of his youth with a bundle of such pleasant memories that I set them down as nearly in his own words as possible, without any of the inquiries and the interruptions of appreciation that they inevitably drew from me.

“In the first part of the journey thither, repeated efforts failed to conjure up anything like a full and definite picture of the place. But, suddenly, as so often happens, the mists of memory cleared, and it seemed as though I had never been away. This almost theatrical change causing me to look about with surprise, I became quickly aware that the train had swung into the beginning of what we used to call ‘The Happy Valley.’ With a sigh of content, I sank back into the comfort of old adjustments, with a sense of their completeness that could come only from a knowledge of later maladjustments to compare them with.

“This valley, perhaps a hundred miles long and from a dozen to a score of miles wide, is walled in by blue mountain ridges of from twelve to two thousand feet in height, their bases sweeping nearer or farther and their sky-lines higher or lower in a series of almost symmetrical curves. The same restrained variety characterizes the surface of the valley, which billows and rolls throughout like a solidified section of mid-ocean. The mountains, foothills, and small patches of the valley are still covered with oak and chestnut, pine and cedar timber, which make springtime delightful and the autumn splendid. Elsewhere all is fertile farm land, squarely fenced or marked with low walls of ever available limestone, which also provides firm, smooth roads stretching in every direction over hill and meadow. Many farm-houses and barns are built of this stone, softened with the mellowness of years. Later structures of local brick with slate roofs seem scarcely less sturdy.

“This same pleasant variety of surface and solidity of building characterizes the town itself. Cheerful two-and-one-half story houses, of red brick, with green shutters still prevail, although about the central square and along the business blocks the height is usually greater. I well remember the builder of the first three-story house in town. The first four-story structure was reared in my boyhood. Its completion was celebrated with fire-works and the first electric lights seen in the town. Now there are even cut-stone bank fronts, and they are building an apartment house and a five-story department store. Near the edges of the town, where the dwellings stand back from the streets with lawns and flowers and trees, the march of improvement is particularly noticeable—as indeed it well might be, for the place has doubled in size since I left.

“These dwellings indicated to me that local prosperity had caused the tide of physical well-being to rise to the second or shelter stage. Formerly, ideas of luxury centred chiefly in food, which was consumed in a variety and abundance that would have made a dietitian shudder. The land is still one of plenty and good cheer, and a progress through the town would delight the monarch who said, ‘Let me have men about me that are fat,’ but other creature comforts have come to be considered also. The stage of personal adornment has yet to be reached: the men seldom have their hair trimmed or their trousers pressed, and the costume of the women is simple. The local attention to such matters seemed interestingly different from the metropolitan order of clothing, shelter, food.

“But as it was not progress that I had chiefly come to see, I found myself returning repeatedly to the old town hall, which once sheltered the oldest bank and is still surmounted by a tower of strange local architecture, bearing an equally erratic clock. All this, like everything else in the place, seemed by no means so large or so imposing as I had remembered it, and the bank’s disappearance prevented the repetition of our one local author’s jest concerning ‘the bank where the wild thyme grows.’ But when I once more climbed the tower and picked out, one by one, the old landmarks, I felt all of my early fondness for the place return. No one, I believe, can be without a certain proprietary affection for a place upon which he has often looked down from a tower.

“There, above the town, my memory of many of its personages became vivid. First, always, we admired the old Governor—we never called him ‘ex,’ although he had been that for many years. A fine, burly figure, even in old age, he was usually seen driving to or from his model farms in a vehicle which must have antedated the one-hoss shay. And he seldom passed without some one relating how, when a misguided ram, not being in position to be awed by his countenance, had made the conventional attack, he expanded to his fullest height and, with his favorite, historic, expletive, thundered: ‘Continental dam, sheep! What do you mean?’

“The Senator, who logically came next, was by no means so impressive; for, being regarded chiefly as a provider of political places, he was forced, when he walked abroad, to assume an abstraction profound enough to make him oblivious of the hungry eyes of his constituents. I fear that his was not a happy life, at least when he was at home, which grew to be more and more seldom.

“The General, however, loved to parade his tall, proud figure. It was currently reported that he wore stays; certainly he carried his shoulders always ready for epaulettes and his head poised for a chapeau. For years he longed to be elected a Congressman, but always in vain. A tradition that he had once compared a poor man to a wet dog embodied the popular distrust of his aristocratic nature; and his set speech of compliment to each village where he spoke—that the fairness of its daughters almost persuaded him to renounce his bachelorhood—usually waked sarcasm rather than applause.

“After the General came the Colonel, an attorney so genial that, it was said, he habitually bowed to trees and hitching-posts, from mere force of habit. Every one suspected him of storing up popularity against the day when he might run for office. Whether he ever compassed or even desired such an end, I do not know.

“The Town Beauty, I learned, had long since married an officer in the army. We had, I think, even more than our share of handsome girls, but to gaze upon her was such an unalloyed delight that she came to be prized as one of the chief attractions of the town. It used to be said, jocosely, that after visitors had seen the new court house, they were always made to wait until she passed, before any one would show them the way to the fair grounds. Certainly she never disappointed the fondest anticipations, except during one sad season when the whole town mourned. Most inexcusably she had attempted to improve the lily and the rose of her complexion by means of a cosmetic, which must have been devised solely to further the sale of the same manufacturer’s healing lotions. The damage wrought was most distressing, and recovery was slow and anxious, but happily complete. There was some desire to express the public anxiety that there should be no more such experiments; but the lesson had been learned, and thereafter her loveliness only bloomed the richer.

“The persons mentioned were all conspicuous members of the local aristocracy, to which the professions of law, and, to a lesser degree, of medicine, were the open sesame. The chief members of these professions, together with all such persons as were distinguished for family, and a selection from those who were distinguished for wealth, made up a somewhat exclusive social set, which gave an annual ball, invited friends to dinner, and went on vacations—sometimes even to Europe. As for the great majority, the men were devoted chiefly to business and sometimes to politics; the women to their homes and their churches, which last regulated all of their social as well as their religious activities.

“For the recreation of our elders there was always a great deal of driving. It was possible to keep a carriage on an income that would not suffice for that alone in the metropolis. The carriage roads were and still are excellent and the country charming, with here and there a stately old manor house for historic atmosphere. Even then the mountains were frequently resorted to. Now they are easily accessible, and boast not only numerous hotels, but many cottages to which the more fortunate go back and forth daily in summer. To my boyhood the mountains represented not only untamed nature, but their hotels were outposts of the great world beyond. The mountains represented history also, for on the side of one was a battlefield, marked with a huge cairn of stones; and they meant literature, as well, for in one of the gaps was the home of an author whose novels and poems were in the town library.

“With us young people bicycles were popular to a degree that once, in the days of the old, high wheels, drew even a national meet to the old town. But the simple attractions of the place palled on our travelled guests, and the occasion began to look like a failure until, in the evening, the entertainment committee got together and started a false alarm of fire, which allowed the visitors to pull the hand-apparatus of the local fire companies madly about the streets, until their superabundant energies were exhausted and they went to bed happy.

“These volunteer fire companies were centres of the most intense interest, making up in anticipation and preparation for the practical efficiency which, happily, they were seldom called upon to demonstrate. They held innumerable initiations, elections, anniversaries, and reorganizations; and they were always considering, with infinite attention to detail, the adoption of new uniforms and the purchase of new equipment. All of which we youngsters ardently emulated with an organization which, in a vocabulary more aspiring than accurate, we called ‘The Juneviles.’

“Even more, if possible, than by the fire companies, our interest was stirred by the annual county fair, which, for four days in the autumn, crowded the town with visitors and filled the central square, of evenings, with all sorts of travelling mountebanks. This was eagerly welcomed as practically our only opportunity for familiarity with the histrionic art, for the attractions of the town theatre were not of a sort to be generally approved. I remember, however, attending at least one performance there when young enough to be tremendously puzzled by the difficulties of a harlequin in attempting to get through a wall the door of which mysteriously changed from place to place, while from time to time the wall became all doors or showed no doors at all.

“Sometimes the few bookish people gathered into reading clubs or welcomed visiting lecturers, who also conducted discussions and criticised essays, when anybody wrote them. The only lecture that I recall dealt with Rugby, and impressed me partly for Tom Brown’s sake, but chiefly because on that occasion the most sensitive man in the town covered himself with confusion by absent-mindedly clapping his hands together in pursuit of a mosquito, with the effect of applauding loudly at a most inappropriate time. The after-lecture discussions struck me then as very learned, but I judge now that I must have been easily impressed, since the only specimen that I remember was the statement that ‘Carlyle was a bear, wallowing in a sea of words,’ made by the principal of the high school.

“Even now I should consider him as remarkable as his rhetoric. For he was not only the official head of the dozen schools in his building, but he also taught, alone and unaided, all of the classes in the high school, preparing us for college in every subject from algebra to zoölogy, and doing it well. His only limitation was that he chewed tobacco, secretly, or as secretly as he was able with the eyes of thirty boys constantly upon him.

“Not the least interesting feature of my visit was the opportunity it provided for noting the present status of old schoolmates. Most of them had developed in directions that might have been anticipated from their youthful traits. Even the fact that two of the most harum-scarum had become responsible bank directors was explained by the remembrance that youthful lawlessness may often represent merely a superabundance of excellent energy. The school dreamer had become the chief confectioner of the town, expending his imagination on a new-art shop and a summer garden lighted by the electric eyes of Cheshire cats and owls perched in the trees. The serious boy had acquired practice as a physician until his stout body and large head seemed bursting with incommunicable knowledge concerning the local human comedy. The clever boy had become a successful attorney, more than satisfied with his profession as an excellent working hypothesis in an unintelligible world. The boy who had become a musician pleased me, perhaps, most of all. With a talent that would win distinction anywhere, he rejected the distractions of cities for a simple environment, where he might discover and develop his spontaneous self.

“If those that I had known as boys were now men, those I had known as mature were now old. The fine old clergyman who for years had led in every movement for things of good report now saw much of his seed bring forth abundantly, and had, moreover, the personal satisfaction of knowing that his youngest son had won distinction as the first Rhodes scholar from his state. The one local artist, a landscape painter, still pursued with modest determination his honest, if undistinguished, toil. The old florist was still the finest of idealists in his devotion to nature, irrespective of worldly considerations. I was happy to note that he seemed to have prospered materially, in spite of his fondness for giving and his distaste for selling his plants.

“One or two old men that I had known were still able to regale me with memories of ‘the Rebellion,’ and of the installation of the town water-works. But most of my familiars of that generation had passed away. The two old admirals who had so strangely chosen such an inland berth for their final cruise, the old doctor who urged his horse by explosively uttering the words ‘effervescent’ and ‘fundamental,’ the little old librarian with his fondness for Josephus, and the sadly wheezy conductor of ‘the Madrigal Club’—even the decayed old gentlewoman who wore different colored wigs to suit her gowns—all had passed on.

“But, in spite of many such absences, and of some sadder memories, my visit was one of profound and lasting pleasure. I did not mind the omniscient small-town scrutiny, which somehow apprised my friends of all that I had been doing, even before I called. And I found the whole place full of the most delightful little interests, even for one who has so little of ‘the restless analyst’ about him. From the point of view of contrasting the residential values of capital and province, the advantages of the old town are, perhaps, largely of a negative character. But all the essentials of life are there, although in little, and success being so much less difficult, and failure so much less disastrous, the balance of vitality left over is satisfyingly large. It was not at all a bad place to spend one’s youth, and it would be by no means a bad setting for one’s old age.”

XXII
The County Fair

I  FOUND Professor Maturin deeply pondering, the other evening, the season when the county fair stirs semi-rural communities, all over the land, with anticipation, realization, and fresh reminiscence. “No one of our institutions for pleasure or profit,” said he, “is more firmly established; and yet students of local manners and customs and of social psychology appear to have given it small attention, and there is no notable record of it in literature, save that by Mr. Howells in the beginning of ‘The Coast of Bohemia.’ Its phenomena, however, are easily ascertainable by any one who has rural acquaintance or access to rural newspapers.”

I asked him to instruct me concerning the subject, and he continued substantially as follows:

“For weeks before the great occasion these newspapers record and reflect the steady growth of the greatest enthusiasm of the year. Meetings of the Fair Association begin, and become more and more frequent, until it is announced that the secretary will be at his office daily. Immediately thereafter rumors spread, or are spread, concerning larger exhibits than ever before, of live stock, of machinery, of household entries; in short, of everything.

“Extra offices are ostentatiously opened for every sort of entry, and are as ostentatiously filled with more and more assistants, who periodically and publicly exhaust their entire supply of exhibit tags. After a secretly anxious interval the officers of the association begin to smile over the conscious possession of actual cash paid for concessions, and lavishly hire a negro of aldermanic proportions, in a costume boasting three hundred and fourteen brilliant patches and two hundred and three assorted buttons, to parade the streets in the interests of advertising.

“At the last meeting but one before the fair, it is officially announced that the ‘outlook is for the greatest collection of exhibits ever entered,’ and the association decides, out of the fullness of its heart and pockets, to equip the new barn with electric lights, and to issue complimentary tickets to all clergymen who apply for them.

“At the same meeting it awards the ‘feed privilege,’ and appoints judges, ticket-takers, grandstand ushers, and many guards, under the command of a military train-announcer, together with various unnecessary marshals and sundry mysterious functionaries known as ‘hill-men’ and ‘hatchet-men.’ All of these, especially the night guards, speedily become heroes in the now almost painfully wide-open eyes of the town’s small boys.

“The Poultry Fanciers’ Association likewise begins to hold frequent meetings, planning its own exhibits and its entertainments for visiting exhibitors, and announcing that silver cups may be given as prizes, in which event the cups also will be exhibited. Finally, at least one cup makes its appearance, and is displayed in advance, surrounded by many ribbon rosettes and streamers destined for such happy birds as are only less than the best.

“Hotel and restaurant keepers hungrily furbish up old and install new equipment, increase their attendance and provide music, and make bids for the reward of virtue by refusing entertainment to such undesirable citizens as Mormon missionaries. Local real estate booms more loudly than ever, and local commerce plumes and preens itself with all kinds of ‘openings’ and ‘fair-week bargains.’ It keeps a jealous eye on competition, requiring visiting street vendors to keep moving; but it is so hospitable to visiting custom that when visiting custom’s sleepy children tumble into its show-cases, it grandly refuses to accept payment for the resulting damage.

“And now ‘the Midway’ begins to cast its lights and shadows before. Its prospective patrons sorrow over the enforced absence of the glass swallower, who has at last succumbed to the rigors of his profession. But they are felicitous over the return of the electric woman, and look forward with eager anticipation to the yet untasted delights of riding on a ‘sea-wave,’ and of throwing rings at the heads of a flock of live geese. They read with avidity long newspaper accounts, by correspondents who sign themselves ‘1t,’ of the approaching Russian midget and the Igorrote village; and the report that two balloonists are contesting for a concession distracts them between the comparative merits of a real wedding in mid-air and a cannon that shoots an aeronaut and a parachute.

“Meanwhile ‘Ten Nights in a Bar-Room’ comes to town with a tent and a band that parades, but so few persons attend that no performances are given. Local entertainers, however, climb to the very pinnacle of competition. The Family Theatre provides ‘An Entire Change of Programme!’ and the Academy of Music presents ‘A Repertoire Company of World Wide Reputation!!!’ The skating rink advertises a new floor, and a grand opening, with decorations of American flags and Japanese lanterns. And the dancing academy announces a series of fair-week dances with a new palm-room capable of seating an orchestra of six pieces.

“Soon the zest of danger is added to the local frame of mind by the appearance of two men ‘from away,’ who appear dissatisfied with all the watches that the leading jeweller can display, until it is learned, after their departure, that they have taken several with them for more leisurely examination. Thereupon all strangers are looked upon with suspicion, doors and windows are doubly locked; valuables are guarded; and local justice warns or incarcerates on suspicion the best or worst-known local offenders, and congratulates the town on the loss of fewer horses, watches, and pocket-books than usual. Anxiety over property, however, at no time approaches that concerning the weather, which cannot possibly last if it is good, although it will certainly continue if it is bad.

“Local finance shows its approval of the general course of things by promising its bank clerks two half-holidays, and local learning smiles indulgently in paying its teachers earlier than usual, and granting its pupils a two days’ recess. The Grand Council of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Fraternity promises its annual visitation during fair week, and the church endeavors to leaven the worldliness of the season by announcing the twenty-sixth annual convention of the Woman’s Home and Foreign Missionary Society.

“When the exhibits actually begin to arrive, one wonders how enthusiasm can rise higher. The fair grounds present an increasingly busy scene, until there is scarcely moving room between workmen and wagons. Incoming teams grow more and more crowded with exhibits and exhibitors, fakes and fakirs, and, finally, with visitors. Every private house entertains old friends and new. Public accommodations are taxed to the utmost, and trading at the city market becomes well-nigh frantic.

“The visitors represent all sorts and conditions of men and women. The old woman who has never ridden on a railroad train and the old man who attended the first fair fifty years ago, the veteran who helped defend the town during the civil war and the business man who is taking his first vacation in twenty-four years—these divide interest with the principals in the runaway marriages, of which there are two or three daily.

“Numerous former residents return for the first time in many years, and several new families decide to locate permanently. At the last moment the Governor finds himself unfortunately unable to be present, but the president of one railroad and the general manager of another come in private cars, and two rival political candidates are much seen but not much heard.

“Various other distinguished guests arrive in touring cars, and countless other less distinguished but equally dust-covered persons arrive in carriages. Street movement grows very brisk. Buggies clash, automobiles bump, and trolley cars jump the track; and over all begins to rise the call of the cabman, ‘Going right out.’ By night all the shops are brilliant, sidewalks are crowded, and in the square there are moving picture advertisements, and the flaring torches of vending and performing fakirs.

“The opening day dawns bright and clear, and every one jubilantly follows the call of the cabmen, until the town itself seems half deserted. On the grounds bands boom, marshals gallop, and crowds pour through and around the buildings. Within one of these, merchants display pipes and pianos, furniture and furnaces, hardware and haberdashery, shoes and sewing-machines, carpets and candy, in apparently endless array.

“On an upper floor the household department demands appreciation for two thousand four hundred and twenty-four glasses of jelly, six hundred and fifty-one jars of pickles, three hundred and thirty cakes, and eighty-nine specimens of homemade soap. Nearby in the department of fine arts are paper flowers, worsted mottoes, six hundred and fifteen pieces of embroidery, one hundred and forty-two cushions, four hundred and forty-three drawings and paintings, and one hundred and ten curiosities and relics, mostly ‘over one hundred years old.’ Among the latter the palm is borne by six cocoanut-shell baskets and a tray of seventeen-year locust shells.

“Elsewhere are many worthy flowers, shrubs, and trees; fruits, vegetables, and grains—celery a yard tall, pumpkins a yard wide, and forty-seven varieties of beans. The pavilions and grounds devoted to machinery present a bewildering array of ploughs, planters, cultivators, reapers, and stackers; of threshers, separators, huskers, shellers, cutters, and grinders; of engines and pumps, saws and mills, and of all things after their kind.

“Every domestic animal, too, after its kind, seems to be represented in countless pens and stalls, until one tarries only long enough to sign the Poultry Fanciers’ demand for a new building and to be grateful for the railroad congestion that has delayed many other exhibits, and then departs, resolutely undeflected by the charms of the Midway, the miniature railway, and the innumerable ice-cream, sausage, and popcorn stands.

“By the second day it is a commonplace that the exhibition is the greatest ever given; everybody begins to count it nearly half over, and a few acknowledge that they wish it were. The cabmen complain of trolley car competition, and a sight-seeing automobile decides that its license is too high to allow it any profit. Lady visitors complain that there are not enough seats on the grounds, that admission to the grandstand is increased to fifty cents, and that the classification of the fancy work department is years behind the vogue. The judges of jellies and the connoisseurs of cakes are prostrated after their investigations into the merits of the two thousand four hundred and twenty-four and three hundred and thirty specimens to which they have submitted their respective tastes.

“On Thursday, however, the third and, by tradition, the greatest day, enthusiasm and optimism return under the stimulus of the largest crowds the town has ever seen. Nobody can count the people, and estimates of their number are as inflated and soaring as the great balloon, which finally does its duty handsomely. Nine trolley cars are counted in the square at one time; there are eighty passenger coaches in the railroad yards, and one livery-stable entertains two hundred and thirty-four visiting horses! People who did not expect them receive premiums, and the indefatigable Poultry Fanciers have a parade and a banquet, at which they announce their building as assured.

“On Friday, the final day, the blessing continues to brighten as it takes its flight. The Fair Association smilingly admits about eight thousand dollars profit, entertains itself, and its live stock and machinery exhibitors, at luncheon, promises the Poultry Fanciers their new building, and utters mysterious hints concerning a great aquarium for next year. Nothing mars the growing satisfaction save that some unknown miscreant drops a lighted match into an entrance ticket box and burns up approximately a bushel of tickets.

“Such are some of the phenomena of the county fair,” concluded Professor Maturin. “They promise much to any proper scientific and literary exposition. Here, as everywhere else, we need only a little more information and a little more intelligence to transform our contemporary superficiality into a realization of life that is, at the same time, strong and fine.”

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.

The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and is entered into the public domain.

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Table of Contents

- The Observations of Professor Maturin
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- I The Staff of Life
- II The Sindbad Society
- III Foreign Travel at Home
- IV Country Life
- V Food for Thought
- VI Beside the Sea
- VII Christmas
- VIII The Sovran Herb
- IX Men’s Faces
- X Mental Hygiene
- XI The Mystery of Dress
- XII Questions at Issue
- XIII The Fountain of Youth
- XIV The Contemporary Fiction Company
- XV The Old Doctor
- XVI Breakfasting with Portia
- XVII Summer Science
- XVIII Measuring the Mind
- XIX The Club of the Bachelor Maids
- XX A Small College
- XXI Old Town Revisited
- XXII The County Fair
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE