Atlantic Classics Volume I Part 14

That is archaic, perhaps, and not without a certain taint of quaintness to modern ears. But how drowsy it is, how minor its harmonies, how subtly soothing its languid melody! It tells, surely, in what manner consciously wrought prose may aid in the creation of illusion. The mood of sleep was here to be evoked, and lo! it comes from the very music of the sentences, from the drowsy lullaby of selected syllables.

We might choose a quite different example, from a seemingly most unlikely source, from the plays of George Bernard Shaw. One hardly thinks of Mr. Shaw with a style, but rather with a stiletto. His prefaces have been too disputative, his plays too epigrammatic, for the cultivation of prose rhythms. Yet his prose is almost never without a certain crisp accuracy of conversational cadence; his ear almost never betrays him into sloppiness; and when the occasion demands, his style can rise to meet it. The truth is, Mr. Shaw is seldom emotional, so that his crisp accuracy of speech is most often the fitting garment for his thought. But in _John Bull's Other Island_ his emotions are stirred, and when Larry Doyle breaks out into an impa.s.sioned description of Ireland the effect on the imagination of the heightened prose, when a good actor speaks it, is almost startling.

'No, no; the climate is different. Here, if the life is dull, you can be dull too, and no great harm done. (_Going off into a pa.s.sionate dream._) But your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colors in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings.

Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! (_Savagely._) No debauchery that ever coa.r.s.ened and brutalized an Englishman can take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him so that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and (_bitterly, at Broadbent_) be "agreeable to strangers," like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.'

This, to be sure, is prose to be spoken, not prose to be read. Different laws prevail, for different effects are sought. But the principle of cadence calculated to fit the mood, and by its melodic, or, as here, its percussive character to heighten the emotional appeal, remains the same.

But beyond the argument for cadenced prose as an aid to illusion, employed in the proper places,--that is, where intensity of imagery or feeling can benefit by it,--is the higher plea for sheer lingual beauty for its own sake. Shall realism preclude all other effects of artistic creation? Because the men on our streets, the women in our homes, talk sloppily, shall all our books be written in their idiom, all our stage characters reproduce their commonplaceness, nearly all our magazines and newspapers give no attention to the graces of style? I am pleading for no Newman of the news story, nor am I seeking to arm our muck-rakers with the pen of Sir Thomas Browne. I would not send Walter Pater to report a football game (though Stevenson could doubtless improve on most of the 'sporting editors'), nor ask that Emerson write our editorials.

But there is a poor way, and there is a fine way, to write everything, and inevitably the man who has an ear for the rhythms of prose, who has been trained and encouraged to write his very best, will fit his style appropriately to his subject. He will not seek to cadence his sentences in bald narration or in exposition, but he will, nevertheless, keep them capable of natural and pleasant phrasing, he will avoid monotony, jarring syllables, false stress, and ugly or tripping terminations which throw the voice as one's feet are thrown by an unseen obstacle in the path. His paragraphs, too, will group naturally, as falls his thought.

But when the subject he has in hand rises to invective, to exhortation, to the dignity of any pa.s.sion or the sweep of any vision, then if his ear be tuned and his courage does not fail him he must inevitably write in cadenced periods, the effectiveness of his work depending on the adjustment of these cadences to the mood of the moment, on his skill as an artist in prose.

And just now the courage of our young men fails. The unrestrained abandonment of all art to realism, of every sort of printed page to bald colloquialism, has dulled the natural ear in all of us for comely prose, and made us deaf to more stately measures. The complete democratizing of literature has put the fear of plebeian ridicule in our hearts, and the wider a magazine's circulation, it would seem, the more harm it does to English prose, because in direct ratio to its sale are its pages given over to the Philistines, and the dignity and refinement of thought which could stimulate dignity and refinement of expression are unknown to its contributors, or kept carefully undisclosed.

I have often fancied, in penitential moments, a day of judgment for us who write, when we shall stand in flushed array before the Ultimate Critic and answer the awful question, 'What have you done with your language?' There shall be searchings of soul that morning, and searchings of forgotten pages of magazines and 'best sellers' and books of every sort, for the cadence that may bring salvation. But many shall seek and few shall find, and the goats shall be sorted out in droves, condemned to an eternity of torture, none other than the everlasting task of listening to their own prose read aloud.

'What have you done with your language?' It is a solemn question for all of us, for you who speak as well as for us who write. Our language is a priceless heritage. It has been the ladder of life up which we climbed; with it we have bridged the sundering flood that forever rolls between man and man; through its aid have come to us the treasures of the past, the world's store of experience; by means of it our poets have wrought their measures, our philosophers their dreams. Bit by bit, precious mosaic after precious mosaic, the great body of English literature has been built up, in verse and prose, the crown of that division of language we call our own. Consciously finding itself three centuries ago, our English prose blossomed at once into the solemn splendors of the King James Bible and then into the long-drawn, ornate magnificence of Sir Thomas Browne, never again till our day to lose consciousness of its power, to forget its high and holy task, the task of maintaining our language at full tide and ministering to style and beauty. There were fluxes in the fashions, naturally; little of Browne's music being found in the almost conversational fluency (but not laxness) of Addison, even as the suave Mr. Addison himself has vanished in the tempestuous torrents of Carlyle. But there always was an Addison, a Carlyle, a Newman, a Walter Pater, whose work loomed large in popular regard, whose influence was mighty in shaping a taste for prose style. Who now, we may ask, looking around us in America, looms large in popular regard as a writer of ample vision, amply and beautifully clothed in speech, and whose influence is mighty in shaping a taste for prose style? It is not enough to have the worthies of the past upon our shelves. Each age must have its own inspiration. Again we hear the solemn question, 'What have you done with your language?' Only Ireland may answer, 'We have our George Moore, and we had our Synge not long ago--but we stoned his plays.'

We have stifled our language, we have debased it, we have been afraid of it. But some day it will rea.s.sert itself, for it is stronger than we, alike our overlord and avatar. Deep in the soul of man dwells the lyric impulse, and when his song cannot be the song of the poet it will shape itself in rhythmic prose, that it may still be cadenced and modulated to change with the changing thought and sound an obligato to the moods of the author's spirit. How wonderful has been our prose,--grave and chastely rich when Hooker wrote it, striding triumphant over the pages of Gibbon on tireless feet, ringing like a trumpet from Emerson's white house in Concord, modulated like soft organ-music heard afar in Newman's lyric moods, clanging and clamorous in Carlyle, in Walter Pater but as the soft fall of water in a marble fountain while exquisite odors flood the Roman twilight and late bees are murmurous, a little of all, perhaps, in Stevenson! We, too, we little fellows of to-day, could write as they wrote, consciously, rhythmically, if we only cared, if we only dared. We ask for the opportunity, the encouragement. Alas! that also means a more liberal choice of graver subjects, and a more extensive employment of the essay form. Milton could hardly have been Miltonic on a lesser theme than the Fall of the Angels, and Walter Pater wrote of the Mona Lisa, not Lizzie Smith of Davenport, Iowa. It is doubtless of interest to learn about Lizzie, but she hardly inspires us to rhythmic prose.

In the Chair

By Ralph Bergengren

About once in so often a man must go to the barber for what, with contemptuous brevity, is called a haircut. He must sit in a big chair, a voluminous bib (prettily decorated with polka dots) tucked in round his neck, and let another human being cut his hair for him. His head, with all its internal mystery and wealth of thought, becomes for the time being a mere poll, worth two dollars a year to the tax-a.s.sessor: an irregularly shaped object, between a summer squash and a canteloupe, with too much hair on it, as very likely several friends and acquaintances have advised him. His ident.i.ty vanishes.

As a rule the less he now says or thinks about his head, the better: he has given it to the barber, and the barber will do as he pleases with it. It is only when the man is little and is brought in by his mother, that the job will be done according to instructions; and this is because the man's mother is in a position to see the back of his head. Also because the weakest woman under such circ.u.mstances has strong convictions. When the man is older the barber will sometimes allow him to see the haircut, cleverly reflected in two mirrors; but not one man in a thousand--nay, in ten thousand--would dare express himself as dissatisfied. After all, what does he know of haircuts, he who is no barber? Women feel differently; and I know of one man, returning home with a new haircut, who was compelled to turn round again and take what his wife called his 'poor' head to another barber by whom the haircut was more happily finished. But that was exceptional. And it happened to that man but once.

The very word 'haircut' is objectionable. It snips like the scissors.

Yet it describes the operation more honestly than the subst.i.tute 'trim,'

a euphemism indicating a jaunty habit of dropping in frequently at the barber's, and so keeping the hair perpetually at just the length that is most becoming. For most men, although the knowledge must be gathered by keen, patient observation and never by honest confession, there is a period, lasting about a week, when the length of their hair is admirable. But it comes between haircuts. The haircut itself is never satisfactory. If his hair was too long before (and on this point he has the evidence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is too short now. It must grow steadily--count on it for that!--until for a brief period it is 'just right,' aesthetically suited to the contour of his face and the cut of his features, and beginning already imperceptibly to grow too long again.

Soon this growth becomes visible, and the man begins to worry. 'I must go to the barber,' he says in a hara.s.sed way. 'I must get a haircut.'

But the days pa.s.s. It is always to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.

When he goes, he goes suddenly.

There is something within us, probably our immortal soul, that postpones a haircut; and yet in the end our immortal souls have little to do with the actual process. It is impossible to conceive of one immortal soul cutting another immortal soul's hair. My own soul, I am sure, has never entered a barber's shop. It stops and waits for me at the portal.

Probably it converses on subjects remote from our bodily consciousness with the immortal souls of barbers, patiently waiting until the barbers finish their morning's work and come out to lunch.

Even during the haircut our hair is still growing, never stopping, never at rest, never in a hurry: it grows while we sleep, as was proved by Rip Van Winkle. And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a hurry; perhaps that is why it falls out. In rare cases the contagion of speed spreads; the last hair hurries after all the others; the man is emanc.i.p.ated from dependence on barbers. I know a barber who is in this independent condition himself (for the barber can no more cut his own hair than the rest of us) and yet sells his customers a preparation warranted to keep them from attaining it, a seeming anomaly which can be explained only on the ground that business is business. To escape the haircut one must be quite without hair that one cannot see and reach; and herein possibly is the reason for a fashion which has often perplexed students of the Norman Conquest. The Norman soldiery wore no hair on the backs of their heads; and each brave fellow could sit down in front of his polished shield and cut his own hair without much trouble. But the scheme had a weakness. The back of the head had to be shaven, and the fashion doubtless went out because, after all, nothing was gained by it. One simply turned over on one's face in the barber's chair instead of sitting up straight.

Fortunately we begin having a haircut when we are too young to think, and when also the process is sugar-coated by the knowledge that we are losing our curls. Then habit accustoms us to it. Yet it is significant that men of refinement seek the barber in secluded places, bas.e.m.e.nts of hotels for choice, where they can be seen only by barbers and by other refined men having or about to have haircuts; and that men of less refinement submit to the operation where every pa.s.ser-by can stare in and see them, bibs round their necks and their shorn locks lying in pathetic little heaps on the floor. There is a barber's shop of this kind in Boston where one of the barbers, having no head to play with, plays on a cornet, doubtless to the further distress of his immortal soul peeping in through the window. But this is unusual even in the city that is known far and wide as the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I remember a barber--he was the only one available in a small town--who cut my left ear. The deed distressed him, and he told me a story. It was a pretty little cut, he said--filling it with alum--and reminded him of another gentleman whose left ear he had nipped in identically the same place. He had done his best with alum and apology, as he was now doing.

Two months later the gentleman came in again. 'And by golly!' said the barber, with a kind of wonder at his own cleverness, 'if I didn't nip him again in just the same place!'

A man can shave himself. The Armless Wonder does it in the Dime Museum.

Byron did it, and composed poetry during the operation, although, as I have recently seen scientifically explained, the facility of composition was not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity of the human mind at that time in the morning. Here therefore a man can refuse the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of a half-dozen apparently inanimate figures, their faces covered with soap, and their noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek and then the other--that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet to invent a 'safety barber's shears.' It has tried. A near genius once made an apparatus--a kind of helmet with mult.i.tudinous little scissors inside it--which he hopefully believed would solve the problem; but what became of him and his invention I have not heard. Perhaps he tried it himself and slunk, defeated, into a deeper obscurity. Perhaps he committed suicide, for one can easily imagine that a man who thought he had found a way to cut his own hair and then found that he hadn't would be thrown into a suicidal depression. There is the possibility that he succeeded in cutting his own hair, and was immediately 'put away,' where n.o.body could see him but the hardened attendants, by his sensitive family. The important fact is that the invention never got on the market. Until some other investigator succeeds to more practical purpose, the rest of us must go periodically to the barber. We must put on the bib--

Here, however, there is at least an opportunity of selection. There are bibs with arms, and bibs without arms. And there is a certain amount of satisfaction in being able to see our own hands, carefully holding the newspaper or periodical wherewith we pretend that we are still intelligent human beings. And here again are distinctions. The patrons of my own favored barber's shop have arms to their bibs and pretend to be deeply interested in the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_. The patrons of the barber's shop where I lost part of my ear--I cannot see the place, but those whom I take into my confidence tell me that it has long since grown again--had no sleeves to their bibs, but nevertheless managed awkwardly to hold the _Police Gazette_. And this opportunity to hold the _Police Gazette_ without attracting attention becomes a pleasant feature of this type of barber's shop: I, for example, found it easier--until my ear was cut--to forget my position in the examination of this journal than in the examination of the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_. The pictures, strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwise you may get to looking in the mirror.

Do not do that.

For one thing, there is the impulse to cry out 'Stop! Stop! Don't cut it all off!

'Oh, barber, spare that hair!

Leave some upon my brow!

For months it's sheltered me!

And I'll protect it now!

'Oh, please! P-l-e-a-s-e!--' These exclamations annoy a barber, rouse a demon of fury in him. He reaches for a machine called 'clippers.' Tell him how to cut hair, will you! A little more and he'll shave your head--and not only half-way either, like the Norman soldiery at the time of the Conquest! Even if you are able to restrain this impulse, clenching your bib in your hands and perhaps dropping or tearing the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_, the mirror gives you strange, morbid reflections. You recognize your face, but your head seems somehow separate, balanced on a kind of polka-dotted mountain with two hands holding the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_. You are afraid momentarily that the barber will lift it off and go away with it. Then is the time to read furiously the weekly contribution of G. K. Chesterton. But your mind reverts to a story you have been reading about how the Tulululu Islanders, a savage but ingenious people, preserve the heads of their enemies so that the faces are much smaller but otherwise quite recognizable. You find yourself looking keenly at the barber to discover any possible trace of Tulululu ancestry. And what is he going to get now? A krees? No, a paint-brush. Is he going to paint you? And if so--what color? The question of color becomes strangely important, as if it made any real difference. Green? Red? Purple? Blue? No, he uses the brush dry, tickling your forehead, tickling your ears, tickling your nose, tickling you under the chin and down the back of your neck. After the serious business of the haircut, a barber must have some relaxation.

There is one point on which you are independent: you will not have the bay rum; you are a teetotaller. You say so in a weak voice which nevertheless has some adamantine quality that impresses him. He humors you; or perhaps your preference appeals to his sense of business economy.

He takes off your bib.

From a row of chairs a man leaps to his feet, anxious to give _his_ head to the barber. A boy hastily sweeps up the hair that was yours--already as remote from you as if it had belonged to the man who is always waiting, and whose name is Next. Oh, it is horrible--horrible--horrible!

The Pa.s.sing of Indoors

By Zephine Humphrey

Indoors is going. We may just as well make up our minds on this revolutionary point, and accept it with such degree of hardy rejoicing or shivering regret as our natures prompt in us.

The movement has been long under way, gradually working the perfect ejection which seems now at hand. We might have recognized the dislodging process long ago, had we been far-sighted enough. It began--who shall say when it did begin? Surely not in the s.h.a.ggy b.r.e.a.s.t.s of those rude ancestors of ours whom we hold in such veneration, and to whose ways we seem to ourselves to be so wisely returning. They dragged their venison into the depths of a cave darker and closer than any house, and devoured it in great seclusion. Perhaps it began in the San Marco Piazza at Venice, with the little open-air tables under the colonnades. "So delightful! So charming!" Thus the tourists, as they sipped their coffee and dallied with their ices. They were right; it was delightful and charming, and so it is to this day, but it was perhaps the thin edge of the wedge which is turning us all out now.

Supper was the first regular meal to follow the open-air suggestion, country supper on the piazza in the warm summer evening. That also was delightful, of course, and not at all alarming. All nations and ages have practiced the sport of occasional festive repasts out of doors when the weather has permitted. But breakfast was not long in following suit; and when dinner, that most conservative, conventional of meals, succ.u.mbed to the outward pressure and spread its congealing gravies in the chilly air, we were in for the thing in good earnest, the new custom was on. No longer a matter of times and seasons, the weather had nothing to do with it now; and in really zealous families the regular summer dining-room was out of doors. Summer dining-room--that sounds well; since summer and warmth go together traditionally. But not always actually in New England, where bleak rains overtake the world now and then, and clearing north-west winds come racing keenly. It was soon essential to introduce a new fashion in dinner garments: overcoats, sweaters, and heavy shawls, felt hats and m.u.f.flers.

'Excuse me while I run upstairs to get a pair of mittens?'

'Finish your soup first, dear; it will be quite cold if you leave it.'

The adherents of the new doctrine are very conscientious and faithful, as was only to be expected. We are a valiant race in the matter of our enthusiasms and can be trusted to follow them st.u.r.dily, buckling on armor or overcoats or whatever other special equipment the occasion demands. Conscientiousness is a good trait, but there is perhaps more of the joy of life in some other qualities.

Sleeping outdoors was the next great phase in the open-air movement.

That also began casually enough and altogether charmingly. One lingered in the hammock, watching the stars, musing in the still summer night, until, lo! there was the dawn beginning behind the eastern hills. A wonderful experience. Not much sleeping about it truly,--there is commonly not much sleeping about great experiences,--but so beautiful that the heart said, 'Go to! why not have this always? Why not sleep outdoors every night?' Which is of course exactly the way in which human nature works; very reasonable, very sane and convincing, but unfortunately never quite so successful as it should be. That which has blessed us once must be secured in perpetuity for our souls to feast on continually; revelation must fold its wings and abide with us. So we soberly go to work and strip all the poetry of divine chance, all the delight of the unexpected, from our great occasions by laying plans for their systematic recurrence.

He who bends to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses a joy as it flies, Lives in eternity's sunrise.

It is a pity that William Blake could not teach us that once for all. As a matter of fact, of course, great occasions care nothing at all for our urging; and a plan is an inst.i.tution which they cordially abhor. The stars and the dawn do not condescend to such paraphernalia for waylaying them as sleeping-bags, rubber blankets, air-pillows, and mosquito netting, with a stout club close at hand in case of tramps or a skunk.