Atlantic Classics Volume I Part 7

You will remember the British lady at the Hotel de l'Univers in Tours, who, in her description of Amboise, p.r.o.nounced curious to rhyme with glorious. Her kind was still pervading the quieter hotels of the continent (the Hotel de l'Univers was still quiet) while her more muscular sister was still climbing all the Alps in valiant weeds. This time, another of the identical type sat next me at the table d'hote, and from the corner of my eye I perceived her to be making endless and surrept.i.tious dives with her head at my bottle of Vouvray mousseux.

Becoming sure that this was neither St. Vitus's dance nor kleptomania, but a desire to learn the name of my wine, I made her a slight bow, turning my bottle so that she could more easily read its label; at which she squeaked skittishly, 'I-didn't-think-you'd-see-me!'

III

The mid-Victorian spinster was gone, the automobile was come, the much expanded Hotel de l'Univers was quiet no more and had abandoned the table d'hote for small tables when next I saw Chenonceaux. Eager as I had been to return to it, still more did I desire to enjoy that particular pleasure which one takes in introducing a scene one delights in to a friend. We were, this time, as we had been the first time, a party of three, and the day was July 4, 1914; but in the Cathedral of Bourges that morning, and at Montrichard and along the Cher that forenoon, firecrackers seemed remote. Later, the Hotel de l'Univers had illuminations and national melodies for the benefit of its American patrons--these having now swelled to the lucrative proportions of invasion.

But Chenonceaux hadn't changed, Chenonceaux looked just as young as ever. Its bright, serene aspect showed no confusion at changing masters so often. To my friends it more than fulfilled my promises for it, while for me it was even fairer than my memory. The concierge, a woman this time, told her band of sightseers enough, but much less than she knew.

She had acquired (one somehow divined and discerned) a certain scorn for her sightseers. She had found (one saw) the affluent automobile to be the chariot of well-informed stomachs, but seldom of intelligences which had ever heard, or would ever care to hear, about Madame Dupin and her many distinguished guests. They knew their Michelin, where to buy _petrol_ along the road, which roads to avoid; and the road they had particularly avoided was the one conducting to civilization. Some of them were present on this occasion with their goggles, their magenta veils, and their bra.s.s voices. To these the concierge imparted what she deemed them able to digest. She didn't mention the _Devin du Village_--but I did! This brought an immediate _rapprochement_, as we lingered with her behind the departing goggles. She knew and loved her Chenonceaux; her scorn fell from her; but she told us nothing so interesting as the fact that during the last twelvemonth _twenty thousand_ visitors had given each their required franc to see the place.

The chateau, at this rate, will pay its way down the ages.

But what of the Bon-Laboureur? If the mid-Victorian spinster and the table d'hote hadn't survived the pace of the new century, what had the automobile done to the innocent village inn? I hope you will be glad to learn that it hadn't--as yet--done much. I have now reached the third of those meals which I mentioned at the outset. The Bon-Laboureur seemed a little larger,--people were lunching in two rooms instead of one, and out behind, kitchenward, there was a hint of bustle and of chauffeurs, and perhaps the personal note of welcome was fainter. But it wasn't quite absent; and still the food was excellent, still the service was courteous, a pleasant young woman waiting; and I felt that here was a good, small tradition still somewhat holding out against the beleaguering pressure of the wholesale. So I spoke to the pleasant young woman and inquired if the old _patronne_ were still living.

'Mais si, monsieur!' I was, to my astonishment, answered. 'A deux pas d'ici.'

The personal note of welcome warmed up on learning that I was an old visitor here; the patronne would value a call from one who remembered her good cooking; she was now very old; she had sold the business and the good-will; she lived very quietly; would I not go to see her? And her house was pointed out to me.

Along the street of the little white village I went, slowly, in the midsummer warmth. The grape-leaves, trailing and basking on the walls, the full-leaved trees, the light and laziness of earth and sky, conveyed the same hush of repose that had exhaled from the golden autumn and the delicate spring I remembered so well; in this July sunshine, also, the pleasant land lay dreamy and unvexed. At a door standing slightly open, I knocked. Though a pause followed, I felt I had been heard; then I was bidden to enter, by a very old voice. Two rooms were accessible from the tiny hall, but I entered the right one, and there by the window sat the patronne. I had remembered her as moving alertly round her table, quiet and vigorous, above average height. All of this was gone; and as her dark, feeble eyes looked at me, I felt in them a certain apprehension, and found myself unpremeditatedly saying,--

'Madame, I trust you will not think ill of an intruder when you learn why it is that he has ventured to knock at your door. They a.s.sured me you would like my visit. Here is my little story: One Sunday afternoon in September, 1882, three travelers came to the Bon-Laboureur. I was one of them; and never forgetting your excellent meal and service, I returned at my first opportunity, in April, 1896. Meanwhile that good meal of yours, and you its hostess, had been mentioned in a book by another of those three guests; and you told me of the prosperity this had brought you. Since that visit, thirty-two years ago, I have become a writer of books too. Of me you will not have heard, but you cannot have forgotten Mr. Henry James, whose praise brought so many guests to the Bon-Laboureur.'

Her eyes, during my speech, had awakened, and now she stood up.

'My servant is absent,' she said, 'or you would not have had to come in so. But my son lives close by in that large place. He will like very much to see you. I will call him.'

She would have gone for him on her trembling feet, but this I begged she would not do; I had but five minutes; friends were waiting for me.

'I am ninety years old,' she said. 'Ah, monsieur, il est bien triste de vieillir. One has nothing any more.' She became suddenly moved, and tears fell from her.

I need not recall the little talk we had then. Strangers though we were, we did not speak as strangers; the memories that rose in each of us, so separate, so different, flowed together in some way, united beneath our spoken words, and made them sacred. But I may record that she got out her old books to show me, her registry-books of the Bon-Laboureur, little, old, modest volumes, where in many handwritings through many years the names of her guests had been inscribed. They had come from almost everywhere in the world. No longer strong enough, she had parted with the business and the good-will; but from these tokens of her past she could not part. She clung to the inanimate survivals of her good days and her renown. And on a blank page of the last volume which she placed before me, putting a pen in my hand, I wrote briefly for her of my three pilgrimages to her _pet.i.t pays_. Of the international distinction of her son she was touchingly and justly proud: famous peonies have spread his name wide as their cultivator and producer. For this, too, was the Bon-Laboureur in its way responsible.

Perhaps I may not see it again, or its grand neighbor, the chateau, that secular shrine of a vivacious and select Past. But I shall need no Michelin, or Baedeker, or Joanne, to guide my memories thither. They are with me, every moment and breath of them, for my perpetual delight, a safe possession, unweakened and undimmed; and to conjure them before me it needs no more than the haunting syllables of Chenonceaux and the quaint, cherished volumes of the patronne.

IN CHENONCEAUX

My noiseless thoughts, if changed to their just sound Amid these courts of silence once so gay With love and wit, that here full pleasure found Where Kings put off their crowned cares to play, Would shake in laughter at some jest unheard; Would sing like viols in a saraband; Would whisper kisses--but express no word That would not be too dim to understand.

Like to a child, who far from ocean's flood Against his ear a sh.e.l.l doth fondly hold To hear the murmur that is his own blood, And half believes the fairy-tale he's told, So I within this sh.e.l.l mistake my sea Of musing for the tide of History.

The Other Side

By Margaret Sherwood

Like every other attentive reader of our periodical literature, I am increasingly aware of our persistent exposure of sin and wrong-doing in high places and in low; like many another attentive reader, I am growing a bit rebellious against this constant demand and supply in the matter of information regarding recent evil. Have we not grown over-alert in the search for this special kind of news? We take vice with our breakfast porridge; perjury with our after-dinner coffee; our essayists vie with one another in seeing who can write up the most startling story of crimes; and it is a bankrupt family nowadays that cannot produce one member to expose civic or political corruption. Undoubtedly much genuine ethical impulse lies back of all this; undoubtedly, too, much of the picturesque and spectacular treatment springs from a desire to startle, and ministers, in many a reader who would scorn paper-covered fiction, to a love of the sensational. Surely it must seem to the people of other countries that we take pride in the immensity of our sins, as we take pride in Niagara, in the length of the Mississippi, in the extent of our western plains.

Many may be, and must be, the good effects of throwing the searchlight upon dark places, but the constant glare of the searchlight bids fair to rob us of our normal vision of life. My poor mind has become a storehouse of misdeeds not my own. I am sick with iniquity; I walk abroad under the shadow of infamy, and I sup with horrors. I shrink from meeting my friends,--not that they are not the best people in the world, but I dread lest they pour into my ears some newly acquired knowledge of wrong-doing. For me, as for others, the sun of noonday is clouded by graft, bribery, treachery, and corruption; and I fear to close my eyes in the dark because of the pictured crimes that crowd before them.

Suppose poor Christian had had to drag after him not only his own bag of transgressions, but those of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Facing-both-ways, and all the denizens of Vanity Fair, what chance would he ever have had of getting out of the Slough of Despond?

It is not that I wish to shirk; I am not afraid of facing anything that I ought to know, and I have not the slightest doubt that we are all, in great measure, responsible for our neighbors' sins. But I am not sure that we are taking the wisest way to mend them. It seems to me incontestable that, with the large issues of individual and of national well-being in mind, we are over-doing the exposure, and slighting the incentives to right action; emphasizing the negative at the expense of the positive; and that, with our weakening convictions regarding the things that are right, it is dangerous to go on loudly proclaiming the things that are wrong. We are much in the position of a village improvement society which has pulled down a bridge because it is rotting, and is impotent to build another and a better. We have invested our national all in wrecking machinery, and have nothing left for constructive tools. It is said that in our explosive setting forth of civic and national wrong-doing, we are all too p.r.o.ne to stop with the explosion, as if mere knowledge of these things would set them right.

Mere knowledge never yet set anything right; only the ceaselessly active, creative will can fashion a world of law out of chaos.

Of the criticism often made that exposure of wrong should be followed, more closely than is done here, by constructive action, if anything is to be really effected, it is not my task to speak. The aspect of the matter which interests me especially concerns the youth of the land; it is the educational aspect. Not through loud wailing over evil can a nation be built, but through resolute dwelling with high ideals. In certain ugly tendencies of recent years among the young, as, for instance, the unabashed sensuality of much of the modern dancing, may we not detect, perhaps, a cynical a.s.sumption that life is at basis corrupt,--a natural result of continued harping on evil things, and of failure to keep before them images of moral beauty? Our magazine writers would be far better employed, if, instead of making our ears constantly resound with reports of civic iniquities, they were, part of the time at least, studying Plato's _Republic_, and filling mind and soul with the hope of the perfect state. Wrong things we dare hope are of small and fleeting consequence as compared with the right; it is not the sin of Judas Iscariot, but the righteousness of his Master, that has brought the human race a gleam of hope and possible redemption. When I was told, not long ago, of a student in one of our great universities who had elected 'Criminology 16,' I could not help reflecting that he might far better have taken Idealistic Philosophy I.

Whether or not our study of evil should be lessened, our study of the good needs to be vastly strengthened. We are losing the vision! 'Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' said the prophet, in promising wonders in the heavens and in the earth, after his account of fasting, weeping, mourning, and beating the breast. There is a time for beating the breast and for tearing the hair, and of this we have had our day, but perpetual sitting upon the ash-heap and howling will not raise the walls of state. Sitting there may, in time, even become a luxury; can it be that we are doing so much of it partly because it is easier, and because the heaven-sent task of building up and shaping is too hard for us?

Take away from youth the power of seeing visions, of dreaming dreams, and you take away the future. It would behoove us to remember, perhaps, that the eras of great deeds have not been eras of a.n.a.lysis, but eras when the creative imagination was at work. Yet our modern mental habit is overwhelmingly a habit of a.n.a.lysis, for which science, in teaching us to pick the world to bits, is partly, though not wholly, responsible. It has brought us an immense amount of interesting information; it has brought also a danger whose gravity we can hardly estimate, in the constant lessening of the synthetic power. The power to image, to fashion high ideals, and to create along the line of the imagining, is weakening, instead of growing more strong. In the glorious days of Queen Elizabeth, in the unparalleled days of Periclean Athens, great ideals formed themselves before men's eyes and great achievements followed; emotion, hope, vision, shaped human nature to great issues. I wonder what influence those perfect marble representations of perfect form had upon the very bodies of the youths and the maidens of Athens, what creative force they exercised,--the imaginative grasp of the perfect reaching forward toward perfectness in the human being. I wonder what influence the character of Sir Philip Sidney alone, with 'high-erected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy,' has had upon succeeding generations of English youth. 'A man to be greatly good,' said Sh.e.l.ley, 'must imagine intensely and comprehensively.'

Here my quarrel with our present intellectual trend and our present system of education becomes more acute. We are not only losing the habit of mind that fosters idealism, but we are more and more breaking with the past. The door of that storehouse of n.o.ble thought and n.o.ble example is being slowly but firmly closed, and there is little in modern teaching that can meet the inroads made by the devastating knowledge of evil of which we have been speaking; little that can build up where this tears down. Study of Greek life, with its incomparable power of shaping existence toward the beautiful, is all but cast aside; most unfortunately now, when, with the rush of ignorant peoples to our sh.o.r.es, it might have a far-reaching potency never attained before. The ignorance of contemporary youth regarding that other and finer loveliness of 'Gospel books' is amazing. More and more we are stripped of the humanities; the incredulity of science in contemplating philosophy, art, literature, as part of the educational curriculum, is full of menace. There has never been, I think, in the history of the civilized world, a time when people were so anxious to cast off the past. In our eager Marathon race of material and physical progress we want to go as lightly equipped as possible. The aeroplane carries small luggage; our light modern mind is ever ready to throw overboard even its precious heritage, in its eagerness for swift flight. As earlier days have reverenced the old, we reverence the new, and are all too insistently contemporaneous.

We need, as we never needed before, a broader and deeper study of history, of philosophy, of literature; for most of our young, a knowledge of the mental and spiritual past of the race is of far greater importance than a knowledge of the physical past, at the amba stage, or any other. Science, much as it can do for us, can never meet our deepest need; the world of imaginative beauty and the world of ethical endeavor are apart from its domain. It has no spring to touch the will, yet that which has, the magnificent inheritance of our literature, is more and more neglected for the latest machinery that applied science has devised, or the most recent treatise on insect, bird, or worm. It is well to study insect, bird, and worm, for they are endlessly interesting, but I maintain that neither the full sum of knowledge concerning them, nor even the ultimate fact about the ultimate star, can be a subst.i.tute for knowledge of the idealism of Thomas Carlyle, of the categorical imperative of Kant,--for that study of the humanities which means preserving, for the upbuilding of youth, that which was best and finest in the past, as we go on toward the future.

If the swift retort should come, from those who think the present the only era of attainment and the physical world the only source of wisdom, that the past is full of villainies, of lapses from high standards, one can but say that for ethical purposes our study should be frankly a selective study, emphasizing the fine and high, subordinating the evil.

There is no hypocrisy in such selection; there is deliberate choice of the higher upon which to dwell, as a formative power, quickening feeling and imagination. I have heard it said that a woman, by resolute dwelling on things n.o.ble and pure, may shape the inner nature of her unborn child, and I have faith to believe it. Even so should the nation yet to be be shaped by resolute dwelling on the good. It was not all cowardice, as many a present writer thinks, that led the mothers of earlier days to say little to their sons and daughters regarding evil things, and much regarding right things. Doubtless greater frankness would have been better, yet I doubt if our protracted dwelling on the evil will produce better results.

Should any one object that this emphasis on the good means suppression of the truth, we can but reply that, for the rational soul, the truth is not necessarily the mechanically worked-out sum of all the facts. That we have forgotten the distinction between fact--that which has indeed come to pa.s.s, but which may be momentary--and truth, which endures, is one of the many signs of what William Sharp calls the 'spiritual degradation' of our time. Much of our modern thinking and teaching, much of our realistic fiction, rests upon a failure to make the distinction; much that is indisputable in individual instances of wrong-doing may be, thank G.o.d! false in the long run.

'That is not true, scientifically true,' we hear often in regard to some fine hope or aspiration of the race; but in the real import of the term there is no such thing as scientific truth. It is a pity that a word of such profound and distinctive meaning should come to be more and more exclusively identified with the observation of physical phenomena, and the formulation of physical laws, whereas the very root-meaning of the word true, from Anglo-Saxon _treowe_, signifying faithful, gives justification for the idealist's belief that vital truth is partly a matter of the will, not of mere perception and of intellectual deductions drawn therefrom. We have need of deeper truth than that of mere fact; and the truth that shall set us free is a truth of choice, of selection; it embraces that part of human thought and human experience which is worth keeping.

Faithfulness to the best and finest in the past and in the present, rather than horrified gaping at the present's worst, is the att.i.tude that means continued and bettered life, for we become what we will. What are we offering, in the way of concrete examples, or of finely expressed thought about virtue, to the young, to the ignorant nations who are pouring in upon us, that will help them form their vision of the perfect? With our narrowing knowledge of the greater past, our choice of heroes becomes more and more local and national, yet our hierarchy of sacred dead is too small to afford that variety of heroic action and heroic choice that should always be kept before the minds of youth. We teach them that George Washington never told a lie; we teach them something--and there could be nothing better--of Lincoln; but those two figures are lonely upon Olympus, and the great tragic story of the way in which Lincoln faced the greatest crisis in our history will not alone suffice to help the everyday citizen shape his thought and action toward constructive idealism. The lesser heroes of our young republic have acquitted themselves n.o.bly in this struggle and in that, but the struggles have been too closely akin in nature to give the embryo hero that breadth and depth of nurture that he requires. We need an enlarged vision of history, and the sight of great men of all ages faithful to small tasks as to great; we need the companionship of heroes of other times and of other nations, and not of military heroes alone. Saint Francis with his unceasing tenderness to man and beast, Father Damien at work among the lepers, might far better occupy the pages of our magazines, than the pictured deeds of criminals and the achievements of contemporary multimillionaires.

If we need a wider range of concrete examples of the good, we need still more a wider range of n.o.bly expressed ideals. Our thought grows narrow; we smother for lack of breathing s.p.a.ce. Benjamin Franklin's philosophy was far from grasping the best of life, yet we remember him better than we do our Emerson, whose plea for spiritual values as the only real ones is lost in the louder and louder groaning of the wheels of our machinery. The idealism that is taught the young in Sunday schools is too often inextricably bound up with unnecessary theology; and many and many a pupil, in discarding the latter, discards the other also. The ideal of success upheld in much journalistic admonition is often rather mean and low; the young of this country need no printed incentives to urge them into commercialism and the victories of trade.

The best influences that are being brought to bear upon them are those which concern social responsibilities and the needs of the poor. Yet all this thought and endeavor should supplement and not supersede, as it is doing, a deep concern with the things of the spirit; and no admonition regarding hygiene for one's self or others is a subst.i.tute for--

A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things.

The great things of the past in all nations, history can teach us; the possible, both literature and philosophy can teach us. We must forego no n.o.ble expression of idealistic faith, lest we impoverish our own souls, and beggar those who come after us. The pure intellectual pa.s.sion of Bacon's _Advancement of Learning_, the n.o.ble stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, the spiritual vision of Plato, of Spenser, the heroic strain of Wordsworth's 'Liberty Sonnets' and his 'Happy Warrior,' Sh.e.l.ley's ardent and generous sympathy, Browning's dynamic spiritual force, should make up part of our life and thought, checking our insistent impulse toward mechanical things, and correcting the evil within and without.

More than anything else, we need a revival of interest in great poetry.

'Now therein of all sciences,' said Sir Philip Sidney, 'is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter it.... He cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue.'

The poet's 'perfect picture' of the good, the great image, causes n.o.ble pa.s.sion, wakes us out of our 'habitual calm,' and stirs us almost beyond our possibilities. The imagination is the miracle-working power in human nature; through it alone can the human soul come to its own.

Only that which is fine and high can feed it aright, while baseness can make of it a destructive tool of terrible power. As I think back to childhood, I can remember the devastating effect that one tale of cruelty had upon my mind, haunting me by day in vivid pictures, turning my dreams to horror, and making me, while the obsession lasted, believe that the world of grown folk must be all alike cruel. So, too, the compelling vision of the good came through concrete instances; and the people, both the living and the dead, in whom I pa.s.sionately believed, shaped all my faith.

The imagination of youth,--there is no power like it, no machine that can equal it in dynamic force, nothing so full of power, so full of danger. We become that which we look upon, contemplate, remember; it is for this that I dread the ultimate effect of the long, imaginative picturing of our neighbor's sins now presented in our periodicals.

Images of evil can hardly help dimming and tarnishing the bright ideals of youth; is there no way--with all our modern wisdom can we find no way--of limiting our exposure of crime to the people who can be of service in helping check it, and keeping it from those who cannot help, but can only be silently hurt? A moment, an hour of some fresh vision, and a child's destiny is perhaps decided for good or for ill. One afternoon's reading of Spenser made the boy Keats a poet; who, knowing the potency of brief experience in the flush of youth, can doubt the lasting wrong wrought again and again by the sudden shock of contact with things evil?

Many images of wrong must of necessity come to the young; let them not be multiplied in our feverish and morbid fashion of to-day. Above all, let them be crowded out by constant suggestion of n.o.ble images and n.o.ble thought, which will work both consciously and subconsciously, shaping the dream when the dreamer is least aware. To hold up before the ardent and impressionable young that which they may become in strength, in purity, would surely be better than placing before them this perpetual moving-picture show of our civic and national transgressions. I can but believe, as I read article after article of exposure, that this continued presentation to youth of the unholy side of life, with our increasing tendency to make education a mere matter of the intellect and of the eye, is bound to lessen the moral energy of the race. Would it not be better if we were more diligent in searching history, philosophy, literature, for 'whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,' and in bidding the young think on these things?

On Authors

By Margaret Preston Montague