Post Impressions Part 9

The sense of utter helplessness before the closed temple of Harold's private life oppressed me. Let alone his soul, I found that I did not even know how the boy was spending his time and who his a.s.sociates were. Fortunately, in this case it was a bishop; but it might have been some one much worse.

And why had Harold never spoken of his friend the bishop until our talk of parachutes and mountain climbing brought forth his perfectly matter-of-fact statement? Was it indifference on Harold's part? Was it studied reticence? I thought with a pang of self-accusation how I would have behaved, after meeting a bishop; how I would have turned the conversation at the dinner-table to the declining influence of the Church; how I would have found a way of comparing the Woolworth Building with ecclesiastical architecture; how I might have steered a course from golf to bridge and from bridge to chess; always ending with a careless allusion to what the bishop said when we met.

There was, as it turned out, a simple explanation for Harold's statement. A notable conclave of bishops and laymen had been in session for some days in our neighbourhood, and one of the visiting dignitaries had addressed the school children at the opening exercises one morning.

I say the explanation is simple, though it is largely my own hypothesis based on Harold's words as I have given them above; but I believe my supposition to be true. With regard to the six mules up a steep mountain I am not so sure; but probably it was a missionary bishop who entertained the children with an account of his experiences in Montana or British Columbia. What else the bishop told them Harold could not say. He admitted, regretfully, that the bishop used long words.

But I am not at all certain that other bits of information from that ecclesiastical speech have not lodged in Harold's memory, to be brought forward on some utterly unexpected but quite appropriate occasion. In the meanwhile I can only think that it must be a very fine sort of bishop, indeed, who could find time for an audience of school children and was not afraid to use long words in their presence. As I can testify, the encounter thus brought about did Harold good; and I am inclined to think that it did the bishop good.

We finally decided that no man could fall from a height over one hundred and fifty feet and reasonably expect to live.

You, mothers and fathers [this advertising folder petulantly insists], can you appease the wonder that looks out of the eyes of your child?

From Harold's eyes, I am inclined to think, no wondering soul looks out.

The world to him is quite as it should be. Everything fits into its place. Harold does not think it strange that a bishop should address him any more than he would think it strange to have the Kaiser walk into the cla.s.s-room and begin to do sums on the blackboard. Why should there be anything to puzzle him? He has learned no rules of life and is, therefore, in no position to be astonished by the exceptions of life. If only you are unaware that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, or that the whole is greater than any of its parts, the world becomes a very easy thing to explain. To Harold everything that is, is.

Everything that appears to be, is. Everything that he would like to be, is; and nothing contradicts anything.

It is true that Harold asks questions. But I believe he asks questions not because he wonders, but because he suspects that he is being deprived of something that should be his. It is that partly and partly it is the desire to make conversation. He insists on having his privacy respected, but often he appears to be seized with an utter sense of loneliness. All children experience this recurrent necessity of clinging to some one, and they do so by putting questions the answers to which frequently do not interest them or else are already known to them. To postpone the bed-time hour a child will try to make conversation as desperately as any fashionable hostess with an uncle from the country in her drawing-room. Children rarely deceive themselves, but they are expert at the game of hoodwinking and concealment. I think we find it difficult to understand how pa.s.sionately they desire to be let alone whenever they do not need us.

And how desperately bent we are upon not letting them alone! The number of ways in which I am constantly being urged to make myself a nuisance to Harold is extraordinary. I am a.s.sailed by advertising folders, uplift articles in the magazines, Sunday specials, Chautauqua lectures, pedagogical reviews, and the voice of conscience in my own breast, to inflict myself upon the boy, to win his confidence, make him my comrade, guide his thoughts, shape his moral development, keep a diary of his pregnant utterances, and in every other way that may occur to a fertile mind bent on mischief, peer into him, pry into him, spy on him, spring little psychological traps under him--a disgusting process of infant vivisection which has no other excuse than our own vacant curiosity.

Provided Harold digests his food, sleeps well, does his lessons, and abstains from unclean speech, it is no business of mine what Harold is doing with his soul. I am thankful for what he consents to reveal at odd moments. I guess at what I can guess and am content to wait.

And waiting, I have my reward--occasionally. Not until several weeks after I had discovered that Harold had the entree into ecclesiastical circles did the subject come up again. The boy paused between two spoonfuls of cereal and asked me whether a bishop would not find it easier to go up a mountain in an aeroplane. I foolishly asked him what he was driving at and he grew shy. I am afraid he now thinks bishops are not proper.

But who shall say that the connection between high alt.i.tudes and the episcopal dignity is not really an important one? Harold is apparently occupied with the question and I shall take care not to disturb him.

XVI

RHETORIC 21

Every time I happen to turn to the Gettysburg Address I am saddened to find that, after many years of practice, my own literary style is still strikingly inferior to that of Lincoln at his best. The fact was first brought home to me during my soph.o.m.ore year.

(Incidentally I would remark that the opportunities for consulting the Gettysburg Address occur frequently in a newspaper office. Every little while, in the lull between editions, a difference of opinion will arise as to what Lincoln said at Gettysburg. Some maintain that he said, "a government of the people, for the people, by the people"; some declare he said, "a government by the people, of the people, for the people"; some a.s.sert that he said, "a government by the people, for the people, of the people." Obviously the only way out is to make a pool and look up Nicolay and Hay. When we are not betting on Lincoln's famous phrase, we differ as to whether the first words in Caesar are "Gallia omnis est divisa," or "Omnis Gallia est divisa," or "Omnis Gallia divisa est." We all remember the "partes tres.")

In my soph.o.m.ore year we used to write daily themes. We were then at the beginning of the revolt from the stilted essay to the realistic form of undergraduate style. Instead of writing about what we had read in De Quincey or Matthew Arnold, we were asked to write about what we had seen on the Elevated or on the campus. I presume this literary method has triumphed in all the colleges, just as I know that the new school of college oratory has quite displaced the old. Instead of arguing whether Greece had done more for civilisation than Rome, soph.o.m.ores now debate the question, "Resolved, that the issue of 4-1/2 per cent. convertible State bonds is unjustified by prevailing conditions in the European money market." So with our daily themes. We did not write about patriotism or Shakespeare's use of contrast. We wrote about football, about the management of the lunch-room, about the need of more call-boys in the library.

The underlying idea was sensible enough. But it was disheartening to have a daily theme come back drenched in red ink to show where one's prose rhythm had broken down or the relative p.r.o.nouns had run too thick.

Our instructors were good men. They did not content themselves with pointing out our sins against style; they would show us how much more skilfully the English language could be used. When I wrote: "That the new improvements that have been made in the new gymnasium that has just been inaugurated are all that are necessary," my instructor would pick up the Gettysburg Address and read out aloud: "But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground."

Sometimes he would pick up the Bible and read out aloud:

For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest,

With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves.

Sometimes he would read from Keats's "Grecian Urn," or ask me, by implication, why I could not frame a concrete image like "Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, Silent upon a peak in Darien."

Even then I laboured under a sense of injustice. I could not help thinking that the comparison would have been more fair if I had had a chance to speak at Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln had had to write about the new gymnasium. I thought how the red ink would have splashed if I had ended a sentence with a comma like Job, or had said "kings and counsellors which." Are there still soph.o.m.ores whom they drill in writing about the prospects of the hockey team and to whom they read "The Fall of the House of Usher," as an example of what can be done with the English language? And do some of them do what some of us, in desperation, used to do? We cheated. We worked ourselves up into ecstasies of false emotion over the hockey team or pretended to see things in Central Park which we never saw. I always think of Central Park with bitterness. We were to write a description of what we saw as we stood on the Belvedere looking north. I wrote a faithful catalogue of what I saw, and the instructor picked up "Les Miserables" and read me the story of the last charge over the sunken road at Waterloo. I should have done what one of the other men did. He never went to Central Park.

He stayed at home and, looking straight north from the Belvedere, he saw the sun setting in the west, and Mr. Carnegie's new mansion to the east, and the towers of St. Patrick directly behind him. He saw it all so vividly, so harmoniously, that they marked him A. I got C+. Is it any wonder that I cannot even now read the Gettysburg Address without a twinge of resentment?

And yet we were fortunate in one way. In those days they read the Gettysburg Address to us as a model, and in spite of our resentment our soph.o.m.ore hearts caught the glory and the awe of it. But in those days the art of text-book writing had not attained its present perfection, and the Gettysburg Address had not yet been edited as a cla.s.sic with twenty pages of introduction and I don't know how many foot-notes. Am I wrong in supposing that somewhere in the high schools or the colleges this is what the young soul finds in the Gettysburg Address?:

Fourscore and seven years[1] ago our fathers[2] brought forth on this continent[3] a new nation,[4] conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition[5] that all men are created equal.[6]

Now we are engaged in a great civil war,[7] testing whether that nation,[8] or any nation so conceived and so dedicated,[9] can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield[10] of that war.

NOTES

[1] I.e., eighty-seven years ago. The Gettysburg Address was delivered Nov. 19, 1863. Lincoln is here referring to the Declaration of Independence.

[2] Figuratively speaking. To take "fathers" in a literal sense would, of course, involve a physiological absurdity.

[3] The western continent, embracing North and South America.

[4] "A new nation." This is tautological, since a nation just brought forth would necessarily be new.

[5] "Proposition," in the sense in which Euclid employs the term and not as one might say now, "a cloak and suit proposition."

[6] See the Declaration of Independence in Albert Bushnell Hart's "American History Told by Contemporaries" (4 vols., Boston, 1898-1901).

[7] The war between the States, 1861-65.

[8] I.e., the United States.

[9] See Elliot's Debates in the several State Conventions on the adoption of the Federal Const.i.tution, etc. (5 vols., Washington, 1840-45).

[10] Gettysburg; a borough and the county seat of Adams Co., Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border, 85 miles southwest of Harrisburg. Pop. in 1910, 4,030.

XVII

REAL PEOPLE

Among the most remarkable people I have never met is the family that had just moved out of the apartment we were going to rent. My knowledge of those strangers is based entirely on odd bits of information casually furnished by the renting-agent in the course of a single interview. Yet they are more actual and alive to me than many people with whom I have lived in intimate communion for years. Is it our fate ever to meet? I look forward to the event and dread it. I look forward with eagerness to a new sensation, and I fear lest the reality fall short of the vivid image I have built up with the help of the renting-agent.

In the matter of picking out an apartment, it is an invariable rule that I shall inspect the place and decide whether I like it. This I do after Emmeline has paid down a month's rent and selected the wall-paper. On questions of such nature, Emmeline is the Balkan States and I am the European Concert. She creates a _status quo_ and I ratify. In the present instance, however, I was really given a free hand. Emmeline admitted she was suffering from headache when she told the renting-agent that she rather liked the place. Later she recognised that the rooms were altogether too small. What had swayed her judgment was that the bedrooms had the sun in the morning and we should thus be saving on our doctor's bills. In this respect expensive apartments are like high-powered motor cars and a long summer vacation on the St. Lawrence.

They may be all easily paid for by cutting in two the doctor's annual bills amounting to ninety-odd dollars. However, I understood that this time Emmeline would be glad to be overruled.

The European Concert had its first shock when it was confronted with the size of the nursery bedroom. The renting-agent called my attention to the wall-paper. It had a very pretty border, showing scenes from "Mother Goose"; this at once revealed the purpose for which the room was intended. But I pointed out to him that if we put a chest of drawers against the wall and a little armchair in the corner, the crib would come hard against the steam pipe and would project halfway across the window.

"Oh," he said, looking up in surprise. "There's a crib?"

"Naturally," I said, "we should want this nursery for the baby."

This did not seem to strike him as altogether unreasonable, but he was puzzled nevertheless.