Part 13
"In real life the young man has other things to do than making love, posing prettily, whispering sweet somethings, framing compliments and acting the gallant and defender of the fair and perfectly safe. He has other things to do than wearing fine clothes and winning smiles. In real life he has a real battle to fight. In real life he cannot always look neat, act aptly, prate loudly, and say the improper thing at the proper time. The improper thing at the proper time--that is the secret of genius. Things are not so smooth in life. The guidance of Providence is not so clear as are the directions of the playwright and novelist. Hard to tell just what to do, just what to say, just where to go, and just when to swear with impunity. Human beings are clumsy, awkward, uncouth. Life is an embarrassing affair. To observe all the niceties is madness, not to observe them is to be sent to a madhouse. What can a man do against his all-powerful rival in fiction and the drama. His course is clear, but we walk in darkness. The ways of God are mysterious, the ways of men are crooked, and then--we are told to find the way. No matter how much you stand on ceremony you are likely to slip and fall anyway. Life is a labyrinth for which there is no specific geography.
"To state the matter more definitely, the problem is this: A young man spends a half of his week's wages, takes the lady of his heart's desire to the theatre--and she falls in love with the hero of the play--the omnipresent, omnipotent hero. His every look, every word, every gesture, every step, every venture--it is just too lovely for anything. Oh, it is adorable, entrancing! And the young man who took her to the theatre, the young man who really exists, what does he amount to? What a puny dwarf he becomes beside the great giant of the drama. Who can say things so sweetly, so smoothly, so sonorously, as the leading character or characters in a play? Who can do things so neatly, so masterfully, and surmount such overwhelming difficulties in the twinkling of an eye? Such magnetic, magnanimous, majestic figures! It was after a pretty love scene on the stage that I once heard a lady sitting near me say to her companion, 'Oh, if some one would say "my dear" to me in that manner!' And perhaps the young lady will go all through life without finding the man, who will know enough to imitate that actor.
"A young man buys the latest and most loudly advertised historical novel and sends it to the lady of his dreams. On the next evening when he calls she is so absorbed, so immersed in the book that she hardly has anytime to speak to him. When she does look up from the tome she tells him all about the hair-raising hero, Count de Mar. 'He is a man,' she says, and so goes on to relate about his mighty exploits. There is nothing worth while in all the world except a man like Count de Mar. Imagine, if you can, how the young man feels. And the lady chases the phantom of Count de Mar in real life until she becomes a shadow of her former self, and the young man goes through existence cursing the historical novel in general and Count de Mar in particular. What else but misery should there be for mere man of mere reality? What is he beside such lords of creation as Count de Mar, Richard Carvel, Ralph Percy, Ralph Marlow, Stephen Brice, Clayton Halowell, Charley Steele, Jean Hugon, Marmaduke Howard, Count Karobke, Boris Godofsky, Louis De Lamoy, General Kapzen, Prince Meturof--what is he beside these? Everything is so small in life, in books things are so big. The world is already created, but fiction is still being written. If Adam were created by a novelist he would have fared much better. The story would never have ended happily. These wonderful heroes, what fine means they have, what splendid opportunities, what glorious achievements, what great accomplishments are theirs. They can do just as they please, have fortunes to squander, and riot in luxuries. They are all born rich, or their rich relatives die early, and in good will.
"In reality it is so different. We have to work for a living and poverty is our reward. In real life we have to write historical novels for a living. We have to write popular plays and pretty poems and sugarcoated stories. Yes, such is life, and there is poverty and the misery of the masses, and there are social problems and political evils--things unknown in the average novel, and in popular art generally. We must do so much that is irksome in order to have a pleasurable moment.
"When Richard Mansfield was delivering those sumptuous stump speeches in Shakespeare's spectacular melodrama of 'Henry V.' and the soldiers were stirred up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, the fair fraulein in front of me constantly kept saying, 'Who wouldn't fight for Harry?' Who wouldn't fight for Harry? A tremendous artist with superb words put into his mouth by Shakespeare, with a beautiful scenic background behind him, with gorgeous costumes and gleaming armor, with glowing electric lights, with an army of well-drilled, well-paid supers, with all the pomp and power of a king on the stage--who wouldn't fight for Harry? But the poor, obscure, unknown Harry of real life, who faithfully fights against poverty, disease, despair, who battles for the right, for his honor and salvation, without scenic effects, without any art, or author's directions, without any light or armor, without any aid or guides, without any one to show the way--this Harry, who will fight for him? Who does not fight against him? What fair damosel will deign to smile on him and shed some sunshine into his life?
"This was on a street car, and I overheard a young woman say to her escort, 'Ah, if you would only put your gloves on as Mansfield does in "Beaucaire"!' So this was the great thing in the play--the manner in which 'Beaucaire' donned his gloves. And yet--fool that I was--I had wondered why an actor of Mansfield's surpassing talent should put on the stage such a trivial, trashy affair. And I had gone without gloves all winter in order that I might be able to see Mansfield. Heavens! But see, how the little niceties, the small delicacies and the petty graces on the stage and in books eclipse all our drudging and trudging, moiling and toiling in real life. We are expected to observe them whatever else we do. Failing in these we fail to win affections and are voted dead failures. Beside these we are expected to do things that can only be done in books and on the stage, under the auspices of Alexandre Dumas the elder and Victor Sardou, for instance. We are expected to equal those magic creatures of the imagination, the heroes with their opulent supplies of good looks, words and wealth, and their strange power to do aught on earth.
"James--we will call him that--is red-headed, freckled, plain, and generally not at all dudish. He is, however, true, loyal, devoted and determined to do some good in the world. He tries to meet her every day after work. He often brings a flower with him, tucked up in his sleeve. Once we saw him press it to his lips, for soon the bloom will be hers. But she is reading an historical novel, and even the flower fails to deliver his message and fades without fulfilling its mission. Of course, James has this advantage over the ideal hero in the novel: that he really exists; but what is reality to the glowing fancy of a youthful maiden? And in spite of his existence, where does James come in?
"These are local and popular incidents I have mentioned, but in a measure all literature, all art has created impossible dreams, unattainable ideals. This is probably the reason why so many aspirations have failed. They were not founded on reality. There are in life considerations 'without which the noblest dreams are a form of opium eating.' Who knows how many have gone grieving through life because they have followed the phantoms conjured up by the false standards of art? With all that is great and grand, heroic and epic in real life there is still such a thing as
'_The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,_ _The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky._'
"Anyway, it is about time to protest against the false heroes of paper and ink, who cut us out of our earthly paradise, to give our rivals in fiction the death stab; about time to remember that that which is not cannot be great, and that all the beauty of this universe is in real life. It is about time to deny the existence of that which does not exist.
"This demand for the superhuman is inhuman. We are not what we are not. We cannot do what we cannot do, and these platitudes are as profound as they are obvious. The weakness of the world is pointed out by its heromania. That we look for our heroes not in life but in artificial creations shows how blind we are. The most striking sign of our imperfection is our longing for impossible perfection. Life has a great grudge against art. It has been slighted, disregarded, abused. With its misleading models it has set up an unjust competition against life. The hope is that the artists to come will give life a hearing and adjust matters. As for the novelists, every time the good Mr. Howells horsewhips the swashbucklers I heartily applaud him. But I am not going to lay down any principles. I don't feel like it to-day. Perhaps things as they were were for the best. Perhaps it is for the dreams of women that there are real men in the world to-day. Perhaps it is their longing for the impossible that made the best that is possible to-day. I sometimes think that a woman's reason is the very acme of all wisdom. But I am going to treat this thing more fully in my volume of essays--if I ever get around to writing them."
XXIV
On Enjoying One's Own Writings
I was alone, ensconced in a corner of the noisy, smoky café, perusing the pages of a valued volume. Keidansky walked in hastily, took up my book and looked at it.
"How can you read anything that you have not written yourself?" he asked, with surprising solemnity. "Why, I don't mind it any longer; I am used to it now," I mumbled in astonishment. But conversations with Keidansky are one-sided. Before I had formed half a thought he was all ready with speech.
"You are coming down, dear fellow," he said; "you are compromising and becoming reconciled to everything. You cannot supply your own demand, so you are going elsewhere for your literature--spending on others your days and your nights that you may devote to the excavations of the things that lie deep and dormant within thyself. I wager that before long you will even be reading the classics. You will abdicate from the sovereignty of your own genius, and measure life by the enjoyment that you derive from the things that other people do.
"Aliens, foreigners, strangers as far away from you as different individuals are, millions of miles of impassable icebergs impeding any possible approach. They were not born as you were born, they have not lived as you have lived, they have not loved as you have loved, they have not hated as you have hated, they have not grappled with the agonies as you have, they have not died as you have over and over again, and yet--you read their books and pretend to enjoy them."
I asked my friend to be seated, but he preferred to stand up, and with a characteristic wave of the hand, showed his annoyance at being interrupted. "If you have not felt what I have felt," he said, "it is useless for me to speak to you, and for you to enjoy what I write is hard and tedious labor. You cannot get behind the things others say, and all that remains for you to do is to read the meaning in so many words; and no meaning is ever absolutely uttered in so many words. There is almost always something unsaid behind the thing that is said. There is as much in as there is out. Thought is an endless chain of which we only see separate rings. We are fortunate to see that in the case of other persons. Most often you only hear and read their talk. But when you read your own thought, you read so vastly more than you have written, and you read the history of your thoughts, their far-away causes, their prehistoric origins, and their subterranean sources--and you enjoy it. You enjoy it, if you are intimately concerned in one near and dear personality, in the greatest study in all mankind--yourself. Also, if you are interested in the evolution of human thought, and can see it through the operations of your own mind.
"We say in Yiddish about this or that person: '_Er kumt mit sich fun ein stedtel_.' Well, I, too, come from the same town with myself. I have gone through the dark labyrinth of life with myself in my hand. I have felt, experienced and known the same things that Keidansky has gone through, and--frankly--I enjoy my own writings. Sometimes my favorite works are my own. They move me, they stir me and they stimulate me to higher things. There is a quality about them, more human, more intimate, more personal, that brings them nearer to me than any other writings. The pathos is so touching, the humor so rollicking, the satire so pungent. It is all so effective, significant and strong. Words, lines, sentences, pages that fall flat on the ears of another, they are pregnant with meaning, choked full of suggestion, and often so thrilling. That one has felt, thought, said, given birth to these things, is so fine; so splendid to watch a grand procession of the children of your brain--particularly when you are intuitively convinced that they are, well, a goodly and well-formed brood, and worthy of you. They have to be quite robust to withstand that uncomfortable critical sense.
"You see, I want a personality, a man, a certain mental attitude, a sense of reserve force, deep-rooted sincerity and determined intentions behind what I read, and I am sure of all that, in the case of my own writings. This gives one a feeling of gladness and joy. In the productions of others one must grope in darkness, painfully explore, and so often search in vain for these qualities through their mental manoeuvres and spiritual contortions.
"In our own work we can easily forgive the flaws, faults and shortcomings. We know why they exist, and to what to attribute them; we realize that they are not due to lack of talent or any cause like that. Our characteristic carelessness, our hasty manner, impatience at the slow accommodations of mere mechanical words, a desire to say too many things at the same time--if it is not the one, it is the other. But we know that we could do better if we wanted to; if we cared less about the matter than about the form. We know that the quality is there. There is nothing the matter with that. But somehow we cannot account so well for the crudities, defects and deformities in the performances of others, which jar upon us terribly and mar so much of our pleasure. Their failings are so flagrant, their meanings so nebulous, their ideas so hazy. It is all so far off and so unsatisfying. Why do people write things we do not like? Oh, the rogues, we answer ourselves, as the thought comes to us, they must be doing it for their own enjoyment. They can fill in the gaps, read in everything that is lacking; they can make masterpieces while they read their commonplace utterances--but we? We ought to read our own immortal works. We ought to, if we have any appreciation of great literature.
"One great source of the enjoyment of our own writings is that as we read we remember when each thought came to us, whence each idea sprang into birth, how each flying fancy originated, and every vaporous whimsy took shape. We go over the old ground, tread the paths of the past again, the paths overgrown with grass, or covered with the moss of the years, and we live our life over again. Words, lines, paragraphs, pages; each turn of a phrase brings one back to some turning-point of life; each flash of thought is the reflection of some vital incident. Behind every revolution of mind was a distinct period of evolution. Every old cry conjures up a crisis. That epigram sums up an entire epoch. This page is a condensed history of your heart. Yonder little etching, who knows of what stuff you have woven it? It all comes back to you so vividly, so graphically, so impressively. You read the things that you have written, no matter how long ago, and you live your life over again. The past reaches out its arms and hugs you to its tender breast again.
"One night, far away from the city, nigh by the sea, a painful silence was broken by agonizing speech. One word, and the world that God had created in seven days was annihilated for you in a second. When you came back in the silence of a sleepless night you wrote in your note-book. 'Our dreams are crimes for which we are punished by the harsh realities of the world.' See how ideas evolve! One day you were chided on the shortness of your stature. You said that you have not had any time to grow. Later you said to some one else that the shape of one's destiny depends on the management of his time.
"The origin of a thought is greater than the thought. It is often an entire drama; and you see it performed as you read. The crowding multitudes of memories that your literary productions bring up! This was suggested at a social gathering, where you felt distressingly lonely, and it was such a soothing consolation. It was while witnessing a play that that idea came into your mind. The play was a popular success, so you were thinking your own thoughts. One night at a symphony concert you wrote on the edge of a programme: 'Music makes mute poets of us all.' You read it years after, and oh, the cherished recollections that it brings up! But no one else can ever know how great that line is. Here is an idea that illumined your mind while in conversation with ----. There were so many delightful conversations, stirring discussions, endearing episodes; there were scenes that you witnessed, events transpired of which you were part; there were little dramas of which you were both the villain and the hero. They have all passed away, and yet you have saved them from oblivion because you have written, and they cannot die. All things are immortal so long as you live. You read, and the old talks and the old walks, the things that you have seen and done, the joys you have felt and the sorrows you have endured come back and you enjoy them over again. You find this in your writings and so much more. The net results of your own ruminations are so large that there is no wonder all other writers suffer from the comparison. Your writings are the plants, the weeds and the flowers that have grown out of your life, and their aroma and fragrance of earliest bloom follow you to the end of your days. There is that in your inner consciousness which you cannot find anywhere else.
"The whole universe is within yourself; in others there is only a queer notion of it. Your crudest expression has more feeling and thought behind it than the most beautiful expression of others. We all cherish and relish our own screeds. Are we not all convinced of their merits and superior qualities? Are we not all anxious to secure editors and publishers? And who rejects them? These editors and the publishers, the people who had nothing to do with the production of these undoubted works of genius. I have piles of scraps of old bits of paper and note-books up in my place, extending over a number of years. They contain stray fragments of thought that I have jotted down at all places and seasons and under all sorts of circumstances. As I come across them now and then, I not only re-experience what has long vanished, but I am again exalted unto all heights of human aspiration and inspiration. The foolishness and the follies, the faith and the fervor, and the blind hopes of my youth are mine again.
"Once I was with some Jewish actors, friends of mine, when a long-bearded, old-fashioned Israelite came in to offer them a play that he had written for production. It was such a touching, thrilling story, the old man said, that it made him weep every time he read it--weep like a child over the sad complications of the characters in his play. Oh, if he could only see it performed, it would melt, it would break his heart. Oh, if the actors would only take it! And as he began to read parts of the first act we actually saw tears in his eyes. There you have it. What Dickens, what Tolstoy, what Perez, what Gordin could probably not do for this man, he had done for himself. His own writings made him weep. Honestly, now," Keidansky broke out violently, "don't you enjoy your own effusions?"
I admitted that they often gave me pleasure, and that at other times I felt strongly disappointed over them. "Sometimes," I said, "I am puzzled and cannot account how I have done certain things. I say to myself that I must have been drunk to have been so witty; or I imagine that I must have been in the company of bright people to have been so dull. Often as I read I think that my stomach was out of order to make me so thoughtful. And again I am sure that I was awfully hungry to have been so ingenious." I confessed that I found it quite possible to overlook and forgive the faults of my own compositions, and that on the whole they were not infrequently a source of pleasure to me. I ventured to say that I also enjoyed a few things that other people have written.
"Well," said Keidansky, and then he became silent for awhile.
"Immortal works are good enough to kill time," he said after a pause; "but my own writings for real, downright enjoyment, every time. At the occasion of a big convention or political gathering in a certain city the newspaper correspondents, I am told, present a striking scene as they assemble in the lobby of their hotel when the newspapers arrive. Each man rushes to the news-stand and buys 'his paper,' and loses not a minute before reading his own report. There they sit all together, oblivious even of a good piece of news, should it happen to be near them, each one buried in his newspaper, intently reading his complete account of the stormy proceedings, and many of them cursing and swearing at the stupid editors, 'who left out the best things.' Editors are always stupid and always leave out the best things; but if they didn't they would be idiots. My point, however, is that this scene shows how much people enjoy their own writings. Each author has at least one great admirer.
"And this is saying nothing of the gratification of writing, of the thrills of pleasure one feels, when a burst of inspiration breaks upon him, of the great, unutterable moments of exultation when a new heaven of thoughts opens before one's mind, of the joys of perpetuating the evanescent and the fleeting."
My friend was about to enumerate some more examples, but it was growing late into the night, so I said:
"But you do read some things that eminent authors have written, do you not?"
"Yes," said Keidansky, "but merely for purposes of comparison. I want to see how total is their eclipse!"
End of Project Gutenberg's Discourses of Keidansky, by Bernard G. Richards