Part 2

_Punch_ is the best of comic papers; it expresses the genuine original humour of a humorous folk. I remember seeing there a picture of the village orchestra, and as the director rapped for attention, the first violin leaned forward and asked, “What is the next piece?” and being informed, replied, “Why I just played that one.”

Woodrow Wilson once told me a story which illustrates how dangerous it is for anyone to assume that the English have no sense of humour.

Three Americans were telling anecdotes to illustrate the English dearth of humour, when they saw approaching a representative of that nation. It was agreed that he should then and there be put to the test. So one of them stopped him and narrated a side-splitting yarn. The Englishman received the climax with an impassive face. The American, delighted, cried, “Cheer up, old man, you’ll laugh at that next summer.” “No,” said the Briton, gravely, “I think not.” “Why not?” “Because I laughed at that _last_ summer.”

The humour of English political campaign speeches at its best, is unsurpassed. When the late John Morley had finished an oration by requesting his hearers to vote for him, one man jumped up and shouted angrily, “I’d rather vote for the devil.” “Quite so,” returned the unruffled statesman; “but in case your friend declines to run, may I not then count upon your support?”

A perfect retort was made to the great and genial Thackeray, on the one occasion when he ran for Parliament. He met his opponent, Edward Cardwell, during the course of the campaign, and after a pleasant exchange of civilities, Thackeray remarked, “Well, I hope it will be a good fight, and may the best man win.” “Oh, I hope not,” said Cardwell.

The English are the only people who seem to be amused by attacks on their country; does this show a sense of superiority that increases the rage of the critic? Or is it that their sense of humour extends even to that most sacred of all modern religions, the religion of nationalism?

The Irish are supposed to excel the English in humour; but it is a fact that English audiences in the theatre are diverted by sarcastic attacks on the English, whereas it is physically dangerous to try a similar method on an Irish audience. The Irish patriot, Katharine Tynan, said that if she could only once succeed in enraging the English, she would feel that something might be accomplished. “But,” said she, “I tell them at dinner parties the most outrageous things that are said against their country, and they all roar with laughter.” Undue sensitiveness to attack betrays a feeling of insecurity.

Typical American humour is not subtle and ironical; it is made up largely of exaggeration and surprise--Mark Twain was a master of ending a sentence with something unexpected. “I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.”

Anthony Hope, in his recent book _Memories and Notes_, says that when Mark made his first dinner speech in London before a distinguished audience, there was intense curiosity as to what he would say. He began with an unusually slow drawl. “Homer is dead, Shakespeare is dead--and I am far from well.”

Another true story (which I took pains to verify) happened during the early days of his married life, which synchronised with the beginnings of the telephone. Incredible as it may seem, Mrs. Clemens had not heard Mark swear, for during the engagement he had managed by superhuman efforts to refrain from what he called that noble art, and she did not dream of his oral efficiency. But one day, thinking he was alone, he started to use the telephone. (The Paris _Figaro_ says that to get your telephone connexion is not an achievement; it is a career.) Mark, having difficulties, poured out a torrent of river profanity. He looked around and there was his wife, frozen with horror.

But she had heard that the way to cure a husband of profanity was for the wife to swear in his presence. So, in a cold, artificial voice, she said, “Blankety-Blank-Blank.” Mark cried, “Darling, you know the words, but you don’t know the tune!”

Mark had a way of combining philosophy and humour. This is the gospel according to Mark Twain. “Live so that when you die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

V

A PAIR OF SOCKS

One fine afternoon I was walking along Fifth Avenue, when I remembered that it was necessary to buy a pair of socks. Why I wished to buy only one pair is unimportant. I turned into the first sock shop that caught my eye, and a boy clerk who could not have been more than seventeen years old came forward. “What can I do for you, sir?” “I wish to buy a pair of socks.” His eyes glowed. There was a note of passion in his voice. “Did you know that you had come into the finest place in the world to buy socks?” I had not been aware of that, as my entrance had been accidental. “Come with me,” said the boy, ecstatically. I followed him to the rear of the shop, and he began to haul down from the shelves box after box, displaying their contents for my delectation.

“Hold on, lad, I am going to buy only one pair!” “I know that,” said he, “but I want you to see how marvellously beautiful these are. Aren’t they wonderful!” There was on his face an expression of solemn and holy rapture, as if he were revealing to me the mysteries of his religion. I became far more interested in him than in the socks. I looked at him in amazement. “My friend,” said I, “if you can keep this up, if this is not merely the enthusiasm that comes from novelty, from having a new job, if you can keep up this zeal and excitement day after day, in ten years you will own every sock in the United States.”

* * * * *

My amazement at his pride and joy in salesmanship will be easily understood by all who read this article. In many shops the customer has to wait for some one to wait upon him. And when finally some clerk does deign to notice you, you are made to feel as if you were interrupting him. Either he is absorbed in profound thought in which he hates to be disturbed or he is skylarking with a girl clerk and you feel like apologising for thrusting yourself into such intimacy.

He displays no interest either in you or in the goods he is paid to sell. Yet possibly that very clerk who is now so apathetic began his career with hope and enthusiasm. The daily grind was too much for him; the novelty wore off; his only pleasures were found outside of working hours. He became a mechanical, not an inspired, salesman. After being mechanical, he became incompetent; then he saw younger clerks who had more zest in their work, promoted over him. He became sour and nourished a grievance. That was the last stage. His usefulness was over.

I have observed this melancholy decline in the lives of so many men in so many occupations that I have come to the conclusion that the surest road to failure is to do things mechanically. There is, for example, no greater literature in the world than the Bible and no more exciting subject than religion. Yet I have heard many ministers of the gospel read the Bible in their churches with no interest and no emphasis, whereas they ought to read it as if they had just received it by wireless from Almighty God. I have heard hundreds of sermons preached mechanically, with no more appeal than if the speaker were a parrot. There are many teachers in schools and colleges who seem duller than the dullest of their pupils; they go through the motions of teaching, but they are as impersonal as a telephone.

* * * * *

In reading that remarkable book, _The Americanization of Edward Bok_, I was impressed by what he said of competition in business. Beginning as a very young man in a certain occupation, he had expected to encounter the severest competition. As a matter of fact, he met no competition at all, and found that success was the easiest thing in the world, if one provided the conditions necessary for it.

He worked along with a number of other young men in the business. He was the only one who ever got to the place ahead of time. At the noon hour at lunch the other youngsters never on a single occasion mentioned the business in which they were engaged. They talked of their girls, or of athletic sports, or of various dissipations. He was the only man who ever remained after business hours, and he was convinced that he was the only one who ever occupied his mind with the business during his evenings.

He rose above the others with consummate ease, and for two obvious reasons: First, he made himself indispensable; second, he found his chief pleasure in his work, not in the dissipations outside of it.

It is simple enough for any one to be attracted by the novelty of a new job. The real difficulty is to keep up that initial enthusiasm every day of one’s life, to go to work every morning with zest and excitement. I believe that a man should live every day as if that day were his first and his last day on earth.

Every person needs some relaxation, some recreation; but a man’s chief happiness should not lie outside his daily work, but in it. The chief difference between the happiness of childhood and the happiness of maturity is that the child’s happiness is dependent on something different from the daily routine--a picnic, an excursion, a break of some kind. But to the right sort of men and women happiness is found in the routine itself, not in departures from it. Instead of hoping for a change, one hopes there will be no change, that one will have sufficient health to continue in one’s chosen occupation. The child has pleasures; the man has happiness. But unfortunately some men remain children all their lives.

VI

AN INSPIRING CEMETERY

Americans should not leave Florence without spending some reflective hours in the so-called Protestant cemetery. The grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is adorned with a beautiful marble tomb designed by the famous artist Leighton, and the only inscription thereupon is “E. B. B. Ob. 1861.”

Not far away lies the famous poet, Walter Savage Landor, who died in 1864 at the age of eighty-nine. His grave is covered with a flat stone. Here is a poem he wrote about it:

Twenty years hence, though it may hap That I be called to take a nap In a cool cell where thunder clap Was never heard,

There breathe but o’er my arch of grass, A not too sadly sigh’d “Alas!” And I shall catch ere you can pass, That wingéd word.

The last time I was in Florence I bent over his grave and with deliberate emphasis I whispered “Alas!” I do not know whether he heard me or not.

Robert and Elizabeth Browning made the poet’s later years as happy as was possible for one of his temperament; they secured a villa for him, furnished it, hired servants and did what they could. He was wildly irascible, and if he did not like a meal that was served, he grabbed the table-cloth, and twitched all the food and dishes on to the floor. All his life he was a fighting man, which makes the beautiful Farewell he wrote somewhat incongruous.

THE LAST FRUIT OF AN OLD TREE

I strove with none; for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life. It sinks and I am ready to depart.

In order to fit my own feelings, I should have to make some slight changes in his poem, so that the amended version would read as follows:

I strove with none. I always hated strife. Nature I loved, and God and Man and Art. I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks--yet I’m not ready to depart.

Landor was sometimes in a more jovial mood, as in his invitation to Tennyson:

I entreat you, Alfred Tennyson, Come and share my haunch of venison. I have too a bin of claret, Good, but better when you share it. Tho’ ’tis only a small bin, There’s a stock of it within. And as sure as I’m a rhymer, Half a butt of Rudesheimer. Come; among the sons of men is one Welcomer than Alfred Tennyson?

Along the path leading to Mrs. Browning’s tomb is the grave of the English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough (pronounced Cluff), who crossed the ocean with Thackeray and James Russell Lowell and whose most famous poem is _Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth_. He died in 1861 the same year as Mrs. Browning, at the early age of 42. He was a distinguished scholar of Balliol college, Oxford. He expressed in his poems the doubts and struggles that have afflicted so many honest and candid minds.

Where lies the land to which the ship would go? Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. And where the land she travels from? Away, Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

On sunny noons upon the deck’s smooth face, Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace; Or, o’er the stern reclining, watch below The foaming wake far widening as we go.

On stormy nights when wild northwesters rave, How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave! The dripping sailor on the reeling mast, Exults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.

Where lies the land to which the ship would go? Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. And where the land she travels from? Away. Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

In addition to the three great English poets who are buried in this cemetery, two famous Americans lie there, Richard Hildreth and Theodore Parker. When I was an undergraduate, I asked Prof. W. G. Sumner what was the best History of the United States that had ever been written; he answered gruffly and without a word of qualification, “Hildreth’s!” Accordingly, I read every word of the six volumes. Many years later I had the unique pleasure of telling Sumner something he had not known; I told him I had done homage at Hildreth’s grave in Florence, and he was surprised to learn that the historian was buried there. If any one believes that the contemporary custom of “debunking” historical characters is new, he should read Hildreth’s Preface to his History.

“Of centennial sermons and Fourth of July orations, whether professedly such or in the guise of history, there are more than enough. It is due to our fathers and ourselves, it is due to truth and philosophy, to present for once, on the historic stage, the founders of our American nation unbedaubed with patriotic rouge, wrapped up in no fine-spun cloaks of excuses and apology, without stilts, buskins, tinsel, or bedizenment, in their own proper persons.”

VII

ANCIENT FOOTBALL

Attacks on the American game of football are often more sensational than the game itself. Some volley out statistics of injuries, in which we see the names of persons “crippled for life” whom we know to be unlike their biographers in that they are both well and cheerful; others descant wildly on the evils of betting and the drunkenness attendant upon a great match; others deplore the time and attention robbed from study; some believe the rivalry of two strong teams causes prolonged bitterness and hatred; some regard the intense earnestness of training as both silly and harmful; some assert that the players on the field behave like ruffians, and some, like the old Puritans, hate the game not because they really think it wicked but because they secretly hate to see eighty thousand people out for a holiday.

There is no doubt that football, like every other sport and recreation, is open to many serious objections. Certain players are every year killed and wounded, though the mortality is nothing like so great as that resulting from automobile accidents and week-end celebrations. It is certainly true that betting and dissipation accompany the game; it is true that many young men sit on the benches, cheering and singing, when they might be studying in the seclusion of their rooms.

It is true that the American spirit--always ambitious of success--makes every member of a university team train with an earnestness that seems tragi-comic to the nonathletic observer. But the immense advantages of this most robust of all sports outweigh all its attendant evils. For football is much more than a contest of animal vigour; in the language of Professor Stagg, who was a moralist before he was an athlete, “Football surpasses every other game in its demand for a high combination of physical, mental and moral qualities.”

This article, however, is not written for the purpose of defending modern football but rather to show that the game thus far has not only flourished in spite of attacks but that there has been a tremendous rise in its respectability since the days of Queen Elizabeth. I cannot just now remember anything on which the Puritans and the playwrights were then agreed, except their opinion of football. What Shakespeare thought of it may be seen in the epithet which Kent applies to one of the most odious characters in _King Lear_. Tripping up Oswald, he calls him “you base football player.”

Modern legislators must rejoice at finding that they have plenty of precedents for legal prohibition of the game. In 1424 we find “The King forbiddes that na man play fut ball under payne of iiiid.” Sir Thomas Elyot remarked, in 1531, “Foote balle, wherin is nothing but beastly furie and exstreme violence.”

If in Elizabethan days the dramatists, who were not noted for their piety, attacked football, what shall we expect from the Puritans? The most circumstantial indictment of the game came from a Puritan of Puritans, Philip Stubbs. In his _Anatomie of Abuses_ (1583) he thus denounces the sport:

For as concerning football playing, I protest vnto you it may rather be called a frieendly kinde of fight, then a play of recreation; A bloody and murthering practise, then a felowly sporte or pastime. For dooth not euery one lye in waight for his Aduersarie, seeking to ouerthrowe him & to picke him on his nose, though it be vppon hard stones? In ditch or dale, in valley or hil, or what place soeuer it be, hee careth not, so he haue him down. And he that can serue the most of this fashion, he is counted the only felow, and who but he? so that by this meanes, sometimes their necks are broken, sometimes their backs, sometime their legs, sometime their armes; sometime one part thrust out of ioynt, sometime another. Sometime the noses gush out with blood, sometime their eyes start out; and sometimes hurt in one place, sometimes in another. But whosoeuer scapeth away the best, goeth not scotfree, but is either sore wounded, craised, and bruiseed so as he dyeth of it, or else scapeth very hardly, and no meruaile, for they haue the sleights to meet one betwixt two, to dash him against the hart with their elbowes, to hit him vnder the short ribbes with their griped fists, and with their knees to catch him vpon the hip, and to pick him on his neck, with a hundred such murdering deuices; and hereof groweth enuie, malice, rancour, cholor, hatred, displeasure, enemities, and what not els; and sometimes fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murther, homicide, and great effusion of blood, as experience dayely teacheth.

In the attack just quoted the most interesting thing to the modern reader is that precisely the same objections were made to the game as we hear today.

In the robust days of Queen Bess football was regarded as low and vulgar; it received the denunciation of the Church and the more potent frown of fashionable society. Today at a great university match prominent clergymen are seen even on the sidelines; the bleachers bloom with lovely women, and in a conspicuous place stands the President of the United States.

VIII

RIVERS

On the first of several agreeable visits to Carbondale in southern Illinois, whither I went to address the best of all audiences--public school teachers--I enquired of the superintendent, Mr. Black, as to the precise distance that separated us from the Mississippi river. I told him I loved all rivers, and this one particularly. I had seen it at St. Paul, at St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans. I wished to see it far from the noise, smoke and artificiality of cities. I wished to see it naked. He informed me that he was the proud owner of an open Ford car, that the Father of Waters was only eighteen miles away, and that he would lead me to it that very afternoon.

It was a charming day in early spring. I stood on the bank of the mighty Mississippi. There was no town, settlement, not even a house in sight. The glorious old river at this point was one mile wide, fifty feet deep, and running seven miles an hour. Away up stream on the Missouri side the trees were in the living green of April; and the flood came rolling along in silent majesty.

I thought of the old seventeenth century poet, Denham, and what he said of another river.

Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.

Every river has a fascination for me, because it is alive. In a green landscape, or in a rocky gorge, or in the midst of a forest, or dividing a city, it gives to every scene the element of life. Living waters flowing through meadows, over sands, between mountains are always moving, progressing, going somewhere. If one climbs a hill, and looks off on a vast expanse of fresh woods and pastures new, and suddenly sees a river, the heart leaps up with recognition.

Looking at a map--the expressive face of the world--I have often wished to follow the course of various rivers. I should like to go down the Amazon, the Yukon, and the Yangtze. Each river has a personality. Most rivers that empty into the ocean are tidal; their current is pushed backward by the incoming sea. But the Amazon is so mighty that it overcomes the force of the tide and transforms the ocean into fresh water. Unless voyagers and novelists are abandoned liars, one can be off the coast of South America, out of sight of land and dip up fresh water, so tremendous and far-reaching is the shove of the Amazon. Its mouth is so wide that one could place in it crosswise, the whole Hudson river from New York to Albany, without touching either shore.

The personality of the Mississippi is striking. In the greatest of all Mark Twain’s contributions to literature, the first volume of _Life on the Mississippi_, he gives us marvellous impressions of the character and behaviour of the stream. And in one of the foremost novels of our time, Charles Stewart’s _Partners of Providence_, the peculiar habits and whims of the Mississippi are set forth. It quite rightly regards itself as socially superior to the Missouri; so much so, in fact, that for some time after the entrance of the Missouri into its waters, the Mississippi positively refuses to have anything to do with the interloper.

In the old days “before the war” (our war), luxurious passenger steamers plied from St. Louis to New Orleans; and I understand that, after the lapse of many years, we are to have similar vessels. This is as it should be; an immense amount of American literature and history, from De Soto to Edna Ferber, is associated with this river, and the opportunity of travelling on it should be given to all Americans. I have not yet abandoned my youthful dream of travelling on the Mississippi from St. Paul to St. Louis, and from St. Louis to New Orleans.