Chapter 13

This is no Ring Lardner, no Irvin Cobb, no Casey at the bat. Mr. Smith is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated social life, tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by an aura of shyness which amounts to a spiritual virginity. He comes to us trailing clouds of glory from the heaven of pure and unfettered speculation which is our home. He is an elf of utter simplicity and infinite candour. He is a flicker of absolute Mind. His little book is as precious and as disturbing as devilled crabs.

Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver from mind to mind, leaping--a shy and shining spark--from brain to brain! I know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these ineffably dainty little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow nuggets of wistful inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers of wit. A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked! Irony so demure, so quaint, so far away; pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm--all this is "Trivia." Where are Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of old time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given scenario of that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences--the mind of a strolling bachelor.

Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of modesty at the thought of all hi sacred plots laid bare, the heavenly man tries to scare us away. "These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Baboon, with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee."

But this whimsical brother to the chimpanzee, despite this last despairing attempt at modest evasion, denudes himself before us. And his heart, we find is strangely like our own. His reveries, his sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, "I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist." Like us he has only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom in a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and prosperous merchants and other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing battle against the platitudes and moral generalizations that hem us round. "I can hardly post a letter," he laments, "without marvelling at the excellence and accuracy of the Postal System." And he consoles himself, good man, with the thought of the meaningless creation crashing blindly through frozen space. His other great consolation is his dear vice of reading--"This joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication."

It is impossible by a few random snippets to give any just figment of the delicious mental intoxication of this piercing, cathartic little volume. It is a bright tissue of thought robing a radiant, dancing spirit. Through the shimmering veil of words we catch, now and then, a flashing glimpse of the Immortal Whimsy within, shy, sudden, and defiant. Across blue bird-haunted English lawns we follow that gracious figure, down dusky London streets where he is peering in at windows and laughing incommunicable jests.

But alas, Mr. Pearsall Smith is lost to America. The warming pans and the twopenny tube have lured him away from us. Never again will he tread on peanut shells in the smoking car or read the runes about Phoebe Snow. Chiclets and Spearmint and Walt Mason and the Toonerville Trolley and the Prince Albert ads--these mean nothing to him. He will never compile an anthology of New York theatrical notices: "The play that makes the dimples to catch the tears." Careful and adroit propaganda, begun twenty years ago by the Department of State, might have won him back, but now it is impossible to repatriate him. The exquisite humours of our American life are faded from his mind. He has gone across the great divide that separates a subway from an underground and an elevator from a lift. I wonder does he ever mourn the scrapple and buckwheat cakes that were his birthright?

Major George Haven Putnam in his "Memories of a Publisher" describes a famous tennis match played at Oxford years ago, when he and Pearsall Smith defeated A.L. Smith and Herbert Fisher, the two gentlemen who are now Master of Balliol and British Minister of Education. The Balliol don attributed the British defeat in this international tourney to the fact that his tennis shoes (shall we say his "sneakers?") came to grief and he had to play the crucial games in stocking feet. But though Major Putnam and his young ally won the set of _patters_ (let us use the Wykehamist word), the Major allowed the other side to gain a far more serious victory. They carried off the young Philadelphian and kept him in England until he was spoiled for all good American uses. That was badly done, Major! Because we needed Pearsall Smith over here, and now we shall never recapture him. He will go on calling an elevator a lift, and he will never write an American "Trivia."

PREFACES

It has long been my conviction that the most graceful function of authorship is the writing of prefaces. What is more pleasant than dashing off those few pages of genial introduction after all the dreary months of spading at the text? A paragraph or two as to the intentions of the book; allusions to the unexpected difficulties encountered during composition; neatly phrased gratitude to eminent friends who have given gracious assistance; and a touching allusion to the Critic on the Hearth who has done the indexing--one of the trials of the wives of literary men not mentioned by Mrs. Andrew Lang in her pleasant essay on that topic. A pious wish to receive criticisms "in case a second edition should be called for"; your address, and the date, add a homely touch at the end.

How delightful this bit of pleasant intimacy after the real toil is over! It is like paterfamilias coming out of his house at dusk, after the hard day's work, to read his newspaper on the doorstep. Or it may be a bit of superb gesturing. No book is complete without a preface. Better a preface without a book....

Many men have written books without prefaces. But not many have written prefaces without books. And yet I am convinced it is one of the subtlest pleasures. I have planned several books, not yet written; but the prefaces are all ready this many a day. Let me show you the sort of thing I mean.

PREFACE TO "THE LETTERS OF ANDREW MCGILL"

How well I remember the last time I saw Andrew McGill! It was in the dear old days at Rutgers, my last term. I was sitting over a book one brilliant May afternoon, rather despondent--there came a rush up the stairs and a thunder at the door. I knew his voice, and hurried to open. Poor, dear fellow, he was just back from tennis; I never saw him look so glorious. Tall and thin--he was always very thin, _see_ p. 219 and _passim_--with his long, brown face and sparkling black eyes--I can see him still rambling about the room in his flannels, his curly hair damp on his forehead. "Buzzard," he said--he always called me Buzzard--"guess what's happened?"

"In love again?" I asked.

He laughed. A bright, golden laugh--I can hear it still. His laughter was always infectious.

"No," he said. "Dear silly old Buzzard, what do you think? I've won the Sylvanus Stall fellowship."

I shall never forget that moment. It was very still, and in the college garden, just under my window, I could hear a party of Canadian girls deliciously admiring things. It was a cruel instant for me. I, too, in my plodding way, had sent in an essay for the prize, but without telling him. Must I confess it? I had never dared mention the subject for fear he, too, would compete. I knew that if he did he was sure to win. O petty jealousies, that seem so bitter now!

"Rude old Buzzard," he said in his bantering way, "you haven't congratulated!"

I pulled myself together.

"Brindle," I said--I always called him Brindle; how sad the nickname sounds now--"you took my breath away. Dear lad, I'm overjoyed."

It is four and twenty years since that May afternoon. I never saw him again. Never even heard him read the brilliant poem "Sunset from the Mons Veneris" that was the beginning of his career, for the week before commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my health. I never came back to New York; and he remained there. But I followed his career with the closest attention. Every newspaper cutting, every magazine article in which his name was mentioned, went into my scrapbook. And almost every week for twenty years he wrote to me--those long, radiant letters, so full of _verve_ and _élan_ and ringing, ruthless wit. There was always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to be born a Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman instead of a dour, dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of Montmartre! Stead of which I have the mess of pottage--stodgy, porridgy Scots pottage" (_see_ p. 189).

He had his sombre moods, too. It was characteristic of him, when in a pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles of Arbroath. "Oh, to have been born a Norseman!" he wrote once. "Oh, for the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, marrowy soul-ache of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of tragedy. Tragedy springs from it, tall and white and stately like the lily from the dung. I will never be a tragedian. Oh, pebbles of Arbroath!"

All the world knows how he died....

PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK

(In six volumes)

The work upon which I have spent the best years of my life is at length finished. After two decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened only by those small bickerings over _minutiæ_ so dear to all scrupulous writers, I may perhaps be pardoned if I philosophize for a few moments on the functions of the historian.

There are, of course, two technical modes of approach, quite apart from the preparatory contemplation of the field. (This last, I might add, has been singularly neglected by modern historians. My old friend, Professor Spondee, of Halle, though deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is particularly open to criticism on this ground. I cannot emphasize too gravely the importance of preliminary calm--what Hobbes calls "the unprejudicated mind." But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack the problem with the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, I think, has observed this.

Some such observations as these I was privileged to address to my very good friend, Professor Fish, of Yale, that justly renowned seat of learning, when lecturing in New Haven recently. His reply was witty--too witty to be apt, "Piscem natare doces," he said.

I will admit that Professor Fish may be free from taint in this regard; but many historians of to-day are, I fear, imbued with that most dangerous tincture of historical cant which lays it down as a maxim that contemporary history cannot be judicially written.

Those who have been kind enough to display some interest in the controversy between myself and M. Rougegorge--of the Sorbonne--in the matter of Lamartine's account of the elections to the Constituent Assembly of 1848, will remark several hitherto unobserved errors in Lamartine which I have been privileged to point out. For instance, Lamartine (who is supported _in toto_ by M. Rougegorge) asserts that the elections took place on Easter Sunday, April 27, 1848. Whereas, I am able to demonstrate, by reference to the astronomical tables at Kew Observatory, that in 1848 Easter Day fell upon April 23. M. Rougegorge's assertion that Lamartine was a slave to opium rests upon a humorous misinterpretation of Mme. Lamartine's diary. (The matter may be looked up by the curious in Annette User's "Années avec les Lamartines." Oser was for many years the cook in Lamartine's household, and says some illuminating things regarding L.'s dislike of onions.)

It is, of course, impossible for me to acknowledge individually the generous and stimulating assistance I have received from so many scholars in all parts of the world. The mere list of names would be like Southey's "Cataract of Lodore," and would be but an ungracious mode of returning thanks. I cannot, however, forbear to mention Professor Mandrake, of the Oxford Chair, _optimus maximus_ among modern historians. Of him I may say, in the fine words of Virgil, "Sedet aeternumque sedebit."

My dear wife, fortunately a Serb by birth, has regularized my Slavic orthography, and has grown gray in the service of the index. To her, and to my little ones, whose merry laughter has so often penetrated to my study and cheered me at my travail, I dedicate the whole. _89, Decameron Gardens._

PREFACE TO A BOOK OF POEMS

This little selection of verses, to which I have given the title "Rari Nantes," was made at the instance of several friends. I have chosen from my published works those poems which seemed to me most faithfully to express my artistic message; and the title obviously implies that I think them the ones most likely to weather the maëlstroms of Time. Be that as it may.

Vachel Lindsay and I have often discussed over a glass of port (one glass only: alas, that Vachel should abstain!) the state of the Muse to-day. He deems that she now has fled from cities to dwell on the robuster champaigns of Illinois and Kansas. Would that I could agree; but I see her in the cities and everywhere, set down to menial taskwork. She were better in exile, on Ibsen's sand dunes or Maeterlinck's bee farm. But in America the times are very evil. Prodigious convulsion of production, the grinding of mighty forces, the noise and rushings of winds--and what avails? _Parturiunt montes_ ...you know the rest. The ridiculous mice squeak and scamper on the granary floor. They may play undisturbed, for the real poets, those great gray felines, are sifting loam under Westminster. Gramercy Park and the Poetry Society see them not.

It matters not. With this little book my task is done. Vachel and I sail to-morrow for Nova Zembla.

_The Grotto, Yonkers._

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

A second edition of "Rari Nantes" having been called for, I have added three more poems, Esquimodes written since arriving here. Also the "Prayer for Warm Weather," by Vachel Lindsay, is included, at his express request. The success of the first edition has been very gratifying to me. My publishers will please send reviews to _Bleak House, Nova Zembla_.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find most stimulating to production, and therefore in this new edition I am able to include several new poems. "The Ode to a Seamew," the "Fracas on an Ice Floe," and the sequence of triolimericks are all new. If I have been able to convey anything of the bracing vigour of the Nova Zembla _locale_ the praise is due to my friendly and suggestive critic, the editor of _Gooseflesh_, the leading Nova Zemblan review.

Vachel Lindsay's new book, "The Tango," has not yet appeared, therefore I may perhaps say here that he is hard at work on an "Ode to the Gulf Stream," which has great promise.

The success of this little book has been such that I am encouraged to hope that the publisher's exemption of royalties will soon be worked off.

THE SKIPPER

I have been reading again that most delightful of all autobiographies, "A Personal Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. Conrad's mind is so rich, it has been so well mulched by years of vigorous life and sober thinking, that it pushes tendrils of radiant speculation into every crevice of the structure upon which it busies itself. This figure of speech leaves much to be desired and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the trellis growth of Mr. Conrad's memories, here blossoming before the delighted reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine or Virginia creeper, spreading hither and thither, redoubling on itself, branching unexpectedly upon spandrel and espalier, and repeatedly enchanting us with some delicate criss-cross of mental fibres. One hesitates even to suggest that there may be admirers of Mr. Conrad who are not familiar with this picture of his mind--may we call it one of the most remarkable minds that has ever concerned itself with the setting of English words horizontally in parallel lines?

The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have been the first on this continent to appreciate the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad grows numerous indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of O. Henry and the pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. It would be amusing to enumerate the list of those who have assured me (over the sworn secrecy of a table d'hôte white wine) that they read the proof-sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in 1895, etc., etc. For my own part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever heard of Mr. Conrad before December 2, 1911. On that date, which was one day short of the seventeenth anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small club of earnest young men was giving a dinner to Sir Sidney Colvin at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of R.L.S., and when the evening was far spent I remember that someone asked him whether there was any writer of to-day in whom he felt the same passionate interest as in Stevenson, any man now living whose work he thought would prove a permanent enrichment of English literature. Sir Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and sensitive critic, and a sworn enemy of loose statement; let me not then pretend to quote him exactly; but I know that the name he mentioned was that of Joseph Conrad, and it was a new name to me.

Even so, I think it was not until over a year later that first I read one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I am happy to remember that it was "Typhoon," which I read at one sitting in the second-class dining saloon of the _Celtic_, crossing from New York in January, 1913. There was a very violent westerly gale at the time--a famous shove, Captain Conrad would call it--and I remember that the barometer went lower than had ever been recorded before on the western ocean. The piano in the saloon carried away, and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an ideal stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my head through a window I could see excellent combers of green sloshing down into the 'tweendecks.

But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be imitated here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But sometimes, when one sits at midnight by the fainting embers and thinks that of all novelists now living one would most ardently yearn to hear the voice and see the face of Mr. Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in "A Personal Record" one comes as close as typography permits to a fireside chat with the Skipper himself. He tells us that he has never been very well acquainted with the art of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set this down as polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and the famous preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of his genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James, and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who would omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in these informal confessions there are pieces that are destined to be classics of autobiography as it is rarely written.

One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally labelled complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as simple as lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, sincerity--those are the words that stand again and again across his pages. "I have a positive horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first condition of good service." He has carried over to the world of desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says that he has been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he sees, and that the attempt to move others to the extremities of emotion means the surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing one's self to be carried away beyond the bounds of normal sensibility. Self-restraint is the duty, the dignity, the decency of the artist. This, indeed, is the creed of the simple man in every calling; and from this angle it appears that it is the Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are complicated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the great simplicity of life and death.

Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since the synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts as where the writer was born, and when, and the customary demonology of boyhood and courtship and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored. A statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary accountant, would rise from the volume nervously shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was all about. The only person in the book who is accorded any comprehensive biographical résumé is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Nicholas B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to Moscow, and was bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lithuania. To the delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad devotes his most affectionate and tender power of whimsical reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family history make the tragedies of Poland clearer to me than several volumes of historical comment. In his prose of that superbly rich simplicity of texture--it is a commonplace that it seems always like some notable translation from the French--he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes us with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him to his uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And to our delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long chapters constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is waiting for dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable tenderness he reviews the formative contours of boyish memories, telling us the whole mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the only true autobiography ever written: true to the inner secrets of the human soul. It is the passkey to the Master's attitude toward all the dear creations of his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel he has written. What self-revealing words are these: "An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety toward all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales." And when one stops to consider, how essentially impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels of the Slop and Glucose school!