Part 2

And what is there, after all, in the life of a boy, that a man would find interesting? Or that he may not do, if such is sufficiently his desire to "make" the time for it, as he makes time for his adult pleasures, and if he is not too old or too fat? He can spend his vacation at the old swimming-hole--but he never does it. He can go barefooted whenever he wishes: his mother can no longer prevent him. He can fish with a bent pin in the porcelain bathtub,--adding a goldfish to make the pursuit more exciting,--every morning before he takes his bath. He can chase butterflies; here and there, indeed, a man makes a profession of it, and institutions of learning call him an entomologist, and pay him much honor and a small salary. Nobody forbids him to enlarge his mental horizon by reading the lives of criminals and detectives; and I can myself direct him to many an entertaining book, which is at once far worse and far better, morally and artistically, than the sober narratives that Old Sleuth used to write by the yard for boys to read by stealth. He can roll a hoop; in many cases it would do him a world of good to roll it down to the office in the morning and back home at night. If he can persuade other ageing men, wishful of renewed boyhood, to join with him, he can play at marbles, tick, puss-in-the-corner, hop-scotch, ring-taw, and "Hot beans ready buttered." (Uncle Jones mentions these games. I do not remember all of them myself, but "Hot beans ready buttered" sounds especially interesting.) And where better than in some green, quiet corner at the Country Club? And why, if you _will_ raise the question of conventionality, why more foolish than golf, or folk-dancing?

But what he cannot do is to assume the boy's unconsciousness of his own mortality. What he cannot unload is his own consciousness of responsibility to and for others. Life, in short, has provided the man with a worrying company of creditors of whom the boy knows nothing--Creditor Cost-of-Living, Creditor Ambition, Creditor Conscience, and Creditor Death. And the boy is unmarried! It is even claimed by one philosopher of my acquaintance that this is why men wish they were once more boys. I grant the plausibility of this opinion; for the more a man is is devoted to his wife and family, the more he is beset and worried by these troublesome creditors, the more, one may reasonably argue, he feels the need of time to meet his obligations, and is likely now and then to envy the boy his narrow, conventional, but immortal-feeling life.

Uncle Jones misses, I think, this fundamental fact. He is always trying to destroy the boy's sense of immortality in this world by trying to persuade him to read the Bible and prepare for immortality in the next. "When a boy first begins his A B C," says Uncle Jones, "it is terrible work for him for a short time; yet how soon he gets over it, and begins to read! And, then, what a pleasure to be able to read a good and pleasant book! Oh, it is worthwhile to go through the trouble of learning to read fifty times over, to obtain the advantage of reading the Bible."

III

ON MEETING THE BELOVED

_Now it is a quainte Oddity of thys State and Mysterie of Loue that youre trew Louer combines the opposyte qualities of a deepe Humilitie and a loftie Conceit of Hymselfe. For with respect to this, hys Mistresse, he believes himself a most inferior Person, and as it were a mere Worme; yet if he doth suspect her to regard any Man els as his Equal, he is consumed with great Astonishment and raging Indignation, for this same Loue is a great Destroyer of Common Sense in its Victimes. For he thinketh Hymselfe inferior to her because he is her Louer, and superior to all Men els for the same silly Reason._--ANATOMIE OF LOUE.

To any sensitive man, not yet armored by the indifference that comes of being married himself, there is cause for apprehension in the prospect of meeting for the first time that person, male or female, whom somebody he knows and loves has recently agreed to marry. The event, when it comes, is unavoidable, nor is there any period in adult life when it may not happen, or anybody we know so old that he or she may not occasion it. Fact is more romantic, or at any rate remains romantic much later in life, than fiction. Only the other day I read in the newspaper of a man of one hundred and thirty-five years who had just subjected his little circle to this formality. Very likely the newspaper exaggerated, but the case undermines the security that one ordinarily feels in his relationship with the ageing.

Now it needs no argument that to be happy in the happiness of others is an inexpensive pleasure and well worth cultivating. Other things being equal, one should go dancing and singing to his first meeting with another's beloved. Bright-colored flowers, be she sixteen or sixty, should blossom, to his imagination, from the granite curb along his way; and, though a foolish convention may repress the song and dance, yet should he walk as if shod with the most levitating heels ever made from the liveliest of live rubber, and sing merrily in his heart.

But, thus to enter into the happiness of another, one must see and feel, as if for himself, some good and sufficient reason for that happiness; and the deep, insoluble mystery essential to all proper betrothals is that this good and sufficient reason is not necessarily visible: these two are happy-mad, and how shall anybody who is sane enter into their lunacy?

Mr. Harvey Todd, 2d,--to take the first name that comes to mind,--has become engaged to Miss Margaret Lemon; Miss Lemon to Mr. Todd. Well and good. Nature, which, for some reason that mankind has long curiously and vainly sought to penetrate, wishes to continue the human race, is, one may believe, reasonably well satisfied. It is one job among many. But the satisfaction of Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon, if it could be put to such haberdashery use, would girdle the Equator, and the ends, tied in a true lover's knot, would flutter beyond the farthest visible star. Men and women have become engaged in the past; men and women will become engaged in the future; but this engagement of Harvey Todd and Margaret Lemon is and will ever remain unique--and so whoever is now called upon to appraise one party to this wonder and congratulate the other, may well be troubled. He is not so much afraid of what he may do and say,--for any man may hope to achieve a hard, quick, almost sobbing pressure of the hand and a few muttered words,--as of the way, in spite of himself, that he will look when he does and says it; there, indeed, the amateur actor profits by his hobby. There is, to be sure, the saving chance that Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd) may so pleasurably affect him that the ordeal will be less difficult than he anticipates: there is even the rare chance that he may _instantly and completely agree with Mr. Todd's estimate of Miss Lemon_; but this is the happy-madness itself, and certainly not desirable under the circumstances. There is the possibility, even more rare and less desirable, that Miss Lemon, seeing him for the first time, _will instantly and completely prefer him to Mr. Todd_. There is the possibility that he may recoil with horror from Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd), or be recoiled from, or that both may recoil simultaneously, falling over, figuratively, on their backs, and being picked up and carried away unconscious, and in opposite directions, by surprised onlookers. His whole nature may, in short, instinctively run toward, or away from, the beloved; and between these extremes lies a gamut of intermediary emotions, which at the moment he would hardly wish to uncover. This stiff and geometrical smile, he asks himself at the worst, can it deceive anybody? this hypocritical mutter of congratulation, does it proceed from his own or an ice chest? Nor is he much relieved when Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon, as the case may be, proves how genuine appeared his smile, how sincere his mutter, by asking him in affectionate detail what he thinks of the other--a procedure which should be legally forbidden the newly engaged, under penalty of being refused a marriage license for at least ten years.

This state of mind in lovers, so important to those who are called upon to meet the beloved for the first time, has engaged the attention of essayists, conversationalists, and philosophers. "They fall at once," wrote Stevenson, "into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centre point of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought, that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow creature. And all the while their acquaintances look on in stupor."

"No, sir," said Dr. Johnson, promptly improving Mr. Boswell's milder assertion that love is like being enlivened with champagne, "No, sir. Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne"--an opinion, one hopes, that will not some day be made the basis of a nation-wide campaign to prohibit falling in love.

"His friends," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, "find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds."

Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon (so like a rainbow) are impervious to any lack of enthusiasm that you or I, dear, unselfish, sensitive reader, may fear to exhibit when either leads us the other by the hand and says, "This is IT." Ours, if any, will be the suffering. It may even happen that Miss Lemon or Mr. Todd--Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon beaming consent and approval--will suggest that _we call her_ (_or him_) _Margaret_ (_or Harvey_).

Yet from another point of view, but this is a selfish one, apprehension is justified in proportion to the sensitive man's previous intimacy with the individual whose beloved he is about to meet. For until that meeting is over, "previous" is the word for it: whatever opinion the beloved may form of him will determine the degree and manner of its continuance. If Miss Lemon disapproves of him, though Mr. Todd has hitherto loved him as Damon did Pythias, all is over; if Mr. Todd disapproves of him, though he has known Miss Lemon from her perambulator, all is over. A pale ghost, he may, in either case, sometimes hang his spectral hat in the Todd hallway, and even extend his phantom legs under the Todd mahogany; but ALL IS OVER. Divinely harmonious as they seem, these two will never agree to let him try, however humbly and conscientiously, to cultivate the inexpensive pleasure of being happy in their happiness. He becomes what no self-respecting man can wish to be--a fly in the ointment. Most cases, fortunately, are not so serious: he will be given a reasonable chance to make a place for himself on this new plane to which Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon have been translated; but it is always a question whether he can enter that plane himself, or must hereafter be content with hearing from his former friend through a medium. For he has not, as is so often gracefully but emptily said on these trying occasions, been enriched by the acquisition of a new friend: he has simply exchanged Miss Lemon or Mr. Todd (as the case may be) for a composite, a Toddlemon or a Lemontodd--a few years will show which. He must make the best he can of that composite. He who was formerly described as (let us say) "my friend, Mr. Popp," becomes, if he becomes at all, "our friend, Mr. Popp"; and if ever he hears himself being introduced as "Mr. Todd's friend, Mr. Popp," or as "Mrs. Todd's friend, Mr. Popp," he had better go away as soon as politeness permits, and never come back. Never.

I speak, of course, in generalities; for there are no rules immutably governing all cases, and life is mellowed and beautified by shining, sensible examples, in which Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon become one, yet realize that in many respects, being human, they must still remain two; then, indeed, the congratulator may actually be enriched by the acquisition of a new friend--but not instantly, as one is enriched by the acquisition of a new hat. Yet it is always the wiser part, in preparing to meet a beloved, to prepare for the worst.

These are evidently the apprehensions of a bachelor, sensitive but not unselfish; the mental attitude is different with a student, philosopher, and idealist who, thinking not of himself, contemplates another's marriage in the calm, intelligent way, having as yet no beloved in which he can contemplate his own. Such a one weighs. Such a one is conscious that, little as _he_ knows the beloved of Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon, there is grave danger that Mr. Todd knows Miss Lemon, or Miss Lemon Mr. Todd, hardly better. This happy-madness may not only be a delusion, as a calm outside intelligence contemplates it, but it may be a snare. Mistakes do happen. There are known cases in which the happy lunatic has been mistaken in a beloved not once but often; and the persistent effort of these poor madmen and madwomen to correct one mistake by making another is one of the most discussed and pitiable phases of our civilization. The calm intelligence must balance also the practical aspects of the business, its risks and liabilities as well as its profits; and so serious is the enterprise when thus examined that he can hardly fail to be terrified for anybody he knows and loves who is undertaking it.

O Harvey! Harvey! (or Margaret! Margaret!)

Tact is what he will pray for. And if his prayer is granted, when Mr. Todd (or Miss Lemon) asks him, "Now, honestly, what do you think of her (or him)?" he will say, "Of course I do not know Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd) very well _yet_, but I have never met anybody whom I _hoped_ to know and like better." Which will be quite true, and please the twittering questioner much more than if he said, "Oh, I don't know. I _don't_ know."

IV

THIS IS A FATHER

_Proud Parent, in this little life Yourself reflected see, And think how Baby will progress A man like you to be!

So stout, so strong, so wise, and when Sufficient years have flown, Like you the happy parent of A baby of his own!

And when that unborn baby grows To be a man like you, Oh, think how proud that man will be To be a parent too.

So think, when life oppresses you And you are feeling sad, A million, million, million times You'll be a happy dad._

--THE FATHER'S ANTHEM.

In the life of man fatherhood is so likely to happen, that I wonder Shakespeare did not select father as a natural, and indeed inevitable, successor to lover in his well-known seven ages. He chose the soldier, "full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard," presumably because such soldiers were common in Elizabethan London. But fathers must have been more so: they must have gone in droves past the tavern window where Shakespeare (as what we now call the "wets" so like to think) sat at his ale-stained table, dipping now his quill in an inkwell, and again his nose in a tankard; but they seem to have made no impression. Indeed this unromantic, necessary figure, composite as it is of all sorts and conditions of men, has never appealed strongly to the poets; perhaps it is their revenge because fathers so seldom read poetry.

Whatever else a man does, whether he lives by banking or burglary, ascends to the presidency or descends to the gutter, he is likely to be a father: they are as countless as the pebbles on a beach or the leaves in Vallombrosa, and the few who evade paternity evade also the purpose for which nature evidently created them, and go through life thumbing their noses, so to speak, at Divine Providence. So taken for granted is this vocation of fatherhood, and so little considered in comparison with other masculine employments, that no correspondence school offers a course, and many a young man undertakes to raise children with less hesitation than he would start in to raise chickens. Some accept fatherhood with joy, others with resignation, like a recently wedded young Italian who cobbles my shoes, and spoke the other day of his own new little one. "Zee fadder and zee modder," he said, "zey work and zey slave for zee leetle one. But what-a good? When he is grow up, he say, 'To hell wiz zee fadder and zee modder!'" And so, as Shakespeare may have decided, there is no universal type of fatherhood, nor has the imagination of mankind created one, as in the case of mothers, for convenient literary and conversational use. The lines of the balladist,--

With his baby on his knee He's as happy as can be,--

were, to be sure, something in this direction; but they have become so wholly associated with humor, that even the late Mr. Rogers, had he known the ballad, could hardly have found inspiration therein for a group; nor Shakespeare adapted the lines to describe seriously one of his seven ages. He might have scribbled experimentally,--

Then the father, Infant on knee, and happy like the clam,--

but that would have been the end of it. He would have crossed out the experiment, and taken another drink.

Father, in fact, follows Mother, in the mind of the general, so far behind that he is almost invisible, a tiny object on red wheels at the end of a string. But the little fellow carries a pocketbook: when Mother needs money she pulls in the string, and he comes up in a hurry. And, as is usually the case with popular conceptions, this odd, erroneous notion, which most fathers seem cheerfully enough to accept, has no doubt its historic foundation, and derives from the unquestionable supremacy of Mother in the beginning. At that period, indeed, it is hardly to be expected that any father should feel immediately _en rapport_ with his new-born child, or become intimately associated with its helpless, flower-like life. Ever since the idea, which has now so long lost its original element of bewildering surprise, yet remains always somewhat surprising, first dawned upon a human father and mother that _this baby_ belonged to _them_, conditions have inexorably consigned the infant to the care of its mother, while its father pursued elsewhere the equally necessary business of providing sustenance for the family. A division of labor was imperative: somebody must stay at home in the cave and tend the baby, somebody must go out in the woods and hustle for provisions. Maternity was, as it must have been, already a feminine habit, but paternity was something new and unexpected; and although I suspect, in many cases, this astonishing discovery was followed by speedy flight. Trueheart the First took up his responsibilities and his stone axe together.

The horror is recorded with which Dr. Johnson regarded the idea of being left alone in a castle with a new-born child; and this feeling in so civilized a man was no doubt an echo of the emotion with which poor, bewildered, primitive, but faithful Trueheart would have envisaged being left alone in the cave with his new-born baby: the sense of relief, of gayety, of something definite and within his capabilities to do, with which the young father nowadays takes his hat and starts for the office, must be much the same as that with which Trueheart took his stone axe and started for the woods.

Thus, in the very inception of the human family, fatherhood became subordinate to motherhood; and so, because conditions after all have not fundamentally changed, it has ever since continued. "Mothers' Day," for example, is celebrated with enthusiasm; "Fathers' Day" remains a mere humorous suggestion, a kind of clown in the editorial circus. Then as now, moreover, in the earlier life of the child, Father, although not quite as useless as a vermiform appendix, was and is of very little importance.

I am not forgetting--for I do them an honor I can hardly express--those fathers who walk, all through the night, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, across an otherwise silent room, that the motion incidental to their perambulation may soothe a mysteriously afflicted babe to sleep; nor am I unaware that Father sometimes pushes baby's wicker chariot, pausing ever and anon to pick up and restore some article of infant use or pleasure that the little rascal has mischievously thrown overboard, and in many other touching ways patiently tries to make himself useful. These offices are almost impersonal. Any father could perform them for any baby: a mechanical father, ingeniously contrived to walk back and forth, push, or pick up and restore, according as the operator wound him up and pressed the proper button, would do as well. Only in proportion as the child begins to sit up and take intelligent notice does Father's position become responsible, important, and precarious. From that time on, his behavior has consequences.

Fatherhood, in fact, is a mighty serious business--yet even to-day many a father seems to have made no more conscious preparation for it than had our astonished ancestor, Trueheart. My friend Mr. Todd, for example, meets Miss Margaret Lemon at an afternoon tea. A blind attachment (I am putting the case with unimpassioned simplicity, for this is no novel) springs up (God knows why) between them. If Harvey Todd had been Faust, Mephistopheles would have wasted time trying to tempt him with any Margaret but a Lemon; and if Miss Lemon had been that other Margaret, Mephistopheles would have had to produce Harvey Todd, who, I am glad to believe, would have promptly told him to go to the Devil.

And so Mr. Todd becomes engaged; and after a decent interval, he becomes a husband; and after another decent interval he becomes a father--and who more surprised than he! Even as we congratulate him, clinking together the long-handled spoons that come in the ice-cream sodas with which all good fellows now celebrate such an occasion, it is perfectly evident that Harvey Todd has given hardly more thought to the tremendously important and interesting relation of father and son than might reasonably have been expected of little Harvey, Jr. Mind you, I do not attempt to say how he shall conduct himself: that is his business; but as he begins, so is he likely to go on to the end of the chapter, when little Harvey is no longer a roly-poly human plaything but a great big man like himself. And according as he _has_ conducted himself, that great big man will bless him or curse him or regard him with varying degrees of affection or contumely. If he has never thought of it before, it is something for him to think about now, seriously, in the brief respite while his duties are perambulatory, and a mechanical father, cleaned, oiled, and wound up once a day, would do just as well. Fill the glasses again, O white-coated Dispenser, and make mine chocolate. For this man is a father! He has created new life, or clothed in mortality an immortal spirit (though he doesn't know which), and here he stands,--I said chocolate,--and Solomon, with all his wisdom and all his experience, could not tell him what to do about it.

So we clink our long-handled spoons.