Chapter 1 of 19 · 3952 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is indicated by _underscores_; boldface is indicated by =equals signs=.

THE POWDER OF SYMPATHY

OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

_Fiction_

PARNASSUS ON WHEELS THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP KATHLEEN TALES FROM A ROLLTOP DESK WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS

_Essays_

SHANDYGAFF MINCE PIE PIPEFULS PLUM PUDDING TRAVELS IN PHILADELPHIA

_Poetry_

SONGS FOR A LITTLE HOUSE THE ROCKING HORSE HIDE AND SEEK CHIMNEYSMOKE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE

THE POWDER OF SYMPATHY

BY CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

[Illustration]

Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

--MAX BEERBOHM

ILLUSTRATED BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1923

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

_First Edition_

[Illustration]

DEDICATION

TO FELIX RIESENBERG and FRANKLIN ABBOTT

DEAR FELIX, DEAR FRANK:--It is a pleasant circumstance that as one sets about collecting material for a book, scissoring night after night among scrapbooks to determine what may or may not be worth revisiting the glimpses of the press, there comes to mind with perfect naturalness who should carry the onus of the dedication. For a book is a frail and human emanation, and has its own instinctive disposition toward a certain kind of people. These Powders of Sympathy I hopefully sprinkle in your direction.

Another good friend warned me seriously, some time ago, against the danger of being too apologetic in a preface. For, said he, people always read prefaces and dedications, even if nought else; if you deprecate, you at once persuade them to the same attitude. And to you two, of all readers, I need not explain just how these pieces were written, day by day, out of the pressure and hilarity and contention of the mind. I have made no attempt to conceal their ephemeral origin. They were almost all written for a newspaper, and contain many references to journalism. And, if I may speak my inmost heart, I have had a sincere hope that they might, in collected form, play some small part in encouraging the youngest generation of journalists to be themselves and set things down as they see them. If these powders have any pharmacal virtue--other than that of Seidlitz--it is likely to be relative, not absolute. I mean, it is remarkable that they should have been written at all: remarkable that any newspaper should take the pains to offer space to speculations of this sort. I have not scrupled, on occasion, to chaff some of the matters newspapers are supposed to hold sacred. And it is my privilege, by the way, to say my gratitude and affection to Mr. Edwin F. Gay, editor of the New York _Evening Post_, under whose jurisdiction these were written. With the generosity of the ideal employer he has encouraged my ejaculations even when he did not agree with them.

But a columnist (it is frequently said) is not a real Newspaper Man: he is only a deboshed Editorial Writer, a fallen angel abjected from the secure heaven of anonymity. That is true. The notable increase, in recent years, of these creatures, has been held to be a sign that the papers required more scapegoats, or safety valves through whom readers might blow off their disrespect. And that by posting these innocent effigies as decoys, the wicked press might go about its privy misdeeds with more security, and conspire unobserved with the dangerous minions of Capital (or Labour, or the Agrarian Bloc).

However that may be, and unsuspecting whether intended by his scheming employer as a decoy, or a doormat, or a gargoyle, or a lightning rod (how is he to know, never having been given instruction of any sort except to go ahead and write as he pleases?) the columnist pursues his task and gradually distils a philosophy of his own out of his duties. Oddly enough, instead of growing more cautious by reason of his exposure, he becomes almost dangerously candid. He knows that if he is wrong he will be set right the next morning by a stack of letters varying in number according to the nature of his indiscretion. If he is wrong about _shall_ and _will_, he will get five letters of reproof. If about some nautical nicety, ten letters. If about the Republican Party, twenty letters. If about food, thirty-two. If about theology or Ireland, sixty to seventy. In all cases most of these letters will be wittier and wiser than anything he could have composed himself. Surely there is no other walk of life in which mistakes are so promptly retrovolant.

I have christened these soliloquies after dear old Sir Kenelm Digby’s famous nostrum, the Powder of Sympathy. But in spite of its amiable name and properties that powder was not a talcum. Its basis was vitriol; and I fear that in some of these prescriptions I have mixed a few acid crystals. It was either Lord Bacon or Don Marquis (two deep thinkers whose maxims are occasionally confounded in my mind) who told a story about a dog of low degree who made his reputation by biting a circus lion--thinking him only another dog, though a large one. Two or three times herein I have snapped at circus lions; and probably escaped only because the lion was too proud to return the indenture. Let it be remembered, though, that often you may love a man even while you dispute with him.

But the chief consideration (Frank and Felix) that seems to emerge from our friendship is that the eager squabbles of critics and littérateurs are of minor account; that the great thing is to circulate freely in the surrounding ocean of inexhaustible humanity, enjoying with our own eyes and ears the gay and tragic richness of life. We have had expeditions together, not commemorated in print, that have been both doctrine and delight. The incident of the Five-Dollar Bill we hid in a certain bookshop will recur to your minds; the day spent in New York Harbour aboard Tug Number 18, and her skipper’s shrewd, endearing sagacity. Then consider the Mystery of the House on 71st Street; the smell of Gorgonzola cheese on a North River pier; the taste of _asti spumante_; the arguments on the Test of Courage! These are matters it pleases me to set down, just as a secret among us. And though I am (you are aware) no partisan of the telephone, there are especially two voices I have learned to hear with a thrill. They say: “_Hello! This is Frank_;” or “_Hello! This is Felix!_” And I reply with honest excitement, for so often those voices are an announcement of Adventure.

Give me a ring soon.

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY.

_New York City, November 24, 1922._

CONTENTS

PAGE

An Oxford Symbol 1

Scapegoats 7

To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence 12

A Call for the Author 16

Mr. Pepys’s Christmases 19

Children as Copy 25

Hail, Kinsprit! 30

Round Manhattan Island 33

The Unknown Citizen 37

Sir Kenelm Digby 42

First Impressions of an Amiable Visitor 58

In Honorem: Martha Washington 63

According to Hoyle 67

L. E. W. 71

Our Extension Course 75

Some Recipes 78

Adventures of a Curricular Engineer 82

Santayana in the Subway 87

Madonna of the Taxis 95

Matthew Arnold and Exodontia 99

Dame Quickly and the Boilroaster 109

Vacationing with De Quincey 114

The Spanish Sultry 132

What Kind of a Dog? 137

A Letter from Gissing 140

July 8, 1822 143

Midsummer in Salamis 148

The Story of Ginger Cubes 153

The Editor at the Ball Game 183

The Dame Explores Westchester 191

The Power and the Glory 197

Gissing Joins a Country Club 202

Three Stars on the Back Stoop 208

A Christmas Card 213

Symbols and Paradoxes 218

The Return to Town 223

Maxims and Minims 228

Two Reviews 262

Buddha on the L 271

Intellectuals and Roughnecks 279

The Fun of Writing 288

A Christmas Soliloquy 291

THE POWDER OF SYMPATHY

[Illustration]

AN OXFORD SYMBOL

When in October, 1910, we arrived, in a hansom, at the sombre gate of New College, Oxford; trod for the first time through that most impressive of all college doorways, hidden in its walled and winding lane; timidly accosted Old Churchill, the whiskered porter, most dignitarian and genteel of England’s Perfect Servants; and had our novice glimpse of that noble Front Quad where the shadow of the battlemented roof lies patterned across the turf--we were as innocently hopeful, modestly anxious for learning and eager to do the right thing in this strange, thrilling environment as ever any young American who went looking for windmills. No human being (shrewd observers have remarked) is more beautifully solemn than the ambitious Young American. And, indeed, no writer has ever attempted to analyze the shimmering tissue of inchoate excitement and foreboding that fills the spirit of the juvenile Rhodes Scholar as he first enters his Oxford college. He arrives with his mind a gentle confusion of hearsay about Walter Pater, Shelley, boat races, Mr. Gladstone, Tom Brown, the Scholar Gypsy, and Little Mr. Bouncer. Kansas City or Sheboygan indeed seem far away as he crosses those quadrangles looking for his rooms.

But even Oxford, one was perhaps relieved to find, is not all silver-gray mediæval loveliness. The New Buildings, to which Churchill directed us, reached through a tunnel and a bastion in a rampart not much less than a thousand years elderly, were recognizably of the Rutherford B. Hayes type of edification. Except for the look-off upon gray walls, pinnacles, and a green tracery of gardens, and the calculated absence of plumbing (a planned method of preserving monastic hardiness among light-minded youth), the immense cliff of New Buildings might well have been a lobe of the old Johns Hopkins or a New York theological seminary. At the top of four flights we found our pensive citadel. Papered in blue, upholstered in a gruesome red, with yellow woodwork, and a fireplace which (we soon learned) was a potent reeker. It would be cheerful to describe those two rooms in detail, for we lived in them two years. But what first caught our eye was a little green pamphlet lying on the red baize tablecloth. It was lettered

NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD Information and Regulations _Revised October, 1910_

Our name was written upon it in ink, and we immediately sat down to study it. Here, we thought, is our passkey to this new world of loveliness.

First we found the hours of college chapel. Then, “All Undergraduates are required to perform Exercises.” In our simplicity we at first supposed this to be something in the way of compulsory athletics, but then discovered it to mean intellectual exercises. Fair enough, we thought. That is what we came for.

“Undergraduates are required, as a general rule, to be in College or their Lodgings by 11 p. m., and to send their Strangers out before that time.... No Undergraduate is allowed to play on any musical instrument in College rooms except between the hours of 1 and 9 p. m., unless special leave has been obtained beforehand from the Dean.... No games are allowed in the College Quadrangles, and no games except bowls in the Garden.” Excellent, we meditated; this is going to be a serious career, full attention to the delights of the mind and no interruption by corybantic triflers.

“A Term by residence means pernoctation within the University for six weeks in Michaelmas or in Hilary Term, and for three weeks in Easter or in Trinity (or Act) Term.”... We felt a little uncertain as to just what time of year Hilary and Act happened. But we were not halting, just now, over technicalities. We wanted to imbibe, hastily, the general spirit and flavour of our new home.... “Every member of the College is required to deposit Caution-money. Commoners deposit £30, unless they signify in writing their intention to pay their current Battels weekly; in this case they deposit £10. An undergraduate battling terminally cannot withdraw part of his Caution-money and become a weekly battler without the authority of his parent or guardian.” We at once decided that it was best to be a weekly battler. Battling, incidentally, is a word that we believe exists only at Eton and Oxford; dictionaries tell us that it comes from “an obsolete verb meaning to fatten.” Sometimes, however, in dispute with the Junior Bursar, it comes near its more usual sense. We wondered, in our young American pride, whether we were a Commoner? We were pleased to note, however, that the alternative classification was not a Lord but a Scholar.

We skimmed along through various other instructions. “A fine of 1s. is charged to the owner of any bicycle not put away before midnight.” The owner, or the bicycle, we mused? Never mind--we would soon learn. Coals and faggots, we noted, were variable in price. “The charge for a cold bath is 2d., for a hot 4d., inclusive of bath-towel.” The duties of a mysterious person named as the Bedmaker (but always, in actual speech, the Scout) were punctually outlined. But now we found ourself coming to Kitchen, Buttery, and Store-Room Tariffs. This, evidently, was the pulse of the machine. With beating heart we read on, entranced:

Beer, Mild half-pint 1½ Beer, Mixed “ 2 Beer, Strong “ 2½ Beer, Treble X glass 3 Beer, Lager pint 6 Stout half-pint 2 Cider “ 1½

There was something significant, we felt by instinct, in the fact that Treble X was obtainable only by the glass. Vital stuff, evidently. Our education was going to come partly in casks, perhaps? In the Kitchen Tariff we read, gloatingly, magnificent syllables. _Grilled Sausages and Bacon_, commons, 1/2. _Devilled Kidneys_, commons, 1/. (A “commons,” we judged, was a large portion; if you wanted a lesser serving, you ordered a “small commons.”) _Chop with Chips_, 11d. _Grilled Bones_, 10d. _Kedgeree_, plain or curried, commons, 9d. (Oh noble kedgeree, so nourishing and inexpensive, when shall we taste your like again?) Herrings, Bloaters, Kippers, each 3d. (To think that, then, we thought the Junior Bursar’s tariff was a bit steep.) Jelly, Compôte of Fruit, Trifle, Pears and Cream. Creams ... commons, 6d. “Gentlemen’s own birds cooked and served ... one bird, 1/. Two birds, 1/6.”

We went on, with enlarging appreciation, to the Store Room and Cellar Tariffs: Syphons, Seltzer or Soda-water, 4½d. Ginger-beer, per bottle, 2d. Cakes: Genoa, Cambridge, Madeira, Milan, Sandringham, School, each 1/. Foolscap, per quire, 10d. Quill Pens, per bundle, 1/6. Cheroots, Cigars, Tobacco, Cigarettes--and then we found what seemed to be the crown and cream of our education, LIST OF WINES.

Port, 4/ per bottle. Pale Sherry, 3/. Marsala, 2/. Madeira, 4/. Clarets: Bordeaux, 1/6. St. Julien, 2/. Dessert, 4/. Hock or Rhenish Wine: Marcobrunner, 4/. Niersteiner, 3/. Moselle, 2/6. Burgundy, 2/ and 4/. Pale Brandy, 5/. Scotch Whisky, 4/. Irish Whisky, 4/. Gin, 3/. Rum, 4/.

It is really too bad to have to compress into a few paragraphs such a wealth of dreams and memories. We sat there, with our little pamphlet before us, and looked out at that great panorama of spires and towers. We have always believed in falling in with our environment. The first thing we did that afternoon was to go out and buy a corkscrew. We have it still--our symbol of an Oxford education.

[Illustration]

SCAPEGOATS

The man who did most (I am secretly convinced) to deprive American literature of some really fine stuff was Mr. John Wanamaker. It was in his store, some years ago, that I bought a kind of cot-bed or couch, which I put in one corner of my workroom and on which it is my miserable habit to recline when I might be getting at those magnificent writings I have planned. Every evening I pile up the cushions and nestle there with _The Gentle Grafter_ or some detective story (my favourite relaxation), saying to myself: “Just ten minutes of loafing”....

But perhaps Messrs. Strawbridge and Clothier (also of Philadelphia) are equally at fault. When I wake up, on my Wanamaker divan, it is usually about 2 A. M. Not too late, even then, for a determined spirit to make incision on its tasks. But I find myself moving towards a very fine white-enamelled icebox which I bought from Strawbridge and Clothier in 1918. With that happy faculty of self-persuasion I convince myself it is only to see whether the pan needs emptying or the doors latching. But by the time I have scalped a blackberry pie and eroded a platter of cold macaroni au gratin, of course work of any sort is out of the question.

So do the Philistines of this world league themselves cruelly against the artist, plotting temptation for his carnal deboshed instincts, joying to see him succumb. Once the habit of yielding is established, Wanamaker, Strawbridge and Clothier (dark trio of Norns) have it their own way. Just as surely as robins will be found on a new-mown lawn, as certainly as bonfire smoke veers all round the brush pile to find out the eyes of the suburban leaf burner, so inevitably do the Divan and the Icebox exert their cruel dominion over us when we ought to be pursuing our lovely and impossible dreams. Wanamaker and Strawbridge and Clothier have blueprints of the lines of fissure in our frail velleity. As William Blake might have said:

Let Flesh once get a lead on Spirit, It’s hard for Soul to reinherit: When supper’s laid upon a plate Mind might as well abdicate.

But one of the things I think about, just before I drop off to sleep on that couch, is My Anthology. Like every one else, I have always had an ambition to compile an anthology of my own; several, in fact. One of them I call in my own mind _The Book of Uncommon Prayer_, and imagine it as a kind of secular breviary, including many of those beautiful passages in literature expressing the spirit of supplication. This book, however, it will take years to collect; it will be entirely non-sectarian and so truly religious that many people will be annoyed. People do not care much for books of real beauty. That anthology edited by Robert Bridges, for instance--_The Spirit of Man_--how many readers have taken the trouble to hunt it out?

But the _Uncommon Prayer Book_ is not the kind of anthology I have in mind at the moment. What I need is a book that would boil down the best of all the books I am fond of and condense it into a little bouillon cube of wisdom. I have always had in mind the possibility that I might go travelling, or the house might burn down, or I might have to sell my library, or something of that sort. I should like to have the meat and essence of my favourites in permanent form, so that wherever I were I could write to the publisher and get a fresh copy.

This thought came with renewed emphasis the other day when I was talking to Vachel Lindsay. He was saying that he had lately been rereading Swinburne, for the first time in nearly twenty years, and was grieved to see how the text of the poet had become corrupted in his memory. He had been misquoting Swinburne for years and years, he said, and the errors had been growing more and more firmly into his mind. That led me to think, suppose we had only memory to rely on, how long would the text of anything we loved remain unblurred? Suppose I were on a desert island and yearned to solace myself by spouting some of the sonnets of Shakespeare? How much could I recapture? Honestly, now, and with no resort to the book on the shelf at my elbow, let me try an old friend:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love That alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken-- Love is the star to every wandering bark Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Then there’s something about a sickle, but I can’t for the life of me quite get it. Presently I’ll look it up in the book and see how near I came.

Before opening the Shakespeare, however, let’s have one more try:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I wail the lack of many a thing I sought ... my dear time’s waste----

And all the rest of that sonnet that I can think of is something about “death’s dateless night.” A pretty poor showing. Of course, I should do better on a desert island: there would be the wide expanse of shining sand to walk upon, and I could throw myself into it with more passion and fury. The secret of remembering poetry is to get a good barytone start and obliterate the mind of its current freight of trifles. The metronomic prosody of the surf would help me, no doubt, and the placid frondage of the breadfruit trees. But even so, the recension of Shakespeare’s sonnets that I would write down upon slips of bark would be a very corrupt and stumbling text. Favourite lines would be scrambled into the wrong sonnets, and the whole thing would be a pitiful miscarriage of memory.

The only sagacious conduct of life is to prepare for every possible emergency. I have taken out life insurance, and fire insurance, and burglary insurance, and automobile insurance. I have always insured myself against losing my job by taking care not to work too hard at it, so I wouldn’t miss it too bitterly if it were suddenly jerked from under me. But what have I done in the way of Literary Insurance? Suppose, to-morrow, Adventure should carry me away from these bookshelves? How pleasant to have a little microcosm of them that I could take with me! And yet, unless I can shake off the servitude of those three Philadelphia mandarins, Wanamaker and Strawbridge and Clothier, I shall never have it.

When I think of the plays that I would have written if it weren’t for those three rascals.

[Illustration]

TO A NEW YORKER A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

I wonder, old dear, why my mind has lately been going out towards you? I wonder if you will ever read this? They say that wood-pulp paper doesn’t last long nowadays. But perhaps some of my grandchildren (with any luck, there should be some born, say twenty-five years hence) may, in their years of tottering caducity, come across this scrap of greeting, yellowed with age. With tenderly cynical waggings of their faded polls, perhaps they will think back to the tradition of the quaint vanished creatures who lived and strove in this city in the year of disgrace, 1921. Poor old granfer (I can hear them say it, with that pleasing note of pity), I can just remember how he used to prate about the heyday of his youth. He wrote pieces for some paper, didn’t he? Comically old-fashioned stuff my governor said; some day I must go to the library and see if they have any record of it.