Part 13
But we were speaking of Lord Northcliffe. We have never made a careful study of his career, but oddly enough we have always had a sort of sneaking affection for the man himself while regarding that type of person in general as extremely mischievous. We do not care at all for these people who accumulate newspapers much as they would a number of suits of clothes, and who hire editors to traipse round the world with them as a kind of subservient mouthpiece. We are being told by all the papers that Northcliffe “wielded terrific power.” Well, in a way, we suppose he did; but it was a power that dealt mainly in ephemeral and unimportant things. Even his greatest triumph, the Premiership of Lloyd George, he could not permanently control. It was one of the oddities of coincidence that on the day of Northcliffe’s death a cable dispatch comes in telling us that four of Mr. George’s goats have won prizes at a goat show. Mr. George has a goat farm, it appears. If it would not seem heartless, we should say that Lord Northcliffe died rather than have to read Mr. Lloyd George’s memoirs. He had a great spirit and a huge ambition; but we cannot see in his career any evidence that Public Life and power necessarily develop the finer and more sensitive parts of man.
[Illustration]
GISSING JOINS A COUNTRY CLUB
A number of our clients have been asking for news of Haphazard Gissing, the Synthetic Dog. Since we have always been so candid with our patrons, we shall have to tell the unvarnished story of the latest surprising chapter in that romantic animal’s career.
We say it with reluctance, and we say it with unfeigned sadness: we have had to deport Gissing. Admirable creature though he was, active, agile (you should have seen him play catch with a rubber ball), sonorous at night when he suspected alien footstep, highly intelligent and not devoid of a rude houndish comeliness--with all these gifts, he was not congenial among children. We do not know whether it was due to some dark strain of philosophy in him that rendered him too introspective to understand the ways of juveniles, or whether it was a blend of hot cavalier jealousy--at any rate, he never seemed able to unbend properly among the extremely young. The terror that he inspired in icemen and tinsmiths could be countenanced, but when he bristled and showed his teeth at neighbouring children something had to be done. It was the familiar problem of literature and life: here is an amiable creature, well beloved, possessed (by some kink of breeding) with an unexorcisable deviltry. We can leave it at that, and not harmonize the theme with sentimental arpeggios.
Of course the first thing to be done was to find a good home for the exile. We consulted Dr. Rothaug, the kindly veterinarian of Sea Cliff, at whose establishment Gissing took a cultural course last winter. Dr. Rothaug told us of a farmer in that pretty suburb of Glen Cove which is miscalled _Skunk’s Misery_, who was said to be looking for a fierce watch-dog to guard his chickens. Thither we went, and found the farmer milking at a barn on the lonely hillside. But just the night before he had been given a tramp collie. We liked the look of the farm at Skunk’s Misery; it was the kind of place where Gissing would have been well content, but the farmer said that one dog was enough. That night, very late, we let Gissing indoors, and shared a Last Supper with him at the icebox. Perhaps we shall remember that he seemed just a little surprised at the beef-bone and the arrowroot biscuits spread with Roquefort cheese. Well, we said to ourself defensively, he was always fond of Roquefort; there’s only a scrap of it left; and very likely he’ll never taste it again.
We refuse to be stampeded into any sentiment about this matter; we always thought that Gissing, as he matured, was developing a touch of the Thomas Hardy fatalism; he would be annoyed if we tried to over-dramatize this incident.
The next day the whole family was mustered to pay parting honours; all hands were embarked in Dame Quickly; the condemned dog ate a hearty breakfast, and with a bight of clothesline about his neck was escorted to the chariot, his long unused hawser having vanished since the Urchin used it to moor a full-rigged ship to a neighbouring sapling. By this time the victim had suspected something amiss; his deeply stricken cider-coloured eye was painfully interrogative. The Dame, however, seemed to us a trifle heartless. Off she went, her cylinders drumming with their usual alacritous smoothness. To a wedding or a funeral, all one to her. Gissing, now probably reviewing inwardly the tale of his errors (there must have been many of which we are ignorant: we never did know where he went on those long daily expeditions) was (we are pleased to record it) too honourable to attempt any insincere repentances. He kept climbing into the laps of his guardians, but the ironist insists that this was not all affection, but rather that the vibration of the floorboards tickled his pads. There was an occasional secret caress, both given and taken, but we know our clients are too stiff in the bosom to want to hear about such matters. The younger generation, in the back seat, were eager to see the country club that Gissing was going to join. So had the matter been explained to them.
Across those autumn-tinted fields of central Long Island--all colours of pink and fawn and panther with the weathered shrivelling corn-shocks like old ghost-Indian tepees, and the pumpkins bright in the stubble--we proceeded to the Bide-a-Wee Home, which lies tucked away in the woods near Wantagh. This place had been to us only a name, and indeed we knew not exactly what to expect. Great was our pleasure to find a charming old farmhouse with great barns and outhouses, and an immediate clamour from hundreds of dogs running gayly in fenced inclosures, and lesser dogs, both hale and cripple, about the yard. Gissing hopped out blithely: his tail lifted sharply over his back, feathering downward as it curved: the warm October air, one supposes, came to him sharply barbed with the aromas of innumerable congenials. He was very much alive, and walked nimbly on cushion toes. Holding the rope, we walked among the barns, saluted by prodigious applause from all sides. Even an inclosure full of cats showed gracious interest. The conclusion drawn by the Younger Generation was that Gissing’s friends were glad to see him. Then came a genial curator, Gissing was led to a wire gate, and introduced into an orchard plot among about thirty more or less his own size. There was a good deal of bristling and growling, but he stood his ground calmly while a dozen or so of his new clubmates inquired into his credentials.
We had been somewhat troubled by the signboard of the Bide-a-Wee, which calls itself a _Home for Friendless Animals_. We wished to impress upon the curator that Gissing was far from friendless, but we soon found that the legend on the board was inaccurate. Many very well-loved animals go there, for one reason or another; the organization tries to find a suitable home for all the beasts in its care; the name and characteristics of each are entered in a ledger when it arrives, and, if he so desires, the previous owner is notified when the animal goes to its new home. We were pleased to learn also that much of the broken bread from the Waldorf and Vanderbilt Hotels is shipped out to the Bide-a-Wee; so, if you are lunching there and don’t finish your roll, perhaps Gissing will get it. (He is particularly fond of the crescent-shaped ones, with little black specks on them.) The Home is supported by voluntary contribution. In the record book we inscribed Gissing’s biography very briefly:
GISSING: _origin doubtful: two years old: has always had a good home. A fine watch-dog, but not good with children._
We would have liked to go on, for much more might have been said. We would have liked to tell the friendly curator that this very week (by the quaint irony of circumstance) a book is to be published of which Gissing--somewhat transformed--is the hero. But we thought it best not to mention this, lest it get around among the other members and they taunt Gissing about it. We were happy to leave him in so congenial and friendly a home. And if any of our clients happen to need a good dog for a lonely country place--a dog who is perhaps too intellectual and excitable for children, but a tocsin of excellent acoustic strength--there you’ll find him. He has promised to write to the Urchiness, provided she eats her cereal a little faster.
As we left, Gissing was standing on his hind legs looking through the fence. He wailed just a little. It would be less than justice (to both sides) not to admit it. Like Milton’s hero leaving the Garden, “a few natural tears he shed, but dried them soon.” As the friendly curator said, “By to-morrow he’ll think he’s lived here all his life.” On the way home, there being more room in the Dame, a supply of cider was laid in for consolation. Last night it seemed just a little strange to visit the icebox all alone. To-morrow, perhaps, we shall take lunch at the Waldorf.
[Illustration]
THREE STARS ON THE BACK STOOP
Before starting on our new notebook we have been looking over the old one. We are painfully astonished to see so many interesting ideas that we never turned to account.
We see no reason for being ashamed of using a memorandum book to jot down casual excitements in the mind. If you are really interested in what goes on inside your head, that is the only possible way to keep track of those flittermice of thought. Astronomers spend much time examining the Great Nebula in Orion, and other pinches of star dust that circumspangle the universe. It is equally important to scrutinize those dim patches of mental shining where, once in a while, one suspects the phosphorescent emergence of Truth. Unhappily, most of the ideas jotted down for sonnets and meditations never get anything done to them. They lie there unexercised, and once a year or so, when we run through the pile of old notebooks just to cheer ourself up, we are newly gratified to see how many occasions for thought the world suggests. Often, however, we aren’t quite certain just what we meant. For instance, scattered through our now discarded memoranda we find the following cryptic entries:
_The army of unalterable bunk._
_Prayers for newspaper men._
_Nesting season for mares._
_Who wrote the line “A rose-red city half as old as time”?_
_The current fetiches, taboos, and hokums are as hard to expel from the mind as the deboshed melody of some vulgar popular song._
_As a child, the phrase “civil engineer” puzzled me--the civility or civics of engineering I could not comprehend._
_It’s a mistake to conclude that the result of an action was necessarily included in the purpose: i. e. Effects overlap Causes, e. g. The Tariff._
_If every day we are surrounded by astonishment and unexpected adventures in the actual realm, why may it not also be true in the spiritual?_
_Kipling is the kind of man who, after half a dozen visits to the dentist, would have been able to write a story filled with accurate technical details of dental science._
_Sign on Italian restaurant on Park Place_: IF YOUR WIFE CAN’T COOK DON’T DIVORCE HER--KEEP HER AS A PET, AND EAT HERE.
_Sign on a Manicure Parlour_: SPECIAL ATTENTION PAID TO OTHER GIRLS’ FELLOWS.
_Potboiling--the crackling of a crown of thorns under a pot._
_Biography is impossible. There’s no such thing._
Well, the preceding items, lifted more or less at random from one of these notebooks, are sufficient to explain the sense of mystification with which one examines old memoranda. And yet one always hopes that he may chance upon some germ of thought which is worth the fun of expanding it. It reminds us rather of the Janitor Emeritus of the _Post_, an elderly and pensive darkness, who has a fixed idea that some day he is going to find something precious in the various rubbish of the office, and is to be seen gravely poking into baskets and canisters of jetsam in the hope of motion picture magazines, tobacco, and detective stories.
But among these fugitive and sudden scribbles we did find one notation that brings back to us more or less clearly what we had in mind. It was written thus: _People in N. Y. no rooted sense of place._
We had been thinking of the curious life of those who dwell in city apartments. We are a great lover of apartments every now and then, for a briefly adventurous term; and certainly every one who has read Simeon Strunsky’s admirable book _Bellshazzar Court_ will have realized how fecund with human episode these great, dense barracks are. But there can be no good life for very long unless one has an opportunity to plant feet on actual soil; to be close witness of earth’s colours and seasons; to be able (sovereign pleasure of all) to go out at night and make the circuit of one’s terrain and recognize a few stars. There are three stars, for instance, that we see (at certain seasons) from the back stoop when we visit the icebox towards midnight. We suspect them of being the trio known as Orion’s Belt. Anyhow, part of our pleasure in life is to notice them occasionally and know that they are still there, or _were_ still there when those agile beams left them to vibrate across all the light-years between us.
Orion’s Belt, by the way, seems to be a Sam Browne, for it is tilted up diagonally. We will show you exactly what his starry girth looks like, so you can recognize it:--
*
*
*
The simple and sensuous pleasures of place are not so easy to enjoy in the city. There is a feeling of unreality, of human and mechanical interposition, when you are snugly nested in a niche of a stone cliff fifteen stories high. Something stands between you and the realization of earth. That something may be fine, comfortable, reassuring, it may be highly stimulant for the mind; but there is also a loss to the spirit. It is a loss not to be able to see exactly how Nature tints her tapestry curtain of gold and bronze, behind which she quietly shifts the scenes for the next act; and then suddenly the curtain is shredded away; the landscape widens and is transvisible to the eye; going out on the porch at night you find the trees full not of leaves but stars.
This is a large topic: we can only hint at it. Science, criticism, ethics, these are urbane. Poetry and religion are rustic. Poetry particularly--whether the writing or the reading of it--thrives best where there is silence and the foundation on earth. The solid satisfaction of visiting one’s own cellar and the brightness of one’s own furnace grate, actually set down inside the shell of earth’s crust; of knowing one’s own chimney shaft open topward to the sky; the fall of autumn acorns rattling on the roof--are sentiments felt rather than understood. But from that quiet fertility of feeling understanding grows gradually. You must be quiet with things before you can love them; and you must love them before you can write about them.
But very likely these fragmentary ideas are true only for those who believe them. It is a way ideas have.
[Illustration]
A CHRISTMAS CARD
[_December, 1921_]
As the Christmas season approaches, it sits heavily upon our mind that there are some to whom we should like to say a word of respectful admiration. First of these is Woodrow Wilson. This, you may think, is a gesture both irrelevant and impertinent on our part. We cannot help it. We feel, as the Friends say, a “concern.” The conjunction of the Christmas month, the Conference on Limitation of Armaments, the hopes and memories of all honest men, Mr. Wilson’s coming birthday, makes the occasion irresistible. There are some things that must be said.
Woodrow Wilson has found the peace he sought. Never before, perhaps, did a public man enjoy such posthumous privilege in his own lifetime. He has joined (in Melville’s noble phrase) “the choice hidden handful of the divine inert.” This phrase requires scrutiny. The divinity is not ascribed to Mr. Wilson, but to inertia. Silence, thought, withdrawal from the maddening struggles of mankind--these are divine; these are godlike. If there were ever any doubt as to his having qualities of true greatness, consider the patience and decency of his present silence. It is a silence, one feels, not of bitterness but of honourable dignity.
Sometimes, tucked away in the papers, one finds a single line or so that gives us more to ponder than all the rest of the day’s news. Such an item was the following, quoted lately by Mr. Tumulty as having been said by Mr. Wilson to one of his advisers at the Paris Conference:
“M. Clemenceau called me a pro-German and abruptly left the room.”
They said this man was impatient and stubborn. Yet he endured insult calmly in the pursuit of his strangely hoped-for peace.
The post-Armistice career of Mr. Wilson has been called a tragedy. We do not see it so. The Paris Conference--it is easy to see it now--was foredoomed to a certain measure of failure. On sand one puts up a tent, not a house. Moreover, in so far as that Conference is concerned, Mr. Wilson has suffered a double fatality. He has never spoken candidly for himself; he has been unfortunate in those who have spoken for him. It has been the habit of those naïf and loyally affectionate souls who have been closest to him to assure us of his subtlety and quicksilver craft. We cannot see it. He has seemed to us, always, a man of genuine simplicity--what would have been called, at one time, a _righteous_ man.
It is an odd thing that when you say a character is rooted in simplicity and piety some will conclude that you are sneering. His character is a great character. Those influences which shake and unsettle men’s fibre more than anything else it has endured in full measure--adulation and hatred. The anger and mockery which were lavished upon Wilson are interesting to contemplate. But, so far as one can see, they did not trouble that stubborn zeal. There was a Cromwellian grimness and singleness of heart in his battle with Europe. You remember what Cromwell said (if Carlyle can be trusted as a reporter)--
“Would we have Peace without a Worm, lay we Foundations of Justice and Righteousness.”
For that he struggled, burdening himself beyond human strength. For that he compromised, as all men do. For that he incurred the malice of all aspirants--both the pure and the impure.
It is amazing to remember the power and depth of that malice. In a perverse way, it is almost encouraging to remember it: it proves so excellently that this earth is still the fallen star, the cindered Eden, in which merely human failings incur more than human angers. What a gruesome life that of politics must be! And yet when, in our recent history, were more positive virtues and high-minded hopes brought into the muddled ferment of national politics? Do you remember how this man lay at death’s door for many silent months, and how ill suppressed were the satisfaction and the sneer? What was his crime? We used to wonder. Only that he had believed the world was ripe for some strokes of simplicity and unselfishness.
Little by little the minds of fair-hearted men are returning to realization and gratitude. There is nothing now accomplished, or even accomplishable, in matters of international dealing, that Woodrow Wilson was not fighting for three years ago. The granolithic minds of the old stand-patters and the luxurious sniffs of young, hot doctrinaires formed for a while a quaint partnership of scorn. Nor would we ourself deny that there were many things to lament. But the world still waits for a competent, understanding, and judicial expression of Woodrow Wilson’s service to men. It was not a perfect service, for it was marred by necessary mortal blunders and qualms. For that perhaps we reverence it the more. And when the just tribute comes, perhaps it will come from the hand of some great writer to whom the puerilities of partisan squabble fade into their deserved shadow; to whom the humour and the pathos will be evident; and most evident of all, the dignity and austerity of a great human hope, frustrated and postponed, but an addition to the honour of the race. Perhaps it will come from the hand of some great dramatist, with the dramatist’s art that can revive great figures, great moments; can purge the occasion of what was merely peevish and fortuitous, and remind us of truths and visions we lost in the hurly-burly of the time.
It is sheer selfishness on our part to hope that some such expression may come soon. We are jealous for the credit of this generation. We are proud to have lived in days when men suffered so hideously and yet did and said and wrote great things. We would like it to be said of this generation that it recognized greatness in its own time. That would be an honourable thing to be able to say. Have we erected, from our imagination, a figure that is not really there? We think not. And so, with humility and hesitation, but impelled by a motive we cannot resist, we would like to say to Woodrow Wilson that there are many who gratefully wish him Merry Christmas.
[Illustration]
SYMBOLS AND PARADOXES
We always suspected, after reading _The Flying Inn_, that G. K. Chesterton is fond of dogs. And now, reading his book, _The New Jerusalem_ (which is full of very gorgeous matter), we learn that at his home in Beaconsfield he is host to both a dog (called “Winkle”) and a donkey (called “Trotsky”). Very genial is his picture of the start of his pilgrimage to Palestine and his last farewell to these beasts: