Part 2

You seem a long way off, this soft September morning, as I sit here and sneeze (will hay fever still exist in 2021, I wonder?) and listen to the chime of St. Paul’s ring eleven. Just south of St. Paul’s brown spire the girders of a great building are going up. Will that building be there when you read this? What will be the Olympian skyline of your city? Will poor old Columbia University be so far downtown that you will be raising money to move it out of the congested slums of Morningside? Will you look up, as I do now, to the great pale shaft of Woolworth; to the golden boy with wings above Fulton Street? What ships with new names will come slowly and grandly up your harbour? What new green spaces will your street children enjoy? But something of the city we now love will still abide, I hope, to link our days with yours. There is little true glory in a city that is always changing. New stones, new steeples are comely things; but the human heart clings to places that hold association and reminiscence. That, I suppose, is the obscure cause of this queer feeling that impels me to send you so perishable a message. It is the precious unity of mankind in all ages, the compassion and love felt by the understanding spirit for those, its resting kinsmen, who once were glad and miserable in these same scenes. It keeps one aware of that marvellous dark river of human life that runs, down and down uncountably, to the unexplored seas of Time.

You seem a long way off, I say--and yet it is but an instant, and you will be here. Do you know that feeling, I wonder (so characteristic of our city) that a man has in an elevator bound (let us say) for the eighteenth floor? He sees 5 and 6 and 7 flit by, and he wonders how he can ever live through the interminable time that must elapse before he will get to his stopping place and be about the task of the moment. It is only a few seconds, but his mind can evolve a whole honeycomb of mysteries in that flash of dragging time. Then the door slides open before him and that instantaneous eternity is gone; he is in a new era. So it is with the race. Even while we try to analyze our present curiosities, they whiff away and disperse. Before we have time to turn three times in our chairs, we shall be the grandparents and you will be smiling at our old-fashioned sentiments.

But we ask you to look kindly on this our city of wonder, the city of amazing beauties which is also (to any man of quick imagination) an actual hell of haste, din, and dishevelment. Perhaps you by this time will have brought back something of that serenity, that reverence for thoughtful things, which our generation lost--and hardly knew it had lost. But even Hell, you must admit, has always had its patriots. There is nothing that hasn’t--which is one of the most charming oddities of the race.

And how we loved this strange, mad city of ours, which we knew in our hearts was, to the clear eye of reason and the pure, sane vision of poetry, a bedlam of magical impertinence, a blind byway of monstrous wretchedness. And yet the blacker it seemed to the lamp of the spirit, the more we loved it with the troubled eye of flesh. For humanity, immortal only in misery and mockery, loves the very tangles in which it has enmeshed itself: with good reason, for they are the mark and sign of its being. So you will fail, as we have; and you will laugh, as we have--but not so heartily, we insist; no one has ever laughed the way your tremulous granfers did, old chap! And you will go on about your business, as we did, and be just as certain that you and your concerns are the very climax of human gravity and worth. And will it be any pleasure to you to know that on a soft September morning a hundred years ago your affectionate great-grandsire looked cheerfully out of his lofty kennel window, blew a whiff of smoke, smiled a trifle gravely upon the familiar panorama, knew (with that antique shrewdness of his) a hawk from a handsaw, and then went out to lunch?

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A CALL FOR THE AUTHOR

But who will write me the book about New York that I desire? The more I think about it, the more astonished I am that no one attempts it. I don’t mean a novel. I would not admit any plot or woven tissue of story to come between the reader and my royal heroine, the City herself. Not to be a coward, should I try to write it myself? It is my secret dream; but, better, it should be written by some sturdy rogue of a bachelor, footfree, living in the very heart of the uproar. Some fellow with a taste and nuance for the vulgar and vivid; a consort of both parsons and bootleggers; a _Beggar’s Opera_ kind of rascal. I can think of three men in this city who have magnificent powers for such a book; but they are getting perhaps a little elderly--yes, they are over forty! Ginger must be very hot in the mouth of my imagined author. He must be young (dashed if I don’t think about 32 is the ideal age to write such a book), but not one of the Extremely Brilliant Young Men. They are too clever; and they are not lonely enough. For this is a lonely job. It’s got to be done _solus_, slowly, with an eye only upon the subject. It has got to show the very tremble and savour of life itself.

The man who will write this book will not necessarily enjoy it. To get into the secret of Herself he has got to have a peculiar feeling about her. For years he must have wrestled with her almost as a personal antagonist. He must have vowed, since he first saw her imperial skyline serrated on blue, to make her his own; a mistress worthy of him, and yet he himself her master. But he must know, in his inward, that in the end she triumphs, she tramples down mind and heart and nerve. Loveliest enemy in the world, implacable victor over reason and peace and all the quieter sanities of the spirit, her mad, intolerable beauty crazes or silences the sensitive mind that woos her. If you think this is only fine writing and romantic tall-talk, then you know her only with the eye, not with the imagination. With good reason, perhaps, her poets have, for the most part, kept mum. Enough for them to see and cherish in imagination her little sudden glimpses. A girl, slender, gayly unconscious of admiration, poises on one foot at the edge of the subway platform, leaning over to see if the train is coming. That gallant figure is perhaps something of a symbol of the city’s own soul.

There must be many who feel about Herself as I do--and, more wisely, are tacit. There are many whose minds have trembled on the steep sills of truth, have felt that golden tremble of reality almost within touch, and rather than mar the half-apprehended fable, have turned troubled away. But there is such poetry in her, and such fine, glorious animal gusto--why is there not some determined attempt to set it down, not with “rhetoricating floscules,” but as it is? Day after day one comes to the attack; and returning, as the sloping sunlight and fresh country air flood the dusty red plush of the homeward smoking-car, readmits the expected defeat. Here is a target for you, O generation of snipers. Let us have done with pribbles and prabbles. Who is the man who will write me the book I crave--that vulgar, jocund, carnal, beautiful, rueful book!

[Illustration: _Pepys’ House at Brampton_]

MR. PEPYS’S CHRISTMASES

Christmas being the topic, suppose we call upon Mr. Samuel Pepys for testimony. The imperishable Diarist had as keen a faculty of enjoyment as any man who ever lived. He wrote one of the world’s greatest love stories--the story of his own zealous, inquisitive, jocund love of life. Surely it is not amiss to inquire what record be left as to the festival of cheer.

On seven of the nine Christmases in the Diary, Mr. Pepys went to church--sometimes more than once, though when he went twice he admits he fell asleep. The music and the ladies’ finery were undoubtedly part of the attraction. “Very great store of fine women there is in this church, more than I know anywhere else about us,” is his note for Christmas, 1664. But in that generously mixed and volatile heart there was a valve of honest aspiration and piety. One can imagine him sitting in his pew (on Christmas, 1661, he nearly left the church in a huff because the verger didn’t come forward to open the pew door for him), his alert mind giving close attention to the sermon of his favourite Mr. Mills, busy with sudden resolutions of virtue and industry, yet happily conscious of any beauty within eyeshot.

The giving of presents was not a large part of Christmas in those days. In 1662 Mr. Gauden gave Pepys “a great chine of beef and three dozen of tongues,” but this had its drawbacks. Pepys had to give five shillings to the man who brought it and also half a crown to the porters. Drink and food were the important part of the festival. At Christmas, 1660, Mr. and Mrs. Pepys, with Tom Pepys as guest, enjoyed “a good shoulder of mutton and a chicken.” This was a brave Christmas for Mrs. Pepys--she had “a new mantle.” We must remember that the fair Elizabeth, though already married five years, was then only twenty years old. Not all Mrs. Pepys’s Christmases were as merry as that, I fear. On Christmas, 1663, she was troubled by anxious thoughts----

My wife began, I know not whether by design or chance, to enquire what she should do, if I should by any accident die, to which I did give her some slight answer, but shall make good use of it to bring myself to some settlement for her sake.

Why haven’t the ingenious life insurance advertisers made use of this telling bit of copy?

Christmas, 1668, seems to have been poor Mrs. Pepys’s worst Yule, but perhaps it was only her natural feminine frivolity that caused the sadness. Samuel says:

Dinner alone with my wife, who, poor wretch! sat undressed all day, till 10 at night, altering and lacing of a noble petticoat.

This noble petticoat was perhaps to be worn at the play they attended the next day, “Women Pleased.” What a pleasant Christmas card that scene would make: Mrs. Pepys sitting, négligée, over the niceties of her needlework, with Samuel beside her “making the boy read to me the Life of Julius Cæsar.” But we do not “get” (as the current phrase is) Mrs. Pepys at all if we think of her as merely the irresponsible girl. For, at Christmas, ’66, we read:

Lay pretty long in bed, and then rose, leaving my wife desirous to sleep, having sat up till 4 this morning seeing her maids make mince-pies.

Ah, we have no such mince pies nowadays. Mrs. Pepys’s mince pies were evidently worthy the tradition of that magnificent delicacy, for at Christmas, 1662, when Elizabeth was ill abed, Samuel records--with an evident touch of regret--that he had to “send abroad” for one.

* * * * *

Which brings us back to the Christmas viands. In 1662, besides the mince pie from abroad, he “dined by my wife’s bedside with great content, having a mess of brave plum-porridge and a roasted pullet.” We are tempted to think 1666 was Samuel’s best Christmas. Parson Mills made a good sermon. “Then home and dined well on some good ribs of beef roasted and mince pies; only my wife, brother, and Barker, and plenty of good wine of my own, and my heart full of true joy.” After dinner they had a little music; and he spent the evening making a catalogue of his books (“reducing the names of all my books to an alphabet”), which is probably the happiest task a man of Pepys’s temperament could enjoy.

Christmas Eve, 1667, was evidently a cheerful evening. Mr. Pepys stopped in at the Rose Tavern for some “burnt wine”; walked round the city in the moonlight, and homeward early in the morning in such content that “I dropped money in five or six places, which I was the willinger to do, it being Christmas Day, and so home, and there find my wife in bed, and Jane and the maid making pies.” The evening of that Christmas Mrs. Pepys read aloud to him--_The History of the Drummer of Mr. Mompesson_, apparently a kind of contemporary Phillips Oppenheim--“a strange story of spies, and worth reading, indeed.” It was only in 1660 that the Christmas cheer was a little too much for our Diarist. December 27, 1660, “about the middle of the night I was very ill--I think with eating and drinking too much--and so I was forced to call the maid, who pleased my wife and I in her running up and down so innocently in her smock.”

* * * * *

It is painful to this tracker of Mr. Pepys’s vestiges to note that on Christmas Day, 1662, Bishop Morley at the Chapel Royal “made but a poor sermon.” The Bishop apparently rebuked the levity of the Court. “It was worth observing how far they are come from taking the reprehensions of a Bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill-actions and courses. He did much press us to joy in these public days of joy, and to hospitality; but one that stood by whispered in my ear that the Bishop do not spend one groat to the poor himself.” In 1665 we fear that Samuel indulged himself in church with some rather cynical thoughts:

Saw a wedding in the church, and the young people so merry one with another; and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.

One could continue for some space recounting the eupeptic Pepys in his Christmas merriments--so large an edifice of pleasing conjecture can be built upon even his slightest notes. One observes, for instance, that on December 27, 1664, when “my wife and all her folks” came “to make Christmas gambols,” Samuel left the party and went to bed. This was very different from his usual habit when there was fun going. He was annoyed also that on this occasion his wife revelled all night, not coming to bed until 8 the next morning, “which vexed me a little, but I believe there was no hurt in it at all, but only mirth.”

So we take leave of the Christmases of the Pepyses; 1668 is the last one recorded--the time when Elizabeth stayed at home all day altering her petticoat. After supper, the boy played some music on the lute, and Samuel’s mind was “in mighty content.” Let us think kindly of the good fellow; and not forget that he coined one of the enduring phrases of English literature--a phrase that is no such ineffective summary of all the lives of men--_And so to bed_.

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CHILDREN AS COPY

Titania said: “You haven’t written a poem about the baby yet.”

It is quite true. She is now thirteen months old, and has not yet had a poem written about her. Titania considers this deplorable. The first baby was hardly a week old before all sorts of literary studies were packing the mails, speeding to such editors as were known to be prompt pay. (I hope, indeed I hope, you never saw that astounding essay--published anonymously in _Every Week_ which expired soon after--called “The Expectant Father,” which was written when the poor urchin was some twenty-four hours old. It was his first attempt to earn money for his parent. If any child ever paid his own hospital bills--C. O. D., as you might say--it was he. I believe in bringing up my children to be self-supporting.)

And the second baby was only three weeks old when the first poem about _her_ was written.

But here is this third morsel, thirteen months old and no poem yet. Titania, I say, considers this a kind of insult to the innocent babe. No, not at all, my dear. I admit that it would be very helpful if H. (I will call her that, for _baby_ is a word that cannot be repeated in print very often without all hands growing maudlin; and I don’t like to use her own name, which seems too personal; just remember, then, that H. stands for a small brown-eyed creature who is still listed in the Bureau of Records of the Department of Health [certificate No. 43515, _anno_ 1920] as _Female Morley_, because when the birth was registered by the doctor her name had not been decided, and ever since then I have been too busy to go round to call on Dr. Copeland, the Health Commissioner, and ask him to have her more specifically enrolled)--I admit it would be very helpful if she were to turn to and lend a hand in paying the coal bill by having some verses written about herself. I have looked at her with admiration every day for these thirteen months, trying, as one might say, to get some angle on her that would lead to a poem. She does not seem very angular.

I insist that my not having written a poem about her is really very creditable. Titania seems to think that it implies my having become, in some sense, blasé about children. Again, not so, not so at all. I must confess that in my enthusiasm I rather made use of the two older urchins as copy. But H., droll infant that she is, is too subtle for me. I’ll come to that in a minute.

I talked all this matter over (being of a cautious turn, and fond of getting experienced advice) with two eminent author-parents--Mr. Tom Masson and Mr. Tom Daly--long ago, before Titania and I began putting on heirs. Both these gentlemen have made a lot of use of their children in earning, or at any rate gaining, a living. Their advices coincided. I myself was worried, but Mr. Tom Masson insisted that there was nothing like having offspring as a source of copy; he said that he would pay ten cents a word, in _Life_, for anything about the then shortly arriving urchin. (He said it would be fifteen cents a word if it was a girl, because girls cost you so much more later on. He has had experience in that matter, I believe.) Mr. Tom Daly, who has run rather to boys, said very much the same thing; but he was not in a position to buy my stuff, so I paid less attention to him.

But to get back to H. There never was a more enchanting infant. Mr. Walter de la Mare, who is also an authority, has written me delightful letters about her, although he has never seen her. But even a prose letter from a poet like Mr. de la Mare is more valuable, I think, than an actual poem from most other poets, so darling H. cannot say she has been neglected. But she is much too delicious for me to be able to sit down easily and write something that would do her justice. The night before she was born her mother and I did two things. We went to Huyler’s for chocolate ice-cream soda, and we read aloud Bernard Shaw’s autobiography, which is printed in Frank Harris’s _Contemporary Portraits_. I dislike to bring Mr. Harris into this, for certainly I can think of no one who has less in common with H., that celestial nugget. But I have to tell the truth, don’t I? Mr. Harris wrote an essay about Shaw; and Shaw, feeling that it was not adequate, wrote a really amusing sketch to show how Harris should have done it. Well, there is something symbolic about this, for H. is as sweet as anything Huyler ever compounded; and she is even more enigmatic than Shaw. (I can see now it should have been Page and Shaw instead of Huyler.)

But I feel that pretty soon I shall be writing a poem about her. I have felt it coming for some time. But it has got to _come_; I am not going to bring it. That shows how I have matured by associating with H. Sometimes I wish I could hire a really great poet to write about her. Swinburne might do for the rough draft. “Oh, what a bee-yootiful babby!” he used to cry when he saw them in their prams up at Putney--so, I think, Max Beerbohm describes. But I should want to have his rough draft polished and refined by someone else. I can only think of Mr. Walter de la Mare. He alone has just the right insight. For babies thirteen months old--the best age of all--must not be treated condescendingly, nor fulsomely, nor adoringly, nor sugarishly. William Blake, if left alone in the room with H., would have understood her. What an infant, I give you my word! Living with children is largely a contest of endurance. It is a question of which one can tire the other out first. (This is a great secret; never before made plain.) Start in early in the morning, and take things with a rush. If you are strong, austere, resolute, you may be able to wear them down and exhaust them by dusk. If you can do so, without prostrating yourself, then you may get them to bed safely and have a few hours of cheerful lassitude. But take every possible advantage. Let them run and frolic, yourself sitting down as much as you can. Favour yourself, and snatch a little rest while they are not looking. Even so, the chances are you will crack first.

This applies to older children; after they gain the use of their limbs and minds. But H. has not reached that harrowing stage. Placable, wise, serene, she sits in her crib. She has four teeth (beauties). To hear her cry is so rare that I hardly know what her voice of sorrow sounds like. Sometimes, for an instant, she looks a little frightened. Then I like her best, for I know she is human, and has in her the general capsule of frailty.

You may be quite sure of one thing, I shall never print that poem unless I feel that it comes somewhere near doing her justice.

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HAIL, KINSPRIT!

The keenest pleasure in life, of course, is to find a Kindred Spirit--one whose mind glows and teeters with delight at the same queer things that rouse us to excitement. We have just found one, and yet we shall never know him, except by his address, which is Y. 1926, the _Times_, E. C. 4, London. For we are much too busy to write to any one, even to a Kindred Spirit.