Part 6

Our first adventures with Dame Quickly, by the way, were not devoid of excitement. One who on his second day as a curricular engineer, navigates the main roads of Long Island on Decoration Day may be said to be a daring soul. Titania, who was with us, says that our publisher passed by in his limousine and looked annoyed because we did not acknowledge his friendly gesture; but, indeed, all the concentrated powers of our retinal system were focussed upon the highway, and even if he docks our royalties for rudeness we cannot help it. We noticed, however, that the drivers who overhauled us as we prowled cautiously along had a way of looking sideways at us in a fixed, not exactly hostile, but at any rate curious gaze, as though to reassure themselves as to what kind of person this was. We remained bland and undismayed, for we are still a driver without spirit; we will give any man as much of the road as he wants; we have no sense of humiliation, nor any competitive lust. Any collisions that Dame Quickly suffers will occur only in her rearward parts.

Oyster Bay, we aver, is a dangerous place to be on the afternoon of Decoration Day. We reached that amiable town around two hours post meridiem, exceedingly hungry from our anxieties en route. As we unobtrusively trundled along the main street our general nervousness was not allayed by the spectacle of a motor fire engine rushing towards us at full speed. Our general idea was to attract as little attention as possible, so we made a bashful détour among back ways. To our horror, there was another fire engine, also roaring along at a furious pace. The whole town of Oyster Bay is burning up, was our thought; however, that is a small matter compared to getting this vehicle to a safe place where we can eat lunch and at the same time watch her with a paternal eye. (Our neighbour in Salamis had said something about new cars getting stolen, and we had a dreadful vision of being trailed along the highways by an experienced crook who would get away with Dame Quickly if we left her unwatched for five minutes.) But every time we approached the main street, trying to slip in unobserved, either a man on a motor bike would rush up and shout something quite unintelligible or else we would hear the roar of another fire engine dashing about. Gradually we divined that a number of Long Island fire departments were having their annual competition; but the fact that it was only a game, and not a real fire, made things worse. No fire engine would go to a real fire with the furious zest with which those fellows sped up and down the street. So, chivvied about by fire engines and cops, we had to take lunch at the only place we could approach unobserved, a very small hash-house which, since we cannot praise, we will not mention.

However, we had cause, later, to be grateful to these fire engines that had so terrified us. For, after some delightful rambling by blue watersides and under green colonnades of ancient trees, we found ourselves endeavouring to shake off the pursuing traffic on a remote and hilly byroad. We shall not go into the why and how of this matter, but the fact is that at one moment the honourable and shining Dame Quickly might have been seen docilely purring along the road; and then, a few minutes later, she was insecurely suspended half over the slope of a steep ravine, quite immovable. The curricular engineer wrung his hands. This, he asserted, is the End. With beaded brow he made some amateurish play with logs of wood that he found in that solitary woodland; but the back wheels of the beautiful, the lovely, the spirited Dame Quickly only revolved grindingly in the sand, and her commodious form hung inert, not to say in peril. Then did the engineer realize that, even on such short acquaintance, he loved her already; and the thought of intrusting her sweet body to the harsh hands of an alien garage man was poisonous. And if we leave her to go back to a garage, we thought, the earth will give; she will plunge to her doom. Titania, we think, prayed.

And then, gods from the machine, here came the Glen Cove Fire Department, some twenty strong, merrily speeding past. What they were doing up this bosky bypath we did not halt to inquire. The hand of Providence, patently, was at work. When the hand of Providence appears, one does not stop to inquire into its palmistry. We laid, bashfully, our case before these great-hearted lads. With a shout they seized our dear Mrs. Quickly; strong arms and gallant hearts of Glen Cove bore her up the perilous precipice; she stood again on level roadway, catching the sun on her noble enamel. The task accomplished, the Glen Cove Fire Department, with their two red engines behind them, looked humorously at us and seemed tacitly to inquire how any sane man would get into such a position. We said, sheepishly, a word of explanation. They roared with laughter.

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SANTAYANA IN THE SUBWAY

To confess one’s self to have had a seizure of pure happiness is, by one theory, to admit one’s self a boob.

And yet we do not know when we have been more happy--in our own secret definition of that state--than when we set off for the subway yesterday noon-time. A more timid or more subtle spirit, perhaps, would not dare the envy of the gods by mentioning it. A fig for the gods!

For, in the first place, that clear pearly light, the patchwork of sun and shadow down the harsh channel of Broadway, the close embrace of wintry air (so dartingly cold that it seemed to enfold and surround one as water does the bather) and the great Singer tower lifting above the cliffs in a tender wash of blue--these were enough of themselves to make one lively. Again, we were bound uptown on an errand of pure generosity, to turn over to a publisher the MS. of a book written by a friend of ours, which we believe to be a fine book. Further, we even considered it possible that the publisher might buy our lunch.

We went down into the subway, and clanked through the turnstile. The thought occurred to us that it seems pretty poor sportsmanship to make merry--as some of the papers have been doing--over the fact that many people have devised ways of bilking the turnstiles. We suppose we shall be accused of having been bought with mickle gold, but we must admit that we have never had any hankering to cheat the subway. There are many corporations we would cheat without a qualm, but the subway is not one of them. It gives us more for a nickel--not only in the way of transportation, but also privacy, mental relaxation, and scrutiny of the human scene--than anything else we know.

We stood in the subway express, about to open a book. We noticed, sitting a little farther along, a young woman whose hat interested us. It was pierced in front by a pin of silver and brilliants, zigzag in shape, representing (we supposed) a bolt of lightning. It was emblematic, we opined, of high-spirited humanity itself, that toys with lightning in more ways than one. This of itself, while valuable for meditation, was not the cause of our happiness. We had a book with us, a book that we have wanted to read for some time. We began to read it.

It was not necessary to travel more than a few lines to be perfectly happy. Why were we happy? We could write many pages to try to explain it to you, and even then should probably fail. This is what we read:

About the middle of the nineteenth century, in the quiet sunshine of provincial prosperity, New England had an Indian summer of the mind; and an agreeable reflective literature showed how brilliant that russet and yellow season could be. There were poets, historians, orators, preachers, most of whom had studied foreign literatures and had travelled; they demurely kept up with the times; they were universal humanists. But it was all a harvest of leaves; these worthies had an expurgated and barren conception of life; theirs was the purity of sweet old age. Sometimes they made attempts to rejuvenate their minds by broaching native subjects; they wished to prove how much matter for poetry the new world supplied, and they wrote “Rip van Winkle,” “Hia----”

That was exactly the first page, as we read it; we needed to go no further to have cause for complete and unblemished satisfaction. There was the kind of writing that we understand, that speaks to us. There, barring the fact that Rip was not written in New England, was that exact, humorous, and telling use of every word--“_demurely_ kept up with the times”; “the purity of sweet old age”--if you don’t get pleasure out of that sort of thing, then there is no use trying to labour it in. And there, in every line and syllable, was exactly what we had expected to find--a genuine Intellect speaking, and not a pseudo and jejuvenile “Young Intellectual.” There were urbanity, charm, the word well-weighed, the strong, reticulated thought. To go into private minutiæ, we even had additional pleasure from the fact that the usage of the semicolons (a matter of great delight to some enthusiasts) conformed to our own private sense of felicity. And we gazed about the car in a tranquil ecstasy.

The book was George Santayana’s _Character and Opinion in the United States_.

We said to ourself, in a kind of anger (for truly a certain ingredient of anger is necessary for complete happiness; a zealous espousal of what one believes to be worth while carries with it the most cheerful flush of irritation towards those who have not, one thinks, sufficiently espoused it)--we said, Why is it that no one has hitherto driven in upon our mind that this book (published a year ago) is one that we could not possibly get along without? Why is it that our admirable colleague L. E. W., from whom we borrowed it, did not long ago come and sit on our desk and talk to us, endlessly, calmly, suasively, about it and about?

We went on reading, and stood there in as perfectly felicitous an absorption as we have ever enjoyed. We could have said to that golden instant, as Mephistopheles promised Faust he would be able to say, “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!” We had committed Grand Larceny. We had achieved what the news headlines daily describe as a “Daring Robbery.” We had stolen, from uncajolable and endless Time, a Perfect Moment.

We see you smile gravely, and perhaps pityingly, at our simplicity. Never mind. We shall never forget the mood of serene peacefulness and cheer in which we then turned to Mr. Santayana’s preface and began to read:

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom--picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode--may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair....

Ah, we said to ourself, that is the kind of writing that makes us truly happy!

* * * * *

We cannot remember when we have marvelled more truly at the pregnancy, the wit, and the exquisite under-piercing insight of any book. We should like to ask those competent to speak--certainly we ourself are not competent; and it is the sheerest bumptiousness for us even to offer an opinion on a book so consummately wise and lovely--whether there has ever been written any more thrillingly potent examination of a whole civilization? In a book so packed and rifted with gold one knows not where to start quoting; but almost at random we seize this passage--not by any means one of the subtlest, but it will serve to begin with:

... The American is imaginative; for where life is intense, imagination is intense also. Were he not imaginative he would not live so much in the future. But his imagination is practical, and the future it forecasts is immediate; it works with the clearest and least ambiguous terms known to his experience, in terms of number, measure, contrivance, economy, and speed. He is an idealist working on matter. Understanding as he does the material potentialities of things, he is successful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies. All his life he jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

Or, if you prefer, consider this:

That philosophers should be professors is an accident, and almost an anomaly. Free reflection about everything is a habit to be imitated, but not a subject to expound; and an original system, if the philosopher has one, is something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught, nor is there much danger that any one will learn it. The genuine philosopher--as Royce liked to say, quoting the Upanishads--wanders alone like the rhinoceros.... If philosophers must earn their living and not beg (which some of them have thought more consonant with their vocation), it would be safer for them to polish lenses like Spinoza, or to sit in a black skull-cap and white beard at the door of some unfrequented museum, selling the catalogues and taking in the umbrellas; these innocent ways of earning their breadcard in the future republic would not prejudice their meditations and would keep their eyes fixed, without undue affection, on a characteristic bit of that real world which it is their business to understand.... At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat. It is not easy for him to shout, or address a crowd; he must be silent for long seasons; for he is watching stars that move slowly and in courses that it is possible though difficult to foresee, and he is crushing all things in his heart as a winepress until his life and their secret flow out together.

You understand (don’t you?) that we do not necessarily recommend Santayana for _you_. As we grow, painfully, in sagacity, we realize the absurdity of recommending anything to anybody. We are simply saying that for us he fulfils (both in what we agree with and what we dissent from) most of the requirements of our private conception of beauty and happiness.

It is a book that quickens the mind. Continuing it on the train, as the smoking car spins through those green Long Island meadows, we look round on our fellow travellers with renewed amazement. Somehow it gives us a strange pleasure to see them immersed in the _Evening Journal_ or the _Evening World_, those grotesque monuments of human frailty. How damnable it would be if they were all reading Santayana. How we should hate them! We know that all humanity are precious fools, and ourself the most arrant of the lot; but we like them that way. It adds to the cheerful comedy of the scene.

Certainly you would have said that two names that sound something alike are at opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum--Santayana and Pollyanna. And yet, oddly enough, the thought has come to us that the foundations of the two philosophies interlock. Santayana’s method of extracting happiness from life; his perfection of cool, tender, smiling, grave, cruel, and imperturbable resignation; the exquisitely sophisticated contentment of his solitude, flight from needless buzbuz, reverie in places haunted by old association; his noble ridicule of destiny--all this brings to a reasonably sophisticated mind the same kind of heavenly refreshment and sense of truth that simpler people find in literature of the Pollyanna sort.

We vented this tentative idea to some colleagues of ours, and they leapt upon us with shouts of anger and contradiction.

Yet we think there is something in it. There is no way of assessing the operations of other people’s minds. But we are inclined to think that very possibly the pure happiness we experience in Mr. Santayana’s calm, humorous, disillusioned, and poetic reveries is not essentially different from the cheerful exaltation some young woman feels reading either of the Mrs. Porters in the Y. W. C. A.

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MADONNA OF THE TAXIS

Speaking of commuting, the Long Island Railroad owes us $7, and we are wondering how long it will take us to collect it.

The incident, tragic as it was, will prove a lesson to us never again to be unfaithful to our beloved Brooklyn.

On Wednesday evening we had to decide whether we would take the train for Salamis from the Penn. Station or from Brooklyn. We decided we would take it from Penn. Station, because we were without reading matter, and knew that at Penn. Station we could stop in at the bookshop in the Arcade and get something to amuse us en route. All began merrily. We got to the station at 9 o’clock, bought an Everyman edition of Kit Marlowe’s plays, and, well supplied with tobacco, we set sail on the 9:10 vehicle. How excellent are the resources of civilization, said we to ourself, as we retraced the sorrows of Dr. Faustus. Here we are, we cried, sitting at ease in a brilliantly lighted smoker reading “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,” and in fifty minutes we will greet again the shabby but well-loved station at Salamis. We even meditated writing a little verse in Marlowe’s own vein, to be called “The Passionate Long Islander to His Love”:

Come live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove That Patchogue, Speonk, Hempstead fields, Ronkonkoma or Yaphank yields.

At this moment, which was 9:15, and just issuing from the tunnel, the train stopped, all lights went out, and we sat gazing at the dreary dormitory of Pullman cars in Long Island City.

For thirty-six minutes we sat so. Occasionally there would be the sound of a heavy sigh, a long-drawn suspiration of some mentally troubled commuter whose feels (in the language of Opal Whiteley) were not satisfaction feels; but commuters are a tested and toughened lot. The time lagged heavily and darkly by, but there was no shrill outcry, no futile beating of the breast. One shining thought there was to console, and the conductor ratified it (we asked him ourself). “Oh, yes,” he said, “the Oyster Bay connection waits for this train at Jamaica.” We envisaged the picture of that battered and faithful old Oyster Bay loco, waiting patiently for its lovers along the windy platform, and we were heartened.

But when we got to Jamaica, the old harridan steam train had gone.

Then, indeed, hearts were broken. Then there was scudding to and fro, and voices raised in menace and imprecation. The next train to Oyster Bay, said the officials, leaves at 12:10. The mourners gathered in little groups, drawn by their several affinities. Those who yearned for Garden City formed one posse. Those who yearned for Babylon and Bayshore, another. But, let it proudly be said, the Oyster Bay group were the loudest in outcry, the angriest in mood. We have a pride of our own on the Oyster Bay branch. (“Cut was the branch that might have gone full straight.”) In Salamis alone, Gen. Pershing is living there, and Dorothy Gish visits sometimes. Are we to be trifled with? Off went the Oyster Bay contingent, some twenty angry, to see the Station Master. Words were passed, without avail.

We ourself are a realist at such moments. We saw that the Station Master held no balm for the sufferers. We fled from the brutal scene. Downstairs one taxi, the only one, was just embarking a passenger and wheeling off. For an instant (we confess it) our nerve was shaken. We screamed, and there was in that scream the dreadful keening note of a lioness balked of her whelps or a commuter ravished of his train. Ha! the taxi halted. It was, strangely enough, a lady chauffeur, and tender of heart. No man chauffeur would have halted at such a time, but this madonna of taxi drivers had a bosom of pity. Her fare, already in situ, was bound for Garden City. They agreed to take us along, and after Garden City had been made she would steer for Salamis.

O Lady Taxi Driver of Jamaica, a benison befall thee. The wind roared stiffly across the plains, and the small henry made leeway. The small henry scuttled like a dog, half sideways, nosing several points upward into the gale in order to pursue a straight course. The other passenger was plainly a Man of Large Affairs, sunk in a generous melancholy. There was little talk. We sat, or, when the roadway required it, leaped aloft like striking trout. Garden City was duly reached, and then, by and by, the woody glens of Salamis Heights. The fare we paid our saviour was $7. We did not grudge it her. She has a seven-year-old boy, and all day she keeps house, all night she runs her taxi. But, in candour, we think the railroad owes us that $7. It has ever been held a point of honour that the Oyster Bay train shall wait for its children. When there are only two after-dinner trains, that seems not much to ask.

If we had gone from Brooklyn, all would have been well.

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MATTHEW ARNOLD AND EXODONTIA

I

This year (1922) brings the centennial of Matthew Arnold’s birth. Except for a few of his more important poems, we confess to an affectionate ignorance about Arnold. Of course, we remember taking notes during a number of lectures about him when we were at college; a few catchwords about culture and anarchy; sweetness and light; seeing life steadily and seeing it whole; Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace--a few faded buntings of this sort flutter rather dingily from the halliards of our memory; and we remember that he had exceptionally fine whiskers. We used to speculate, in the jejune manner of youth, as to whether Matt, as Rugby boy and Oxford undergraduate, was not a rather amusing contrast to the robust Tom Brown whom his father made famous. But, as you will see, Arnold has never been more than an interesting and gracious wraith in our mind. Those of his essays that we were told to reread we have forgotten, or else (more likely) we never opened.

But rambling not long ago in the cellar of Mr. Mendoza’s bookshop on Ann Street we found, with a shock of excitement, a little book published in Boston in 1888, called _Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America_, by Matthew Arnold. We wondered whether this little book had ever been perused by any of the vigorous skeptics who published a recent large volume with the same title. They made, as far as we can recall, no allusion to it. Yet they would have found in it much nourishing meat.