The Observations of Professor Maturin

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The Observations of
Professor Maturin
By
Clyde Furst

New York
Columbia University Press
1916
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1916, by Columbia University Press
Printed March, 1916
∵
Reprinted, by permission, from
The New York Evening Post
D. B. Updike · The Merrymount Press · Boston

Dedicated to
Professor Maturin’s
Oldest and Best Friend
R. E. M.

Table of Contents

Introduction

IT was never my good fortune actually to meet Professor Maturin, or even to see him, although in the latter case I should instantly have recognized him, so familiar have I been through my mind’s eye, at least, with his personal appearance—his slender figure somewhat stooping with the bodily inclination of the scholar, the clear-cut features that could only have fitted his clear-cut mind, and the thoughtful eyes that were their necessary concomitant. I had known, of course, of his predilection for the Athenaeum, and his habit of dining at that club of intellectual and gastronomic repute, and I was aware of his membership in the veracious Sindbad Society whose meetings he frequently attended; but here, too, and principally from the fact, no doubt, that I was a member of neither, I had never been able to bring about the much desired personal acquaintance with him.

Of acquaintance, however, and even of a fairly satisfactory sort, there has nevertheless been no lack, for I have read much that Professor Maturin has written, and I have remembered, although inadequately enough, many of the things that he has said with such understanding and insight of the real bearing of individual experience, along quite extraordinarily extended lines, upon the wide problems of human existence.

It is so much the more a pleasure, accordingly, to me, and as it will be to all those who have read Professor Maturin before only sporadically and at intervals, at length to have the opportunity to read him consecutively, and thus to get those side-lights and reflections of understanding that can only come with a reasonable contiguity of statement.

In the present book, moreover, we shall be able to read the sayings of this philosopher of the cheerful mind as they have been remembered and recorded by one who, better than any one else at all, knew Professor Maturin as he thought, and as he spoke, and as he had his being. It is a record, as it will be very easy to discover, of one who has thought much and thought well, for there is a great difference, as we all know, in the quality as well as in the quantity of thinking. In it all there is an intellectual optimism that inevitably follows the thought wherever it roams—and it often roams far afield—which is one of the thrice blessed things of life. If through it all there runs, as again may clearly be seen, the visible thread of the conscious pursuit of happiness, Professor Maturin is no mere eudemonist whose belly is his god and whose goal is pleasure, but rather one who sees in the attainment of personal happiness the rightful accessory of a rounded and rational living. And with it all, and notwithstanding his calling, and in spite of the fact that he himself must have been conscious of an unusual knowledge which leads him at times even into the imperilled field of epigram, it is all done, not with a pedantic air of professorial sophistication, but with genuine human sympathy. And in this spirit he is commended to that wider circle of readers who are now to be able to know him.

William H. Carpenter

Columbia University
February 14, 1916

The Observations of Professor Maturin

I
The Staff of Life

MY friend Professor Bedelar Maturin exercises the right of a bachelor and a man of fifty to a considerable number of eccentricities. All of these are harmless, since he is by nature a gentleman; and, his habit being that of a scholar, some of them are of more than ordinary interest. I very well remember my first learning of that one I am about to describe. My family having left town for the summer, I found him dining at the Athenaeum, as I knew him frequently to do for the sake of detachment from the bachelor ménage he maintains—as much for his books as for himself—in a house near the river, not far from the university.

He beckoned me to take my already ordered dinner at the particular corner table for which his preference is always respected by his fellow Athenians, and, after a smile of greeting, he passed over to me the book he had been reading—“The Physiology of Taste,” by Brillat-Savarin—with the quiet comment, “The standard and gauge of modern civilization.”

I had never before seen the work of that high-priest of gastronomy, but before examining it I looked my surprise at the apparent enthusiasm of the scholar whose abstemious habits were well known to his friends, and whose slender figure, thoughtful eyes, and clear-cut features made it impossible to associate him with the pleasures of the table. For reply he merely indicated several of the “Fundamental Truths of the Science,” on the open page before me:

“But for life the universe were nothing; and all that has life requires nourishment.”

“The fate of nations depends upon how they are fed.”

“The man of sense and culture alone understands eating.”

I was familiar with Dean Swift’s tracing the origin of certain essays to the consumption of particular varieties of cheese, and I had read Maturin’s own whimsical paragraphs explaining the peculiarities of certain national literatures by the characteristics of their national beverages, and paralleling the growth of humanitarianism with the increasing use of tobacco, of which he is sparing; but he seemed now to be serious, so that I merely asked what he made of such a statement as the following, which I read from his author: “The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a planet.”

Explaining that he would have the author convince me, rather than himself, he indicated yet another paragraph: “What praise can be refused the science which sustains us from the cradle to the grave, which entrances the delights of love and the pleasures of friendship, which disarms hatred, makes business easier, and affords us, during the short voyage of our lives, the only enjoyments that both relieve us from fatigue and themselves entail none!”

“Take it, and read it,” he said, as I looked up. “I know it by heart.” I gladly accepted the volume, for there was here evidently more than appeared; but I also expressed the wish that he would, himself, first tell me more about it; and this, retaking the book, his own dinner being now finished and mine but about to begin, he proceeded to do.

“I should not need to remind you,” he began, “that I am no friend to indulgence, much less to so gross a form as over-feeding, nor to speak of my known antagonism to every form of ignorance—except to explain that it is for these reasons that I have become an earnest advocate of gastronomy, which endeavors to transform eating from the ignorant indulgence it usually is to a reasonable science of nutrition and a refined art of enjoyment. Whatever popular disesteem the science and the art still suffer is due either to ignorance of its serious endeavor, or to a Puritanic attitude that is both inconsistent and irreverent. The fabric of nature is so constituted that all of our essential processes are accompanied by pleasure; a thoroughly consistent ascetic would necessarily cease to exist.

“Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, although of course not the founder of gastronomy, is its most admirable modern champion. He lived from the first half of the eighteenth century through the first quarter of the nineteenth, first as mayor of his native town of Belley in France; then, during the Revolution, an exile in Switzerland and in America; and, finally, during the last third of his life, a judge in Paris of the highest national court. The fame of his professional wisdom and justice was great, but that of his personal benevolence and geniality was far greater. The choicest flavor and charm of many years of social life he preserved in the book he apparently intended to leave, at his death, as a legacy of good cheer to his friends. The record of his love of good living was to serve him, a bachelor, as a posterity.

“His fears that so genial a production might seem inconsistent with his judicial dignity were overcome by arguments which are given in a prefatory dialogue, and the volume was published anonymously in 1825, a year before his death. Even in so short a time the book was crowned with extraordinary popularity. Although one would hesitate, perhaps, to call it ‘adorable,’ as Balzac did, it is certainly one of those rarely spontaneous and charming outpourings of personality that belong apart with White’s ‘Selborne’ and Walton’s ‘Angler.’

“In addition to the Prefatory Dialogue and the Fundamental Truths, already mentioned, the little volume includes a Preface, thirty ‘Meditations,’ or chapters, and, in conclusion, a dozen narrative and descriptive ‘Varieties’ bearing upon the subject. The whole amounts to less than three hundred small pages.

“The earlier chapters on the senses of taste, appetite, and thirst are largely physiological or psychological, but even here the author carries out with charm his intention of touching but lightly subjects likely to be dull. Throughout he practices the preaching of the mad poet Blake,—‘To particularize is the great distinction of merit,’—and everywhere he introduces original anecdotes, witticisms, and similar side-dishes. Although Savarin separates the functions of taste into direct, complete, and reflective, he finds himself unable to classify its results further than to suggest some such gradation as,—positive, beef; comparative, veal; superlative, pheasant. For its greatest satisfaction one should eat slowly and in minute portions—all that is valuable of ‘Fletcherism’ in a sentence. Anything else would be unworthy of our perfected organism, ‘the structure of the tongue of all animals being analogous to the reach of their intelligence.’ Under ‘Thirst’ there is a similar, but even more daringly imaginative observation: ‘The desire for fermented liquors and curiosity about a future state are the two distinctive attributes of man as the masterpiece of nature.’

“Perhaps the most valuable, certainly the most pleasing, of the chapters are those on ‘Gastronomy,’ ‘The Love of Good Living,’ ‘People Fond of Good Living,’ ‘Gastronomic Tests,’ and ‘The Pleasures of the Table.’

“Gastronomy is defined as ‘the scientific knowledge of all that relates to man as an eater;’ being founded upon natural history, physics, chemistry, economics, and cookery, as well as on the sciences already touched upon; and affecting physically, mentally, and morally, every individual, of every class of society, every moment of his life. Some knowledge of it is therefore indispensable to all, and the more as one ascends the social scale; it being well known that the most momentous decisions of personal and of national life are made at table.

“‘The Love of Good Living’ is shown to be not merely a physical, but an intellectual and a moral quality as well, ‘almost deserving to rank as a virtue;’ opposing excess, developing discrimination, promoting physical health, and aiding moral resignation to the laws of nature. In addition, it is an easily and constantly available source of natural and innocent pleasure in a world of pain.

“People fond of good living, especially physicians, men of letters, churchmen, and people of sense and culture in general,—others being incapable of the necessary appreciation and judgment,—always live longer than ordinary men. Napoleon’s worst defeats were due to his injudicious diet. The wise in regard to food may usually be known by their mere appearance, but for cases of doubt Brillat-Savarin suggests a series of ‘Gastronomic Tests,’ or dishes, of such indisputable excellence that those who do not instantly respond may immediately be declared unworthy. Thus: For a small income, filet of veal larded with bacon, or sauerkraut bristling with sausages; for a moderate income, filet of beef with gravy, or boiled turbot; for a generous income, truffled turkey, or stuffed pike with cream of prawns. It is important in these tests that generous portions be provided, for quantity as well as quality has its effect.

“The conclusion of the meditation ‘On the Pleasures of the Table’ must be quoted entire, so worthy is it of a place in ‘The Golden Book of Hospitality:’ ‘Let the number of guests be small, that the conversation may be constantly general; of various occupations, but analogous tastes; the men of wit without pretension, the women pleasant, but not coquettish. Let the dishes be few but choice, and the wines of the first quality; the order from the more substantial to the lighter, the simpler to the finer flavors. Let the meal proceed without hurry or bustle; the coffee be hot, the liqueurs chosen with care. Let the room to which the guests retire be large enough for cards, for those who cannot do without them, while leaving ample scope for conversation; the guests animated with the hope of still further pleasure. Then let the tea be not too strong, the toast artistically buttered, the punch skilfully made. Finally, let nobody leave before eleven, and everybody be in bed by twelve.’

“After reaching such an elevation, Brillat-Savarin wisely follows the dramatic principle of relief, by introducing anecdotes of the halts of a hunting party, and chapters on digestion, rest, sleep, and dreams. His observations and illustrations are always interesting and picturesque, frequently very suggestive, and sometimes strikingly modern—as when he says, ‘Digestion, of all the bodily functions, has most influence on the morale of the individual;’ when he recommends for sleeping an airy room, no bed curtains, and light but warm coverings; or when he discusses foods that produce sleep, and those that induce pleasant dreams.

“The theme of the meditation ‘On Corpulence’—‘The great majority of us eat and drink too much’—is of such general and permanent applicability that it is rediscovered every decade and announced with trumpets. The chapter ‘On the Prevention or Cure of Corpulence’ outlines the diet by means of which for thirty years the author kept that tendency in himself ‘to the limit of the imposing’—a statement that his portrait well bears out. After a counter meditation on leanness, some felicitations over the decline of fasting, and an excursus on ‘Exhaustion and Death’—‘Death itself being not unaccompanied by pleasure when it is natural’—the author is again ready for a higher flight.

“This occurs in the longest chapters of the book, in the form of ‘A Philosophical History of Cookery, Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern,’ with an appendix, ‘On Parisian Dining-Houses.’ Here, indeed, is richness: the advantages and disadvantages of eating raw meat; the primitive feasting in the ‘Iliad;’ the advent of boiling in the Old Testament; how Cadmus brought the alphabet and good cooking to Greece; the elaborate and sometimes strange taste of the Romans,—as for dormice and assafoetida,—and a survey of the ancient literature of the subject, from the fragmentary poem on gastronomy by Archestratus, to the convivial poetry of Horace and Tibullus. The whole story is told, although briefly, excepting only the peculiar taste of the Greeks for mingling sea-water and turpentine with their wines.

“The mediaeval and modern development of the art is sketched, although of necessity more rapidly, from the rescue of cookery from barbarism by Charlemagne; through the introduction of spices from the East, garlic from Palestine, parsley from Italy, coffee from Turkey, and the potato from America; to the ages of pastry and of sugar, and the final culmination of the art in political gastronomy. Every line of this section contains such good things as ‘coffee should be crushed, not ground;’ and, ‘It was Talleyrand who first brought from Italy the custom of taking Parmesan cheese with soup.’ But to select would be to quote the whole.

“Restaurants—unhappily Savarin could not know the modern derivation from res and taurus—appear to have been invented in Paris in 1770. There is a fascinating picture of the best of the author’s time, with three hundred dishes and a hundred wines; a height of eloquence over the cosmopolitan sources of a good dinner; and yet higher soaring over the Parisian missionaries of the doctrine throughout the civilized world.

“Nor does inspiration wane in the chapter on ‘Gastronomic Principles Put into Practice’—‘the treasures of nature were not created to be trodden under foot ... a good dinner is but little dearer than a bad one ... a man may show himself a distinguished connoisseur without going beyond the limits of his actual needs.’

“The last chapter, ‘Gastronomic Mythology,’ is pure creation—of Gasterea, the tenth muse, her nature, habit, aspect, and worship; and then—for like Donne, ‘when he is done, he is not done, for there is more’—comes a ‘Transition:’ ‘In writing I had a double object ... to lay down the fundamental theory of gastronomy, so that she would take her place among the sciences in that rank to which she has an incontestable right. The second, to define with precision what must be understood by the love of good living, so that for all time that social quality may be kept apart from gluttony and intemperance, with which many have absurdly confounded it.’

“Finally follow the generous dozen of short ‘varieties’—anecdotes like ‘The Curé’s Omelette;’ personal experiences of ‘The Gastronome Abroad,’ some in America; original recipes and original verse; and an ‘Historical Elegy,’ in pity for the gastronomic ignorance of the past, and in prophetic vision of the full gastronomic glories of the year nineteen hundred.

“But, alas,” said Professor Maturin, slowly closing the book, “I cannot wish that he were here. The world is not yet ready for his message; he should have added another hundred years. It was fifty years before his work was well enough known outside of France to be translated; and even to-day, in spite of all its delightful qualities, not one in a hundred, even among reading men, know it. And yet, there has never been anything quite like it. Such a rare combination of race, time, and personality; of experience, cultivation, and taste, seldom occurs more than once. But no other is necessary; nothing can be better than the best, and Savarin has handled his theme with unapproachable wisdom and charm, once for all.

“The science has, of course, progressed immensely since his day. You may fill your shelves with portentous tomes on food and dietetics, and with experimental pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture. Educators have introduced instruction concerning food into the curriculum of the modern school. And I understand that there are magazines of practical cookery for such ladies as look to the affairs of their households. But as for Brillat-Savarin’s hope that the science and the art of gastronomy, as he elaborated it, would soon become a part of the faith and practice, the delight as well as the duty, of all cultivated people,—that is yet far from fulfilment.

“But, my good friend,” and here Professor Maturin rose, shaking his long forefinger, “the truth will undoubtedly prevail, ‘though long deferred, though long deferred,’ as Lanier says. Take the book, and keep it—I make a practice of distributing copies—read it; you cannot help doing so at a single sitting; talk about it; become, like me, a propagandist, and the blessing of Gasterea will go with you. Good-night.” And he was gone.

My friend Professor Maturin spoke the very truth. I finished the book before I left my seat, and then and there became a fellow equestrian to Banbury Cross. Deliberately and with prepensive aforethought, I invite the reader to do the same, and thereby to gain not only personal pleasure and profit, but, in addition, the greater satisfaction of contributing a lasting good to others.

II
The Sindbad Society

THE writer recently enjoyed the great privilege of being the guest of his friend, Professor Maturin, at a meeting of the Sindbad Society, an organization for the enjoyment of informal discussion concerning the theory and practice, the graces and the usefulness, of foreign travel.

Similar in purpose to the Travellers’ Club of London, but lacking anything like the equipment of that body’s sumptuous Pall Mall home, the Sindbad Society endeavors to fulfil its function by means of occasional dinners in the private rooms of other clubs. Indeed, I was given to understand that the members were unanimous in considering a local habitation, or immovable property of any sort, to be most inappropriate for a club the very essence of which was peregrination. My neighbor at the large round dinner table averred that to own even a portrait of Sindbad the Sailor, the mythical founder and patron of the club, would be to embody in a concrete object sentiments of value only so long as they animated the mind.

As we took our places at table, it became evident, in spite of the recreative character of the club, that here was no body of amateurs, to whom travel meant merely London and Paris, the Rhine and the Riviera. I recognized a former director of the American School in Rome, an artist and a craftsman who had just returned from Japan and India, an importer of things Persian, and a biologist who spent half his time in the South Seas. Professor Maturin described the other members to me as an engineer who had developed oil wells in China, an archaeologist who directed excavations in Syria, former secretaries of legation at St. Petersburg and at Constantinople, an army officer from Manila, and an explorer who had climbed everything but the mountains of the moon.

The dinner, although entirely without pose, was intentionally and interestingly exotic. Russian preserved cucumbers and a soup of chestnuts from the south of France were followed by an entrée of lamb, prepared according to a Constantinople recipe, and by boned capon. The colonel mixed a Filipino salad-dressing, and with it the archaeologist supplied cigarettes made of coffee leaves. Finally, the engineer introduced a South American dessert of ripe red bananas, guava jelly, and sharp cheese, and with this was served Carlsbad burnt-fig coffee. The wines, although poured sparingly, were as interesting as the food. The cigars were Cuban vegueras. The endeavor, which was surely realized throughout, had evidently been to seek the unusual, not for the sake of mere strangeness, but for an excellence unattainable through the ordinary.

The same might be said of the talk which accompanied the meal. It was anything but conscious or formal, and yet I noticed that leading questions were not only allowed but expected, and that it was the custom of the entire company to listen when any conversation became generally interesting. In this way I enjoyed a whole series of descriptions of forests and mountains, rivers and deserts, of barbarous and unfrequented countries, of harbors and fortifications, cities and courts, cathedrals and colleges, libraries and museums; with anecdotes of experience and adventure, of state and society, of beautiful women and distinguished men.

The near distance of Europe was by no means forgotten, but it was discussed in a way that made me feel that I must, in Bacon’s phrase, have gone there “hooded,” or, at least, as the mythical American who checked off each city in his Baedeker after a hurried glance about him from the top of some tall building. In particular, I was possessed with successive desires to make good my deficiencies by going at once to live at a wonderful small hotel across the river in Paris, visiting a certain sculptor’s studio in Madrid, dreaming on the terraces of Lake Maggiore, and hearing the opera by telephone at Budapest. When the talk ranged more widely, as it did for the most part, I longed to observe a volcano and experience an earthquake in action, and determined to journey without delay to Damascus for the sake of its baths and cafés, “the most exquisitely luxurious in the world;” that is, if I did not decide, instead, for Shepherd’s hotel at Cairo, or, perhaps, the vale of Thingvalla in Iceland.

With the cigars, the conversation shifted from details of observation and experience, by way of penetrative comment on men and manners, until it reached what seemed, at least to me, profound conclusions concerning national and social characteristics. The classical scholar, with a majority of the other members, opposed the craftsman and the engineer, in ascribing a certain monotony and shallowness to Japanese life, in spite of its old aestheticism and its new efficiency. Both of the diplomats endorsed the Persian specialist’s statement that “the hope of the East is in Western inoculation; it will never regenerate itself.” “Nor be regenerated,” growled the colonel. “From my point of view,” replied the artist, “it has no need to. Nature is the absolute artist, and nowhere else do people live so close to her. Rare natural beauty, a constant sun, and a mellow atmosphere give existence there such an intensity and richness that mere living becomes an art—‘pure pomegranate, not banana,’ as they say in Egypt.” “It takes the eyes of love to see angels,” concluded the archaeologist. “Natural savages may be noble, but effete races are not, and such most of the Eastern peoples seem to me. However, I may be wrong, or at least narrow; toleration is the great lesson of travel.”

After a number of such discussions, which were listened to by all, the company returned by general consent to more specific topics—plans, principally, for future journeys. These had but a melancholy interest for me, who had not the remotest hope of realizing any of them, until the conversation became once more general in outlining an ideal rapid journey around the world. This whirled me past Honolulu palm trees and craters, amid Japanese cherry-blossoms and wistaria, along the Great Wall of China, through Canton gardens and bazaars, into Calcutta palaces and Delhi temples, by dahabeah in Egypt and camel in Syria, until I caught my breath once more in the midst of the Mediterranean.

But the most valuable part of the evening, and to me the most enjoyable, if satisfaction is to be measured by what one remembers longest, was the concluding half-hour, when every member of the group, quite unconsciously I am sure, fell to felicitating every other member on the success of the evening, the value of travel, and the pleasure and profit of thus discussing it.

I had, myself, experienced vicariously some of the delights of filling in the blank spaces on the map of the world with picturesque scenes and animated figures. I had noted with interest how the habit of observation seemed to lead inevitably to comparison, and that to generalization and conclusion. It had been no small satisfaction to learn how adequately the human frame and mind had met and withstood the severer experiences of the more daring—how small, after all, were the world’s greatest difficulties and dangers to the unconquerable spirit. But it was most gratifying of all to realize that the general experience had resulted not in distrust, but in belief in the fundamental kindliness, if not goodness, of general human nature; and in a firm conviction that the world as a whole was visibly advancing in material, mental, and moral well-being.

I had, naturally, never questioned the charm of travel as a recreation, but this evening gave me a new sense of its superior value as experience and education. I knew, of course, that travel required no ordinary equipment of perception, knowledge, and judgment—of sensitiveness to impressions, with material to compare and ability to value; that indifferent travel would serve only, as Rousseau said of indifferent reading, “to make presumptuous ignoramuses.” But, although I had long believed that the observant and thoughtful home-keeping man might attain an understanding of himself and even of his nation, I came now to doubt that there was any means other than foreign travel for developing a realization of what is really fundamental to the general human spirit.

In voicing to Professor Maturin my gratitude for the pleasure and profit of the evening, I found that he had observed me growing a trifle stale, and had designedly administered this meeting as a remedy. He expressed his opinion that I was already out of danger, judging from my evident appreciation, with Shakespeare, that “a good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner.” And he beamed on me as mellowly as the moon when, at parting, I expressed my intention of continuing the medicine, homoeopathically, through books of travel, until my wonted tone was entirely restored. The whole prescription worked such wonders as a tonic that I strongly recommend it to others.

III
Foreign Travel at Home

“I THANK you,” said Professor Maturin, laying aside the manuscript he had been reading me, in order to test its appeal,—“I thank you. I am only afraid that you are too generous. But, in any case, I am very grateful, and I hope that you will allow me to be at your service during the remainder of the evening. Do I not see you looking somewhat dispirited again? Are you not neglecting your mental hygiene?” and, leaning forward from his circle of lamplight, he peered at me anxiously.

I replied with one affirmative for both queries, but pleaded misfortune rather than fault. I knew that I was in serious need of variety, but I had found that the specific he had recommended—the atmosphere of foreign travel—no longer satisfied the demand. On the contrary, it aggravated my distemper, by adding to an already overpowering sense of monotony an impossible desire to fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. Books of travel and my friends’ discussions of their coming journeys merely increased my distress.

“So-o?” said Professor Maturin. “So-o-o?” leaning back in his huge leather chair, and putting his finger and thumb tips together. “Well, I suspected as much, and I fear that I am at least partly to blame for your condition. I prescribed a remedy that you have come to find worse than the disease, and, apparently, you have come at the same time to a new realization of Stevenson’s saying that ‘books are all very well in their way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life’—not that I would be disrespectful to my best friends,” and he smiled at the well-filled shelves which extend around his admirable library.

“You will not think me unsympathetic when I say that I have been waiting for this symptom,” he continued. “It is an important part of your cure. Some day I will explain to you my entire system of mental hygiene, but there is not time for that to-night, nor are you quite ready for it until you act upon my next and final recommendation.

“You will remember that Emerson said, ‘Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. The truest visions, the best spectacles I have seen, I might have had at home.’ He did not himself practice his preachment, but that does not invalidate it. Kant, however, I believe, never travelled more than forty miles from Königsberg; and Sainte-Beuve for fifty years seldom left Paris. What, of course, one wants is not to subject himself to the miscellaneous and often distracting impacts of foreign travel, but to realize What essential elements he needs, where to find, and how to apply them. As one of our poets has put it:

Who journeys far may lack the seeing eye:

Stay, thou, and know what wonders round thee lie.

“At one time in my life I travelled continually. But now that I am older and wiser, I know that I can find practically everything I want here at home. At different times I want an almost infinite variety of things, but they are all here in New York. This city is the true cosmopolis: eighty nations are represented in its public schools; four-fifths of the parents of its citizens came from the ends of the earth; there are more than a million Germans; more than a million Irish; more, and vastly more fortunate Hebrews than in all Palestine; and so on—you know the figures.

“Now, I need not insist that what is most important in foreign travel is not the novel sensations to which it gives rise,—the sense of a different climate, the flavor of new dishes, the fragrance of strange flowers, the sound of unfamiliar music, even the sight of ancient buildings or famous pictures—pleasurable and profitable as all of these are; and, fortunately, most of them may be enjoyed here, directly or indirectly. The fundamental value of travel is in the realization that it gives of ways of feeling, thinking, and acting, other than our own; and these, along with many of their outward manifestations, our new Americans bring with them.

“Thus, for example, if you are weary of the physical and mental traits of a land where all things are yet new, you may find the inscrutable calm of the immemorial East in Chinatown, where life flows as it did before Confucius. The ceremonial prescribed by Moses is still carried out here in many synagogues, and I can introduce you to more than one turbaned swami who will talk like Buddha. Unfortunately, our best illustration of the rigid solidity of the Egyptian spirit vanished when the old Tombs prison was torn down, but there is still the obelisk in the Park; and if you read Rossetti’s poem in the midst of the New York Historical Society’s Assyrian marbles, you will surely feel yourself in ancient Nineveh.

“If material crudities or social unrest distress you, you have but to reopen your Aeschylus or your Cicero to recall the balanced strength and fineness of Greece, the early law and order of Rome. Our nearest approaches to Greek architecture are perhaps the porticoes of the Sub-Treasury and the Columbia Library, or the choragic Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Riverside Drive. But from time to time the local Greeks revive their ancient games and enact their classic dramas—for particulars, see their newspaper, Atlantis, if you read modern Greek. As for Rome, High Bridge might fitly stand on the Campagna, or Washington Arch by the Forum; and for both, the Metropolitan Museum is full of casts of sculpture and of actual remains, from the Etruscan chariot to whole walls from Pompeii.

“Would you reap anew the fruits of the Teutonic invasion, you need only observe how it has brought force and endurance, solidity and creature comfort, family affection and social sentiment, good humor and good sense, to New York, as it did to Rome. The city would not be itself, without its delicatessen shops or its Christmas trees; much less without German scholarship or German music—Wagner and Beethoven having become ours even more than Berlin’s.

“Or, if you prefer oil to butter,—that is, are Latin rather than Teutonic in temper,—you may cultivate your mood by a morning with the tower of Madison Square Garden, which is a copy of the Giralda at Seville, and an afternoon in the new Hispanic Museum in Audubon Park. For mediaeval Italy you need but read your Dante in the Church of the Paulist Fathers. For the Renaissance, as for the Gothic, you may study the architecture of any one of a score of our public buildings, or the sculpture and painting in the Metropolitan Museum. Rome itself has now no more Italian citizens than New York, and it hears far less Italian music. While as for French music, French art, French cookery, and French amenity—we have appropriated them as thoroughly as we have the name Lafayette. Our rich men imitate French châteaux; the rest of us bless or revile the French invention of the apartment house.

“Or, if you hold rather to the Anglo-Saxon temper: the English satisfaction in the serious, the solid, the useful; the English habit of accumulation, experiment, and certain conclusion; and the English ideals of physical and mental health and exercise—these traits and their tangible results are happily still so native to us that they can in no sense be considered foreign.

“But even should your need or desire be for the mere sensations of foreign travel, these also may be had in New York. You may taste strange dishes and hear strange music in more foreign cafés in New York than in any other city in the world. In the local shop of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tobacco monopoly you may smoke a water-pipe, calling it hookah, chibouque, or nargileh, according to the place in which you would like to be. You may eat real spaghetti and see marionettes enact the story of Roland on Macdougal Street. You need go no farther east than the East Side to buy Damascus inlaid metals, or Chinese medallion ware, or Japanese flowered playing-cards. It is possible, even, to become an importer in a small way, by buying for five dollars, on Allen Street, Russian brasses that cost seven dollars and fifty cents when transported to Twenty-second Street, or ten dollars and seventy-five cents when they arrive on Fifth Avenue. You may hear the service of the Greek Catholic Church, celebrated by an archbishop, in a cathedral on Ninety-seventh Street. Bohemians, Syrians, and even Egyptians have made whole sections of the city practically their own, so far as manners and customs are concerned. Nearly one hundred newspapers and periodicals are published in New York in more than a score of foreign tongues. Perhaps you would care to read a New York daily that is printed in Arabic?”

Rising, Professor Maturin drew from a drawer and held before me a copy of Kawkab Amerika, a goodly-sized sheet, in strange characters, but with a pictured heading eloquent to all. There I saw the desert, with mosques to the right, and pyramids and Sphinx to the left. Between were hosts of desert-dwellers, on foot, on horseback, on camel, but all gazing and pointing to the central sky, where appeared a radiant vision of our harbor statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.

“And it is no mirage to them,” said Professor Maturin, after a pause, “and that is the best of it all to me. The strangeness of these newcomers is, indeed, refreshing, but I like better to think of them as most of them really are, or soon will be—the most genuine of Americans. They are so through choice and, often, hard endeavor; you and I, perhaps, only through accident. You know the fundamental loyalty of the typical German-American. The Spanish press of the city was staunchly American during our last war. The Turkish periodicals applauded our demonstrations against the Porte; and Hungarians, Servians, Syrians, and Persians have each formally organized for the purpose of influencing their fatherlands to become more like the land of their adoption.

“And so we come to the most valuable of all the ends of travel—the greater realization and appreciation of home. We return from other nations with relief—for there are few American emigrants—to a yet new land of fertile soil and mineral wealth; to a people varied, yet homogeneous, energetic, aggressive, ingenious, and self-reliant. We face, it is true, problems such as the world has never known before, but with unprecedented belief in idealism, morality, order, and education; not apprehensive of danger, but quick in recognizing and decisive in meeting it. Our successes in transportation, in architecture, and in material well-being in general; our achievement of the welfare of the whole people over that of section or class, of equality of opportunity for each and of benevolence toward all, have already taught the whole world new lessons of peace, tolerance, and faith in the average man. Nor do I see any reason, as we become more and more a new race, blended of many, why our good fortunes should not continue and increase. Anything else would falsify our trust in a wide and a wise humanity—and that is unthinkable.

“But, I beg your pardon,” said Professor Maturin, as I rose to say good-night, “I did not mean to take the stump; and yet, I believe that it is good sometimes to give utterance to these things which all of us feel. Nothing revives the vigor of one’s spirit like the conscious realization of being in harmony with fundamental law.”

IV
Country Life

I HAVE never seen my friend Professor Maturin in better health or spirits than he was when I met him the other evening at the Athenaeum. He had just finished dinner, and indicated that he was in the mood for talk by ordering two of the Cuban vegueras that he keeps in a private box at the club, for use on special occasions.

“I am just back from the best vacation I have ever had,” he began. “I have been spending a month with a friend up the river, at a most delightful place, built and planted about fifty years ago by his father, from memories of the villas about Florence, where he once lived. The house has window balconies, a tower, a loggia opening west and south, and a red-flagged terrace with a stone balustrade, all complete. Below this slopes a wide lawn, then many flowering shrubs, and finally splendid groupings of trees between and over which you may see the river, here at its widest. The hills beyond and the highlands to the north complete the picture.

“After breakfasting alone, at any time my fancy chose, according to the happy custom of the house, I spent whole mornings on the terrace, looking through the aisles of ancient oaks at the river, or at the heaped-up summer clouds as they drifted south. I have heard the Hudson called epic, because of its breadth and power. It is no less so in its incidental embellishments of sunlight and shadow. I often watched it from its morning silver, through all shades of reflected blue, until at night it looked like a texture of royal purple into which the moonlight and the stars were being woven. The clouds were better than any Alpine mountains. Their mass and light and dark were as definite, and they had other clouds about their peaks and oceans of vapor at their feet. In addition they changed constantly, and turned to gold and opal at evening.

“At luncheon, or shortly before, I met my host and hostess. If before, we often strolled through a catalpa avenue to a semi-circular stone seat overlooking the river, or along a pine walk to a lookout toward the highlands, or past an orchard back of the house to a certain sunset hill, for the widest view of all, where we could see the river for twenty miles. Sometimes the hostess led us to sections which she called ‘nature’s gardens,’ because of the wild flowers, of which she was particularly fond.

“About such flowers I knew so little that I would have been tempted to revive my ancient botany had I not a good while ago learned the necessity of limiting the number of one’s avocations and of resisting the temptation to rob them of time, to spend on this new thing and that. I felt the same way about the trees, which, I was told, represented every indigenous variety. I knew by name only oak and elm, beech and maple, and a few others; but I made the most of the compensations of my ignorance, by noting, with all the freshness of discovery, the characteristic angle or curve of the different boughs, the varied form, texture, and characteristic movement of branch and leaf, the innumerable greens of the foliage, and their infinite modulations under light and shade.

“I am sure that we often know too much to get the full value of our impressions. For a long time painters could not represent trees because they remembered what each leaf was like; Claude painted his landscapes from what he knew, rather than what he saw, Constable from what he loved, Turner from what he imagined. It was not until the Barbizon men lived in the forest that Rousseau caught the actual form and Corot the fragrance of nature, and Monet could paint true light and air. It is said that the most interesting writing is done by generally cultivated people concerning subjects that are new to them. The greatest enjoyment of nature often comes in the same way. It is quite possible to be ‘connoisseured out of one’s senses.’

“At our luncheons the talk was always delightful, for my friend’s ample fortune gives him both occupation enough to keep him contemporary, and leisure enough to allow him to be Coleridge’s ideal man of letters, reaping only the choicest and most spontaneous growths of a richly cultivated mind. After luncheon we usually sat awhile in the large, although simple, conservatory, which adjoined the dining-room—if the word ‘simple’ may properly be applied to a place where orange and lemon trees attained their natural size, roses bloomed by the hundred, and where we picked ripe pomegranates and figs for our dessert. This, too, was due to the genius of the founder of the house, whose works my friend delighted to honor and cherish.

“When we separated again I usually retired to my room for a book and a nap, which lasted I know not how long, one of the charms of the place being that artificial timepieces were absent, or, at least, invisible and inaudible, everything, apparently, being regulated by the sun. This source of light and heat usually led me in the late afternoon to the loggia to watch the earliest anticipations of the evening glow, and to listen to an orchestra of mocking-birds in an open-air cage, accompanied by their wild neighbors, of whom there seemed to be multitudes. English sparrows were ruthlessly banished, but every other sort of bird was protected, with the reward of the almost familiar companionship of orioles, cardinals, wrens, and humming-birds, and the constant song of warbler, thrush, and meadow-lark. In nothing, I think, is the country more delightfully different from the town than in its sounds. Even the winds and the rains sound different there.

“My friend has so long lived his life with nature that it has become the theme of his chief study. He outlined this to me one evening when the rain caused us to transfer our coffee from the terrace to the conservatory, where his ideas became permanently associated with the impressions of azalea bloom and jasmine fragrance which I acquired at the same time.

“‘I am slowly accumulating,’ he said, ‘facts and ideas for a history of the relations between nature and man in the United States. The conditions have been peculiar, and the results more than ordinarily interesting. Nowhere else, for example, have people possessing all the arts of civilization made their homes in the midst of absolutely primitive nature. With such a beginning, three thousand years of history have here been epitomized in three hundred. Nature as an enemy was soon conquered, and nowhere else has she afterward shown herself more friendly in surface fertility and underground resources. Our vast and relatively undiversified territory has brought men of the coast, the mountains, and the plains; of the rugged North and the languorous South, into closer and more constant contact than ever before. And to this unparalleled interplay we have welcomed myriads from every other climate and condition on the earth, and have set up for the whole theories of government which allow almost perfect freedom to all racial, local, and individual traits.

“‘I intend to deal but briefly with the physical results of such inhabitation. The wisdom of experience is beginning to check the perhaps natural tendency to spoil ruthlessly the conquered forest; and even the most materially minded are beginning to act toward the universal mother no more harshly than they would toward a captive or slave whose usefulness is increased by considerate treatment.

“‘The peculiar relations between nature and the human spirit in the United States, however, seem to me worthy of extended study. Thus, it is undoubtedly because of our unique environment, that so just an observer as Emerson found American perceptions keener than any he met with elsewhere. Our poets have certainly recorded other and more varied aspects of nature than their English brethren, who in comparison seem to deal chiefly with the “common or garden variety.” Nothing is more mistaken than to consider Bryant a kind of inferior Wordsworth. There is more truth in the remark that Wordsworth himself was not primarily a nature poet, since nature was to him chiefly the source of certain stimuli to the mental life, which was his fundamental interest. Bryant not only feels this stimulus, along with nature’s suggestive and representative qualities, and its physical benefits; but he also apprehends nature as an independent world of physical life and order, of which man is a citizen so far as he is a creature, and of which he may be a ruler so far as his mind works in harmony with natural law, and partakes of the power behind it.

“‘This aspect of nature was not, I believe, apprehended by Wordsworth at all. He at least gave no utterance to it. Similarly, in the treatment of the water-world, in which English poets have usually excelled, the English critic Henley has shown how Longfellow, through a simple self-forgetfulness in his impressions, found eternal beauties hitherto unnoticed. Emerson’s nature-teaching is fairly well known, but the depth and breadth of Whitman’s sympathy for land and sea has yet to be generally appreciated; and these poets are only a few of many examples.

“‘American painting, too, has found itself in landscape; our sculpture and music have drawn inspiration from aboriginal life; and our natural science is second to none in its careful, accurate, and tireless study.

“‘The special field in which we may learn from the older world is in the employment of nature as the material of art; and for this with our advance in wealth and leisure, we are now ready. Roman, Italian, and English examples have already been followed in making real for us some of Poe’s visions of cultivated landscape; and I am daily expecting those delightful intellectual and aesthetic results which have always come when men, wearied with the cultivation of cities, retire to the contrasting peace, simplicity, and beauty of nature.’

“There were, of course,” continued Professor Maturin, “many other general ideas in my friend’s system, and he has accumulated a vast hoard of particular facts to illustrate them. The last aspect of the subject, however, continued to interest me most; for I was experiencing hourly the truth of what he said concerning the thaumaturgic, healing power of nature. I never felt such gentle and cumulative refreshment in my life. The varied sensations of travel, which is perhaps the favorite form of recreation, merely whip the jaded spirit into new activity. But these peaceful, natural scenes and sounds allow the senses to relax, and the mind to renew its texture and recover its tone. As Browning puts it,

my soul

Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll.

I have experienced a real re-creation.

“Therefore,” concluded Professor Maturin, as we finished our cigars, “you must not be surprised if, within the next few weeks, I compose a pastoral symphony, or become a new Theocritus, or—what is less unlikely—retire to a villa, as Horace did.”

V
Food for Thought

I WAS just ordering dinner at the Athenaeum when Professor Maturin entered the room and peered about over his spectacles in search of a congenial corner. Happily for me, his glance encountered mine, and his smile accepted my invitation. I settled myself for an hour of rare conversation.

“And what are you planning to have?” he queried. I passed him the order I was signing, but noticed, as he read it, first surprise, then incredulity, and finally sorrow in his expression.

“My friend, my friend,” he said, mournfully shaking his head, “and you a literary man!”

“Won’t you, then, order for me instead?” I responded, cancelling the slip, outwardly meek, but inwardly rejoicing that my friend’s energy had created a situation which his kindliness would require him to explain at length.

“In the cause of the advancement of learning, sir, I will!” he replied. And taking a new blank, he began to write from the bottom upward, remarking: “In the first place, I always feel, in order that a dinner may have unity and consistency, it should be planned like a poem, from the end toward the beginning; all the more, since there is no chance for revision. There,” he resumed, finishing, “I think that will do, as simple, nourishing, and suggestive.”

And he read: “Oysters, with a few Platonic olives, for the sake of Dr. Holmes and criticism; a bit of tenderloin, in memory of Mary Lamb’s beefsteak pudding; asparagus, which, according to Charles Lamb, inspires gentle thoughts; cauliflower, which Dr. Johnson preferred to all other flowers; Vergil’s salad; apple pie, according to Henry Ward Beecher’s recipe, with a bit of Dean Swift’s cheese; and, finally, a little coffee. I have considerably increased my usual ration in order that you may not miss what the French call ‘the sensation of satiety.’

“I find it difficult,” sighed Professor Maturin, as he passed the order to an attendant and leaned back in his chair, “to absolve men of letters from what has been called the crime of unintelligent eating. Of all men their need of and their opportunity for wisdom in such matters is the greatest. And yet you have Gray wondering at his ailments and his melancholia, when he was eating chiefly marmalade and pastry, taking no exercise, and dosing himself with tar water and sage tea.

“Shelley did scarcely better in a more enlightened age. Byron’s habitual flesh-reducing mixture, potatoes and vinegar, is chemically indigestible. And Thoreau literally consumed himself in following and advocating a diet which so prepared him for tuberculosis that living half his time in the open air could not prevent it.

“The opposite extreme, which is yet more common, is even less attractive in men of genius. Who likes to remember that Spenser and Milton had gout, or that Goethe drank in his time fifty thousand bottles of wine? As for Pepys, what do you think of having one’s ‘only mayde’ dress such a home dinner as this, copied from his ‘Diary:’ ‘A fricassee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton, three carps, a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie, a dish of anchovies, and good wine of several sorts’? No wonder that his better qualities are obscured in our memories of him.

“Philosophers, men of action, and, interestingly enough, men of the world, have usually set a better example. ‘They that sup with Plato,’ said Aelianus, ‘are not sick or out of temper the next day.’ Socrates, Epicurus, and Kant, all preached and practiced judgment and restraint. Horace and Catullus insisted that their pampered guests should bring their luxuries with them. Montaigne highly disapproved of elaborate cooking, and Pope refused to dine with Lady Suffolk so late in the day as four.

“Then there is that admirable story of Cincinnatus, whom the venal senators knew they could not bribe after they found him preparing his own dinner of turnips. It is quite in keeping that King Alfred should have burned the cakes, and that Napoleon should have spilled the omelet; and it is to Lady Cromwell’s credit that she would not allow the Protector oranges that cost a groat apiece.

“Even aside from health and morals, a man’s relation to food is always significant. Who can think of Tasso without remembering that he loved sweetmeats? Is there not literary suggestion in the fact that Vergil loved garlic and Horace hated it; that Horace preferred his Falernian and his Sabine farm to the dinners and Persian apparatus of Maecenas, but that Cicero loved to dine with Lucullus and bought himself a seven-thousand-dollar dinner table?

“Is it not illuminating to know that the favorite food of Burns was oat-cake, that of Byron truffles? De Quincey’s reports that Wordsworth used the same knife for cutting butter and the pages of books; and that Scott, when Wordsworth’s guest, repaired secretly to an inn for chops and ale—these are not gossip, but literary criticism. It is as surely interpretative of Dickens to know that he disliked Italian cookery as that he was fond of playing an accordeon.

“Carlyle’s pessimism is usually attributed to indigestion. It ought, I think, to be as usual to explain Emerson’s optimism by a digestion that could cope successfully with his favorite pie. We habitually associate tea and coffee with Johnson and Balzac, and their work. Should we not as often remember that Milton produced ‘Paradise Lost’ on coffee, and ‘Paradise Regained’ on tea? Of course, such physical criticism of literature must be limited by other judgments. I can well agree with Dr. Gould that many writers show the effects of eye-strain, and it is difficult to upset the diagnosis of anaemia in Hawthorne; but I hesitate to think, with Dr. Conan Doyle, that Shakespeare had locomotor ataxia.”

“Why did you associate oysters with criticism?” I inquired, as Professor Maturin paused.

“Do you not recall,” he replied, “the Autocrat’s remark that literary reputations are largely a matter of administering oysters in the form of suppers, to gentlemen connected with criticism? Veuillot similarly claimed that men were elected to the French Academy chiefly because they gave good dinners. Sydney Smith applied the principle to religion when he said, ‘The way to deal with fanatics is not to reason with them, but to ask them to dinner.’ On the other hand, Swift used deliberately to test men’s tempers by offering them bad wine.”

“And did Plato like olives?” I continued.

“He often made a meal of nothing else,” was the reply.

“And what was Vergil’s salad?” It arrived at that moment.

“It is made of cheese and parsley, with a bit of garlic, rue, and coriander, salt, oil, and vinegar. A little of it is, I think, very pleasing. I much prefer it to Sydney Smith’s. I never understood how he could write ‘Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day’ about a salad made of potatoes. For the truly esoteric doctrine you must read John Evelyn’s ‘Discourse of Sallets.’

“Indeed, I am inclined, on the whole, to think that Sydney Smith was what Carlyle called ‘a blethering blellum,’ when he wrote about food, as he so often did. It was perfectly proper for him to express a desire to experience American canvasbacks, and to be glad that he was not born before tea; but to say that roast pheasant and bread sauce was the source of the most elevated pleasure in life, and that his idea of heaven was eating pâté de fois gras to the sound of trumpets—that was both posing and trifling with serious subjects. Charles Lamb’s comments on roast pig and frogs’ legs, and his kindred table talk, are much more genuine, and, of course, charming; but even they scarcely touch the deeper aspects of the subject.

“Thackeray had all of Lamb’s appreciation of food and, I think, something more. He enjoyed his own and accepted others’ idiosyncrasies of taste,—witness his treating boys to apricot omelet, which he hated,—but his plea for simpler and more varied dinners, for more hospitality and less ostentation, indicates, I think, that he realized at least something of the profound moral and social significance of food.

“This, as you know, is one of my hobbies, and I unconsciously add it to my other criteria of judgment in my reading. That Scott invented a venison pasty, Dickens a sandwich, Webster a clam chowder, and Henry Clay a stew is interesting; just as it is that Buckle was discriminate and Heine indiscriminate in choosing tea. But it is far more significant that Dr. Johnson considered writing a cook-book, and that Dumas’ last work actually was such a volume of more than a thousand pages.

“That is the kind of thing we need: sound doctrine from influential writers, but it is not easy to get. The intemperate use of food, which is always with us, causes many to turn with prejudice from the whole subject. Here, as elsewhere, conservatism often opposes the good. You know, for example, how long the clergy decried the use of forks; and I never cease to regret that the man who was opened-minded enough to introduce umbrellas into England should have been furiously opposed to tea.

“Many writers, too, treat the subject fancifully, without regard to its inherent truths—witness the conventional praise of the indigestible turtle. Often those who intend well lack knowledge: Pythagoras made it a principle of morality to abstain from beans, an almost perfect food; the ideal diet of Plato’s republic, barley pudding and bread, does not contain the elements necessary to sustain life properly. Democritus inaugurated the still repeated heresy that any food that is pleasant is wholesome; and even Dr. Johnson defended his doubtful practice of eating whenever he was hungry, without regard to regularity. For all these reasons and many others I hold it, in this enlightened age, doubly the responsibility of intelligent men, and particularly of those who influence popular opinion, to acquire a sound knowledge of such matters and to do all that they can to disseminate it.”

“You have previously convinced me of this,” I replied, “but I have not found it easy to attain to such knowledge.”

“The important thing,” continued my mentor, “is a conscious attitude of serious attention to contemporary investigations in the field. One should welcome every item of reliable information, observe much, and, whenever possible, experiment. Of course, our special problem, as persons of sedentary habit, is to obtain a large quantity of blood and brain nutriment without taxing an organism which gets comparatively little physical exercise. The problem is not simple, indeed it is very complex, but it can be so completely handled by knowledge and care that the process of solving it adds another satisfaction to life.

“Cheerfulness, by the way, is an invaluable agent in the whole business. I know of a physician who cured a persistent dyspeptic by requiring him to tell at least one amusing story at each meal. We are apt to forget that the taking of food is not only a necessity, but also one of our most constant sources of pleasure.

Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,

Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?

Sometimes, even, as Voltaire says, ‘the superfluous is a very necessary thing.’

“That high thinking does not require that all our living be plain, is admirably illustrated by this quotation from Mr. Howells’s reminiscence of the ‘very plain’ suppers which followed the meetings of Longfellow’s memorable Dante Club. They consisted of ‘a cold turkey, or a haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a plate of quails, with a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect vintages which Longfellow loved and chose with the inspiration of affection.’

“From such pabulum came our most poetic version of the world’s most spiritual poet.”

VI
Beside the Sea

HEARING that Professor Maturin was back again in town, I made an early call, and found him hale and hearty, bleached and bronzed, and even more than usually clear-eyed.

“Behold me returned from a summer beside the sea,” he said in greeting. “I see that you note the visible indications of my sea-change. Whenever you are in the mood for a tide of talk, I believe I can convince you that my experience was as rich as its outward signs are strange.” I reminded him that there was never any time like the present, and added such further solicitation that he began at once.

“You know the locality of my preference: a place frequented just enough not to be lonely, a region of bays and sounds as well as of open sea; where the waves batter at the cliffs only to return their spoil to the sands—where, in short, the unity of the element appears in endless variety. My favorite station was a dune-guarded beach of sand, which swept on either hand into pebbles and stones, until lost in the rocks heaped below the boulder cliffs that formed the horns of a crescent cove.

“At first I spent unmeasured hours looking over the expanse toward the terminal haze, and watching, as far out as I could, the great ridges rolling with the motion of wind and tide and open sea. At the farthest, they looked like mountain ranges, one behind the other; nearer, they were dark green hills with grayish summits. Nearer yet, one could see them reflect the sky, and sometimes the shore. Nearest of all, there was a visible upgathering before the rush, plunge, and sweep on the beach—all endlessly repeated and infinitely varied.

“The same perpetual repetition and variety appeared in the surge, as it flooded up the sands in a wide curve of plash, ripple, and foam; paused, retreated slowly, and then swept out, only to join with the drag of the bottom in opposing an incoming wave, until it rose high, plunged forward, and broke into the churning shallows, which were quickly covered by the main body of the wave as it flooded in.

“The outermost margin of almost every surge lingered long enough to make its record in a tiny ridge of sand and to reflect the light and color of the sky; then it sank into the sand, leaving a burden of pebbles and shells, stubble and seaweed, and the like. This flotsam and jetsam is so constantly swept up, drawn back, and tossed to and fro that I was not surprised to find the sands, under a microscope, composed entirely of such materials worn to powder. Behind me, the sea and the wind had heaped the sand into hills, that shore grasses burrowed into and held together. To left and right, the cliffs, although high and precipitous, were so scarred and worn by storm and wave that they looked almost primeval. Their tops were bared by the winds and corroded by the alternate action of heat and moisture; their granite sides were seamed and stained by the surge; and their feet were encumbered with fragments of their own wreckage that must have thundered down like avalanches. These rocks, whether flung forward in reefs like sculptured waves, or heaped like ruins, were naturally of a rich old rose, but they were often also gray with barnacles, or green with sea growths, and they showed even deeper in tone when submerged beneath the many pools that similarly mellowed and enriched the coloring of pebbles, shells, and weeds.

“My observation of the almost infinitely varied flora and fauna of the sea was, naturally, but superficial. Yet I saw many delightful plant and flower-like forms of dark or light green, yellow, brown, and red, all ceaselessly retinted by the ever-changing sky lights, and the reflection and refraction of the water. Sometimes they rioted in thick tangles among the rocks; again they softly swayed, outspread toward the rising and falling surface.

“The fauna I preferred to look at under water, for, on the whole, I found them grotesque, although I was bound to admire their adjustment to their environment, and to respect them as possible images of our remote ancestors. I was especially impressed with the constant warfare beneath the surface, as exemplified in the regular manœuvring of whole armies of tiny fish, only to have company after company routed by the dash and gulp of some larger enemy.

“The bottom of the sea I have never seen, save through the glass-bottomed boats of the Bermudas, but some day I hope for a diver’s view of the depths. It is easy to understand why the imagination of the poets should be stimulated by the idea of that cool, dim quietness, disturbed only by the swaying of verdure and the movement of great fish; of the richness of color, and the long, slow passage of time, measured only by the up-building of the coral.

“The open sea is, of course, familiar to us all, and yet its apparent boundlessness and immeasurable depth are ever new as the most immense thing in our knowledge—the sky belonging rather to the realm of the intangible. Mid-ocean always makes me feel the infinite continuity of time, the omnipresence of natural law, and a stimulus to greater harmony with its workings. Nowhere else are my ‘cosmic emotions’ so stirred. One gets something of the same impression on land wherever one can mark the ceaseless rising, pausing, and falling of the tide, under the mysterious governance of the moon. I am more than fond of the regular, gentle quality of the tide’s behavior, even if it does sometimes seem stealthy in its creeping toward and around the half-oblivious observer.

“I cannot similarly commend the behavior of the wind, when it opposes the tide in bluster on the sea or pushes it in tumult on the shore. The tide is a serene and responsible world power; the wind almost always performs its indispensable functions with all the eccentricity of genius. A breeze is positively attractive when ruffling the surface or sweeping spray from the wave-crests, and the wind itself is unobjectionable when it consistently urges the waves in one direction. But when it plays havoc with the clouds, or ‘ruffians on the enchafèd flood’ until it fastens upon the eluctant sea a behavior as bad and a reputation worse than its own—then I am by no means for it.

“It was my fortune this summer to witness several storms of such intensity that I became impressed with the routine of their procedure. The sea—grown dark, heavy, and oily—is first flicked and spotted, and then strangely lighted, all over, with the dash of rain and hail; the sun is made lurid, then shrouded, and then hidden by a metallic sky; the clouds grow gloomy and sullen until they are shattered by peals of thunder and riven by livid lightnings. Then the wind rushes, howls, and roars; tearing and hurtling the clouds and tumbling and lashing the waves until they leap and plunge, reel and writhe, flinging up hissing foam and whirling spray ‘shrewd with salt.’ It is undoubtedly glorious—but I like it best when it is over, leaving the torn waves heavy with foam as a reminder, by contrast, of the quieter beauties of a calmer sea.

“Even the sky, the most beautiful thing that we know, seems to multiply its beauty by the sea. One day I saw night gradually lapsing into dawn. The sea glimmered as though the stars had come down, and then flashed until, in the language of Swinburne, it blossomed rosily and flowered in the sun, floating all fiery upon the burning water. I saw many long mornings of sapphire sky and lapis-lazuli sea, and many noons when the waves glittered until their spray became diamonds. Through long afternoons the sea reflected sky and clouds in every shade of silver, blue, and green. The amber fire of the setting sun not only made the heavens splendid, but poured both direct and reflected rays upon the sea until nothing but the idea of a stupendous opal could suggest its coloring. Later, all would fade until land was lost, the sea grew deep and dark, and the only light was the foam and the reflections of the stars. With the moon, all grew new again. Rising low and large, it threw a broad, undulating pathway as golden as that of the sun was silver. Where it reached the shore its glitter extended along the surf, gleaming over the sands, and twinkling wherever spray or dew had fallen. Later yet, as the moon quietly sank, the general illumination grew dim, until obscurity covered land and sea alike, and the sea seemed to merge into infinite space.

“Then, as at no other time, one hears the sound of the sea. I spent many hours listening, endeavoring to analyze it, and to interpret its effect. Its continuity and variety are perhaps its most striking characteristics. It is so ceaseless that it suggests the everlasting. Within this perpetuity it rises and sinks, leaps and falls, gathers and dissolves; it sweeps and rolls, sways and trembles; it seems to approach and withdraw, to flow and overflow; it sounds and resounds, repeats and changes. And well it may do all this and more, considering that its source is a countless number and variety of waves, surging, breaking, and seething among themselves; rushing, plashing, lapping on the shore, chafing sand, rattling pebbles, grating shells, grinding rocks:—all of the resulting sound being constantly varied as well as augmented by breeze, wind, and storm; by the configuration and reverberating qualities of the shore; and by the varying acoustic properties of the atmosphere.

“Analysis being thus nearly baffled, I turned to analogy, and found the sound like the rumble of thunder, the crash of falling rocks, the rush of cataracts; like the quiver of green branches and the rustle of dry leaves; like the bellow and roar of animals; the clash of arms and armor. It is very much like music in its elements of monotone, chord, cadence, melody, and harmony; its relations of continuity, rhythm, repetition, and variation; in its sounds as of cymbal, tympani, bell, trumpet, viol, harp, or organ; its suggestions of symphony or chorale. It is, perhaps, most of all like the human voice, half audible in whisper or murmur; inarticulate in sigh or sob; muffled in mutter or moan; hushed in lullaby or croon; blended in a unison of song or supplication; confused in the hum and rumor, the call and shout, the clamor or tumult of great crowds.

“From such prosing of my own I turned to the record and interpretation of sea music by the poets. From them I collected an alphabetical list of characterizations, and by the time that I had accumulated about one hundred I fell so into their spirit that I, myself, produced the following—as yet unnamed—poetic fragment:

Always attunéd, its anthem billowing, breaking is blown;

Ceaseless, its cadenced complaining deepens to dirge or to drone;

Ever its eloquent echo falling, again flies free,

Till it gathers and grows in grandeur like heaven’s high harmony.

“I stopped there, because ‘kissing’ was the next striking epithet and that seemed rather too fanciful, although the Swinburnian spirit aroused by the composition yearned, so to speak, to go on to ‘mightily murmured the main’ and ‘sonorously sounded the sibilant sea.’

“Seriously, however, the problem of adequately recording and interpreting the aspects of the sea is as fascinating as it is difficult. The best media are, of course, sculpture for its form and substance, painting for its light and color, music for its movement and sound. Poetry and prose reflect something of all of these, poetry more suggestively, prose more accurately. The poets, however, turn so quickly from actual aspects and impressions to their mental and emotional accompaniments, that they seem devoted rather to exploiting their own poetic gifts than the richness of their subject. Their observation is usually sensitive and keen, but it is quickly checked and often distorted by the action of fancy. Accuracy of expression is frequently disturbed by spontaneous or deliberate search for the picturesque or figurative utterance, made so easy by the enormous vocabulary that the sea has impressed upon our language. Poets who are gifted with rhythmical or harmonic power habitually exceed in those directions also. Happily there are some sea poems that are true as well as beautiful, but it seems quite too bad that such masters as Shelley, Arnold, and Emerson should intellectualize, and Coleridge, Rossetti, and Poe should dream, about the sea until they make it appear merely a minister to their moods rather than the immense, unspoiled, cosmic thing it really is.”

“Man overboard?” said Professor Maturin suddenly, as he halted abruptly before me in the perambulation he had begun after rising to secure the manuscript of his poetic fragment, and had slowly continued ever since back and forth along the long rug that he calls his “beat”—“I have flowed in good earnest. Your submerged appearance indicates that you agree with me that my experience was well-nigh overwhelming.”

Accepting his helping hand, I pulled myself out of the depths of the huge leather chair into which I had sunk, and expressed my genuine appreciation by saying, along with my good-nights, “The next time we meet, I should like just such another dip.”

VII
Christmas

IT is always possible to divine something of the state of Professor Maturin’s mind from the order or the congestion of his books and papers. When, therefore, the other day, I found him behind a perfect rampart of volumes bristling with paper-markers, I knew that he was loading with some new knowledge or other, and meditated how I might draw his fire. But he anticipated my efforts by sallying from his fortification, dishevelled but beaming, with the salvo:

“God rest you, merry gentleman;

Let nothing you dismay!—

“What will you give for the Christmas spirit?” he continued. “I have been seeking it, seasonably, and believe that I have found it.”

I capitulated immediately, and we sat down by the fire for a parley, which he began promptly.

“The Christmas spirit appears to be inherent in human nature, in the climatic change from summer seed-time, through autumn harvest, to hearty winter relaxation and cheer over the garnered fruits of husbandry or art. In the South it began as the winter feast of Saturn, celebrated with masking and gifts. In the North it was Odin’s, with log fires and feasting. Then the early Christian fathers chose it for celebrating their Founder’s new teaching of peace and good-will.

“Gradually all of this blended into the most interesting mingling of the material and the spiritual that we have in all our manners and customs. The traditions of the shepherds and the star, the nativity, and the wise men of the East became the centre of the celebration. But the mediaeval popularity of Macrobius’s book on the Saturnalia perpetuated its carnival and games, its candles and garlands, and its giving of gifts, especially to children. The descending Teutons brought their wassail and their tree ceremonials. Germany added Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus, and the filling of stockings. France seems to have furnished the carols. England elaborated the season’s food and drink, and America contributed the turkey.

“With the growth of church and state the day became one of pomp and circumstance. Westminster Abbey was consecrated on Christmas in 1065, and William was crowned there the next Christmas. Other episcopal and royal functions followed, until more was spent on this season than in all the year beside. There were special buildings, elaborate pageants elaborately set, and feasts of five hundred dishes with sixty oxen for one course and eight-hundred-pound plum puddings. There were jousts at which three hundred spears were broken, and the presentation of as many as thirty plays. Earlier, the plays were religious; later, Shakespeare provided the court play for Christmas, 1601, and Ben Jonson for 1616. Milton’s ‘Comus’ was presented at Ludlow Castle during the Christmas season of 1634.

“The universities and the inns of court were likewise keen for plays and for ‘the boar’s head served with minstrelsy.’ The aristocracy and gentry kept open house, for sometimes as many as three hundred persons. Sir Roger de Coverley sent a string of puddings and a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish; and rich decedents left Christmas dinners and gifts to the poor. The peasantry entered heartily into seasonable mummery and games, dances and songs, so industriously thumbing the many early printed books of carols that almost none of them remain.

“Everywhere indoor leisure and the seasonable mood gave rise to all sorts and conditions of legendary lore—of spirits, of trees that flower and animals that speak on Christmas eve, and of weather wisdom, like:

If Christmasse day on fryday be,

The frost of wynter harde shal be.

“From the beginning, the spirit of the celebration had to wage war with the flesh. The fathers of the church never ceased to remonstrate that festivity endangered the solemnity of the season. There were constant failures to remember the peaceful character of the feast. The Danes fell on King Alfred while he was celebrating Christmas in 878, and William the Conqueror got into York on Christmas in 1069 by sending in spies with good-will gifts of food. The mediaeval Lords of Misrule, originally established to control festivity, became themselves uncontrolled, and had to be abolished.”

“Even though they made some very good laws,” I interrupted, “against eating two dinners in one day, and kissing without leave.”

“The Pilgrim fathers at Plymouth frowned on current excesses by working on Christmas day in 1620 and by later prohibiting its celebration. Cromwell’s Parliament sat every Christmas day from 1644 to 1656, and sermonized and legislated against the celebration as a carnal feast, ordering churches shut, shops open, and decorations down. But this was too extreme, and the people smashed the shop windows and put up more evergreens than the Lord Mayor’s men could burn; and Evelyn delighted in being arrested for going to church on Christmas in 1657. In five years all was so changed that Pepys could for once combine preaching and practice, by hearing a Christmas sermon on joyousness and having plum pudding and mince pie for dinner.

“From the beginning, too, the spirit of benevolence has had its difficulties. Watchmen left verses at doors, wanderers sang carols, and children chanted, ‘I’ve got a little pocket to put a penny in,’ until such suggestion to benevolence became a little too definite, and it was legislated against. In 1668 Pepys says tipping ‘cost me much money this Christmas already, and will do more.’ Half a century later Swift writes: ‘By the Lord Harry, I shall be done with Christmas boxes. The rogues at the coffee house have raised their tax, every one giving a crown, and I gave mine for shame; besides a great many half-crowns, to great men’s porters, etc.’

“Of other giving Swift writes: ‘Making agreeable presents ... [is] an affair as delicate as most in the course of life,’ and he never fails to caution Stella against a new danger, that of losing her money in Christmas gaming. Concerning this custom Walpole wrote on twelfth-day in 1752: ‘His Majesty, according to annual custom, offered myrrh, frankincense, and a small bit of gold; and, at night, in commemoration of the three kings or wise men, the King and royal family played at hazard ... his most sacred Majesty won three guineas, and his R. H. the duke, three thousand four hundred pounds.’

“Concerning gifts, Walpole instances the charming presents devised for a little girl of ten by the Duchess of Suffolk and Lord Chetwynd, aged seventy-six and eighty, respectively; and he prescribes the theory, ‘Pray remember not to ruin yourself in presents. A very slight gift of a guinea or two obliges as much, is more fashionable, and not a moment sooner forgotten than a magnificent one; and then you may cheaply oblige the more persons.’”

“Such being the earlier history and tradition of the festival, what should be its modern spirit?” I inquired.

“For that, too,” continued Professor Maturin, “there is no lack of leading. Charles Lamb is frankly for ‘the good old munching system ... ingens gloria apple-pasty-orum,’ and does not hesitate to prescribe for Christmas, 1800, ‘snipes exactly at nine, punch at ten, with argument; difference of opinion expected about eleven, perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve.’

“Thomas Love Peacock makes his Rev. Dr. Opimian say, about 1860: ‘I think much of Christmas and all its associations. I like the idea of the yule-log. I like the festoons of holly on the walls and windows; the dance under the mistletoe; the gigantic sausage; the baron of beef; the vast globe of plum pudding; the tapping of the old October; the inexhaustible bowl of punch.... I like the idea of what has gone, and I can still enjoy the reality of what remains.’

“Dr. Opimian further prescribes for the season such merry tales as his contemporary ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ provide in the distinguished career, but inglorious end, of ‘The Spectre of Tappington,’ which nightly made away with the trousers of the guest who occupied the haunted room at Christmas. All of these same hearty traditions are perpetuated by Fenimore Cooper in his description of Christmas festivity in ‘The Pioneers.’”

“Does not Washington Irving,” I asked, “have an important place in the tradition?”

“Precisely so,” continued Professor Maturin; “it was reserved for him, from his knowledge of Dutch and English customs, to make a new selection and recombination of Christmas ideals so appealing as to have set the standard ever since. His half-dozen Christmas papers dwell, with his characteristic love of the past, on the superior honesty, kindliness, and joy of the old holiday customs. No refinement of elegance can replace, he maintains, the family gatherings, the perfecting of sympathies, the realization of mutual dependence, and the increase of mutual affection, instinct in the ancient hospitality. To his own question as to the worth of Christmas observances, he gives the most characteristic answer in his philosophy—there is plenty of wisdom in the world, but we need more sound pleasure to beguile care and increase benevolence and good humor.

“It was this ethical intention to reëstablish the old tradition of kindliness that Dickens followed, with the result of again endearing the season, as Mr. Howells has said, ‘to the whole English-speaking world, with a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before ... the chief agency in universalizing the great Christmas holiday as we now have it.’

“There is no need to remind any one how the whole baker’s dozen of Dickens’s ‘Christmas Stories’ delightfully champion hard work and good cheer, sympathy and benevolence, affection and self-sacrifice, and even the softening effects of suffering and sorrow—sometimes by directly illustrating these blessings, again by picturing the misery of their opposites. His satires at pretended benevolence and commercial greed, and his championship of the common man, answer in advance all later criticisms concerning the burden and the cost of Christmas and current complaints over popular ingratitude.

“‘I have great faith in the poor,’ Dickens once wrote. ‘To the best of my ability I always endeavour to present them in a favourable light to the rich; and I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances of their condition, in its utmost improvement, will admit.’

“Thackeray called Dickens’s ‘Christmas Stories’ a national benefit, and to any man or woman who reads them a personal kindness; and Thackeray, too, served the season with Christmas pieces of sympathy, humor, and pantomime, and with his famous onslaught on pretentious misanthropy. You recall how the Times slated one of his Christmas stories as worthless on the very day that the publishers asked for a second edition; and how Thackeray, in the preface to the second edition,—‘An Essay on Thunder and Small Beer,’—made such delightful fun of the review’s futility, its absurd superciliousness, its inflated language, and its false figures of speech, that snarling criticism learned at least a temporary lesson.

“Thackeray waged his war differently from Dickens, but, on the whole, I have found nothing more compactly adequate on the Christmas spirit than Thackeray’s

I wish you health, and love, and mirth,

As fits the solemn Christmas-tide,

unless it be the conclusion to old Nicholas Breton’s ‘Fantasticks,’ written in 1626: ‘In brief I thus conclude it: I hold it a memory of Heaven’s love and the world’s peace, the mirth of the honest and the meeting of the friendly. Farewell.’”

VIII
The Sovran Herb

“YOU are come most opportunely,” said Professor Maturin, as I was shown into his study. “Just in time for coffee and a cigar and some good talk with my friend the Vicar of All Souls.” And he presented me to a gentleman whose clerical dress graced a more than ordinarily handsome figure. His chair and Professor Maturin’s being on opposite sides of the fireplace, I drew mine between them, and noted, during the pouring of the coffee, the fine seriousness and serenity of the clergyman’s face. He made no remark, however, until he said, “None, I thank you,” slightly raising his hand when I proffered the cigars that Professor Maturin had passed. But, after I had made my selection and had returned the box to Professor Maturin, the Vicar reconsidered and joined us.

“Smoking rests me greatly when I am tired,” he continued, after we had lighted, “but I am thinking of giving it up. I am moved to do so by such statements as this from my afternoon paper”—and extracting a clipping from his pocket and adjusting his eye-glasses, he read: “Medical opinion and statistics unite to prove that smoking irritates the respiratory system, decreases lung capacity, prevents the purification of the blood, depresses the nerve centres, checks heart action, impairs digestion, retards growth, reduces weight, strength, and endurance; restricts the therapeutic effects of medicines, delays the healing of wounds, and impairs, if it does not destroy, mental life—all of which effects, inevitable although perhaps hidden for years, would make tobacco one of the gravest dangers of the century even if it did not harm the eyes, excite thirst, and induce intemperance.”

“If we believed that,” said Professor Maturin, getting out of his chair, “we should not only abandon tobacco instantly, but organize a crusade for its total prohibition. But my medical friends inform me that the statistics are still quite too scanty to generalize from, and that there have been no scientific experiments, except a few which have apparently proved that smoking aids digestion.

“As for personal opinion, it has long been equally violent on both sides of the question. Here,” he continued, opening a volume of pamphlets which he had drawn from one of his bookcases, “is a three-century-old illustration,” and he read: “There cannot be a more base, and yet hurtful corruption in a country than this barbarous and beastly habit borrowed from wild Indians, a habit unnatural, urgent, expensive, unclean—loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs—and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

“That,” resumed Professor Maturin, “is the personal opinion of James the First of England in the ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco,’ which he followed up by imposing a duty of six shillings eightpence a pound in addition to the modest tuppence previously demanded.

“But here also is a counterblast to King James’s, by one of the most learned physicians of his time, William Barclay. He proclaims tobacco to be a heavenly panacea of wondrous curative power, the fuel of life divinely sent to a cold, phlegmatic land. He characterizes all other opinions as ‘raving lies, forged by scurvy, lewd, unlearned leeches.’” As Professor Maturin put the book up and returned to his chair he concluded: “I cannot feel that personal opinion on the subject to-day has any sounder basis.”

“Possibly not,” replied the Vicar, after a short pause,—“possibly not. But can we not conclude something from the standing of the witnesses? Is there not some significance in the cordial affiliation between the weed and alcohol? How shall we answer Horace Greeley’s offer to give two white blackbirds for one blackguard who did not use tobacco?”

“The collocation of Bacchus and tobacco is, of course, historic,” responded Professor Maturin, “but, on the other hand, as a substitute for alcohol, tobacco is certainly on the side of temperance. If, moreover, it is to be judged by the company it has kept, we must reckon with the practical advocacy of many good men and true from Milton to Emerson, as well as of all the smoking roysterers from Ben Jonson to Burns.”

“I must admit that I can recall only Sir Isaac Newton and Horace Walpole, Dr. Holmes and Mr. Swinburne, in specific opposition,” said the Vicar, “although I venture to think that the Greeks would have opposed it.”

“And the Romans have approved it,” rejoined Professor Maturin. “There is an immense mass of literature on both sides. I agree neither with King James nor with his counterblasters. But I do believe with Cowper that smoking quickens thought, with Lowell that it mellows conversation, with Dr. Johnson that it induces tranquillity, and with Molière that it prompts benevolence.”

“But Dr. Holmes held that it muddled thought,” retorted the Vicar, “and it certainly silenced two eloquent talkers on that occasion when Carlyle and Emerson smoked together a whole evening with never a word. I fear that only too often it relaxes divine discontent into ill-timed resignation, turns thought to reverie, and lulls the stir of action into dreams.”

“That, surely, is the defect of its quality,” admitted Professor Maturin; “yet it did not cloud Kant’s thought, dim Milton’s poetic vision, or relax the will of Frederick the Great or of Bismarck. It may, perhaps, have somewhat clouded Lowell, dimmed Thackeray, and relaxed Lamb. But who can tell? We cannot determine the ideal combination of the strenuous and the contemplative life until we solve the personal equation.”

“Very true, very true,” acknowledged the Vicar; “therefore, let us begin again. Is not smoking an essentially selfish, or at least an anti-social, habit?”

“It does, I believe,” responded Professor Maturin, “incline one to prefer the company of other smokers, and to reduce the number even of those that one desires at a time. However, if that be the case, we must commend it for inciting such conversation as the present, such intimate games as chess, and such profitable solitude as that with books. It was no accidental combination that made Buckle say he never regretted the money spent for books or tobacco. King Alfred and his ancient candle are succeeded by the modern scholar, measuring time by the rings on the ash of his cigar, or by the succession of his pipes. Is not tobacco, therefore, an encourager of domesticity? What makes one more content to stay at home?”

“Or away from home?” smiled the clergyman, consulting his watch. “As for domesticity, you know the saying that ‘tobacco is woman’s only successful rival;’ and you recall those shocking lines of Kipling’s. I think I never knew a woman who was not, secretly, at least, distressed by the odor of tobacco—no matter what the younger ones may say to the contrary. Remember poor Mrs. Carlyle!”

“There were two Mrs. Carlyles,” chuckled Professor Maturin, “and you must restrict your sympathies to Jane, for the dowager and son Thomas used to smoke their pipes together. Of the feminine reaction to tobacco, however, I am no judge, although I do recall George Sand’s pipe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s snuff, and the cigarettes of contemporary empresses and suffragettes. Have I not heard that women physicians prescribe the latter—cigarettes, I mean—for feminine nervousness?”

“I have no doubt whatever about cigarettes,” replied the Vicar. “I would unhesitatingly banish them as the bane of the young and the foolish. Snuff, also, we are done with, and happily, for it was the most slovenly form of an indulgence which is unclean at its best.” Here the Vicar flicked some imaginary ashes from his waistcoat. “We can never be too grateful that our contemporary Sir Joshua Reynoldses are not snuffy. But I must confess that a good Havana now and then”—and the Vicar spoke slower and slower, until his sentence became an eloquent silence as he drew upon his cigar, expelled the smoke, and watched it fade away.

No one spoke for some moments, and as neither the Vicar nor Professor Maturin seemed inclined to do so, I ventured a brief panegyric upon pipes, preferably briars—their intimate, companionable, cumulative qualities; the preference for them on the part of Spenser and Tennyson, Locke and Fielding, Lamb and Lowell; and the varied range of their offering as illustrated by Cowper’s Virginia, Thackeray’s Canaster, and Aldrich’s Latakia.

“Nor may we forget Southey’s ‘Elegy on a Quid,’” added Professor Maturin. “Seriously, however,” he continued, “smoke is beautiful to the eye, pleasing in flavor and odor, smooth to the tactile and comforting to the temperature sense, the occasion of a tranquil muscular rhythm—the last not the least important. Thus it gratifies six senses at once—no wonder its use has become universal, intimately incorporated into national life east and west, south and north.”

“Alas, too intimately,” sighed the Vicar. “It costs half a billion a year. It is another artificial habit that the world finds it difficult if not impossible to do without. So few have Newton’s fear of adding to the number of their necessities. Think how Thackeray missed his cigar and how Prescott, when but one a day was allowed to him, ranged Paris over for the very largest procurable! Did not Stevenson write, ‘Most men eat occasionally, but what they really live on is tobacco’? Did not Charles Lamb say he toiled after tobacco as other men toiled after virtue? Was not his struggle to stop smoking as severe as De Quincey’s with Opium?”

“I suspect,” replied Professor Maturin, “that both Lamb and De Quincey made the literary most of their sufferings, and as for force of habit, who can tell? I am sure that I never smoke merely from habit, but always because of a conscious desire for the kind of satisfaction that smoking gives.”

“Yes, yes,” sighed the Vicar, finishing his cigar, “but I am truly distressed about the matter. I wish that your scientists would make a comprehensive and conclusive investigation into the effects of tobacco, as they have recently done into those of alcohol. Is it a stimulant or a sedative? What is its effect on perception, comprehension, association, combination, on general efficiency, on general health? Is it a poison or a panacea?”

“It is certainly time that we knew surely,” replied Professor Maturin gravely, “and it is our obligation to urge our scientific friends to inform us. Until then, however, I must confess that my own experience chiefly corroborates Carlyle’s judgment that ‘sedative, gently clarifying tobacco smoke, with the obligation to a minimum of speech, surely gives human intellect and insight the best chance they can have.’ The general situation is well summed up by old Burton, when he says: ‘Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, ... but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ’tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco.’ Have another cigar, dominie.”

“Until we really know about tobacco,” concluded the Vicar, firmly closing the box, “we, at least, will practice moderation.”

IX
Men’s Faces

“COME in, come in,” said Professor Maturin, as I was shown to the door of his study. “I am very well, indeed, thank you—‘pursuing the even terror of my way,’ as the proofreader said. I have just been trying,” he continued, taking some papers from his writing-table, “to triangulate Shakespeare’s nose according to Sir Francis Galton’s plan for classifying profiles. But it appears that the shape of Shakespeare’s nose is as uncertain as the spelling of his name. Here in the Ely House portrait it is long and rounded, in the Droeshout it is rather flattened, in the Zoust quite irregular, in the Trinity Church monument a very vile nose indeed. You may observe, moreover, among these plates, a similar disagreement concerning every one of his features, although the general expression is like enough. All of which was renewing in my mind, as you came in, certain observations concerning men’s faces.

“If you were to go over with me my collection of literary portraits here,—I have about two thousand,—you would note immense differences in line and mass, light and shade, depth and delicacy. The prints are from all sorts and conditions of statues, paintings, engravings, and photographs; taken at all sorts of angles from profile to full face, and at various elevations. The actual color and texture of the originals, to say nothing of the artists’ ideas of them, would make the variation much greater. And yet I believe you will agree that, in spite of all detractions, almost every plate gives a surprisingly expressive and individual characterization.”

Professor Maturin waited in silence while I looked over enough of the portraits to convince myself of the justice of his observation. Then he continued: “While possessed of that idea I amused myself by picking out doubles. Here are some surprising similarities in the faces of most dissimilar persons—Tolstoy and Verlaine, Bishop Heber and Byron, Ronsard and Lincoln. All of these portraits of Spenser make him look like Mephistopheles, and Seneca here is the exact counterpart of our friend the sporting editor. In general, however, a resemblance in appearance—like that, for example, between Shakespeare and Calderon—represents a considerable correspondence in nature. Sometimes this may be attributed to identity of race and nationality, as in the cases of Renan and Sainte-Beuve, Taine and Zola. But most often the resemblance shows true to temperament and character in spite of race, time, and circumstance. Notice, for example, these prints of Horace and Herrick, Bürger and Burns, Heine and Chopin, Maurice Jokai and George W. Cable. Such resemblances hold even between very unusual faces, such as those of Uhland and Goldsmith, and there are sometimes triplets like Fouqué, Hoffmann and Poe. It appears, decidedly, that appearances are not deceptive.

“Personality cannot, of course, entirely transcend all rules: Dumas père shows unequivocally his negroid blood; you can generalize concerning the bent Russian head, the arched Spanish brows, the full German nose, the common irregularity of English features. Accident broke Thackeray’s nose, cost Camoens an eye, and at least threatened De Foe’s ears. Distress left its mark on Cervantes and on Poe. Lamb said, you remember, that Coleridge looked like an archangel, a little damaged. Pope and De Quincey show their imperfect health. The posture and the pose of occupation leave traces, like the knitted brows of philosophers and men of action, the narrowed eyes of historians and explorers, the open nostril of the naturalist, the worn mouth of the orator. But these are minor matters—the general expression remains.

“The character of this general expression is perhaps most determined by the size and shape of the head. These vary enormously—as one may see in the Hutton collection of masks at Princeton—all the way from the greatness of Thackeray’s to the smallness of Byron’s, from the shortness and breadth of Luther’s to the narrowness and length of Lope de Vega’s, from Darwin’s deep sloping dome to Scott’s ‘Peveril of the Peak.’

“A single feature frequently dominates, like Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘imperial head with fair, large front,’ or Jean Paul Richter’s strangely bulging forehead. The eye is often the most striking feature. Scott said, literally, that the eyes of Burns glowed; the same thing was said about Keats and Hawthorne. Scientists are notable for eager eyes, mystics for dreamy ones. I have noticed that stylists, like Flaubert, Catulle Mendès, d’Annunzio, John La Farge, and Charles Eliot Norton, are heavy-lidded. Large noses connote power, if we may judge from the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans; from Dante and Savonarola, Wordsworth and Newman. We have the testimony of Lowell that Emerson’s nose was so large that it cast a shadow. Socrates and Plato, Herbert Spencer and Dr. Holmes, however, were but illy favored in this respect. Satirists’ noses are long, and, as we might expect, often pointed,—witness Erasmus, Swift, and Voltaire.

“Mouths are only less expressive than eyes. Sterne’s mouth shows him a satyr, De Quincey’s marks him an imp. In general the mouths of authors, and of clergymen, too often show self-importance or complacency. Julius Caesar’s square jaw and Bismarck’s thick neck are also full of meaning, although such features and the always significant poise of the head are often obscured by the countless forms of ruff, band, stock, or collar that men have affected from time to time.

“The hair and beard are even greater transformers. Personally, I like somewhat wayward hair such as Scott’s, Hazlitt’s, and Tennyson’s. All red-haired writers from Ben Jonson to Bulwer-Lytton attract me, while I am repelled by Byron’s glossy and Shelley’s silky hair. Many heads are improved by the thinning of their thatch, although Emerson’s was not; some, like Irving’s, are enhanced by a wig. But in general wigs are great levellers,—imagine Dr. Johnson in Addison’s! Alexander Hamilton’s queue makes a fine balance for his profile, and a tonsure is not always unbecoming. One may say the same for beards: Fitzgerald always objected to Tennyson’s, but Bryant and Longfellow and Ruskin were all bettered by theirs, the last immensely so. Freeman, however, rather overdid it, and Flaubert’s walrus moustache was a monstrous thing in such a stylist. Baudelaire’s beard and Swinburne’s are to me much more shocking than anything in their verses. But the doctrine of beards is really very subtle. Mr. Henry James’s removal of his apparently reacted upon his style.

“After conspicuous single features, arrangement most influences expression, and it is surprising to note how irregular this is. Such correlation and symmetry as that of George Meredith is quite exceptional. There are disagreements in color even between eyes—one of Lamb’s was hazel, the other gray. The eyes and brows of Chatterton, Balzac, and Douglas Jerrold are on a different plane, back of the rest of their features. The right side of Thoreau’s face and of Whitman’s is lower than the other, while the left side of Poe’s face is smaller. Disproportion in mass is most frequent, the lower half of the face being often too large for the remainder. Alexander von Humboldt and Matthew Arnold are the only examples I have noted of disproportionally large brows and eyes. The chins of Hegel, Gray, and Pater, on the other hand, are at least one size too large; the nose and mouth of Tyndall and Emerson are certainly two sizes too large; Hans Christian Andersen displays an even greater lack of harmony. Dr. Johnson combined a fine head and eyes with a coarse nose and mouth; Landor’s mouth was as weak as his head was powerful. Goldsmith presented the extraordinary combination of a low, bulging forehead, with almost no head behind the ears, handsome eyes and nose, a swollen upper lip, and a receding chin—all much pitted with smallpox. Goldsmith is a striking example, for in spite of his singularly unfortunate appearance, his intrinsic charm is yet obvious.

“Thus, while the details of men’s faces are a source of curious interest, their greatest significance is the way in which a general expression transpires through them. We are not in the least repelled by the ugliness of Aesop and Socrates, the ‘dumb-ox’ look of Thomas Aquinas, or what Edward Lear called ‘Wordsworth’s desire for milk appearance.’ When Petrarch appears cheerful and Montaigne sad, Smollett mournful and Spinoza merry, we yet feel that there is more than meets the eye. I believe, Tennyson to the contrary notwithstanding, that a man’s character is usually clear in his countenance; here I take up at random Confucius and Calvin, Cicero and Franklin, Rabelais and Chaucer—who could misjudge them? It is as Hazlitt said—you get from a great number of details a general impression which is true and well founded, although you may not be able to analyze or explain it.”

“It is certainly most interesting,” I said, as Professor Maturin put his portraits into their cabinet. “I wonder why the subject has not been investigated more fully and scientifically.”

“It has been thought about a good deal,” replied Professor Maturin, “ever since the Greeks. Renaissance rulers thought it of use in selecting their courtiers. Goethe kept a painter busy recording faces that interested him. About a century ago Lavater devoted a score of handsome folios, with splendid plates, to the study of faces, but his treatment was very desultory—discussions of ‘deep, designing, envious villains as represented by Raphael,’ and so on. Some of his successors went to the opposite extreme of definiteness, concluding that long noses denote courage, high cheek-bones honesty, large lips sociability, and the like. There have been, however, various scientific studies, such as Darwin’s on the expression of the emotions, Galton’s composite photography, and Bertillon’s accurate system of measurement and classification. Yet for some reason the subject still remains one of those that bibliographers catalogue as merely ‘curious.’ I like to dip into it now and then because of its general human interest, and always find it a stimulus to freshness and directness of observation; a caution, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, against distrusting imagination and feeling in favor of ‘narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories.’”

I remained silent while Professor Maturin looked over his cases for a book, and then stood leafing through it, until he found his place, and said: “Hazlitt sums the matter up in his essay ‘On the Knowledge of Character’ with these words: ‘There are various ways of getting at a knowledge of character—by looks, words, actions. The first of these, which seems the most superficial, is perhaps the safest, and least liable to deceive:... A man’s look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay more, by the hand of nature.... This sort of prima facie evidence shows what a man is, better than what he says or does.’”

X
Mental Hygiene

AS the Vicar, the Physician, and I entered Professor Maturin’s study, after dinner, the Vicar sank into his chair with a deep sigh. “Is it so bad as that?” queried Professor Maturin, as he passed the cigars. “I beg a general pardon,” replied the Vicar. “To-day has quite tired me out, although I am just back from a vacation.” The Physician gazed at him professionally for a moment, and then said: “A clear case for the Book of Mental Hygiene.” As we turned, expectant, Professor Maturin, after some hesitation, took a portfolio from his desk, saying: “The Physician refers to a collection of memoranda, drawn from my experience and reading, during a series of years, but recently put into something like order. They are semi-personal in substance, and quite staccato in form, but I am very willing to read them if you will agree to stop me when you have had enough.” Accepting our assent, he began:

“Now that science can cause the Ethiopian to change his skin and the leopard his spots,—that is, can modify the color of rabbits and multiply the toes of guinea-pigs, or graft new characteristics on cattle or on grain,—it is high time to take thought for the efficient and economic working of that intellectual machinery which is not only the means to all such progress, but the fundamental condition of our mental being. Even if we do not accept Professor Lankester’s view that man has produced such a special state for himself that he must either acquire firmer hold of the conditions, or perish, we must agree with Professor James that the problem of access to different kinds of power is a practical issue of supreme importance.

“Physical conditions, of course, are the basis of all mental hygiene. Whatever may be the relation between body and mind, no one can doubt its intimacy. Many persons, like Wordsworth and Lowell, suffer physical prostration after mental exertion; nor does Dr. Johnson need to tell us that ‘ill-health makes every one a scoundrel.’ Habits of confinement or exercise mean so much that we might almost know from their work that Balzac and Poe wrote in closed rooms; but that Wordsworth and Browning composed in the open air, Burns and Scott on horseback, Swinburne while swimming. It is true that, as Roger Ascham said, ‘walking alone into the field hath no token of courage in it,’ and that the horsemanship commended by Erasmus is expensive; but there are countless forms of physical exercise, some suitable to each. George Sand set a standard of wisdom in increasing her exercise when under especial strain. Food and sleep also influence mental life tremendously. Whether we eat one simple meal a day with Kant, or many varied ones with Goethe, we must remember the laws of nutrition and Carlyle’s warning that indigestion comprises all of the ills of life.

“The criteria for sleep likewise are wholly individual so long as we do not drowse on other people’s hearth-rugs like De Quincey; or, like Rossetti, entertain our callers by taking naps. Some think it impossible to get too much sleep. Kant limited his for the sake of soundness; he, moreover, carefully tranquillized his mind before going to bed, not by a total exclusion of ideas but by a selection. Some forms of analysis and combination appear to continue during sleep. Gray had a friend who made verses in his dreams, and Bancroft’s bedtime problems were often solved when he awoke. The time to sleep and the time to wake must be left to individual instinct and social sanction. The doctrine of deliberate rising—dear to Lamb and Hazlitt, Thackeray and Lowell—has recently been reinforced by a French savant’s declaration that getting up quickly leads to madness.

“Again, mental life is so conditioned by sensations that every man should ask himself Professor Dowden’s list of questions concerning them. What did not Tennyson owe to his hearing, Keats to his taste and smell? Has anything ever affected human character more than the present eye-mindedness due to printing and artificial lighting? We have recently been shown the relation between thought and the jerks of the eye in reading, and even between pessimism and eye-strain. What might not be explained by nervous tension or arterial pressure, in Dr. Holmes’s ‘bulbous-headed men’ or Donizetti’s creative headaches. The very posture of the body is important in mental labor—many books are cramped from being bent over. Writers in bed have scientific endorsement for their approach to the horizontal. Yet, as this is hard on the eyes, a reclining-chair like Milton’s seems better. But no habit should be too rigid. It is unwise to risk Kant’s distress at the loss of the weather-vane he gazed at While pondering; and one doubts whether Schiller’s odor of rotten apples, or Gautier’s cat in his lap, or Marryat’s lion-skin table were worth the trouble.

“Accommodation must be practiced also with regard to youth and age. Whether through cellular differentiation or bacteria, age so profoundly affects the mind that books might almost be classified according to the productive ages of their authors.

“The influence of climate on mental life is beyond control, except as we may choose our place of residence and vary our occupation according to the season or the weather. Days vary according to the ebb and flow of the vitality stored at week-ends—Monday often wasting energy that is much missed by Friday. Deliberation and determination can do much to increase efficiency and well-being by employing one’s best times appropriately: prizing the cumulative value of unbroken hours,—of morning concentration, afternoon acquisition, and evening meditation. Those who cannot control the day must use the night—a French scientist even advocates a watch in the middle of the night. There are no rules of universal applicability, but study of the characteristics and circumstances of our best moments may make possible their easy and frequent duplication. That was Pater’s recipe for successful living.

“In the matter of environment, congenial surroundings means spontaneous action. Yet lack of harmony may stimulate: pastoral poetry and landscape painting are the work of men weary of towns. Both town stimulus and country composure have corresponding values. Many realistic and introspective writers agree with Poe that circumscription of space aids concentration of attention: Pope worked best in his grotto, Montaigne in his tower, and many great books have been written in prisons. Many romanticists and philosophers, on the other hand, prefer wide views from hills or mountains, or to be beside or upon the sea. There are similar differences with regard to tidiness or disorder among scholarly paraphernalia and personal belongings. Both efficiency and happiness depend upon a nice individual balance of habit and variety, freedom and restraint. Flaubert used the same study for forty years, and Lecky could think only when perfectly tranquil; but William Morris and Anthony Trollope liked to write on railway trains.

“As for mental society or solitude, there has been, as Edmund Gosse puts it, ‘a strong sentiment of intellectual comradeship in every age of real intellectual vitality.’ Philip Gilbert Hamerton was probably right in saying that intellectual traditions persist more through coteries than through books. Some general society is necessary to cultivate tolerance and sympathy. One must also come to some adjustment with democracy—its freedom and unrest, its ideal foundation and materialistic structure, its lack of prejudice and its inexperience—we cannot rest in Socrates’ opinion that the majority is merely a heap of bad pennies. After the demands of social service are arranged for, however, the intellect must look through and beyond popular standards, and purchase independence at whatever cost. Much seclusion is essential for knowledge, some solitude for wisdom. Both independence and sympathy are attained through an inner circle of select companions, kept in what Dr. Johnson called repair, by Emerson’s plan of allowing the less interested to fall away and be replaced by choice additions.

“Mental health, moreover, demands some conscious agreement with one’s income, and some mastery of expenditure. Too much money is as bad as too little. A generous amount insures free activity and rich material, but it relaxes determination and demands discrimination. Wealth is essential for works of great accumulation in history, or of fine appreciation in the arts. But humanists appear to be none the worse for poverty—Cervantes was a public letter-writer, and his family took in washing. It is well, in any case, to learn with Socrates how many things one does not need, and to remember that there are uses even for adversity.

“From physical foundation and social setting we approach personality:—that something peculiarly our own which, in the words of Petrarch, ‘it is both easier and wiser to cultivate and to correct than to alter;’ that something within us which, in the words of Emerson, ‘accepts and disposes of impressions after a native, individual law.’ We grow in wisdom as we grow in the knowledge of such inner laws. They are fundamental and inevitable. They control mental life and are not to be controlled save through much self-realization. Is a man instinctively active, or does he love contemplation and the forsaking of works? Is he single-minded, identified with his occupation, or does he work merely for bread and live, for himself alone, in some dear avocation? The single-minded may look forward to the perfection that comes from practice—and toward becoming subdued to what he works in. Hence Charles Lamb on the melancholy of tailors and Dr. Robertson Nicoll on Matthew Arnold as ever the inspector of schools. Other men show their spontaneity and genuineness in their avocations—witness Michael Angelo’s sonnets and Victor Hugo’s sketches. Little intentional literature has charmed the world like the amateur quatrains of Omar the astronomer, translated by Fitzgerald the dilettante.

“Is a man an idealist or a realist? Let him ponder Don Quixote’s impracticality and Sancho Panza’s aimlessness, following inner impulse or outward stimulus, denying the world or losing his own soul. Let him ponder, moreover, Rembrandt’s struggle to serve both at the same time. The pitfalls of the realist are proverbial, but ideals, also, may be dangerous, through mistaken selection, partial generalization, or imperfect adjustment to the facts in hand.

“What, again, are our innate or acquired interests and desires? Does their vision of the future help or hinder our realization of the present? Do we aspire after the impossible, expecting precision or clarity, brevity or completeness, where they cannot or should not be? Do we apprehend the unlikely? ‘If anything external vexes you,’ says Marcus Aurelius, ‘take notice that it is not the thing which disturbs you, but your notion about it, which notion you may dismiss at once if you please.’ Disappointment, says Dr. Johnson, ‘you may easily compensate by enjoining yourself some particular study, or opening some new avenue to information.’ If we cannot attain, like Lamb, to hissing our failures, let us, like La Motte, retire to a Trappist monastery, and drown consciousness in study. Let us not expect ideal conditions—Spencer and Huxley could work but three hours a day. Let us look, if necessary, to our compensations. Napoleon had satisfactions in spite of his standing forty-second at military school. Darwin’s inability to master languages and his loss of pleasure in poetry, painting, music, and natural scenery were more than made up for. Let us hope for no ‘simple, plausible, easy solution of life that will free us from all responsibility;’ but endeavor to apprehend and ennoble our practical religion, that scale of values according to which we spend our hoard of life.

“Mental action varies with individuals, yet Emerson’s general statement is true—‘thought is a kind of reception uncontrolled by will; we can only open our senses and clear away obstructions; suddenly thought engages us; afterward we remember the process and its results.’ Attention, however, may be led, if not driven; sensibility may become dirigible; it is possible to learn how to keep a fresh eye. Observation of our reactions will make possible a wise selection among stimuli; so Gray learned to seek music, Darwin to avoid it, and many have come to some conscious relation between reading and writing. Experience will teach us how to free the mind from haunting suggestions by fixing and holding their values; how to recollect emotion in tranquillity; how to begin work slowly, and steadily, and then accelerate; how to value the process as well as the product of acquisition. We may learn, through the slowness of accumulation, that we retain only what we use, that a bad memory may be the best, because selective, that even leisure may be well employed. ‘Whatever I do or do not do,’ said Sainte-Beuve, ‘I cease not to learn from the book of life.’ Lope de Vega, sailing with the Armada, sacrificed all his manuscripts for gun-wads, but landed with eleven thousand new verses.

“With such realization of ends and calculation of means, production reduces itself largely to a matter of method. ‘The difference between persons,’ said Emerson, ‘is not in wisdom, but in the art of classifying and using facts.’ Each mind has some ways in which it works most easily and efficiently; let us discover and arrange for these, and reap the rewards. Then it is time to remember Dante’s saying that ‘sitting upon down one cometh not to fame,’ and Whistler’s that ‘drudgery leads to felicity,’ and Emerson’s that ‘inspiration is the sister of daily labor.’ Newton made his discoveries ‘simply by always thinking about them.’ Darwin’s method was as elaborate as it was successful—with portfolios of abstracts, memoranda, and references; detailed, general, and classified indexes for books; brief, then full, then minute outlines before beginning to write. Concentration and intensity of thought come almost of themselves through such a system. Darwin’s practice, too, of writing rapidly and later correcting deliberately, reaped the reward of both states of mind without suffering the loss involved in continually changing from one adjustment to another,—that drain of energy which makes interruptions so wasteful, even to minds that focus quickly. Wisely controlled change combines the benefits of continuity and variety. The scientist, whose study requires muscular as well as mental activity, tires less easily than the scholar busied wholly with books. Varying the adjustment of the same part, or successively occupying different parts of the mechanism, is more refreshing than total relaxation.

“While thus adapted to the mental mechanism, a successful system must also be adjustable to the material in hand. Observation must be receptive, reading selective. Poets may harvest their dreams; historians must winnow their documents. Goethe’s ‘vast abundance of objects that must be before us ere we can think upon them,’ and Hawthorne’s ‘immense amount of history that it takes to make a little literature,’ must be provided for, along with Pater’s selection and rejection—‘all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.’ Every system ought to provide, at any time and in any place, some form of record, careful enough to be permanent, yet so simple as not to be wasteful if never used—an envelope that can contain data or be written upon itself meets these needs. A system for preservation and arrangement must be comprehensive enough to include everything, accurate enough to make everything available, flexible enough to vary with any need, yet so simple as not to become a tax. Few devices are better than Darwin’s labelled portfolios, or smaller envelopes arranged alphabetically or logically. Note-books are useful only when abstracted or indexed. There are clergymen whose sermons write themselves as particular texts accumulate references in the interleaved Bibles in which they note what interests them. For coördination and organization few things equal a tabular abstract on a single sheet of paper large enough to show at a glance the nature of all the material. Such implements influence intellectual efficiency more than we suppose. Much crabbed writing is due to bad pens, much journalistic ease to soft pencils. Self-realization and the sense of life depend upon some form of diary; style varies with dictation and the typewriter.

“The chief criteria of mental efficiency, then,” read Professor Maturin, with a glance at the clock, “lie between Matthew Arnold’s definitions of genius—‘mainly an affair of energy’ and ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains.’ Professor James, holding that the average man uses only a small part of his energy, would have us persist through fatigue and ‘second wind,’ perhaps to a third and a fourth. Even if experiment, however, did not show that working beyond the fatigue point yields a rapidly decreasing product at a rapidly increasing cost, it would be uneconomic to attempt to increase our flow of energy so long as we waste so much of what we have in inefficient and unhygienic methods of work. Let us rather study the conditions of our best moments, clear away hindrances, and provide helps. Let us prize the spontaneous activity of each state, using fortunate moments for concentration, less efficient periods for accumulation and selection, looking to future coördination. Let us follow natural rhythms of activity, relaxing primary activities by secondary functions useful also in themselves. Thus regularity and routine will develop speed; accumulation and economy end in ripeness. Quantity condenses into quality; selection and arrangement grow into judgment and intuition that may bear inspiration and vision. ‘A man’s vision,’ says Professor James, ‘is the great thing about him.’ The natural history of such vision, however, indicates that it is scarcely more than the synthetic apex of long and careful accumulation. The moment of the aperçu is so memorable that the conditions precedent are usually forgotten, but the precious brilliance of the diamond is merely the result of a happy crystallization of common elements.

“For all of which,” concluded Professor Maturin with a smile, as he closed his portfolio, “I bespeak your most esteemed consideration.”

XI
The Mystery of Dress

PROFESSOR Maturin was leaning sidewise on his cane, gazing at the river. I stood by his side several moments before he came out of his reverie, greeted me warmly, and proposed a walk along the Drive.

“I was thinking,” said he, “of Fitzgerald’s falling overboard and coming up serenely, still wearing his top hat. This morning, while reading Scarron’s sonnet on the decay of the pyramids and his black doublet, I noticed that I too needed a new coat. Later, I lunched with one colleague who is as dressy as Disraeli, and another who goes almost as much out at elbows as Napoleon when he entered Moscow. I have just left a third, who is devoted to Lowell’s favorite combination of short coat and top hat. That brought me, by way of Old Fitz, to a general contemplation of the custom of wearing clothes. Hast any such philosophy in thee, shepherd?”

“But little, I fear,” replied I, “unless Carlyle’s will do.”

“Scarcely, if you mean ‘Sartor Resartus,’” was his answer. “Do you believe that man, by nature a naked animal, is demoralized by clothes, and that a return to nudity would dissolve society? On the contrary, when Humphrey Howarth, the surgeon, went to a duel naked for fear of the infection of cloth in a gunshot wound, his antagonist came to his senses and withdrew his challenge. Of course, I agree that whatever represents spirit is a kind of clothing, and that wisdom looks through vestures to realities. But clothes in ‘Sartor’ are merely the beginning of a philosophy of things in general. Carlyle’s irritation when Browning called on him in a green riding-coat, and his own refusal to carry an umbrella are more to my point. It is obviously appropriate that George Borrow should always have carried an umbrella, I understand how Goethe could ignore waistcoats and Coleridge forget his shirt, but why did Dickens dress like a dandy and Swinburne like a farmer? What do clothes mean?”

“They sometimes represent the state of their owners’ finances,” said I. “Lack of suitable clothing made Poe decline dinners and Johnson dine behind the screen—if he really did.”

“And Lovelace vary between cloth of gold and rags,” continued Professor Maturin meditatively, “much as Rembrandt varies his dress in his portraits of himself. But that was when one man would wear the worth of a thousand oaks and a hundred oxen, when mantles were conferred by royal patent, and orders grew rich out of hat monopolies. To-day, however, in spite of adulterations that I am told call for a pure textile law, few of us are in need either of Pepys’ prayers to be able to pay his tailor, or of Lord Westminster’s thrifty making over his servants’ liveries for himself.

“Habit influences us more than cost, but what influences habit? Why did Milton always wear black, Pope gray, and Lamb snuff color? Why did distributing his cast clothes ‘disconsolate and intender’ Montaigne? Why did Tennyson send his old clothes to be measured for new ones? Why do I find myself repeating an outfit I once chose because it suggested what naturalists call protective coloration—when an animal, like a squirrel on a tree-trunk, is scarcely distinguishable from its background? Do I make a good principle gloss a dull habit?”

“Such a habit,” I replied, “like George Fox’s suit of leather, does deprive you of the interest that accompanies even unsuccessful effort for variety. The fairer sex is never wearied in its quest of beautiful garb, nor sated with the rapture of attainment.”

“How curiously we have changed all that,” replied Professor Maturin, “in the three centuries since James Howell said that a letter should be attired simply, like a woman; an oration richly, like a man. I would not, like him, have putting on a clean shirt an occasion for special prayer; but perhaps we have gone too far in our neglect of finery. Dr. Holmes’s counsel, ‘always err upon the safe side,’ may be too cautious. Allingham says that Leigh Hunt was old in street costume, but young in his dressing-gown. Perhaps Goldsmith’s satin, or Jefferson’s plush, or Mark Twain’s white flannels would renew my youth.”

“Are you elated by your scarlet gown on Commencement Day?” said I.

“By no means so much as the boys are,” he replied with a chuckle. “But that suggests another aspect of the matter. Outward and visible signs move those who are blind to inward graces. Since Protestantism is retrieving some of its banished ceremonial, it might advance learning to clothe it with more circumstance. Yet, we seem to hesitate at symbolic clothing. Police and military uniforms help law and order, but we tolerate ecclesiastical, judicial, and academic costume only during the performance of specific functions. We are so far from intellectual blue-stockings and political sans-culottes, that we smile at musicians’ hair and painters’ cloaks, and banish yachting and golf clothes from every-day wear.

“Simplicity seems the only unwritten law that has succeeded so many written ones concerning clothes. Tradition itself is weak. We wear the Roman orator’s neck-cloth, the wrist-bands that marked the gentleman’s freedom from manual labor, the nobleman’s black evening clothes, the courtier’s sword-belt and gauntlet buttons, and a sailor king’s long trousers—but all because we wish to, or, at least, do not mind. Names are naught, whether of mackintoshes or cravenettes or bluchers or tam-o’-shanters. We ignore even fashion, with its ever varying promise of equality to the uncomely and its powerful economic urge. We are emancipated by a common sense in clothes that would have jailed a man in Addison’s day.

“We may dress as we like, so long as we are inconspicuous, but we must be that. We will no longer tolerate clothes-advertising like the Admirable Crichton’s. The man who lost his lawsuit for damages because his horse ran away when he saw the first top hat in England, would recover at least costs to-day. Gautier deserved the mobbing his pink doublet cost him. Tennyson was right to charge a young woman with creaking stays, and to apologize when he found that the sound came from his own braces.”

“What other principles would you adduce?” said I.

“A modicum of care,” he continued, “in agreement with Plato and Ruskin, that ‘clothes carefully cared for and rightly worn, show a balanced mind.’ I would have clothes appropriate, too, to climate, use, and the individuality of the wearer. I was once advised, most profitably, by a friendly portrait painter as to what was appropriate to my figure, features, and coloring. He objected especially to my hats.

“It is curious how difficult hats are,” continued Professor Maturin, after a pause that I forbore to break. “I doubt if any one, except Fortunatus, ever had a perfect one. The Greeks were wise in having little to do with them—suppose all Greek statues had their straw bonnets tied under the chin! Indeed, hats are chiefly developments of the last five centuries, and, it is said, baldness with them. Yet, Synesius wrote ‘In Praise of Baldness;’ Caesar prized the privilege of continually wearing a laurel crown because it hid his, and I do not know why else the academic mortar-board comes down so far behind. I will not wear a ventilating hat like Rossetti’s, although I long for summer and the straws that America has done so much to popularize.

“I am too thin for the comfortable Tennysonian sombrero. I enjoy, as a dressing-gown, a cowled Capuchin robe that I once had made on Lake Orta, because of my theory that the flowering of the monastic mind in the Middle Ages was due to the germinating heat of hoods. But, generally, I would emulate an acquaintance who usually carries his hat in his hand, or another who actually owns none, were that not too conspicuous. Even Leigh Hunt’s charming essay on ‘Hats, Ancient and Modern’ has no help for me—although I believe I might like a cocked hat or a chapeau.

“I can take comfort in a coat,” he continued, “if it is loose; and in overcoats, if they resemble Socrates’ cloak, or the cloak that Petrarch bequeathed to Boccaccio. Indeed, I should welcome a return to shawls. I am uncomfortable in any neckwear but black, or in any but reindeer gray gloves. I should disesteem trousers had I not once inadvertently worn a striped pair with evening clothes—since then I have respected their power. In shoes I emulate Wellington’s care, for, like William Morris, I need rather large ones. And I enjoy canes as much as Wellington did umbrellas.”

“All of which,” said I, as we reached Professor Maturin’s door, “even if unvaried, is sufficiently sober, appropriate, and individual.”

“And simple enough,” concluded he, “for Frederick the Great or Newton. But, most of all, I wish that the Germans would extend their investigations in the hygiene of clothing. If we knew more about that, we might trust its architecture and ornamentation to any discriminating tailor.”

XII
Questions at Issue

THE Sindbad Society at its last meeting—on the night of the full moon, according to custom—met within the hospitable doors of the Ollapod Club. There, in the room with the roses on the ceiling, we had for dinner caviare with limes, a thin mushroom soup, duck roasted over spice-wood, Turinese pepperoni of chilies and preserved grapes, Leghorn coffee, and Turkish sweetmeats.

The archaeologist was hot against such modern abuses as motor boats in Venice, and motor cars on what he called the finest roads in the world—those from Nice to Genoa, Amalfi to Sorrento, and Ragusa to Gravosa. But when the diplomat begged him also to ban the ancient and dishonorable dogs from Constantinople, he became resigned to life’s little ironies, and, in response to a general request, described quite wonderfully how, after years of fruitless digging, he had found a royal tomb in Egypt, and entered its hot silence, to find its stately presences, its furniture and linen, its sacrificial bread and incense and flowers, all with their sense of yesterday enduring through the ages.

This prompted the musician, who was reared in Turkey, to tell how an Arab sheik he used to visit in the desert always bore with him the same atmosphere of untold centuries. The colonel followed, queerly enough, by saying that in his aeroplane tests he always had the same impression of the endless duration of time. Then some one broke the happy spell, as people will, with something clever and distracting, although the joke was good enough—James Howell’s on people who “travel much but see little, like Jonah in the whale.”

At that the talk scattered, the colonel describing Coromandel and Malabar, the biologist a boat he was building, the mountain-climber planning for Alaska, and the painter for Japan, until the psychologist asked the last why he was going there.

The painter bent his head sidewise for a moment, as he does when he is thoughtful, and then said: “Partly for the natural beauty, but chiefly to study an art that does not disturb the truth of its impressions by conscious theories like our perspective; that honors color and emotion as well as line and thought.”

“Your psychology is sound,” commented the other. “Color vision is very organic, which is to say, emotional; being apparently caused by minute chemical changes in the eye, under the action of light. The appreciation of line, on the other hand, seems to be due to mental association with touching and feeling, and therefore is rather a matter of attention and judgment.”

“Will you kindly explain me also?” asked the musician, who had been telling how no one knows his own voice in a phonograph, because every one hears his own speech reverberate through his inner, as well as his outer ear.

“Music is the most emotional and the most rhythmical of the arts,” continued the psychologist, “because the auditory nerve keeps close company in the brain with nerves from the heart and lungs. Melody is merely a series of answers to the body’s expectation of its usual rhythm. As one of your own critics has said, when music seems to be yearning for the unutterable it is only yearning for the next note.”

The musician quelled the psychologist with an imaginary baton, which he then pointed at the biologist, saying, “Pray prove to the psychologist that he is nothing but pulp.”

“He is surely little else,” smiled the biologist, “built by evolution and run by a chemical engine.”

“Out on you scientists and your evolution!” broke in the archaeologist. “Can your mechanism make a Raphael, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven? Can your evolution show any architecture, sculpture, statecraft, drama, or philosophy equal to those of the age of Pericles? The world will produce nothing fine or permanent so long as you fellows tinker with its machinery. Your heresy of universal progress is merely a contemporary mythology that is falser than—”

“Softly, softly,” said Professor Maturin, shaking his long forefinger at the disputants. “The true philosopher, with Dante, loves every part of wisdom. Why can we not all enjoy knowing that cats hear better than dogs, and, at the same time, appreciate Blake’s saying that the sun is not a round ball of fire, but the glory of the universe?”

Everybody prepared to be mollified until Professor Maturin undid his peacemaking by asking the astronomer to tell us all what a comet looked like. When the astronomer replied that he had not looked through a telescope for years, but spent his time entirely in making calculations, the archaeologist threw up his hands and moved over to the painter and the musician, growling that he was going to spend the rest of the evening talking to somebody he understood.

I heard the two eagerly agree with him that the Nile was the finest river in the world, if you were there in November, but that you ought never go to Japan except in summer, and then I moved to other groups, where the mountaineer was comparing the view of the eternal snows from Darjeeling with that of valley, river, and sea from Mount Wellington, in Tasmania; or the diplomat was telling about Bulgaria; or the importer describing the Taj Mahal by moonlight; or the psychologist quoting, with a twinkle toward the archaeologist, Sir Francis Galton’s saying, that men who are too bad for Europe go to Constantinople, those who are too bad for Constantinople go to Cairo, and those who are too bad for Cairo go to Khartoum.

Everybody talked for a long while, since this was the last meeting for the year, and in spite of the earlier disagreement, which was, perhaps, more apparent than real, I remember the evening as one of especial illumination.

XIII
The Fountain of Youth

PROFESSOR Maturin’s study lamps were dimmed to the mellow glow that makes good talk. But his coffee and cigars were so worthy of the dinner we had just ended that we continued to smoke in silent content, until our host asked about the Vicar’s vacation.

“My plans are about as usual,” answered that worthy, naming his sea-shore place without enthusiasm.

“Mine, too, are about the same,” added Professor Maturin, naming his similar place, with a similar lack of interest.

The Physician hemmed severely and shifted in his chair. “Let us have it,” smiled Professor Maturin.

“Why will you act as though you were a hundred years old?” said he.

“Perhaps we feel so, sometimes,” replied Professor Maturin, while the Vicar nodded. “I fancy we would not ignore the fountain of youth, if we knew where it was.”

“It isn’t far,” retorted the Physician; “it’s merely open air and exercise.”

“I love open air,” said Professor Maturin, “but I hate what is usually called exercise.”