Produced by Al Haines

WALKING-STICK PAPERS

BY

ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY

1918

AS A CAT MAY LOOK AT A KING

SO I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE DOINGS TO

THREE FINE MEN:

W. C. BROWNELL

HILAIRE BELLOC

ROYAL CORTISSOZ

BECAUSE THEY REPRESENT TO MY MIND

THE BEST THINGS GOING:

THE PURE MILK OF THE WORD

FOREWORD

These little records of some excursions made by what Mr. James called "a visiting mind" first saw the light of public countenance in the pages of various publications. "On Going to Art Exhibitions" has been much expanded since its appearance in Vanity Fair. In The Unpopular Review the original title of "That Reviewer 'Cuss'" was brought into harmony with the dignity of its setting by being changed to "The Hack Reviewer." "A Clerk May Look at a Celebrity" was printed in the New York Times under the head "Glimpses of Celebrities." This paper has been included in this collection at the request of several distinguished gentlemen who have been so unfortunate as to lose their newspaper clippings of the article. That several of the personages figuring in this and one or two other of these papers have passed away since these papers were written seems to be thought an additional reason for reprinting these essays here. The Bellman fell for "Caun't Speak the Language"; the New York Tribune, "Humours of the Bookshop"; The Independent, "Reading After Thirty," "You Are an American" appeared in the New York Sun; where the head "An American Reviewer in London" was substituted for the title of "Literary Levities in London." The following papers were contributed to the New York Evening Post: "The Fish Reporter," "On Going a Journey," "A Roundabout Paper," "Henry James, Himself," "Memories of a Manuscript," "Why Men Can't Read Novels by Women," "The Dessert of Life," "Hunting Lodgings," "My Friend, the Policeman," "Help Wanted," "Human Municipal Documents," "As to People," "A Town Constitutional," and "On Wearing a Hat." "On Carrying a Cane" appeared in The Bookman. I thank the editors of the publications named for permission to reprint these papers here. R. C. H.

New York, 1918.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: ON CARRYING A CANE

I THE FISH REPORTER II ON GOING A JOURNEY III GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS IV A ROUNDABOUT PAPER V THAT REVIEWER "CUSS" VI LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDON VII HENRY JAMES, HIMSELF VIII MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT IX "YOU ARE AN AMERICAN" X WHY MEN CAN'T READ NOVELS BY WOMEN XI THE DESSERT OF LIFE XII A CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY XIII CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE XIV HUNTING LODGINGS XV MY FRIEND, THE POLICEMAN XVI HELP WANTED—MALE, FEMALE XVII HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS XVIII AS TO PEOPLE XIX HUMOURS OF THE BOOK SHOP XX THE DECEASED XXI A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL XXII READING AFTER THIRTY

EPILOGUE: ON WEARING A HAT

WALKING-STICK PAPERS

PROLOGUE

ON CARRYING A CANE

Some people, without doubt, are born with a deep instinct for carrying a cane; some consciously acquire the habit of carrying a cane; and some find themselves in a position where the matter of carrying a cane is thrust upon them.

Canes are carried in all parts of the world, and have been carried—or that which was the forefather of them has been carried—since human history began. Indeed, a very fair account of mankind might be made by writing the story, of its canes. And nothing that would readily occur to mind would more eloquently express a civilisation than its evident attitude toward canes. Perhaps nothing can more subtly convey the psychology of a man than his feeling about a cane.

The prehistoric ape, we are justified in assuming, struggled upright upon a cane. The cane, so to speak, with which primitive man wooed his bride, defended his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and brought down his food, was (like all canes which are in good taste) admirably chosen for the occasion. The spear, the stave, the pilgrim's staff, the sword, the sceptre—always has the cane-carrying animal borne something in his hand. And, down the long vista of the past, the cane, in its various manifestations, has ever been the mark of strength, and so of dignity. Thus as a man originally became a gentleman, or a king, by force of valour, the cane in its evolution has ever been the symbol of a superior caste.

A man cannot do manual labour carrying a cane. And it would be a moral impossibility for one of servile state—a butler, for instance, or a ticket-chopper—to present himself in the role of his occupation ornamented with a cane. One held in custody would not be permitted to appear before a magistrate flaunting a cane. Until the stigma which attaches to his position may be erased he would be shorn of this mark of nobility, the cane.

Canes are now carried mostly by the very youthful and the very aged, the powerful, the distinguished, the patrician, the self-important, and those who fancy to exalt themselves. Some, to whom this privilege is denied during the week by their fear of adverse public opinion, carry canes only on Sundays and holidays. By this it is shown that on these days they are their own masters.

Custom as to carrying canes varies widely in different parts of the world; but it may be taken as a general maxim that the farther west you go the less you see of canes. The instinct for carrying a cane is more natural in old civilisations, where the tradition is of ancient growth, than in newer ones, where frequently a cane is regarded as the sign of an effete character. As we have been saying, canes, we all feel, have an affinity with the idea of an aristocracy. If you do not admit that the idea of an aristocracy is a good one, then doubtless you are down on canes. It is interesting to observe that canes have flourished at all especially chivalrous periods and in all especially chivalrous communities. No illustrator would portray a young planter of the Old South without his cane; and that fragrant old-school figure, a southern "Colonel," without his cane is inconceivable. Canes connote more or less leisure. They convey a subtle insinuation of some degree of culture.

They always are a familiar article of a gentleman's dress in warm climates. The cane, quite strictly speaking, in fact has its origin in warm countries. For properly speaking, the word cane should be restricted in its application to a peculiar class of palms, known as ratans, included under the closely allied genera Calamus and Daemonorops, of which there are a large number of species. These plants, the Encyclopedia tells us, are found widely extended throughout the islands of the Indian Archipelago, the Malay Peninsula, China, India and Ceylon; and examples have also been found in Australia and Africa. The learned Rumphius describes them, under the name of Palmijunci, as inhabitants of dense forests into which the rays of the sun scarce can penetrate, where they form spiny bushes, obstructing the passage through the jungle. They rise to the top of the tallest trees and fall again so as to resemble a great length of cable, adorned, however, with the most beautiful leaves, pinnated or terminating in graceful tendrils. The plants creep or trail along to an enormous length, sometimes, it is said, reaching five hundred feet. Two examples of Calamus verus, measuring respectively two hundred and seventy feet and two hundred and thirty feet, were exhibited in the Paris exhibition of 1855.

The well-known Malacca canes are obtained from Calamus Scipionum, the stems of which are much stouter than is the case with the average species of Calamus. Doubtless to the vulgar a Malacca cane is merely a Malacca cane. There are, however, in this interesting world choice spirits who make a cult of Malacca canes, just as some dog fanciers are devotees of the Airedale terrier. Such as these know that inferior Malacca canes are, as the term in the cane trade is, "shaved"; that is, not being of the circumference most coveted, but too thick, they have been whittled down in bulk. A prime Malacca cane is, of course, a natural stem, and it is a nice point to have a slight irregularity in its symmetry as evidence of this. The delicious spotting of a Malacca cane is due to the action of the sun upon it in drying. As the stems are dried in sheaves, those most richly splotched are the ones that have been at the outside of the bundle. What new strength to meet life's troubles, what electric expansion of soul, come to the initiated upon the feel of the vertebra of his Malacca cane!

The name of cane is also applied to many plants besides the Calamus, which are possessed of long, slender, reed-like stalks or stems, as, for instance, the sugar-cane, or the reed-cane. From the use as walking-sticks to which many of these plants have been applied, the name cane has been given generally to "sticks" irrespective of the source from which they are derived.

Our distinguished grandfathers carried canes, frequently handsome gold-headed ones, especially if they were ministers. Bishops, or "Presiding Elders;" when, in those mellow times, it was the custom for a congregation to present its minister with a gold-headed cane duly inscribed. Our fathers of some consequence carried canes of a gentlemanly pattern, often ones with ivory handles. Though in the days when those of us now sometime grown were small one had to have arrived at the dignity of at least middle-age before it was seemly for one to carry a cane. In England, however, and particularly at Eton, it has long been a common practice for small aristocrats to affect canes.

The dandies, fops, exquisites, and beaux of picturesque and courtly ages were, of course, very partial to canes, and sometimes wore them attached to the wrist by a thong. It has been the custom of the Surgeon of the King of England to carry a "Gold Headed Cane." This cane has been handed down to the various incumbents of this office since the days of Dr. John Radcliffe, who was the first holder of the cane. It has been used for two hundred years or more by the greatest physicians and surgeons in the world, who succeeded to it. "The Gold Headed Cane" was adorned by a cross-bar at the top instead of a knob. The fact is explained by Munk, in that Radcliffe, the first owner, was a rule unto himself and possibly preferred this device as a mark of distinction beyond the knob used by physicians in general. Men of genius now and then have found in their choice of a cane an opportunity for the play of their eccentricity, such a celebrated cane being the tall wand of Whistler. Among the relics of great men preserved in museums for the inspiration of the people canes generally are to be found. We have all looked upon the cane of George Washington at Mount Vernon and the walking-stick of Carlyle in Cheyne Walk. And is each not eloquent of the man who cherished it?

Freak canes are displayed here and there by persons of a pleasantly bizarre turn of mind: canes encased in the hide of an elephant's tail, canes that have been intricately carven by some Robinson Crusoe, or canes of various other such species of curiosity. There is a veteran New York journalist who will be glad to show any student of canes one which he prizes highly that was made from the limb of a tree upon which a friend of his was hanged. In our age of handy inventions a type of cane is manufactured in combination with an umbrella.

Canes are among the useful properties of the theatre. He would be a decidedly incomplete villain who did not carry a cane. Imaginative literature is rich in canes. Who ever heard of a fairy godmother without a cane? Who with any feeling for terror has not been startled by the tap, tap of the cane of old Pew in "Treasure Island"? There is an awe and a pathos in canes, too, for they are the light to blind men. And the romance of canes is further illustrated in this: they, with rags and the wallet, have been among the traditional accoutrements of beggars, the insignia of the "dignity springing from the very depth of desolation; as, to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go in livery." J. M. Barrie was so fond of an anecdote of a cane that he employed it several times in his earlier fiction. This was the story of a young man who had a cane with a loose knob, which in society he would slyly shake so that it tumbled off, when he would exclaim: "Yes, that cane is like myself; it always loses its head in the presence of ladies."

Canes have figured prominently in humour. The Irishman's shillelagh was for years a conspicuous feature of the comic press. And there will instantly come to every one's mind that immortal passage in "Tristram Shandy." Trim is discoursing upon life and death:

"Are we not here now, continued the Corporal (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health and stability)—and are we not (dropping his hat upon the ground) gone! in a moment!—'Twas infinitely striking! Susannah burst into a flood of tears."

Canes are not absent from poetry. Into your ears already has come the refrain of "The Last Leaf":

"And totters o'er the ground,
With his cane."

And, doubtless, floods of instances of canes that the world will not willingly let die will occur to one upon a moment's reflection.

Canes are inseparable from art. All artists carry them; and the poorer the artist the more attached is he to his cane. Canes are indispensable to the simple vanity of the Bohemian. One of the most memorable drawings of Steinlen depicts the quaint soul of a child of the Latin Quarter: an elderly Bohemian, very much frayed, advances wreathed in the sunshine of his boutonniere and cane. Canes are invariably an accompaniment of learning. Sylvester Bonnard would of course not be without his cane; nor would any other true book-worm, as may be seen any day in the reading-room of the British Museum and of the New York Public Library. It is, indeed, indisputable that canes, more than any other article of dress, are peculiarly related to the mind. There is an old book-seller on Fourth Avenue whose clothes when he dies, like the boots of Michelangelo, probably will require to be pried loose from him, so incessantly has he worn them within the memory of man. None has ever looked upon him in the open air without his cane. And is not that emblem of omniscience and authority, the schoolmaster's ferule, directly of the cane family? So large has the cane loomed in the matter of chastisement that the word cane has become a verb, to cane.

There was (in the days before the war) a military man (friend of mine), a military man of the old school, in whom could be seen, shining like a flame, a man's great love of a cane. He had lived a portion of his life in South America, and he used to promenade every pleasant afternoon up and down the Avenue swinging a sharply pointed, steel-ferruled swagger-stick. "What's the use of carrying that ridiculous thing around town?" some one said to him one day.

"That!" he rumbled in reply (he was one of the roarers among men), "why, that's to stab scorpions with."

They've buried him, I heard, in Flanders; on his breast (I hope), his cane.

"When a Red Cross platoon," says a news despatch of the other day, "was advancing to the aid of scores of wounded men. Surgeon William J. McCracken of the British Medical Corps ordered all to take cover, and himself advanced through the enemy's fire, bearing a Red Cross flag on his walking-stick."

Indeed, the Great War is one of the most thrilling, momentous and colourful chapters in the history of canes. "The officers picked up their canes," says the newspaper, and so forth, and so forth. Captain A. Radclyffe Dugmore, in a spirited drawing of the Battle of the Somme, shows an officer leading a charge waving a light cane. As an emblem of rank the cane among our Allies has apparently supplanted the sword. Something of the dapper, cocky look of our brothers in arms on our streets undoubtedly is due to their canes. One never sees a British, French or Italian officer in the rotogravure sections without his cane. We should be as startled to see General Haig or the Prince of Wales without a cane as without a leg. With our own soldiers the cane does not seem to be so much the thing, at least over here. I have a friend, however, who went away a private with a rifle over his shoulder. The other day came news from him that he had become a sergeant, and, perhaps as proof of this, a photograph of himself wearing a tin hat and with a cane in his hand. It is also to be observed now and then that a lady in uniformed service appears to regard it as an added military touch to swing a cane.

Women as well as men play their part in the colourful story of the cane. The shepherdess's crook might be regarded as the precursor of canes for ladies. In Merrie England in the age when the May-pole flourished it was fashionable, we know from pictures, for comely misses and grandes dames to sport tall canes mounted with silver or gold and knotted with a bow of ribbon. The dowager duchess of romantic story has always appeared leaning upon her cane. Do not we so see the rich aunt of Hawden Crawley? And Mr. Walpole's Duchess of Wrexe, certainly, was supported in her domination of the old order of things by a cane. The historic old croons of our own early days smoked a clay or a corn-cob pipe and went bent upon a cane.

In England to-day it is swagger for women to carry sticks—in the country. And here the thoughtful spectator of the human scene notes a nice point. It is not etiquette, according to English manners, for a woman to carry a cane in town. Some American ladies who admire and would emulate English customs have not been made acquainted with this delicate nuance of taste, and so are very unfashionable when they would be ultra-fashionable.

Anybody returning from the Alps should bring back an Alpine stock with him; every one who has visited Ireland upon his return has presented some close friend with a blackthorn stick; nobody has made a walking tour of England without an ash stick. In London all adult males above the rank of costers carry "sticks"; in New York sticks are customary with many who would be ashamed to assume them did they live in the Middle West, where the infrequent sticks to be seen upon the city streets are in many cases the sign of transient mummers. And yet it is a curious fact that in communities where the stick is conspicuously absent from the streets it is commonly displayed in show-windows, in company with cheap suits and decidedly loud gloves. Another odd circumstance is this: trashy little canes hawked by sidewalk venders generally appear with the advent of toy balloons for sale on days of big parades.

In Jamaica, Long Island, the visitor would probably see canes in the hands only of prosperous coloured gentlemen. And than this fact probably nothing throws more light on the winning nature of the coloured race, and on the character and function of canes. In San Francisco—but the adequate story, the Sartor Resartus—the World as Canes, remains to be written.

This, of course, is the merest essay into this vast and significant subject.

I

THE FISH REPORTER

Men of genius, blown by the winds of chance, have been, now and then, mariners, bar-keeps, schoolmasters, soldiers, politicians, clergymen, and what not. And from these pursuits have they sucked the essence of yarns and in the setting of these activities found a flavour to stir and to charm hearts untold. Now, it is a thousand pities that no man of genius has ever been a fish reporter. Thus has the world lost great literary treasure, as it is highly probable that there is not under the sun any prospect so filled with the scents and colours of story as that presented by the commerce in fish.

Take whale oil. Take the funny old buildings on Front Street, out of paintings, I declare, by Howard Pyle, where the large merchants in whale oil are. Take salt fish. Do you know the oldest salt-fish house in America, down by Coenties Slip? Ah! you should. The ghost of old Long John Silver, I suspect, smokes an occasional pipe in that old place. And many are the times I've seen the slim shade of young Jim Hawkins come running out. Take Labrador cod for export to the Mediterranean lands or to Porto Rico via New York. Take herrings brought to this port from Iceland, from Holland, and from Scotland; mackerel from Ireland, from the Magdalen Islands, and from Cape Breton; crabmeat from Japan; fishballs from Scandinavia; sardines from Norway and from France; caviar from Russia; shrimp which comes from Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia, or salmon from Alaska, and Puget Sound, and the Columbia River.

Take the obituaries of fishermen. "In his prime, it is said, there was not a better skipper in the Gloucester fishing fleet." Take disasters to schooners, smacks, and trawlers. "The crew were landed, but lost all their belongings." New vessels, sales, etc. "The sealing schooner Tillie B., whose career in the South Seas is well known, is reported to have been sold to a moving-picture firm." Sponges from the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. "To most people, familiar only with the sponges of the shops, the animal as it comes from the sea would be rather unrecognisable." Why, take anything you please! It is such stuff as stories are. And as you eat your fish from the store how little do you reck of the glamour of what you are doing!

However, as it seems to me unlikely that a man of genius will be a fish reporter shortly I will myself do the best I can to paint the tapestry of the scenes of his calling. The advertisement in the newspaper read: "Wanted—Reporter for weekly trade paper." Many called, but I was chosen. Though, doubtless, no man living knew less about fish than I.

The news stands are each like a fair, so laden are they with magazines in bright colours. It would seem almost as if there were a different magazine for every few hundred and seven-tenth person, as the statistics put these matters. And yet, it seems, there is a vast, a very vast, periodical literature of which we, that is, magazine readers in general, know nothing whatever. There is, for one, that fine, old, standard publication, Barrel and Box, devoted to the subjects and the interests of the coopering industry; there is, too, The Dried Fruit Packer and Western Canner, as alert a magazine as one could wish—in its kind; and from the home of classic American literature comes The New England Tradesman and Grocer. And so on. At the place alone where we went to press twenty-seven trade journals were printed every week, from one for butchers to one for bankers.

The Fish Industries Gazette—Ah, yes! For some reason not clear (though it is an engaging thing, I think) the word "gazette" is the great word among the titles of trade journals. There are The Jewellers' Gazette and The Women's Wear Gazette and The Poulterers' Gazette (of London), and The Maritime Gazette (of Halifax), and other gazettes quite without number. This word "gazette" makes its appeal, too, curiously enough, to those who christen country papers; and trade journals have much of the intimate charm of country papers. The "trade" in each case is a kind of neighbourly community, separated in its parts by space, but joined in unity of sympathy. "Personals" are a vital feature of trade papers. "Walter Conner, who for some time has conducted a bakery and fish market at Hudson, N.Y., has removed to Fort Edward, leaving his brother Ed in charge at the Hudson place of business."

The Fish Industries Gazette, as I say, was one of several in its field, in friendly rivalry with The Oyster Trade and Fisherman and The Pacific Fisheries. It comprized two departments: the fresh fish and oyster department, and myself. I was, as an editorial announcement said at the beginning of my tenure of office, a "reorganisation of our salt, smoked, and pickled fish department." The delectable, mellow spirit of the country paper, so removed from the crash and whirr of metropolitan journalism, rested in this, too, that upon the Gazette I did practically everything on the paper except the linotyping. Reporter, editorial writer, exchange editor, make-up man, proof-reader, correspondent, advertisement solicitor, was I.

As exchange editor, did I read all the papers in the English language in eager search of fish news. And while you are about the matter, just find me a finer bit of literary style evoking the romance of the vast wastes of the moving sea, in Stevenson, Defoe, anywhere you please, than such a news item as this: "Capt. Ezra Pound, of the bark Elnora, of Salem, Mass., spoke a lonely vessel in latitude this and longitude that, September 8. She proved to be the whaler Wanderer, and her captain said that she had been nine months at sea, that all on board were well, and that he had stocked so many barrels of whale oil."

As exchange editor was it my business to peruse reports from Eastport, Maine, to the effect that one of the worst storms in recent years had destroyed large numbers of the sardine weirs there. To seek fish recipes, of such savoury sound as those for "broiled redsnapper," "shrimps bordelaise," and "baked fish croquettes." To follow fishing conditions in the North Sea occasioned by the Great War. To hunt down jokes of piscatory humour. "The man who drinks like a fish does not take kindly to water.—Exchange." To find other "fillers" in the consular reports and elsewhere: "Fish culture in India," "1800 Miles in a Dory," "Chinese Carp for the Philippines," "Americans as Fish Eaters." And, to use a favourite term of trade papers, "etc., etc." Then to "paste up" the winnowed fruits of this beguiling research.

As editorial writer, to discuss the report of the commission recently sent by congress to the Pribilof Islands, Alaska, to report on the condition of our national herd of fur seals; to discuss the official interpretation here of the Government ruling on what constitutes "boneless" codfish; to consider the campaign in Canada to promote there a more popular consumption of fish, and to brightly remark apropos of this that "a fish a day keeps the doctor away"; to review the current issue of The Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan, containing leading articles on "Are Fishing Motor Boats Able to Encourage in Our Country" and "Fisherman the Late Mr. H. Yamaguchi Well Known"; to combat the prejudice against dogfish as food, a prejudice like that against eels, in some quarters eyed askance as "calling cousins with the great sea-serpent," as Juvenal says; to call attention to the doom of one of the most picturesque monuments in the story of fish, the passing of the pleasant and celebrated old Trafalgar Hotel at Greenwich, near London, scene of the famous Ministerial white-bait dinners of the days of Pitt; to make a jest on an exciting idea suggested by some medical man that some of the features of a Ritz-Carlton Hotel, that is, baths, be introduced into the fo'c's'les of Grand Banks fishing vessels; to keep an eye on the activities of our Bureau of Fisheries; to hymn a praise to the monumental new Fish Pier at Boston; to glance at conditions at the premier fish market of the world, Billingsgate; to herald the fish display at the Canadian National Exhibition at Toronto, and, indeed, etc., and again etc.

As general editorial roustabout, to find each week a "leader," a translation, say, from In Allgemeine Fishcherei-Zeitwung, or Economic Circular No. 10, "Mussels in the Tributaries of the Missouri," or the last biennial report of the Superintendent of Fisheries of Wisconsin, or a scientific paper on "The Porpoise in Captivity" reprinted by permission of Zoologica, of the New York Zoological Society. To find each week for reprint a poem appropriate in sentiment to the feeling of the paper. One of the "Salt Water Ballads" would do, or John Masefield singing of "the whale's way," or "Down to the white dipping sails;" or Rupert Brooke: "And in that heaven of all their wish. There shall be no more land, say fish"; or a "weather rhyme" about "mackerel skies," when "you're sure to get a fishing day"; or something from the New York Sun about "the lobster pots of Maine"; or Oliver Herford, in the Century, "To a Goldfish"; or, best of all, an old song of fishing ways of other days.

And to compile from the New York Journal of Commerce better poetry than any of this, tables, beautiful tables of "imports into New York": "Oct. 15.—From Bordeaux, 225 cs. cuttlefish bone; Copenhagen, 173 pkgs. fish; Liverpool, 969 bbls. herrings, 10 walrus hides, 2,000 bags salt; La Guayra, 6 cs. fish sounds; Belize, 9 bbls. sponges; Rotterdam, 7 pkgs. seaweed, 9,000 kegs herrings; Barcelona, 235 cs. sardines; Bocas Del Toro, 5 cs. turtle shells; Genoa, 3 boxes corals; Tampico, 2 pkgs. sponges; Halifax, 1 cs. seal skins, 35 bbls. cod liver oil, 215 cs. lobsters, 490 bbls. codfish; Akureyri, 4,150 bbls. salted herrings," and much more. Beautiful tables of "exports from New York". "To Australia" (cleared Sep. 1); "to Argentina;"—Haiti, Jamaica, Guatemala, Scotland, Salvador, Santo Domingo, England, and to places many more. And many other gorgeous tables, too, "Fishing vessels at New York," for one, listing the "trips" brought into this port by the Stranger, the Sarah O'Neal, the Nourmahal, a farrago of charming sounds, and a valuable tale of facts.

As make-up man, of course, so to "dress" the paper that the "markets," Oporto, Trinidad, Porto Rico, Demerara, Havana, would be together; that "Nova Scotia Notes"—"Weather conditions for curing have been more favourable since October set in"—would follow "Halifax Fish Market"—"Last week's arrivals were: Oct. 13, schr. Hattie Loring, 960 quintals," etc.—that "Pacific Coast Notes"—"The tug Tatoosh will perform the service for the Seattle salmon packers of towing a vessel from Seattle to this port via the Panama Canal"—would follow "Canned Salmon"; that shellfish matter would be in one place; reports of saltfish where such should be; that the weekly tale of the canned fish trade politically embraced the canned fish advertising; and so on and so on.

Finest of all, as reporter, to go where the fish reporter goes. There the sight-seeing cars never find their way; the hurried commuter has not his path, nor knows of these things at all; and there that racy character who, voicing a multitude, declares that he would rather be a lamp post on Broadway than Mayor of St. Louis, goes not for to see. Up lower Greenwich Street the fish reporter goes, along an eerie, dark, and narrow way, beneath a strange, thundering roof, the "L" overhead. He threads his way amid seemingly chaotic, architectural piles of boxes, of barrels, crates, casks, kegs, and bulging bags; roundabout many great fetlocked draught horses, frequently standing or plunging upon the sidewalk, and attached to many huge trucks and wagons; and much of the time in the street he is compelled to go, finding the side walks too congested with the traffic of commerce to admit of his passing there.

You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese. Then you would delight in Greenwich Street. You could feast your highly creditable appetite for these excellent things for very nearly a solid mile upon the signs of "wholesale dealers and commission merchants" in them. The letter press, as you might say, of the fish reporter's walk is a noble paean to the earth's glorious yield for the joyous sustenance of man. For these princely merchants' signs sing of opulent stores of olive oil, of sausages, beans, soups, extracts, and spices, sugar, Spanish, Bermuda, and Havana onions, "fine" apples, teas, coffee, rice, chocolates, dried fruits and raisins, and of loaves and of fishes, and of "fish products." Lo! dark and dirty and thundering Greenwich Street is to-day's translation of the Garden of Eden.

Here is a great house whose sole vocation is the importation of caviar for barter here. Caviar from over-seas now comes, when it comes at all, mainly by the way of Archangel, recently put on the map, for most of us, by the war. The fish reporter is told, however, if it be summer, that there cannot be much doing in the way of caviar until fall, "when the spoonbill start coming in." And on he goes to a great saltfish house, where many men in salt-stained garments are running about, their arms laden with large flat objects, of sharp and jagged edge, which resemble dried and crackling hides of some animal curiously like a huge fish; and numerous others of "the same" are trundling round wheelbarrow-like trucks likewise so laden. Where stacks of these hides stand on their tails against the walls, and goodness knows how many big boxes are, containing, as those open show, beautifully soft, thick, cream-coloured slabs, which is fish. And where still other men, in overalls stained like a painter's palette, are knocking off the heads of casks and dipping out of brine still other kinds of fish for inspection.

Here it is said by the head of the house, by the stove (it is chill weather) in his office like a ship-master's cabin: "Strong market on foreign mackerel. Mines hinder Norway catch. Advices from abroad report that German resources continue to purchase all available supplies from the Norwegian fishermen. No Irish of any account. Recent shipment sold on the deck at high prices. Fair demand from the Middle West."

So, by stages, on up to turn into North Moore Street, looking down a narrow lane between two long bristling rows of wagons pointed out from the curbs, to the facades of the North River docks at the bottom, with the tops of the buff funnels of ocean liners, and Whistleranean silhouettes of derricks, rising beyond. Hereabout are more importers, exporters, and "producers" of fish, famous in their calling beyond the celebrities of popular publicity. And he that has official entree may learn, by mounting dusky stairs, half-ladder and half-stair, and by passing through low-ceilinged chambers freighted with many barrels, to the sanctums of the fish lords, what's doing in the foreign herring way, and get the current market quotations, at present sky-high, and hear that the American shore mackerel catch is very fine stock.

Then roundabout, with a step into the broad vista of homely Washington Street, and a turn through Franklin Street, where is the man decorated by the Imperial Japanese Government with a gold medal, if he should care to wear it, for having distinguished himself in the development of commerce in the marine products of Japan, back to Hudson Street. An authentic railroad is one of the spectacular features of Hudson Street.

Here down the middle of the way are endless trains, stopping, starting, crashing, laden to their ears with freight, doubtless all to eat. Tourists should come from very far to view Hudson Street. Here is a spectacle as fascinating, as awe-inspiring, as extraordinary as any in the world. From dawn until darkness falls, hour after hour, along Hudson Street slowly, steadily moves a mighty procession of great trucks. One would not suppose there were so many trucks on the face of the earth. It is a glorious sight, and any man whose soul is not dead should jump with joy to see it. And the thunder of them altogether as they bang over the stones is like the music of the spheres.

There is on Hudson Street a tall handsome building where the fish reporter goes, which should be enjoyed in this way: Up in the lift you go to the top, and then you walk down, smacking your lips. For all the doors in that building are brimming with poetry. And the tune of it goes like this: "Toasted Corn-Flake Co.," "Seaboard Rice," "Chili Products," "Red Bloom Grape Juice Sales Office," "Porto Rico and Singapore Pineapple Co.," "Sunnyland Foodstuffs," "Importers of Fruit Pulps, Pimentos," "Sole Agents U.S.A. Italian Salad Oil," "Raisin Growers," "Log Cabin Syrups," "Jobbers in Beans, Peas," "Chocolate and Cocoa Preparations," "Ohio Evaporated Milk Co.," "Bernese Alps and Holland Condensed Milk Co.," "Brazilian Nuts Co.," "Brokers Pacific Coast Salmon," "California Tuna Co.," and thus on and on.

The fish reporter crosses the street to see the head of the Sardine Trust, who has just thrown the market into excitement by a heavy cut in prices of last year's pack. Thence, pausing to refresh himself by the way at a sign "Agency for Reims Champagne and Moselle Wines—Bordeaux Clarets and Sauternes," over to Broadway to interview the most august persons of all, dealers in fertiliser, "fish scrap." These mighty gentlemen live, when at business, in palatial suites of offices constructed of marble and fine woods and laid with rich rugs. The reporter is relayed into the innermost sanctum by a succession of richly clothed attendants. And he learns, it may be, that fishing in Chesapeake Bay is so poor that some of the "fish factories" may decide to shut down. Acid phosphate, it is said, is ruling at $13 f.o.b. Baltimore.

And so the fish reporter enters upon the last lap of his rounds. Through, perhaps, the narrow, crooked lane of Pine Street he passes, to come out at length upon a scene set for a sea tale. Here would a lad, heir to vast estates in Virginia, be kidnapped and smuggled aboard to be sold a slave in Africa. This is Front Street. A white ship lies at the foot of it. Cranes rise at her side. Tugs, belching smoke, bob beyond. All about are ancient warehouses, redolent of the Thames, with steep roofs and sometimes stairs outside, and with tall shutters, a crescent-shaped hole in each. There is a dealer in weather-vanes. Other things dealt in hereabout are these: chronometers, "nautical instruments," wax gums, cordage and twine, marine paints, cotton wool and waste, turpentine, oils, greases, and rosin. Queer old taverns, public houses, are here, too. Why do not their windows rattle with a "Yo, ho, ho"?

There is an old, old house whose business has been fish oil within the memory of men. And here is another. Next, through Water Street, one comes in search of the last word on salt fish. Now the air is filled with gorgeous smell of roasting coffee. Tea, coffee, sugar, rice, spices, bags and bagging here have their home. And there are haughty bonded warehouses filled with fine liquors. From his white cabin at the top of a venerable structure comes the dean of the salt-fish business. "Export trade fair," he says; "good demand from South America."

II

ON GOING A JOURNEY

One of the pleasantest things in the world is "going a journey"—but few know it now. It isn't every one that can go a journey. No doubt one that owns an automobile cannot go. The spirit of the age has got him fast. Begoggled and with awful squawks, feverish, exultant, ignorant, he is condemned to hoot over the earth. Thus the wealthy know nothing of journeys, for they must own motors. Vain people and envious people and proud people cannot go, because the wealthy do not. Silly people do not know enough to go. The lazy cannot, because of their laziness. The busy hang themselves with business. The halt nor the aged, alas! cannot go. In fine, only such as are whole anywise and pure in heart can go a journey, and they are the blessed.

"We arrive at places now, but we" (most of us) "travel no more." The way a journey is gone, to come to the point, is walking. Asking many folks' pardon, to tear through the air in an open car, deafened, hilariously muddled by the rush and roar of wind, is to drive observation from the mind: it is to be, in a manner, complacently, intellectually unconscious; is to drink an enjoyment akin to that of the shooters of the chute, or that got on the very latest of this sort of engine of human amusement called the "Hully-Gee-Whizz," a pleasure of the ignorant, metaphorically, a kind of innocents' rot-gut whiskey. The way a journey is gone, which is walking, is a wine, a mellow claret, stimulating to observation, to thought, to speculation, to the flow of talk, gradually, decently warming the blood. Rightly taken (which manner this paper attempts to set forth), walking is among the pleasures of the mind. It is a call-boy to wit, a hand-maiden to cultivation. Sufficiently indulged in, it will make a man educated, a wit, a poet, an ironist, a philosopher, a gentleman, a better Christian (not to dwell upon improving his digestion and prolonging his life). And, too, like true Shandyism "it opens the heart and the lungs." Whoso hath ears, let him hear! Once and for all, if the mad world did but know it, the best, the most exquisite automobile is a walking-stick; and one of the finest things in life is going a journey with it.

No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), should ever go a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let us suppose) of men's given names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall be named after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, two and two, since the world began, there have always been young men who have time to one another plighted their troth. If one is not still one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys. Mention should be made in passing that some have been found so ignorant of the nature of journeys as to suppose that they might be taken in company with members, or a member, of the other sex. Now, one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be burned at the stake before he would knowingly underestimate women. But it must be confessed that it is another season in the life of man that they fill.

They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey. They must be forever thinking about you or about themselves; with them everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these matters; and when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you could they would not allow it), you must be forever thinking about them or yourself. Nothing on either side can be seen detached. They cannot rise to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very marrow of going a journey. One reason for this is that they can never escape from the idea of society. You are in their society, they are in yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which connect you all to that great order called society that you have for a period got away from physically are present. Like the business man who goes on a vacation from business and takes his business habits along with him, so on a journey they would bring society along, and all sort of etiquette.

He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he has fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the moment, to no time or place. He is neither rich nor poor, but in that which he thinks and sees. There is not such another Arcadia for this on earth as in going a journey. He that goes a journey escapes, for a breath of air, from all conventions; without which, though, of course, society would go to pot; and which are the very natural instinct of women.

The best time for going a journey (a connoisseur speaks it) is some morning when it has rained well the day or night before, and the soil of the road, where it is not evenly packed, is of about that substance of which the fingers can make fine "tees" for golfing. This is the precise composition of earth and dampness underfoot most sympathetic to the spine, the knee sockets, the muscles, tendons, ligaments of limb, back, neck, breast and abdomen, and the spirit of locomotion in the ancient exercise of walking. On this day the protruding stones have been washed bald in the road; the lines and marks of drainage are still clearly, freshly defined in the soil; in the gutters light-coloured sand has risen to the surface with the dark moist soil in a grained effect not unlike marbled chocolate cake; and clean, sweet gravel is laid bare here and there in the wagon ruts. This is the chosen time for the nerves and senses. On such a day the whole world greets one cleansed and having on a fresh bib-and-tucker. It is a conscious pleasure to have eyes. It is as if one long near-sighted without knowing it had suddenly been fitted with the proper spectacles. It is sweet to have olfactories. Whoso hath lungs, let him breathe. Man was made to rejoice!

How green, on such a day, are the greens; the distant purples how purple! The stone walls are cool. The great canvas of the sky has been but newly brushed in, as if by some modern landscape painter (the tube colours seem yet hardly dry); the technique, the brush-marks, show in the unutterably soft, warm-white clouds; or, like a puff of beaten-egg white, wells above that orchard hill. Higher up, thinly touched across the blue, a great sweep of downy, swan breast-breast feathers spreads. But not one canvas is this sky; ceaselessly it changes with the minutes. To observe is to walk through an endless gallery of countless pictures. It is alone a life-study. Now the wind has blown it clear as blue limpidness; now scattered flakes appear; now it is deep blue; now pale; now it tinges darkly; now it is a layer of cream. Again, it breaks into shapes—decorative shapes, odd shapes, lovely shapes, shapes always fresh. Its innovations are unflagging, inexhaustable. Always art, its genius is infinite.

One must go a journey to discover how vast the sky really is, and the world. To mount, bending forward, up by a long, tree-walled ascent from some valley, and come upon this spectacular sight—the fair globe that man inhabits lying away before one like a gigantic physical map, a map in relief, cunningly painted in the colours of nature, laid off by woods and orchards and roads and stone walls into many decorative shapes until it melts into purple, and fainter and fainter and still fainter purple Japanese hills. The sight is some of the noble quarry, the game; this is the anise-seed bag of him that goes a journey. Some glimmering of the nobility of the plan of which he is a fell, erring speck comes over one as he looks. This is the religious side of going a journey.

It is best to go a journey on a road that you do not know; on a road that lures you on to peep over the crest of yonder hill, that ever flees before you in a game of hide-and-seek, disappearing behind great, jutting rocks and turns and trees, to leap out again at your approach and laughingly, elusively, continually slip before you; a road that winds anon where some roaring brook pours near by; a road that may deceive you and trick you into miles out of your way.

A high breeze rushes through the trees and fans the traveller's opened pores. With a sudden, startling whir, mounting with their hearts, a bird flushes from the tangled growth at the roadside.

The worst roads for walking are such as are commonly called the best; that is, macadam. A macadam pavement is a piece of masonry, wholly without elasticity, built for vehicles to roll over. To go a journey without a walking-stick much would be lost; indeed it would be folly. A stick is the fly-wheel of the engine. Something is needed to whack things with, little stones, wormy apples, and so forth, in the road. It can be changed from one hand to the other, which is a great help. Then if one slips a trifle on a down-grade turn it is a lengthened arm thrown out to steady one. It is the pilgrim's staff. On the up-grades it assists climbing. It is a weapon of defence if such should ever be needed. It is a badge of dignity, a dress sword. It is the sceptre of walking.

Dipping the dales, riding the swells, the automobiles come, like gigantic bugs coming after the wicked. With a sucking rush of wind and dust and an odour of gasoline they are past. Stray pieces of paper at the roadside arise and fly after them, then, further on, sink impotent, exhausted.

"I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another!" One who goes much a-journeying cannot understand how Thoreau got it so completely turned around. But after the first effervescence of going a journey (of speech a time of times) has passed, and when, next, the fine novelty of open observation has begun to pale, there are still copious resources left; one retires on the way, metaphorically speaking, into one's closet for meditation, for miles of silent thought—when one's stride is mechanical, and is like an absent-minded drumming with the fingers; but that it is better, for it pumps the blood for freer thought than in lethargic sitting.

In this rhythmic moving one thinks as to a tune. To sit thus absolutely silent, absent in thought completely, even with that friend one wears in one's heart's core, will at length become dull for one or other; sitting thus one is tempted, too, to speech. Walking, it is not so. One may talk or one may not. If both wish to think, both feel as if something sociable is being done in just walking together. If one does not care to go wool-gathering, the other does not leave him without entertainment; walking alone is entertainment. It is assumed, of course, that one goes a journey in silence as in speech with the companion with whom one has been best seasoned. Silently walking, the movement of the mind keeps step in thought exactly with the movement of the man, so that the pace is a thermometer of the temperature at that moment of one's brain.

One who has written on going a journey as well perhaps as the world will ever see it done owned that he never had had a watch. Further, he intimated that the possession of one was an indication of poverty of mental resource. It was his own wont, he said, to pass hours, whole days, unconscious of the night of time. He described his father as taking out his watch to look at whenever he could think of nothing else to do. His father, our author says, was no metaphysician. It must be confessed that one now writing of journeys, sometimes, somewhat unmetaphysician-like, conscious of the flight of time, has communication with a watch; and, finding the day well advanced, decides, speaking very figuratively, to lay the cloth, beneath some twisted, low, gnarled apple tree.

"At the next shadow," he suggests.

"Let's wait until we get to the top of this hill, first."

"Here we are."

Sweet rest! when one throws one's members down upon the turf and there lets them lie, as if they were so many detached packages dropped. Then one feels the exquisite nerve luxury of having legs: while one rests them. One's back could lie thus prone forever. One feels, sucking all the rich pleasure of it, that one couldn't move one's arms, lift one's hand, if one had to. What are the world's rewards if this is not one!

At length in going a journey comes a time when one tiredly shrinks from the work of speech, when observation dozes, and thought lolls like a limp sail that only idly stirs at the passing zephyrs; the legs like piston-rods strike on; when the pleasure is like that almost of dull narcotics; one realises only dimly that one is moving. At such times as these, coming from one knows not whence, and one feels too weak to search back to discover, there flit across the mind strange fragments, relevant, as they seem, to nothing whatever present.

When a journey has been made one way, the trick has been done; the superfluous energy which inspired it has found escape; the way to return is not by walking. A friend to fatigue is this, that in walking back one is not on a voyage of discovery; one knows the way and very much what one will see on it; one knows the distance. In fact, the fruit has been plucked: the bloom is gone; to walk back would be like tedious marching with a regiment. One should return resting. On trains one returns from a journey.

Whoso hath life, one thinks as his journey draws to its close, let him live it! What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and never know his own soul?

III

GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS

There are two opposing views as to going to art exhibitions. And much with a good deal of reason may be said on both sides. There is one very vigorous attitude which holds that the pictures are the thing. This, indeed, is a perfectly ponderable theory. But it may be questioned whether in its ardour it does not go a little far. For it affirms that people are a confounded nuisance at art exhibitions, and should not be permitted to be there, to distract one's attention from the peaceful contemplation of works of art, and to infuriate one by their asinine remarks in the holy presence of beauty. I have heard it declared with very impressive spirit, and reasoned with much force, that only one person, or at most only one person and his chosen companion, should be allowed in an art gallery at a time. It is debatable, however, whether this intellectually aristocratic idea is altogether practicable. On the other hand, was it not even Little Billie who found the people at art exhibitions frequently more interesting than the pictures?

Anyhow, persons who write about art exhibitions confine themselves exclusively to the subject of art. When they gossip it is about the pictures, the painters, and the sculpture. True, of course, this is their job, and then, these persons go on press days and so only see, outside of that which is intentionally exhibited, other critics.

Now, there is nothing in all the world quite like art exhibitions. Beyond any other sort of show they possess a spirit which (to use a pet and an excellent critical expression of one of our foremost art critics) is "grand, gloomy, and peculiar." You feel this charged atmosphere at once at an art exhibition. You walk softly, you speak low, and you endeavour to become as intelligent as possible. Art exhibitions, in short, present various features indigenous to themselves which, so far as I am aware, have not before been adequately commented upon. The principal observations which they solicit are as follows:

First, art exhibitions are attended by two classes of people: very fine-looking people, and funny-looking people. There is a very striking kind of a young man goes to art exhibitions that I myself never accomplish seeing anywhere else, though sometimes I see pictures of him. This young man is superbly patrician. You may have remarked this singular phenomenon. All the young men in all the advertisements in the magazine Vanity Fair are the same young man, whether riding in a splendid motor car, elegantly attending the play, or doing a little shooting of birds. You know him, for one thing, by his exquisite moustache. This fastidiously groomed, exclusively tailored young man, to be seen in the pages spoken of and at art exhibitions, is certainly not of Art, nor is he of business. He takes no account whatever, apparently, of time, as men of business do; and manifestly one could not work in such a moustache and such clothes without mussing them. He is, in fine, of Vanity Fair. Oscar Wilde was, as usual, wrong when he said that all beautiful things were quite useless. This immaculate young man's practical function at art exhibitions, as perhaps elsewhere, is that of escort.

He is escort to groups of very handsome and very expensive-looking young ladies; and these fragrant, rustling groups, with the waxen, patrician young man in tow, stroll slowly about, catalogues unnoticed in hand, without pause skirting the picture-hung walls. They are very still, and they gaze upon the art that they pass with the look of a doe contemplating the meaning of the appearance of a man. The perfect escorts of these groups, who would seem naturally to be rather gay young men, look very serious indeed. Now one of them gracefully, though as if careful not to make any noise, bends to one of the young ladies; and, indicating by a solemn look one of the paintings, he whispers to her apparently concerning it. She silently nods: it is, evidently, quite as he says. When an art exhibition is so undertakery a thing you wouldn't think that one would come. Though perhaps it is that one ought.

At any rate, there is quite a turn-out to-day moving beneath the ghostly glow of the shrouded sky-light ceiling. Half the Avenue seems to be here. What a play it is, this highly urban throng! Let us sit here on this divan down the middle of the room. With what a stately march the pictures go in their golden frames along the symphonious, burlap walls! There, by that copious piece of intelligence, Manet's "Music Lesson," is—

But see! What has come over our earnest group? Those who compose it are all quite changed. They look as happy as can be, all beaming with smiles, their backs to the neighbouring walls. Friends, it seems, have greeted them. How they all bubble on, all about the outside world! But goodness! Now what is the matter? Suddenly one of the newcomers is struck by a startled look. She sees, that is it, one of the pictures. In an arrested voice she says: "Oh, isn't that perfectly lovely!" At once the happy light fades from the faces of all. An awed hush falls upon them as stiffly they turn their heads in the direction of her view. "Charming!" one of the young men breathes, staring intently at the painting which has come upon them. That it is awkward for everybody is plain. But, happily, there is much rebound to youth. One of the young ladies, at length, shakes herself free from the pall upon her spirits; the mesmeric spell is broken; and presently all are chatting again, gaily oblivious to Art.

By the way, there is the proprietor of the gallery, just before the three Renoir pastels. Is there anything about art exhibitions that more enlists the imagination than the study of the "dealers" themselves? The gentlemen who preside at art exhibitions fall, rather violently, into three, perhaps four, classes. You have, I dare say, been repeatedly struck by the quaintly inappropriate character in appearance of those of one of these classes. I mean, of course, those very horsey-looking men, with decidedly "hard" faces, loudly dressed, and dowered with hoarse voices. They would seem to be bookmakers, exceedingly prosperous publicans, bunco-brokers, militant politicians—anything save of the Kingdom of Art. Are their polished Bill Sykes' exteriors but bizarre domiciles for lofty souls? I cannot tell.

Here and there, it is true, you find the aesthete in effect among dealers: the wired moustaches, the spindle-legged voice, and the ardent spirit in discussing his wares with lady visitors. Our horsey type seems rather ponderous and phlegmatic in this matter. Then there is, too, a land of art exhibition which is very close indeed to Art, a kind of spirited propaganda, in fact, which is presided over by those of hierarchical character, beings as to hair and cravat, swarthy complexion and mystic gesticulation, holy from the world and mocked by the profane.

But, to my mind, the most satisfying sort of a host to observe at an art exhibition is that of the description of this admirable dealer before us. Benign, frock-coated, hands clasped behind him, he stands, symbol of gentlemanly, merchantly dignity. Occasionally he rises upon his toes, and then sinks again to his heels obviously with satisfaction. But that which proclaims the perfect equity of his mind is this: his nice recognition of the nuances in human kind. You perceive that his bow to each of his guests, that he recognises at all, is graduated according to the precise degree of that person's value to Art; that to some few, royal patrons presumably, being at an angle of forty-five degrees; while a common amateur of Art is acknowledged by one of five. Where—to continue the paraphrase of a pleasant observation upon Mr. George Brummell—it is a mere question of recognising the fact that a certain person dwells on the same planet with Art "a slight relaxation of the features" is made to suffice.

So! This profound bow is plainly meant for a particular tribute to one who wears the richest purple. Lo! He advances with unclasped hands. Pleasure beams from his countenance. Without such as she Art, and dealers, and galleries, and the recorded beauty of the world would perforce pass away. This entertaining personage, who is the great flurry at art exhibitions, is of the novelists' dowager Duchess type. A short, obese, and jovial figure, or dried and withered but imperious distinction, as the case may be. There is much crackling of fine garments, a brilliant display of lorgnette, and this penetrating and comprehensive royal critical dictum: "Isn't that interesting! So full of feeling."

Two outstanding features, you mark, of art exhibitions everywhere are here presented. Is any one who doesn't know what he is talking about at art exhibitions (and which of us does?) properly equipped for attendance there without this happy esoteric phrase "full of feeling"? It is safe, or as safe as anything can be, to say about any picture. It graphically indicates in the speaker delicate sensitivity and emotional responsiveness to Art. And, most beneficently, it subtly evades anything like the trying ordeal of an analysis of a work of art. It is, indeed, invaluable.

The other thing is this: There is no place going which is so well adapted to the exhibition of handsome, fashionable, or eccentric eye-glasses as an art exhibition. You observe there all that is newest and classy in glasses, and you are insistently invited to admiring study of the art of wearing queer glasses effectively, and of taking them off, letting them bound on their leash, doubling them up, opening them out, and putting them on with a gesture.

The complimentary type to the storied Duchess at art exhibitions is represented by yonder portly blood, in this case a replica of the late King Edward. The fruitful spectacle of art exhibitions, I think, presents nothing which gives one a more gratifying sense of their dignity and of the imperial character of Art than the presence there of these patently highly solvent, ruddy joweled, admirably tailored, and impressively worldly looking connoisseurs of painting to be seen scrutinising the pictures at close range, in a near-sighted way, and rather grimly, as though somewhat sceptically appraising possibly dubious merchandise.

Hello, there's Mr. Chase! And that's a fortunate thing, too, as no sympathetic picture of a representative American art exhibition should omit Mr. Chase. Whether or not we think of him as our premier painter, we should be inordinately proud of him. Undoubtedly he is a great artist. He has wrought himself in the grand manner. In person he delights the eye, and satisfies the imagination. With his inevitable top-hat, his heavy eye-glasses cord, his military moustaches and upward pointing beard, his pouter-pigeon carriage, his glowing spats and his boutonniere, his aroma of distinction, and his ruddy consciousness of his prestige, he is our great tour-de-force as a figure in the artistic scene. He is here, naturally, now the target of popular interest.

The practice of having artists shown at their own exhibitions is one too little cultivated. The Napoleonic brow and the Napoleonic forelock (famous in their circle) of George Luks, the torrential Luksean mirth, how would not their actual presence open the spiritual eyes of visiting school-children to the humane qualities of the works of the Luksean genius! And why should we who procure for our better perception of their works illuminating biographies of the Old Masters not be permitted the intellectual stimulation of beholding the Ten American Painters seated along on a bench at their annual show? The subject of the artists themselves, however, brings us around to the line between the two kinds of people having to do with art exhibitions: fine-looking people and funny-looking people.

Come; let us trot along. Artists themselves are, in a most pronounced degree, of both kinds. And a very singular thing is this: the funnier an artist's pictures are, the funnier-looking is the artist that made them. We'll stop in here, at The Advanced Gallery.

"Ah! How are you?"

That, just going out, is one of the newest groups of painters, known as the Homeopathics. I used to know him before he went abroad. And the curious thing is, that at that time he was very good-looking. He was clean shaven. This strange assortment of whiskers of different fashions on various parts of his face, imperial, goatee, burnsides, he brought back with him.

Notice as we step from the car at the gallery floor the numerous others here who also were at the show we just left. And those who are thus making the rounds, you perceive, are not of what is called society, but of the kind known in these circles, doubtless, as interesting. Nearly everybody in this gallery, in fact, is of the interesting sort. At once it is apparent that there is nothing of the perfunctory here. Art is vital. Art is earnest. The atmosphere is tense. The young women are clad in a manner giving much freedom to the movement of their bodies. They walk with a stride. Their clothes are not of the mode of the Avenue, but they have—how shall I say? To twist what Whistler said of his model: Character, character is what these clothes have. They suggest, many of these young women, the type that has never got back from—

"Do you know Chelsea at all?" asks one of them, of an anarchic-looking young man.

Never got back, as I was about to say, from Chelsea. A couple of other anarchic-looking young men are viewing a painting in the manner that a painting, or perhaps this particular painting, is intended to be viewed; that is by squinting at it first over the tops of their hands and then through their fingers. They discuss it darkly, in low, passionate tones. They advance upon it; and, a few inches before it, one, as though holding a brush in his hand, sweeps eloquently with his arm, following the contour of the painted figure. Legerdemain kind of thing, painting, isn't it? Sort of a black art, when you see into the science of it.

Well, I declare! Here's a friend of mine—there, talking with the
Titian-haired lady in the exotic gown. Now, he is coming over to us.

He says he wants us to know Ben-Gunn, who is here, "one of the new crowd," he says. My friend is very keen on the new crowd; everything else he declares is "passe." Anyhow, it is a very valuable experience to talk with an exhibitor at an art exhibition. Your mind is impregnated, until it swells dizzily in your head. That would be he, the illiterate-looking little creature with the uncombed and unsanitary-looking mop.

There! I knew he would say something, something that would never leave you again the same. "Nothing is shiny in Nature," says Mr. Ben-Gunn as though rather depressed, surveying a canvas in this respect unhappily divorced from the truth. "Nature," he adds with Brahminic finality, "is always dull."

Mr. Ben-Gunn is greeted affectionately by a gentleman you always see at every art exhibition. This is Mr.—I forget his name—it is French; I know he writes on Art for Demos; a remarkable being who apparently talks, hears, and sees nothing else but aestheticism. For as there are types peculiar to art exhibitions, so there are certain individuals apparently quite peculiar to art exhibitions. Come, let us go on down to see some Old Masters. Notice there in the corner the foreign-looking gentleman with the three foreign-looking children. That, the quiet, cultivated, foreign father and his children, is one of the pleasantest sights frequently to be seen at art exhibitions. Thus he is to be seen, easily and intimately discussing the pictures with his attentive followers.

The great point about the study of art exhibitions from the point of view of the humanist is the affinity between pictures and people. Here, for instance, on Madison Square, amid the art heritage of times past, what is it that at once strikes you? Why, that old paintings evidently are quite passe to the new crowd. At these exhibitions preliminary to the big auction sales of venerable masters, and of middle-aged masters, and of venerable and middle-aged not-quite-masters, there is a very attractive class of people, a class of funny-looking, fine-looking people, a class, that is, of rather shabby-looking people who look as if they might be very rich, of dull-looking people who look as if they might be very bright. They buy huge catalogues at a dollar or so apiece, which they consult continually. They arrive early and remain a long time.

The women of this audience frequently are rather dowdy, and shapen in very individual fashions. The men generally are elderly beings, now and then reminiscent of the period of Horace Greeley. They are very bald, or with untrimmed white (not grey) hair, and, sometimes, Uncle-Sam-like whiskers. They are usually very wrinkled as to trowsers and overcoats. Here and there among the gentlemen of this company is to be seen one who looks strikingly like Emile Zola, or the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan slightly gone to seed. All these charming folk make of looking at old-fashioned pictures a very busy occupation, and also in effect a rather mundane occupation, as though they were alertly considering the possibility of making a selection from among a variety of serviceable kitchen chairs.

Argumenting the throng are authentic representatives of the world of fashion; some who appear to be students; the ever present foreigners, including the frequently present Jap; a number of those enigmatic beings who continually take notes at art exhibitions; and a respectable quota of those ladies we always have with us at art exhibitions who in the presence of pictures and it necessary to say: "Isn't that wonderful, marvellous tone quality!" Occasionally a decidedly quaint student of Art strolls in, past the imposing flunky (in finery a bit faded) at the door, strolls in in the form of a lodger in Madison Square. He looks at the pictures as if thoughtfully, but without animation.

Well, we have now covered, in an elementary way, about every important species of art show, except one, the most human perhaps of all, that held annually on Fifty-seventh Street. We should hardly have time to go up there to-day. I'll tell you about it. There are several reasons why this exhibition is the most human perhaps of all. One is that more people go than to any other. And these people, taken by and large, are more human, too, than one sees at most art exhibitions, that is more like just ordinary people. This may be, for one thing, because the pictures as a rule are more ordinary pictures. And a very human touch, indeed, is this: when you see the card "Sold" on a painting it is fairly certain to be one of the most ordinary pictures of the lot.

That reminds one of museums. People who are called in the world to the curious pursuit of copying pictures in museums, for some reason or other which I have been unable as yet to work out, apparently always copy the most bourgeois pictures there. But museums, with their throngs of subdued holiday makers and their crowds of weary gaping aliens of the submerged order, museums comprise a separate study.

At any rate, I hope in our stroll I have been able to give you a new insight into the fascination of the great world of Art.

IV

A ROUNDABOUT PAPER

No reader of The Spectator will have forgotten an article which appeared there some years ago entitled "As to Bears." Or ever will forget it until his shall be "the shut lid and the granite lip of him who has done with sunsets and skating, and has turned away his face from all manner of Irish," as William Vaughn Moody says. Not only because it was one of the finest things ever in The Spectator, or anywhere else (after, possibly, that imperishable dissertation of the great Dean's—or was it Sir William Temple's?—"On a Broomstick"), but also because it was one pure flower in our day of a kind of art little cultivated any more. "As to Bears." All, me! How engaging, simple, gracious, and at ease; what perfection of literary breeding; what an amused and genial wave of the finger tips; how marked by good-humoured acuteness, and animated nonchalance; how saturated with a distinguished, humane tradition of letters—that title!

That is just the note I would strike in the great book I have been brooding for years, "Bums I Have Known." It has been my felicity to have known more bums, I think, than any living man. But I fear I shall never get that book written. And this is a pity. It is a pity because this book would be of great value in the years to come. With our modern passion for efficiency, and with efficiency rapidly becoming compulsory everywhere, that colourful class of ancient lineage, the bums, is quickly becoming persona non grata to our civilisation, and will soon be extinct. To the next generation, in all probability, the word bum will be but an empty name. I doubt whether it would be a feasible plan for Dr. Hornaday to undertake to preserve a small number of this species in the Bronx Park. The bum nature, I fear, would languish in captivity. The creature would likely lose its health, and, worse, its spirits. It is a nomad, a child of nature. It takes no thought for the morrow, as our modern prophets teach us to do. I remember well an excellent bum (I mean excellently conforming to type), one Bain, who, growing restive under restraint, lost a position which he happened to have. I asked him what he was going to do now. There was something sublime about that being. He had faith that the Lord would provide. His simple reply was: "Well, the ravens fed Elijah."

Stuffed bums in the American Museum of Natural History would not be any good. Any good, that is, as objects of study. Our children will require to know, to see the past steadily and see it whole, the habits of bums, their manners and customs. So, as I say, my work would be invaluable. The wastrel (as they say in England) has, of course, been celebrated in the literature of the past from time immemorial. I can't at the moment put my finger on any, but I have no doubt there are bums in the pages of Homer, That Persian philosopher who found paradise enow with a jug of wine and a book of verse beneath a bough, Falstaff, Richard Swiveller, how they flock to the mind, they of the care-free kidney! They are in the Books of the great Hebrew literature. There was he that took his journey into a far country. "Gil Blas" and all the early picaresque novels on into the pages of "The Romany Rye" swarm with them. But what is wanting, what will be needed, is a richly informed picture of the last of the race, those now, like the Indian and the buffalo, fast passing away. There is only one way in which such a book could be, or should be written.

"Peace be with the soul of that charitable and Courteous Author who introduced the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing," wrote Lord Shaftsbury in the opening paragraph of his "Miscellaneous Reflections." Peace be with the souls of all those who, for the delight of the anointed, have practised that most debonair of all the arts, the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing! Now, as highly successful novelists always say nowadays when interviewed for highly successful newspapers, "I know very little about literature," but I fancy this benign way of writing had its well-spring in those preposterous days, now long fled, when men of reading were content to give their best thoughts first to their friends and then—ten years or so afterwards—to the "publick." Its period was the day of the "wits"—those beaux of the mind.

I guess the reason it has gone by the board is that it was what would be called "literary." And there is nothing we are so scared of to-day as the literary. It was not those dons the critics, we are told on the subway cards, who made Dickens immortal—it was YOU. And our foremost magazines advertise the "un-literary essay." "Literary expression," that Addisonian English stuff, whose elegance pleasantly conceals the lack of ideas beneath, is taboo in these parts. What we want is writers who have something to say, and who say it naturally and without any beating about the bush.

While the spell of miscellaneous writing, for those who savour it, is the author's joyous inability, it would seem, to get any "forrader," to stick to the point, to carry anything with a rush. See the greatest miscellaneous writer who ever lived, as an admirable later miscellaneous writer the late (in a literary sense) Hon. Augustine Birrell calls him, the Rev. Laurence Sterne. See positively the most buoyant book in all the world; I mean, of course, "The Path to Rome," by Hilaire Belloc. That glorious newspaper article, "Is Genius Conscious of Its Power?" starts off, indeed, with an allusion to the subject of genius. But the genius of this writer, of such unsurpassed and ingratiating savagery, soon turns to its true business of getting lost in the woods, and we take it from William Hazlitt that all in power are a lot of crooks.

So one born under the miscellaneous writer's star who purposed to write on, say, bums he had known would quite likely begin with a disquisition upon the importance of a good shape of human ear, and very naturally would conclude, with some warmth, with a denunciation of tight trowsers. And he would, of course, wander by the way into pleasant reminiscences of his childhood—how, for instance, the child gets his idea of what a native is from the cuts in his geography book. I well remember the first time I was alluded to in my presence as a native. I was very indignant. I knew what natives looked like from the cuts I had pored over. They were a fine, spirited race, very picturesquely attired, mostly in bows and arrows, and as creatures of romance I admired them greatly. Persons such as I and my parents were generally depicted in this connection as fleeing from them. And it did strike me as an ignoramus kind of thing that I should be called a native. When I was reasoned with to the effect that I was a native of Indiana, my resentment but grew. There were no natives in Indiana.

Speaking of efficiency reminds me of the real estate business. I have recently come somewhat into contact with this business and I have observed certain outstanding facts about it which I have not seen commented upon before. To set up in the real estate business one thing above all else is necessary, that is uncommon familiarity with the word "imagination." If you are thinking of buying a lot you will meet a tall, fair man, or a short, dark man (as the case may be), but in any case as unimaginative-looking a man as you could readily imagine. From this person you will learn that the thing at the bottom of every great fortune was imagination. If the location of the lot which you view strikes you as rather a desolate and barren-looking part of the world the trouble is not with the location but with you. Forty-second Street looked worse than that at one time. Thus, I imagine, if you have sufficient imagination you buy the lot.

It is a remarkable thing that the most startling spectacle in New York has never struck any one but myself. Forty-second Street puts me in mind of this. If you were a native of the Sandwich Islands and had never before been in town and were standing at the South-East corner of Broadway and Fulton Street at nine o'clock in the morning and were facing West, you would cry out aghast at this sight: You would see the quiet, old world grave-yard of St. Paul's Chapel, the funereal stone urn upon its stone post marking the corner and the leaning headstones beyond. There is no trumpet sound. But from a mouth at the grave-yard's side the earth belches forth a host which springs quick into the new day. It is a remarkable spectacle to contemplate, fraught with portent and symbol, though the mouth is a subway kiosk, my Sandwich friend.

Now, there are men who walk about London just as some men collect books. They are amateurs of London. Year by year they add precious souvenirs to their rich collections, the find of an old passage way here, there the view when the light is quite right from one precise spot, say, on Waterloo Bridge. Sometimes, indeed, they write books about their hobby, more or less useful to the neophyte: as "A Wayfarer's London," or "A Wanderer in London," or "Ghosts of Piccadilly," or some such thing; but more frequently they are of the highest type of amateur, the connoisseur who will gladly share his joy in his treasures with a cultivated friend but has nothing of his love to sell. I doubt whether there are any such amateurs of New York, any who for thirty years and more have walked our streets as an intellectual sport with unabated zest. London, of course, has the drop on us in the matter of richness of material for this sort of collector, but there is plenty to bag at home. Not far from the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street, I recollect, is a queer place called Vandewater Street.

Some twenty years or so ago you used to go to melodramas, real melodramas. There are aesthetic revivals of melodrama in Boston, I hear. There was nothing aesthetic about the ones I mean, and the enjoyment of them was untainted by the malady of thought. Come along now. We'll dive through Park Row and turn here down Frankfort Street. Few do turn down Frankfort Street, and I fear its admirable points are unappreciated. For one thing, it goes down, down, down a very steep incline; which is a spirited thing for a street to do, I think. And it is very narrow, at the beginning, with sidewalks that hug the walls, and is always in shadow, so that it has a fine, wild, villainous look. Horses climbing it always come with a plunge and a grinding of sparks. And the roar from the cobble stones is deafening, very stimulating to the imagination. The atmosphere is one of typefounders, leather, hides, and oyster houses.

Very few people, I fancy, could tell you where there is a portcullis in New York just like the one at a gateway in The Tower. But if you snook around the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge you'll find one, with a winding stair disappearing beyond it, and mounting, presumably, to a dungeon. Newswomen, I think, are pleasanter to see than newsboys. There is a newsgirl who minds a stand here at the corner of Rose and Frankfort Streets who is charming as a type of 'Arriet. She always wears an enormous hat. A fine thing for a 'Arriet to do, I think. Sometimes the stand is minded by her mother. (I take it, it is her mother.) An old body who always has her head wrapped in a knitted affair. A fine thing for an old body to do, I think. Phil May would have delighted in Frankfort Street. So would Rembrandt. Here comes an elderly person, evidently George Luk's "My Old Pal," who is balancing a large bundle of sticks on her head. Across the way is a Whistler etching; Whistler did not happen to etch it; but it is a Whistler etching all the same. You look up a frowsy little courtyard, the walls of which are more graceful than plumb, and you see a horse's head sticking out into the etching. Also, across the way the "k" has dropped out of steak on the window of a chop-house. The public-houses down this way, many of them, are very low places. The thing to do in this world is to get as much innocent pleasure out of the spectacle as possible.

Well, the streets here twist about beneath the Bridge, so that you do not know what's beyond the turning. People going and coming through the arches are silhouettes. Overhead it is like the grumbling of a thunder storm. Wagons going over the stones rattle tremendously, and they carry lanterns swung beneath to be lighted at night. The streets have fine names: there is Gold Street, and then Jacob Street. Frankfort Street widens out and becomes a generous thoroughfare, all in sunlight. There is a huge, gay hoarding to the right as you go down. On your left you see one of the towers of the Bridge rising high in the air. Directly ahead the "JL" crosses the way!

Now comes the point which I have been getting at. You dip and turn into Vandewater Street. Under the Bridge at once you go, where all sounds are weird, hollow sounds, and then out again. The atmosphere has been becoming more and more charged with the character of the printing business. Now may be felt the tremour and heard the sound of moving presses. Printing houses, dealers in "litho inks," linotype companies, paper makers, "publishers and jobbers of books," "photo engraving" establishments are all about. Here is a far-famed publishing house the sight of which takes you back with a jump to your boyhood, your youthful, arrant, adventurous reading. Those were the happy days when the flavour of Crime was like ginger i' the mouth. Perhaps the recollection of this affects your thoughts now, and makes your mind more active than want.

All the people going through Vandewater Street appear to be compositors. Fine, strapping, romantic people, compositors, smeared with ink! Though there are other interests in this street besides printing. There is a big schoolhouse with every window in it broken; grand, desolate look to it! There is a delightful sign which says: "Horse collars, up stairs." There are little homes toward the end of the street—it is one block long—little, old, two-story, brick dwelling houses, in charmingly bad repair, with fire escapes, little stairs twisting up to the doors and iron railings there, and window-boxes at the windows.

As you turn at Pearl Street to go back again something comes over you. It is melodrama that comes over you. The vista of this queer, cold, lonesome, hard little street, down by the great city's river front, was painted, or something very like it was painted, on back curtains long ago. The great, gloomy pile of the Bridge rises before over all. To make it right there should be a scream. A female figure with hair streaming upward should shoot through the air to black waters below, where there is a decrepit boat with a man in a striped jersey pulling at the oars.

V

THAT REVIEWER "CUSS"

There are very young, oh absurdly young! reviewers; and there are elderly reviewers, with whiskers. There are also women reviewers. Absurdly young reviewers are inclined to be youthful in their reviews. Elderly reviewers usually have missed fire with their lives, or they wouldn't still be reviewers. The best sort of a reviewer is the reviewer that is just getting slightly bald. He is not a flippertigibbet, and still an intelligent man—if he is a good reviewer.

Book reviews are in nearly all the papers. Proprietors of newspapers don't read these things: they think they are deadly stuff. Many authors don't: because they regard them as ill-natured and exceedingly stupid. Book clerks don't read them much: for that would be like working overtime. Business men infrequently have time for such nonsense. University professors are inclined to pooh-pooh them as things beneath them. Still somebody must read them, as publishers pay for them with their advertising. No publishers' advertising, no book reviews, is the policy of nearly every newspaper; and the reviews are generally in proportion to the amount of advertising. Now publishers are sagacious men who generally live in comfortable circumstances, and who occasionally get quite rich and mingle in important society. They set considerable store by reviews; they employ publicity men at good wages who continually supply reviewers with valuable information by post and telephone; they are fond of quoting in large type remarks from reviews which please them; and sometimes, at reviews they don't like, they stir up a fuss and have literary editors removed from office.

Yes, reviews have much power. They are eagerly read by multitudes of people who write very indignantly to the paper to correct and rebuke the reviewer when, owing to fatigue, he refers to Miss Mitford as having written "Cranford," or otherwise blunders. They are the wings of fame to new authors. They can increase the sale of a book by saying that it should not be in the hands of the young. They are tolerated by the owners of papers, who are very powerful men indeed, engaged in the vast modern industry of manufacturing news for the people, and in constant effort to obtain control of politics. Reviewers are paid space rates of, in some instances, as much as eight dollars a column, with the head lines deducted. When there is no other payment they always get the book they review free for their libraries, or to sell cheap to the second-hand man. Reviewers are spoken of as "the critics"—by simple-minded people; when their printed remarks are useful for that purpose, the remarks are called "leading critical opinions"—by advertisements; and reviewers are sometimes invited to lunch by astute authors, and are treated to pleasant dishes to cheer them, and given good cigars to smoke.

Occasionally somebody ups and discusses the nature of our literary journalism and what sort of a creature the reviewer is. Dr. Bliss Perry was at this not long ago in the Yale Review. Editor for a couple of decades of our foremost literary journal, and now a professor in one of our great universities, Dr. Perry certainly knows a good deal about various branches of the book business. His highly critical review of the reviewing business has somewhat the character of a history that a great general might write of a war. A man who had served in the trenches, however, would give a more intimate picture, though of course it would not be as good history.

I will give an intimate picture of the American reviewer at work to-day: the absurdly young, the slightly bald, and the elderly with whiskers; and of his hard and picturesque trade.

There was an old man who had devoted a great many years to a close study of engraved gems. He embodied the result of his elaborate researches in a learned volume. I never had a gem of any kind in my life; at the time of which I write I did not have a job. A friend of mine, who was a professional reviewer, and at whose house I was stopping, brought home one day this book on engraved gems, and told me he had got it for me to review. "But," I said, "I don't know anything about engraved gems, and" (you see I was very inexperienced) "I can write only about things that particularly interest me." "You are a devil of a journalist," was my friend's reply; "you'd better get to work on this right away. You studied art, didn't you? I told the editor you knew all about art. And he has to have the article by Thursday."

He instructed me in certain elementary principles of the art of successful reviewing; such, for example, as getting your information out of the book itself; and he cautioned me against employing too many quotation marks, as the editor did not like that.

My review, of a couple of columns, cut a bit here and there by the literary editor, appeared in a prominent New York paper. Speaking quite impartially, simply as now a trained judge of these things, I will say that it was a very fair review: it "gave the book," as the term is. I discovered that I had something of a talent for this work; and so it was that I entered a profession which I have followed, with divers vicissitudes, for a number of years.

I became good friends with that literary editor, and began to contribute regularly week by week to his paper. He liked my style, and always gave me a good position in the paper. He liked me personally, and always put my name to my reviews; which was a thing against the rule of the paper—that being that only articles by celebrated persons were to be signed.

This is a point sometimes questioned. It seems to me that it is a good thing for the reviewer to have his work signed, particularly for the young reviewer, whose yet ardent spirit craves a place in the sun. It contributes to his pleasant conception of reviewing as a fine thing to do. It makes him more alive than the anonymous thing. He meets people who brighten at the recollection of having read his name. I know a man who was a very witty reviewer (when he was young); that fellow used to get love letters from ladies he had never seen, just like a baseball pitcher, or a tenor; there was a rich man who ate meals at the Century Club had him there to dinner, because he thought him funny; he got a note from a Literary Adviser asking him for a book manuscript; and two persons wrote him from San Francisco. I myself have had courteous letters thanking me from authors here and in England. That fellow of whom I just spoke undoubtedly was on the threshold of a brilliant career; he was full of courage and laughter, though very poor. Then a great man offered him a Position as a literary editor. His name ceased to be seen; I heard of him after a year, and it was said of him that he was dreadfully bald and had a long beard, I mean of course metaphorically speaking.

Whether signed reviewers are conducive to honesty I am not sure. There was a man (I know him well) wrote a book on Alaska or some such place, claimed he had been there. There was another man, his friend, who was a reviewer. Now the Alaskaian said to the critic: "Why don't you get my book from the paper? I'll write the review—I know more about the book than anybody else, anyway; and you sign it and get the money." And this was done; and it was an excellent review; and the paper (which you read every day) was no wiser.

The literary editor who signed my reviews for me was a youth of an independent turn of mind. He encouraged the expression in reviews of exactly what one thought; he liked an individual note in them; he had an enthusiasm for books of literary quality, somewhat to the neglect of other branches of the publishing business; he gathered about him a group of writers of a spirit kindred to his own; and he was rapidly moulding his department of his paper into a thing, perhaps a plaything, of life and colour.

But he lacked commercial tact. He wanted to make something like the English lighter literary journals. He offended the powers behind the man higher up. I saw him last on a Wednesday; he outlined his plans for the future. On Friday, I know he "made up" his paper. Saturday I looked for him, but he had gone from that place. There was in it a dried man of much hard experience of newspapers, who reigned in that youth's stead. The wrath of authority grinds with exceeding quickness.

This which I have written is history, as many excellent of mind know, and should be put into a book: for it reveals how close we came to having in this country a Literary Doings that could be read for pleasure. I continued to learn the business.

Sometimes reviewers are poets also. I know fifteen. Sometimes they are Irishmen. Sometimes both. I knew one who was one of those Celtic Poets. His name had all the colour of the late Irish literary movement. That is, after he became a man of letters; before that it was Bill Somethingorother. He was an earnest person, without humour (strange for an Irishman!), eloquent, very pronounced in his opinions; and he had never read anything at all (outside of Columbia University) before he was called to the literary profession. Later he went into politics, and became something at Washington. Some reviewers, again, are lexicographers. I know about a dozen of these, ranging in age from twenty-seven years to seventy. When they had finished writing the dictionary, they joined the army of the unemployed, and became reviewers. I am acquainted with one reviewer who has been everything, almost, under the sun—a husband, a father, and a householder; he has been successively a socialist, an aesthete, a Churchman, and a Roman Catholic. He is an eager student of the universe, a prodigiously energetic journalist, a lively and a humorous writer, a person of marked talent. He will be thirty shortly.

Sometimes reviews are charmingly written by veteran literary men, such as, for instance, Mr. Le Gallienne, and Mr. Huneker. Dr. Perry mentions among reviewers a group of seasoned bookmen, including Mr. Paul Elmer More and Professor Frank Mather, Jr. Mr. Boynton is another sound workman. On the other hand, by some papers, books are economically given out for review to reporters. And again (for the same reason), to editorial writers and to various editors. In America, you know, practically everybody connected with a newspaper is an editor. The man who sits all day in his shirt sleeves smoking a corncob pipe, clipping up with large scissors vast piles of newspapers, is exchange editor. There was a paper for which I worked from morn till dewy eve, reviewing hooks, where we used to say that we had an elevator editor and a scrub editor, and a nice charwoman she was.

Reviewers of course frequently differ widely in their conceptions of a book. I said one time of a book of Lady Gregory's that it was a highly amusing affair; and I gave numerous excerpts in support of my statement. I had enjoyed the book greatly. It was delightful, I thought. It was then a bit of a jolt to me to read a lengthy article by another reviewer of the same book, who set forth that Lady Gregory was an extremely serious person, with never a smile, and who gave copious evidence of this point in quotations. Each of us made out a perfectly good case.

Now suppose you read in the New York This, a daily paper, that Such-and-Such a book was the best thing of its kind since Adam. And suppose you found the same opinion to be that of the New York Weekly That and of the New York Weekly Other. Notwithstanding that the New York Something-Else declared that this was the rottenest hook that ever came from the press, you would be inclined to accept the conclusion of the majority of critics, would you not? Well, I'll tell you this: the man who "does" the fiction week by week for the New York This and for The That and for The Other, is one and the same industrious person. I know him well. He has a large family to support (which is continually out of shoes) and his wife just presented him with a new set of twins the other day. He is now trying to add the job on The Something-Else to his list.

Let us farther suppose that you are a magazine editor. You wrote this Such-and-Such book yourself. You are a very disagreeable person (we will imagine). You rejected three of my stories about my experiences as a vagabond. Farthermore, when I remonstrated with you about this over the telephone, you told me that you were very busy. When your book came out I happened to review it for three papers. I tried to do it justice although I didn't think much of the book, or of anything else that you ever did.

Now, reflecting upon the vast frailty of human nature, and considering the power of the reviewer to exercise petty personal pique, I think there is little dishonesty of this nature in reviews. The prejudice is the other way round, in "log rolling," as it is called, among little cliques of friends. Though I have known more than one case more or less like that of a reviewer man, otherwise fairly well balanced, who had a rabid antipathy to the work of Havelock Ellis. Whenever he got hold of a book of Havelock Ellis's he became blind and livid with rage.

In the period when I was a free lance reviewer, I used to review generally only books that I was particularly interested in, books on subjects with which I was familiar, books by authors whom I knew all about. And in writing my reviews I used to wait now and then for an idea. Those were happy, innocent, amateur days. That is: when my thoughts got stalled I would throw myself on a couch for a bit, or I would look out at my window, or I took a turn about Gramercy Park for a breath of air. Reviews sometimes had to be in by the following day, or, so my editor would declare to me with much vigour over the telephone, the paper would go to smash; and then he would hold them in type for three weeks. But they rarely had to be done within a couple of hours or less.

In the course of time I got down to brass tacks; I took a staff position, a desk job. It was up to me to review everything going, in a steady ceaseless grind. I began work at half past nine in the morning. When I was commuting I began earlier, taking up a book on the train. Between nine thirty and a quarter to eleven I did a book, say, on the extermination of the house-fly; from then until lunch time, three hundred words on a very pleasant novel called, for instance, "Roast Beef, Medium"; in the afternoon, three-quarters of a column on a "History of the American Negro"; winding up the day, perhaps, with a lively article about a popular book on "Submarine Diving and Light Houses"; and taking home at night the "Note Books of Samuel Butler." I began the morrow, very likely, with an "omnibus article" lumping together five books on the Panama Canal. And then, as the publishers of the latest book on art had turned in a double-column hundred-agate-line "ad" the week before, it was necessary to do something serious "for" that masterpiece. I reviewed a dictionary and a couple of cookery books. At the holiday season I polished off a jumble of Christmas and New Year's cards, a pile of picture calendars, and a table full of "juveniles." Woman suffrage, alcoholism, New Thought, socialism, minor poetry, big game hunting, militarism, athletics, architecture, eugenics, industry, European travel, education, eroticism, red blood fiction, humour, uplift books, white slavery, nature study, aviation, bygone kings (and their mistresses), statesmen, scientists, poverty, disease, and crime, I had always with me. I became a slightly bald reviewer.

Books of theology and of philosophy were given out to a theologian; books concerning the dramatic art were done by the dramatic critic; and those on music went to the music critic. We had an occasional letter from Paris on current French literature.

In addition to writing (for I was an editor), I read the "literary" galley proofs; "made up" once a week down in the composing room late at night; compiled the feature variously called in different papers Books Received, Books of the Week, or The Newest Books; and got out the correspondence of the literary department—with publishers and with fools who write in about things. I also went over the foreign exchange, that is: clipped literary notes out of foreign papers. Once a month I surveyed the current magazines. I worked in the office on every holiday of the year except Christmas and New Year's, and frequently on Sundays at home.

With a view to attracting the intellectual elite to a profession where this class is needed, I will tell you what I got for this. It should be understood, however, that I was with one of the great papers, which paid a scale of generous salaries. Mine was forty dollars a week. That is a good deal of money for a literary man to earn regularly. But—

I did, indeed, have an assistant in this office; there was a person associated with me who took the responsibility of everything in the department that was excellent. That is, I was "assistant literary editor." Few newspapers can afford to employ a chief solely for each department. It is recognised that the work of the literary editor can be economically combined with that of the dramatic editor, or with that of the art critic; or the art critic runs the Saturday supplement, or some such thing. My chief looked in every day or so, and frequently, perhaps in striving for exact honesty I should say regularly, contributed reviews. He directed the policy of the department, subject, of course, to criticism from "down stairs."

But (as I was about to say above) that regular income is very uncertain. Universities cultivate a sense of security in their professors, in order to obtain loyal service and lofty endeavour. The editorial tenure, as all men know, is a house of sand—a summer's breeze, a wash of the tide, and the editor is a refugee. I know the editor of literary pages that go far and wide, who has held down that job now for over a year. That man is troubled: none has ever stood in his shoes for much longer than that.

"Don't fool yourself," I heard a successful young journalist say the other day to a very conscientious young reviewer. "Good work won't get you anything. Play politics, office politics all the while." Doubtless sound advice, this, for any gainful employment.

Now about that prime department of the press called the business office. Many people firmly believe that all book reviews—and dramatic criticisms and editorials—are bought by "the interests." One of the principal librarians of New York holds this view of reviews. I never knew a reviewer who was bound to tell anything but the truth as he saw it. Nor have I ever written in any review a word that I knew to be false; and I believe that few reviewers do. Because, however, this or that publishing house was "a friend of ours," or because the husband of this author used to work for the paper (pure sentiment!), or that one is a friend of the wife of The Editor (caution!), it has been suggested to me by my chief that I "go easy" with certain books.

The good reviewer does go easy with most books. It is a mark of his excellence as a reviewer that he has a catholic taste, that he sees that books are written to many standards, and that every book, almost, is meet for some. It is not his business to break things on the wheel; but to introduce the book before him to its proper audience; always recognising, of course, sometimes with pleasant subtle irony, its limitations. It is only when a book pretends to be what it is not, that he damns it. All that is not business, but sensible, sensitive criticism.

To return. The business office exerts not a direct but a moral influence, so to put it, upon the literary department. Business tact must be recognised. A hostile review already in type and in the plan of the next issue may be "killed" when a large "ad" announcing books brought out by the publisher of this one so treated comes in for the next paper; and then search is made for a book from the same publisher which may be favourably reviewed. Or a hostile review may be held over until a time more politic for its release, say following several enthusiastic reviews. And there is no sense in noticing in one issue a disproportionate number of books published by one house.

In concluding my discussion I will draw two portraits of professional reviewers, one composite of a class, the other a picture of a man who stands at the top of his profession.

Seated at his desk is a little man with a pointed beard and a large bald spot on top of his head. This man has been all his life a literary hack. He has read manuscript for publishing houses; he has novelised popular plays for ha-penny papers, and dramatised trashy novels for cheap producers; he has done routine chore writing in magazine offices, made translations for pirate publishers, and picked up an odd sum now and then by a "Sunday story." He has always been an anonymous writer. He has never had sufficient intellectual character to do anything well. The downward side of middle age finds him afflicted with various physical ailments, entirely dependent upon a precarious position at a moderate salary, without influential friends, completely disillusioned, with a mediocre mind now much fagged, devoid of high ambition, and with a most unstimulating prospect before him. His attitude toward the business of book reviewing is that he wishes he had gone into the tailor business or that his father had left him a grocery store. He would not have succeeded, however, as either a tailor or a grocer, as he has even less business than literary ability. Farther, he regards himself as a gentleman, and books strike him as being more gentlemanly than trade. He has got along as well as he has, by bluff about his extensive acquaintance with literature, and his long experience in writing and publishing.

This type of reviewing man says that he does the thing "mechanically." About the new crop of juvenile books, let us say, he says the same thing again now that he said four years ago. "One idea every other paragraph," is his principle, and he thinks it sufficient in a review. Sufficient, that is, to "get by." And whatever gets by, in his view, "pleases them just as well as anything else." Our friend of this character has a considerable number of stock remarks which may at any time be written very rapidly. One of these sentences is: "This book furnishes capital reading;" another says that this book "is welcome;" and he holds as a general principle that, "the reviewer who reads the book is lost."

Occasionally, very occasionally, there is found among reviewers the type of old-fashioned person who used to be called a "man of letters." This is a wild dream, but it would be a grand thing for American reviewing if every one of our young reviewers could have for an hour each week the moral benefit of the society of such a man. I know one who now has been active in New York literary journalism for something like thirty years—a fine intellectual figure of a man. He makes his living out of this, indeed, but his interest is in the thing itself, in literature. He has all that one really needs in the world, he has the esteem of the most estimable people, and he follows with unceasing pleasure a delightful occupation. He is as keen to-day, he declares, on the "right way of putting three words together" as he was when he began to write. His mellow, witty, and gentlemanly style is saturated with the sounds, scents and colours of literature. The exercise of his cultivated judgment is not a trade, but a sacred trust. To look at him and to think of his admirable career is to realise the dignity of his calling—discussing with authority the books of the world as they come from the press.

VI

LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDOW

Now it's a funny thing, that, come to think of it. Some folks have questioned whether, the other way round, it could be done in this country at all. It's a pleasant view anyhow that the matter presents of that curious affair the English character.

There is a notion knocking about over here that considerable rigmarole is required to meet an Englishman. And very probably few who have tried it would dispute that it is somewhat difficult to "meet" an ordinary Englishman to whom you are not known in a railway carriage. With the big 'uns, however, the business appears to be simple enough. Foolish doings do clutter up one's luggage with letters of introduction when all that is needed to board round with the most celebrated people in England is a glance at a "Who's Who" in a public library to get addresses.

For the purpose of convenience the writer of these souvenirs will refer to himself as "I" and "me." I was all done up in health and was advised by doctors to clear out at once. So I bought a steamship ticket, packed a kit bag, crossed the water and took a couple of strolls about that island over there; when, feeling fitter, I turned up in London for a look about.

It sort of came over me that in my haste of departure I had neglected to bring any of my friends along, or to equip myself with the means of making others here. I was unarmed, so to say—a "Yank" in an obviously hostile country. This, you see, was before the war, before we and Britain had got so genuinely sweet on one another.

At that time I had two acquaintances resident in London. One, a Bostonian, whose attention was quite occupied with a new addition to his family; the other was the errand man stationed before my place of abode. He was an amiable soul, whose companionable nature, worldly wisdom and topographical knowledge I much appreciated. He instructed me in the culinary subject of "bubble and squeak" and many other learned matters; but unfortunately his social connections were limited to one class.

One time not a great while back I happened to review in succession for a New York paper several books by Hilaire Belloc. Mr. Belloc had written me a note thanking me for these reviews. I decided to write Mr. Belloc that I was in London and to ask if he could spare a moment for me to look at him, Mr. Belloc being one of my literary passions.

Then an ambitious idea popped into my head. I determined to write the same request to all the people in England I had ever reviewed. Reviewing, mostly anonymous, had been my business for several years, with other literary chores on the side. I communicated to Mr. Chesterton the fact that I had come over to look about, told him my belief that he was one of the noblest and most interesting monuments in England, and asked him if he supposed that he could be "viewed" by me, at some street corner, say, at a time appointed, as he rumbled past in his triumphal car.

Writing to famous people that you don't know is somewhat like the drink habit. It is easy to begin; it is pleasurably stimulating; it soon fastens itself upon you to the extent that it is exceedingly difficult to stop indulgence and it leads you straight to excess. I wound up, I think, with Hugh Walpole. I had liked that "Fortitude" thing very much.

My Englishised Boston friend—he's the worst Englishman I saw over there—simply threw up his hands. He groaned and fell into a chair.

"Holy cat!" he cried, or English words to that effect, "you can't come over here and do that way. It's not done," he declared. "You can't meet Englishmen in that fashion. These people will think you are a wild, bounding red Indian. They'll all go out of town until you leave the country."

Well, I saw it was awfully bad. I have disgraced the U.S.A. That's what comes of having crude notions about meeting people. I felt pretty cheap. I felt sorry for my friend too, because he had to stay there where he lived and try to hold his head up while I could slink off back home. My friend pointed out to me that Mr. Chesterton and the other gentlemen had only my word for it that I had any connection with literature, and that as far as they were aware I might be the worst kind of crook, and at the very best was in all likelihood a very great bore.

Annie, the maid at my lodgings, handed me a bunch of mail. Mr. Belloc was particularly eager to see me, he said. He gave me an intimate two page account of his movements for the past couple of weeks or so. He had just been out to sea in his boat, the Nona, and had only got back after a good deal of difficulty outside; this he hoped would account for the delay of a day or so in his reply.

During the Whitsun days he had to travel about England to see his children at their various schools, and after that he had to go to settle again about his boat, where she lay in a Welsh port. Then he must speak at Eton. He would be "available," however, at the beginning of the next week, when he hoped I would "take a meal" with him. Perhaps he could be of some use in acquainting me with England; it would be such a pleasure to meet me, and so on. Very nice attitude for a man so slightly acquainted with one.

Mr. Chesterton wished to thank me for my letter and to say that he would be pleased if I cared to come down to spend an afternoon with him at Beaconsfield. Mr. Walpole apologised very greatly for seeming so curtly inhospitable, but he was only in London for a short time and had difficulty in squeezing his engagements in. This week, too, was infernally complicated by Ascot. But couldn't I come round on Monday to lunch with him at his club?

Mr. Chesterton is a grand man. Smokes excellent cigars. But first, as you come up the hill, from the railway station toward the old part of the village and to the little house Overroads, you enter, as like as not, as I did, a gate set in a pleasant hedge, and you knock at a side door, to the mirth later of Mrs. Chesterton.

This agreeable entrance is that for tradesmen. The way you should have gone in is round somewhere on another road. A maid admits you to a small parlour and in a moment Mrs. Chesterton comes in to inquire if you have an appointment with her husband. She always speaks of Mr. Chesterton as "my husband." It develops that the letter you sent fixing the appointment got balled up in some way. It further develops that a good many things connected with Mr. Chesterton's life and house get balled up. Mrs. Chesterton's line seems to be to keep things about a chaotic husband as straight as possible.

Mr. Chesterton is a very fat man. His portraits, I think, hardly do him sufficient honour in this respect. He has a remarkably red face. And a smallish moustache, lightish in colour against this background. His expression is extraordinarily innocent; he looks like a monstrous infant. A tumbled mane tops him off. He sits in his parlour in a very small chair.

Did I write him when I was coming? Wonder what became of the letter? Doesn't remember it. Perhaps it is in his dressing gown. Has a habit of sticking things that interest him into the pocket of his dressing gown. Where, do you suppose, is his dressing gown? However, no matter. "Have a cigar. Do have a cigar. Wonder where my cigars are! Where are my cigars?" Mrs. Chesterton locates them.

Now about that poem, "The Inn at the End of the World," or some such thing. He is inclined to think that he did write it, but he cannot remember where it was published. Now he has lost his glasses, ridiculously small glasses, which he has been continually attempting to fix firmly upon his nose. Slapping yourself about the chest is an excellent way to find glasses.

Well, it is very flattering to be told that one is so well known in America. But so he had heard before. Describes himself as a "philosophical journalist." Did not know that there was an audience in America for his kind of writing. Wonders whether democracy as carried on there "on such a gigantic scale" can keep right on successfully. Admits a division between our two peoples. "Trenches have been dug between us," he declares.

Rises to a remark about the Englishman's everlasting garden. "He likes to have a little fringe about him," he says. And then tells a little story, which one might say contains all the elements of his art.

When he first came to Beaconsfield, Mr. Chesterton said, the policemen used to touch their helmets to him, until he told them to stop it. Because, he said, he felt that rather he should touch his hat to the policemen. "Saluting the colours, as it were," he explained. "For," he added, "are they not officers of the King?"

Mr. Chesterton apologised for being, as he put it, excessively talkative. This was occasioned, he said, by "worry and fatigue." I declined to stay for tea, as I noticed a chugging car awaiting in front of the house. "You must come to see me again," said the grand young man of England. The last I saw of him he was rolling through his garden, tossing his mane; the famous garden that rose up and hit him, you remember, at the time of his unfortunate fall.

Fine time I had with young Walpole. Those English certainly have the drop on us in the matter of clubs. They live about in the haunts beloved of Thackeray, and everybody else you ever heard of. Pleasant place, the Garrick. Something like our Players, but better. Slick collection of old portraits. Fine bust there of Will Shakespeare, found bottled up in some old passage.

Fashionable young man, Walpole. I can't remember exactly whether or not he had on all these things; but he's the sort that, if he had on nothing, would look as if he had: silk topper, spats, buttonhole bouquet. Asked me if I had yet been to Ascot. "Oh, you must go to Ascot." Buys his cigarettes, in that English way, in bulk, not by the box. "Stuff some in your pocket," he said. "Won't you have a whiskey and soda?"

Difficult person to talk with, as the only English he knows is the King's English. I was endeavouring to explain that I had left New York rather suddenly. "I just beat it, you know," I said.

"You beat it?" said Mr. Walpole.

"Yes, I just up and skidooed."

"You skidooed?"

I saw that I should have to talk like John Milton. "Sure," I said, "I left without much preparation." And then we spoke of some writer I do not care for. "I don't get him," I said.

"You don't get him?" inquired Mr. Walpole.

"No," I said, "I can't see him at all."

"You can't see him?" queried Mr. Walpole.

More Milton, I perceived. "I quite fail," I said, "to appreciate the gentleman's writings."

Mr. Walpole got that.

"Fortitude" had done him very well. The idea of Russia had always fascinated him; he had enough money to run him for a couple of years, and he was leaving shortly for Russia. "Is there any one here you would like me to help you to see?" he asked. Queer way for a gentleman to treat a probable crook. "Have you met Mr. James?" Walpole was very strong with Mr. James, it seemed.

Read aloud a letter just received from Mr. James, which he had been fingering, to show that his informal, epistolary style was identical with that of his recent autobiographical writings, which we had been discussing. "Bennett, of course you should see Arnold Bennett." Great friend of Walpole's. "And Mrs. Belloc Lowndes," said Mr. Walpole, "you really must know her; knows as much about the writing game as any one in England. I'll write those three letters to-night."

Suddenly he asked me if I were married. "All Americans are," was his comment. He had to be going. Some stupid affair, he said, for the evening. We walked together around into the Strand. "Well, good-bye," said Mr. Walpole, extending his hand, "I've got to beat it now."

There was an awesome sort of place where Thackeray went, you remember, where he was scared of the waiters. This probably was not the Reform Club, as he was very much at home there and loved the place. However, just the outside of this "mausoleum" in Pall Mall scared Mr. Hopkinson Smith, who had been inside a few clubs here and there, and who spoke, in a sketch of London, of its "forbidding" aspect, "a great, square, sullen mass of granite, frowning at you from under its heavy browed windows—an aloof, stately, cold and unwelcome sort of place."

An aristocratic functionary, probably a superannuated member of
Parliament, placed me under arrest at the door, and in a vast, marble
pillared hall I was held on suspicion to await the arrival of Mr.
Belloc.

A large, brawny man he is, with massive shoulders, a prizefighter's head, a fine, clean shaven face and a bull neck. Somehow he suggested to me—though I do not clearly remember the picture—the portrait of William Blake by Thomas Phillips, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery, frequently reproduced in books.

He gives your hand a hearty wrench, turns and strides ahead of you into another room. You—and small boys in buttons, with cards and letters on platters, to whom he pays no attention—trot after him. A driving, forceful, dominating character, apparently. Looks at his watch frequently. Perpetually up and down from town, he says, and continually rushing about London. Keen on the job, evidently, all the while.

He does not know how far you are acquainted with England; "there is a wonderful lot of things to be seen in the island." Tells you all sorts of unusual places to go; how, somewhere in the north, you can walk along a Roman wall for ever so long, "a wonderful experience." Makes your head spin, he knows so much that you never thought of about England.

Discussing a tremendous meeting later on, where all the literary nobility of London are to be with you, he follows you down the steps when you go. Later forgets, in the crush of his affairs, all about this arrangement. Then sends you telegrams and basketfuls of letters of apology, with further invitations.

"Here you are, sir! All the winners! One penny." This had been the cry of the news lads but the week before.

"England to fight! Here you are, sir. Britain at war!" suddenly they began to yell through the streets.

It was not an hour now, I felt, to trouble Englishmen with my petty literary adventures. Also, I became a refugee, to some extent. And, well—I "beat it" back 'ome again. This was the only way I knew, as a neutral (then), to serve the countries at war.

VII

HENRY JAMES, HIMSELF

We have now to record an extraordinary adventure. Our later education was derived in some considerable measure from the writings of Mr. Henry James. This to explain our emotion. We had never expected to behold himself, the illustrious expatriate who had so far enlightened an unkempt mind. But the night before we had been talking of him. Indeed, it is impossible for us to fail to perceive here something of the supernatural.

But hold! "William Edwards," says a newspaper notice, "who used to drive a post stage between New York and Albany, died on Saturday at his home. He was born in Albany," and so and so, "and many were the stories he had to tell of incidents connected with the famous men who were his passengers." Even so. We were ourselves a clerk. That is, for a number of years we waited on customers in a celebrated book shop. This is one of the stories we have to tell of the personages who were, so to say, our passengers. Or perhaps we are more in the nature of those unscrupulous English footmen to high society, of whom we have heard, who "sell out" their observation and information to the society press.

Anyhow, we are of a loquacious, gossipy turn; and we were booksellers, so to speak, to crowned heads. We have recently heard, too, of another precedent to our garrulous performance, the publication in Rome of the memoirs of an old waiter, who carefully set down the relative liberality of prominent persons whom he served. After having served Cardinals Rampolla and Merry del Val, this excellent memoirist entered opposite their names, "Both no good." With this we drop the defensive.

We noticed Mr. Wharton sitting down, legs crossed, smoking a cigar. Awaiting, we presumed, his wife. A not unpicturesque figure, tall, rather dashing in effect, ruddy visage, dragoon moustache, and habited in a light, smartly-cut sack suit of rather arresting checks, conspicuous grey spats; a gentleman manifesting no interest whatever in his surroundings.

Mr. Brownell, the critic, entered through the front door and moved to the elevator.

There stepped from the elevator car a somewhat portly little man who joined Mr. Wharton. He wore a rather queer looking, very big derby hat, oddly flat on top. His shoulders were hooped up somewhat like the figure of Joseph Choate. A rather funny, square, box-like body on little legs. An English look to his clothes. Under his arm an odd-looking club of a walking-stick. Mr. Brownell turned quickly to this rather amusing though not undistinguished figure, and said, "Mr. James—Brownell." The quaint gentleman took off his big hat, discovering to our intent curiosity a polished bald dome, and began instantly to talk, very earnestly, steadily, in a moderately pitched voice, gesticulating with an even rhythmic beat with his right hand, raised close to his face.

Joined presently by Mrs. Wharton, the party, bidding Mr. Brownell adieu, took a somewhat humorous departure (we felt) from the shop; Mr. James, with some suddenness, preceding out the door. Moving nimbly up the Avenue, he was overhauled by Mrs. Wharton under full sail, who attached herself to his arm. Her husband by an energetic forward play around the end achieved her other wing. In this formation, sticks flashing, skirt whipping, with a somewhat spirited mien, the august spectacle receded from our rapt view, to be at length obliterated as a unit by the general human scene.

We saw Mr. James after this a number of times. Accompanied again by Mrs. Wharton, and later in the charge (such was the effect) of another lady, who, we understood, drives regularly to her social chariot literary lions. In something like six years' observation of the human being in a book shop, we have never seen any person so thoroughly in a book store, a magazine, that is, of books, as Mr. James. One can be, you know—it is most common, indeed—in a book store and at the same time not be in a book store—any more than if one were in a hotel lobby. Mr. James "snooked" around the shop. He ran his nose over the tables, and inch by inch (he must be very shortsighted) along the walls, stood on tiptoe and pulled down volumes from high places, rummaged in dark corners, was apparently oblivious of the presence of anything but the books. He was not the slightest in a hurry. He would have been, we felt, content and quite happy, like a child with blocks, to play this way by himself all day.

Happening, by our close proximity, to turn to us the first time in the shop that he required attention, upon each succeeding visit he sought out us to attend to his wishes. The position of retail salesman "on the floor" is one completely exposed to every human attitude and humour. Against arrogance, against contempt of himself as a shop person, a species of "counter-jumper," against irascibility, against bigoted ignorance, against an indissoluble assumption, perhaps logical, that he is of inferior mentality, this factotum has no defence. His very business is to meet all with amenity. It is his daily portion, included in the material with which he works.

It (he finds) injures him not, essentially; it ceases to particularly affect him, beyond his inward appraisement of the character before him. Toward him one acts simply in accordance with the instincts of one's nature. His status counsels no constraint, invites no display, has no property of stimulation. Thus the view of a famous man's character from the position of retail clerk is valuable. Mr. James's manner with Mr. Brownell would hardly be the same as toward us. But it was, exactly. There was present in his mind at the moment, was quite apparent, absolutely no consciousness of any distance of mind, or position, between him and us. He sought conversation (any suggestion of so equalising a thing as conversation with a clerk is not uncommonly repressed by the important as preposterous). In his own talk with us, he seemed to us to be a man consciously striving with the material of words and sentences to express his thought as well as he could.

He was very earnest. He looked up at us constantly (we are a little tall) with fixed concentration of gaze, and moved his hand to and fro as though seeking to balance his ideas. He asked questions with deference. Among other things, he desired very much to know what per cent. of the novels on the fiction table was the product of writers in England. "I live in England myself," he said, very simply, "and I am curious to know this." He expressed a little impatience at the measureless flood of mediocre fiction, making a fluttering gesture conveying a sense of impotence to give it attention. He barely glanced at the pile of his own book, and did not mention it. He did not seem at first (though we believe later he changed this opinion) to think highly of Arnold Bennett (this was at the first bloom of Mr. Bennett's vogue here), nor to have read him. "Oh, yes, yes; he is an English journalist," in a tone as though, merely a journalist. Clear artist in fibre. When he took his departure he bade us "Good day," and lifted his hat.

Succeeding visits caused us to suspect that Mr. James's ideas of the machinery of business are somewhat naive. He seemed to regard us as, so to say, the whole works. It entered our head that maybe Mr. James thought we received and answered all manner of correspondence, editorial as well as that connected with the retail business, opened up in the morning, read, accepted, and rejected manuscript, nailed up boxes for shipment, swept out the shop, and were acquainted perfectly with all confidential matters of the House. "I wrote you" (us), "you know," he said. And he referred by the way, apparently upon the assumption that the matter had been laid before us, to business of which we could not possibly have cognizance. And then he desired to send some books. Fumbling in his breast pocket, he produced a letter, from which he read aloud a list of his own works apparently requested of him. Carefully replacing his letter, he said: "I should like to send these books to my sister-in-law." With that he started out.

Now, it was not a difficult problem to assume that this could be no other than Mrs. William James, still, it is customary for purchasers to state the name of the person to whom goods are to go, and many people are sceptical that the salesman has it down right even then. "Your sister-in-law, Mr. James, is———?" we suggested. "Oh, yes, of course—of course; Mrs. William James; of course—of course," Mr. James said. Now, certainly, he supposed (it was evident) he had got finally settled a difficult and complicated piece of business. Mrs. William James's regular address we might reasonably infer. Still it might be that she was at the moment somewhere else, on a visit. It were better to have Mr. James give his order in the regular way. "And the address?" we mentioned. "Oh, yes—oh, yes; of course—of course," Mr. James said apologetically. Then, pausing a moment to see if there was anything more in this bewildering labyrinth of details to such a complex transaction, he departed, taking, as he drew away, his hat, as Mrs. Nickleby says, "completely off."

Instead of ascending directly to that regal domain which is unaware of our existence, Mr. James, with the inclination of a bow, approached us one day and inquired, in a manner as though the decision rested largely with us, whether he "could see" the head of the firm. The lady who was his escort swept past him. "Oh, I am sure he will see him," she declared; "this" (with impressive awe) "is Mr. James." Had we said, No, right off the bat, so to say, like that, we believe (unchampioned) Mr. James would have gently withdrawn.

VIII

MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT

I was born in Indiana. That was several years ago, and I have since seen a good deal of the world. I was reading in a newspaper the other day of a new film which shows on the screen the innumerable adventures of a book in the making, from the time the manuscript is accepted to the point where the completed volume is delivered into the hands of the reader. And it struck me that the intimate life of a manuscript before it is accepted might be even more curious to the general public. The career of many an obscure manuscript, I reflected, doubtless is much more romantic than its character. I wonder why, I said, manuscripts have all been so uncommonly reticent concerning themselves. But manuscripts, one recollects, have sensitive natures; and their experiences, at least the experiences of those not born to a great name, could hardly be called flattering to their feelings. Indeed, manuscripts suffer much humiliation, doubtless little suspected of the world. And it requires a manuscript strong in the spirit of detachment to lay bare its heart.

My parent—manuscripts commonly have but one parent—bore me great love; indeed I think he loved me beyond everything else in the world. He was a young man apprenticed to the law, but he cared more for me, I think, than for his calling, which I suspect he decidedly neglected for my sake. I know that in his family he was held a rather disappointing young man; but his family did not know the fervour of his heart, or the tenacity of purpose of which he was capable. He toiled over my up-bringing for two years, and often and often into the very small hours. I think I was never altogether absent from his thoughts, even when he was abroad about his business or his pleasure. I was his first manuscript—his first, that is, that ever grew up. And though I know he was not ashamed but very proud of me, he attempted to keep my existence something of a secret. I could not but feel that as I developed I was a great happiness to him, and yet at times he would give way to black discouragement about me. I know that I have passages which caused him intense pain to bring about. Throughout the time of my growth my dear parent alternated between periods of high exultation and of keen torture. As time passed he became more and more completely absorbed in me. When my climax came into sight he fell to working upon me with exceeding fury, and in the construction of my climax it was plain that he wrestled with much agony—an agony, however, which seemed to be a kind of strange, mad joy.

And then one night (I remember a storm raged without) my parent came to me with a wild, yet happy, light on his face. He pounded at me harder than ever before; and at intervals paced the floor, up and down, up and down, like a man demented, throwing innumerable half-smoked cigarettes over everywhere. The wind blew, and the little frame house strained and groaned in its timbers. As he bent over me a face enwrapt, striking the keys with a quick, nervous touch, great tears started from my dear parent's eyes. Then, it must have been near dawn and the little room hung and swayed in a golden fog of tobacco smoke, I knew that I was finished. My parent was bending over my last page like a six-day bicycle racer over his machine, when he straightened up, raising his hands, and drove his right fist into his left palm. "Done!" he cried, and started from his chair to pace the room in such a frenzy as I had never seen him in before. It was fully half an hour before his excitement abated, when he fell back into his chair, and smoked incessantly until the light of morning paled our lamp. At length I noticed he had ceased to smoke, his head gradually slipped backward, his eyes closed, and he slept. Thus I was born and brought up and grew to manuscript's estate in a little Middle-Western town, on a rented typewriter.

One day shortly after this I was packed up with great care and very carefully addressed, and under my parent's arm I boarded an interurban car. We new over the friendly-looking Hoosier landscape, and at length rolled into the interurban station of the bustling capital, the largest city I had as yet seen. I did not see much of it, however, on this first visit, as we went quickly around the handsome Soldiers' Monument to the office of the American Express Company on Meridian Street. I was given over in charge of a man there who very briskly weighed me and asked my parent my value. My parent seemed to be in a good deal of a dilemma as to this. He hemmed and hawed and finally replied: "Well, I hardly know."

"Is its value inestimable?" inquired the clerk. "Why, in a way I guess you might say it is," said my parent.

Finally, against the clerk's mounting impatience, an estimate was effected, and I was declared to be worth $500. I was cast carelessly on to a pile of other packages of various shapes and sizes, and my parent, giving me a farewell lingering look of love, went out the door.

Of my journey there is not much to say. I arrived in New York amid a prodigious crush of packages, and was delivered, in company with about a dozen others, which I knew to be brother or rival, manuscripts, at the office of a great publishing house. Here I was signed for, and, in the course of the day, unwrapped. I was ticketed with a number and my title, and placed in a tall cabinet, where I remained in the society of several shelves full of other manuscripts for a number of days. Here I was delighted to find quite a coterie of fellow-Hoosiers. But a remarkable proportion of my associates, I discovered, was from the South. The majority of us hailed from small towns. In our company were three or four of somewhat distinguished lineage.

As time passed and nothing happened, I grew somewhat nervous, as I knew with what anxiety my dear parent in Indiana would be counting the days. One of my new-found friends, a portly manuscript (a story of sponge-fishers) that had been out of the cabinet and had had a reading before my arrival, told me in the way of gossip something of the situation at the moment in this house. My friend was an old campaigner, very ragged and battered in appearance, and had been (I was appalled to hear) submitted to seventeen publishing houses before arriving here. It had lost all hope of any justice in the publishing world, and was very cynical. Heavens! would I———

However, it appeared that at this house the first reader had just been obliged to take a vacation owing to ill-health occasioned by too assiduous application to her task of attempting to keep somewhere abreast of the incoming flood of manuscripts. She was, it seems, a large elderly lady who had tried out her own talents as a novelist without marked success some twenty years ago. Her niece, a miss of twenty or so, who had a fancy for an editorial career and who had vainly been seeking a situation of this character for some time, found a windfall in the instant need for a substitute first reader. It was with some petulance, it struck me, that she yanked the door open one day. She was, apparently, showing some one about her office. "All that," she said, waving her hand toward my case, "practically untouched; and mountains besides. I don't know how I'm to get away with it. I suppose I'll have to do a couple every night." I don't know what time it was, but the light was going and the young lady had got into bed when she began to read me, propped up against her knees. She yawned now and then and sighed repeatedly as she shifted back my pages. I thought I noticed that her, knees swayed, just perceptibly, at times. Then suddenly my support sank to one side; I started to slide, and would have plunged to the floor, very nearly pulling her after me, if the disturbance had not as suddenly caught the young lady back into wild consciousness, and she grabbed me and her knees and the slipping bedclothes all in a lump. Shortly after this she turned back to see how I ended, and then went to sleep comfortably, lights out.

I did not see the report the young lady wrote of me, but I had occasion to think that she declared I was rather stupid. However, I got another reading. I was given next to a young man, not, so I understood, a regular reader, but a member of the advertising department who was frequently called on to help weed out manuscript, who took me home with him and threw me onto a couch littered with books and papers. Here I stayed for ever so long. One day I heard the young man say to his wife, nodding toward me: "I ought to try to get that unfortunate thing off my hands before my vacation, but I never seem to get around to it." As, alack-a-day! he did not get around to me before that occasion, I went, packed in the bottom of a trunk, with the young man and his wife on their annual holiday. In my pitchy gaol I had, of course, no means of calculating the flight of time, but when I next saw the light, after what seemed to me an interminable spell, I appeared to be the occasion of some excitement. The young man brought me up after several vigorous dives into the bottom of the trunk, as his wife was saying with much energy: "Well, of course, you can do as you please, but if I were you I'd telegraph an answer right straight back that I did not propose to spend my vacation working for them. The idea! After all you do!" "Oh, well," was the young man's reply, "some poor dog of an author wrote the thing, and it's only right that he should have some kind of an answer within a reasonable time. I ought to have got around to it long ago."

Whatever the kind-hearted young man may have said about me I was given yet another chance. A very business-like chap "took a shot at me," as he expressed it, one forenoon at his desk, I was considerably distressed, however, by the confusion and the multiplicity of interruptions to which his attention to me was subject. When I thought of the sacred privacy devoted to my creation, the whole-hearted consecration of my dear parent's life-blood to my being, I felt that such a reading was little short of criminally unjust. And how could any one be expected to savour my power and my charm in the midst of such distractions? The business-like chap sat somewhere near the middle of a vast floor ranged with desks. In his immediate neighbourhood a score or more of typewriters were clicking and perhaps half as many telephones were going. The chap's own telephone rang, it seemed to me, every five or six pages, and, resting me the while on his knee, he expectantly awaited the outcome of his secretary's answering conversation. At frequent intervals he was consulted by colleagues as to this and that: covers, jackets, electros, fall catalogues, what not? Nevertheless, he got through me in rather brisk order. At my conclusion I observed no tears in his eyes. And, it was evident, he settled my hash, as the phrase is, at this house.

I certainly felt sick at heart in that express car back to the corn belt. My poor parent, when I again met him, unwrapped me very tenderly, and sat for a long time turning me through very dully. I stayed on his desk for several days, and then fared forth again on my quest, valued this trip at a hundred dollars.

After the initial formalities, I fell this time first into the hands of a driving sort of fellow who had the air of being perpetually up to his neck in work, and who handed me to his wife with the remark: "Here's another job for you tomorrow. Make a careful, working synopsis of the story, and I'll dip into the manuscript here and there when I come home to get a line on the style and general character of the thing." The next night, after rustling energetically through me, he wrote out his report, and, passing it to his wife, said: "There are no outright mis-statements of fact as to the plot in that, are there?"

I next fell in the way of a fashionable character just leaving for a week-end, who read me in the smoking-car on his way up into the country. He burned several holes in my pages with the falling ash of his cigarettes. He read me in bits between scraps of conversation with his seat neighbour and recesses of enjoyment of the flying scenery. And he found it rather awkward holding me balanced on his legs crooked up against the seat in front of him. This, my precarious position, led to a grievous calamity. I toppled and fell, and my reader, making a swooping clutch at me as I went, but the more scattered my pages over the polluted floor of the car. An evil draught carried my third page underneath a seat, the third forward from my reader. It was an anguishing thing, but I could not cry out, I could not tell him: as my reader, cursing me heartily (for what I cannot admit was my fault) gathered me up, he neglected to crawl far enough under the seat before him to perceive my page three.

But it does not fall within the scope of my present design to extend this chronicle to the length of an autobiography. With what pain and labour my poor parent recovered from his memory, and then very imperfectly, of course, my third page; how he grew more melancholy of countenance at each of my successive returns to the house of my birth and formative years; how I sometimes remained away for months at a time, and how once an office boy mis-addressed me to a lady in New Jersey who very graciously herself forwarded me to my parent; how my poor parent was obliged at length by the increasing dilapidation of my appearance to go to the expense of having me completely re-typed by a public typist, and how directly after this he entirely re-wrote, expanded, and elaborated me at the instigation of one firm of publishers; how I was read by a delightful old lady who knitted in her office as she read; by a lady of cosmopolitan mien who had me together with many other manuscripts sent to her home in a box, and who consumed innumerable cigarettes as she perused me; by a young gentleman who I am sure had a morning "hang over" at his desk; by a tough-looking customer who wore his hat at his desk; by a young lady of futurist aspect who took me home to her studio; by an old, old man who seemed to "see" me quite, and by many more—all this I may merely indicate.

One very striking phenomenon I should by no means fail to mention, and this uncanny fact may be illustrated thus: If an object is blue or if it is yellow it will be recognised by all men as being blue or yellow, as the case may be. One will not say of it, "See that lurid yellow object," to have another reply, "What! that object directly before us? I see nothing yellow about it; it is as black as ink." But I was apparently exactly like such an impossible object. I was, figuratively speaking, no colour of my own and I was all colours. One, so to speak, saw me as green, another as white, and yet another as orange, while some saw quite red as they looked at me. That is, my character consisted altogether, it seemed, in the amazingly diverse reactions I inspired in my successive readers. I was intolerably dull, I was abundantly entertaining, I was over-subtle, I was painfully obvious, I was exceedingly humorous, and I lacked all humour.

How, at length, a group of editorial gamblers succeeded in coming sufficiently into harmony about me to render a composite verdict that I would be a fair publishing risk; but how the title my poor parent had given me it was unanimously held wouldn't do at all; and how I got another in book committee meeting; how, after I was (wonderful thing!) "accepted," I lay in a safe until I thought I should crumble away with age; and how I was suddenly brought forth and hastily read by the manufacturing department for ideas for my cover to be, and then by the advertising department for "copy dope," before being rushed to the composing room—of these things I have not time to speak further, as I am now on the press, and am rapidly ceasing to be merely a manuscript.

IX

"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN"

"Lavender, sweet lavender,
Who will buy my sweet blooming lavender?
Buy it once, you'll buy it twice,
And make your clothes sweet and nice!"

She was a wretched-looking creature, with a great basket; and it was so she sang through the street. By this you know where we are, for this is one of the old cries of London town.

For the sake of my clothes, and for the noble pleasure of associating for an instant with the original of a coloured print of old London types, I bought a sprig of lavender. "Thank you, sir," she said.

I saw it coming; ah! yes, by now I knew she would. "You are an
American, sir," she added, eyeing me with interest.

You would think that since the "American invasion" first began ever so long ago, some time after Dicky Davis "discovered" London, they, the British, would have seen enough of us to have become accustomed to us by now. But, as you have found, it is not so—we are a strange race from over the sea.

"You are an American, sir," said the barmaid. She was a huge young woman who could have punched my head in. I am not so delicate, either. And she had a pug nose.

"I do not so much care for American ladies," she said. "I think they are a bit hard, don't you?" Then, perhaps feeling that she may have offended me, she quickly added: "Not of course that I doubt that there are maidenlike ladies in America."

They are a curious people, these English, with their nice ideas, even among barmaids, of the graces of a mellow society. For some time I could not understand why she was so beautiful. Then I perceived that it was because of her nose. She looked just like the goddesses of the Elgin marbles, whose noses are broken, you know. Still I doubt whether it would be a good idea for a man to break his wife's nose in order to make her more beautiful.

I will grave her name here on the tablet of fame, so that when you go again to London you may be able to see her. It is Elizabeth.

He was a cats' meat man. And on his arm he carried a basket in which was a heap of bits of horse flesh (such I have been told it is), each on a sliver of stick. There was a little dog playing about near by. "Would you care to treat that dog to a ha'penny's worth of meat, sir?" asked the man.

I had never before treated a dog to anything, though treating is an American habit. So I "set up" the dog to a ha'penny's worth of meat. "Thank you, sir," said the cats' meat man. I saw by the light come into his eye that he had recognised me. "You are———" he began. "I know it," I said; "I am."

I looked at the wretched dog. Would he too accuse me? But he ate his meat and said never a word. Perhaps he was not an Englishman. No, I think he was a tourist, too, like myself. I was glad I had befriended him in an alien land.

"What is the price of this?" I asked. "Thri'pence?" I inquired, reading a sign.

"Three pence," pronounced the attendant very distinctly. It was but his way of saying, "You are an American."

I went into an office to see a man I know. "How are you?" I said in my democratic way to the very small office boy. "You are looking better than when I saw you last," I remarked with pleasant home humour.

"I never saw you before, sir," replied the office boy. "He is an
American," I heard him, apologising for me, tell the typist.

Some considerable while after this I went to this office again. I had quite forgotten the office boy. I handed him my card. A bright lad, he. "I'm feeling much better, sir," he said.

In Pall Mall there is a steamship office in the window of which is displayed a miniature sheet of water. At opposite sides of this little ocean are small dabs of clay, one labelled England, the other America. Tiny ships ply back and forth between the two countries. Observers cannot make out how it is that these little boats turn about as they do, apparently of their own accord. And the scene has continually a number of spectators. (This was before the war.)

One day I was looking in at this window, very much interested in this problem. Standing next to me was a fine specimen of a Pall Mallian, with his silk "topper," his black tail coat, his buttonhole, his checked trowsers, his large grey spats, his shining boots, his stick and his glass on its ribbon, apparently equally absorbed. I turned to him after a hit—a quite natural thing to do, I thought—and, "How the deuce do you suppose that thing works?" I said.

The tall gentleman slowly turned. Slowly, stiffly, with an aristocratic gesture, he raised his arm and placed his glass in his eye, for a moment. I was frozen by his blank stare, quite through. Then he lifted his eyebrow; the glass dropped and bounded before him on its ribbon. And he turned and walked away. Walked away, I dare say, to his frowning club, to tell how he had just been set upon in the street and insulted by some strange ruffian. But, you see, I didn't know; I was an American.

To Epsom I went in a cart to see the Derby. It was at Epsom, you know, that the King's horse was thrown several seasons ago by a suffragette who lost her life in the act. Well, most of the fine gentlemen of England, I think, were there, all in splendid tall grey hats and with their field glasses slung over their shoulders. And a horde of the cleverest crooks in Europe also.

There I had my pocket "cut" by a pickpocket. That is the way they go through you in England, neatly lift your pocket out. I thought this was an interesting thing, so I told it about that I had had my pocket cut, but I did not see any international significance in the affair.