Atlantic Classics Volume I Part 12

'Well, what's the good word?' says Williams.

When two men meet on Broadway the spirit of optimism strikes fire. We begin by asking each other what the good word is. We take it for granted that neither of us has anything but a chronicle of victory and courage to relate. What other word but the good word is tolerable in the lexicon of living, upstanding men? Failure is only for the dead. Surrender is for the man with yellow in his nature. So Williams and I pay our acknowledgments to this best of possible worlds. I give Williams the good word. I make no allusion to the fact that I have spent a miserable night in communion with neuralgia; how can that possibly concern him?

Another ma.n.u.script came back this morning from an editor who regretted that his is the most unintelligent body of readers in the country. The third cook in three weeks left us last night after making vigorous reflections on my wife's good nature and my own appearance. Only an hour ago, as I was watching the long, black steamers bound for Sorrento and Fontainebleau, the monotony of one's treadmill work, the flat unprofitableness of scribbling endlessly on sheets of paper, had become almost a nausea. But Williams will know nothing of this from me. Why should he? He may have been sitting up all night with a sick child. At this very moment the thought of the little parched lips, the moan, the unseeing eyes, may be tearing at his entrails; but he in turn gives me the good word, and many others after that, and we pa.s.s on.

But sometimes I doubt. This splendid optimism of people on Broadway, in the Subway and in the shops and offices--is it really a sign of high spiritual courage, or is it just lack of sensibility? Do we find it easy to keep a stiff upper lip, to buck up, to never say die, because we are brave men, or simply because we lack the sensitiveness and the imagination to react to pain? It may be even worse than that. It may be part of our commercial gift for window-dressing, for putting up a good front.

Sometimes I feel that Williams has no right to be walking down Broadway on business when there is a stricken child at home. The world cannot possibly need him at that moment as much as his own flesh and blood does. It is not courage; it is brutish indifference. At such times I am tempted to dismiss as mythical all this fine talk about feelings that run deep beneath the surface, and bruised hearts that ache under the smile. If a man really suffers he will show it. If a man cultivates the habit of not showing emotion he will end by having none to show. How much of Broadway's optimism is--But here I am paraphrasing William James's _Principles of Psychology_, which the reader can just as well consult for himself in the latest revised edition of 1907.

Also, I am exaggerating. Most likely Williams's children are all in perfect health, and my envelope from the editor has brought a check instead of a rejection slip. It is on such occasions that Williams and I, after shaking hands the way a locomotive takes on water on the run, wheel around, halt, and proceed to buy something at the rate of two for a quarter. If any one is ever inclined to doubt the spirit of American fraternity, it is only necessary to recall the number of commodities for men that sell two for twenty-five cents. In theory, the two cigars which Williams and I buy for twenty-five cents are worth fifteen cents apiece.

As a matter of fact they are probably ten-cent cigars. But the shopkeeper is welcome to his extra nickel. It is a small price to pay for the seal of comrades.h.i.+p that stamps his pair of cigars selling for a single quarter. Two men who have concluded a business deal in which each has commendably tried to get the better of the other may call for twenty-five cent perfectos or for half-dollar Dreadnoughts. I understand there are such. But friends sitting down together will always demand cigars that go for a round sum, two for a quarter or three for fifty (if the editor's check is what it ought to be).

When people speak of the want of real comrades.h.i.+p among women, I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons may not be that the prices which women are accustomed to pay are individualistic instead of fraternal.

The soda fountains and the street cars do not dispense goods at the rate of two items for a single coin. It is infinitely worse in the department stores. Treating a friend to something that costs $2.79 is inconceivable. But I have really wandered from my point.

'Well, be good,' says Williams, and rushes off to catch his boat.

The point I wish to make is that on Broadway people pay tribute to the principle of goodness that rules this world, both in the way they greet and in the way they part. We salute by asking each other what the good word is. When we say good-bye we enjoin each other to be good. The humorous a.s.sumption is that gay devils like Williams and me need to be constantly warned against straying off into the primrose paths that run out of Broadway.

Simple, humorous, average American man! You have left your suburban couch in time to walk half a mile to the station and catch the 7.59 for the city. You have read your morning paper; discussed the weather, the tariff, and the prospects for lettuce with your neighbor; and made the office only a minute late. You have been fastened to your desk from nine o'clock to five, with half an hour for lunch, which you have eaten in a clamorous, overheated restaurant while you watched your hat and coat. At odd moments during the day the thought of doctor's bills, rent bills, school bills, has insisted on receiving attention. At the end of the day, laden with parcels from the market, from the hardware store, from the seedman, you are bound for the ferry to catch the 5.43, when you meet Smith, who, having pa.s.sed the good word, sends you on your way with the injunction to be good--not to play roulette, not to open wine, not to turkey-trot, not to joy-ride, not to haunt the stage door. Be good, O simple, humorous, average suburban American!

I take back that word suburban. The Sunday Supplement has given it a meaning which is not mine. I am speaking only of the suburban in spirit, of a simplicity, a meekness which is of the soul only. Outwardly there is nothing suburban about the crowd on lower Broadway. The man in the street is not at all the diminutive, apologetic creature with side whiskers whom Mr. F. B. Opper brought forth and named Common People, who begat the Strap-Hanger, who begat the Rent-Payer and the Ultimate Consumer. The crowd on lower Broadway is alert and well set up. Yes, though one hates to do it, I must say 'clean-cut.' The men on the sidewalk are young, limber, sharp-faced, almost insolent young men.

There are not very many old men in the crowd, though I see any number of gray-haired young men. Seldom do you detect the traditional signs of age, the sagging lines of the face, the relaxed abdominal contour, the tamed spirit. The young, the young-old, the old-young, but rarely quite the old.

I am speaking only of externals. Clean-cut, eager faces are very frequently disappointing. A very ordinary mind may be working behind that clear sweep of brow and nose and chin. I have known the shock of young men who look like kings of Wall Street and speak like shoe clerks.

They are shoe clerks. But the appearance is there, that athletic carriage which is helped out by our triumphant, ready-made clothing. I suppose I ought to detest the tailor's tricks which iron out all ages and all stations into a uniformity of padded shoulders and trim waist-lines and hips. I imagine I ought to despise our habit of wearing elegant shoddy where the European chooses honest, clumsy woolens. But I am concerned only with externals, and in outward appearances a Broadway crowd beats the world. aesthetically we simply are in a cla.s.s by ourselves when compared with the Englishman and the Teuton in their skimpy, ill-cut garments. Let the British and German amba.s.sadors at Was.h.i.+ngton do their worst. This is my firm belief and I will maintain it against the world. The truth must out. _Ruat clum. Ich kann nicht anders. J'y suis, j'y reste._

Williams laughs at my lyrical outbursts. But I am not yet through. I still have to speak of the women in the crowd. What an infinitely finer thing is a woman than a man of her cla.s.s! To see this for yourself you have only to walk up Broadway until the southward-bearing stream breaks off and the tide begins to run from west to east. You have pa.s.sed out of the commercial district into the region of factories. It is well on toward dark, and the barracks that go by the unlovely name of loft buildings, are pouring out their battalions of needle-workers. The crowd has become a ma.s.s. The nervous pace of lower Broadway slackens to the steady, patient tramp of a host. It is an army of women, with here and there a flying detachment of the male.

On the faces of the men the day's toil has written its record even as on the women, but in a much coa.r.s.er hand. Fatigue has beaten down the soul of these men into brutish indifference, but in the women it has drawn fine the flesh only to make it more eloquent of the soul. Instead of listlessness, there is wistfulness. Instead of vacuity you read mystery.

Innate grace rises above the vulgarity of the dress. Cheap, tawdry blouse and imitation willow-plume walk shoulder to shoulder with the shoddy coat of the male, copying Fifth Avenue as fifty cents may attain to five dollars. But the men's shoddy is merely a horror, whereas woman transfigures and subtilizes the cheap material. The spirit of grace which is the birthright of her s.e.x cannot be killed--not even by the presence of her best young man in Sunday clothes. She is finer by the heritage of her s.e.x, and America has accentuated her t.i.tle. This America which drains her youthful vigor with overwork, which takes from her cheeks the color she has brought from her Slavic or Italian peasant home, makes rest.i.tution by remoulding her in more delicate, more alluring lines, gives her the high privilege of charm--and neurosis.

Williams and I pause at the Subway entrances and watch the earth suck in the crowd. It lets itself be swallowed up with meek good-nature. Our amazing good-nature! Political philosophers have deplored the fact. They have urged us to be quicker-tempered, more resentful of being stepped upon, more inclined to write letters to the editor. I agree that only in that way can we be rid of political bosses, of brutal policemen, of ticket-speculators, of taxi-cab extortioners, of insolent waiters, of janitors, of indecent congestion in travel, of unheated cars in the winter and barred-up windows in summer. I am at heart with the social philosophers. But then I am not typical of the crowd. When my neighbor's elbow injects itself into the small of my back, I twist around and glower at him. I forget that his elbow is the innocent mechanical result of a whole series of elbows and backs extending the length of the car, to where the first cause operates in the form of a station-guard's shoulder ramming the human cattle into their stalls. In the faces about me there is no resentment. Instead of smas.h.i.+ng windows, instead of raising barricades in the Subway and hanging the train-guards with their own lanterns about their necks, the crowd sways and bends to the lurching of the train, and young voices call out cheerfully, 'Plenty of room ahead.'

Horribly good-natured! We have taken a phrase which is the badge of our shame and turned it into a jest. Plenty of room ahead! If this were a squat, ill-formed proletarian race obviously predestined to subjection, one might understand. But that a crowd of trim, well-cut, self-reliant Americans, sharp-featured, alert, insolent as I have called them, that they should submit is a puzzle. Perhaps it is because of the fierce democracy of it all. The crush, the enforced intimacies of physical contact, the feeling that a man's natural condition is to push and be pushed, to shove ahead when the opportunity offers and to take it like a man when no chance presents itself--that is equality. A seat in the Subway is like the prizes of life for which men have fought in these United States. You struggle, you win or lose. If the other man wins there is no envy; admiration rather, provided he has not shouldered and elbowed out of reason. That G.o.d-like freedom from envy is pa.s.sing to-day, and perhaps the good-nature of the crowd in the Subway will pa.s.s. I see signs of the approaching change. People do not call out, 'Plenty of room ahead,' so frequently as they used to.

Good-natured when dangling from the strap in the Subway, good-natured in front of baseball bulletins on Park Row, good-natured in the face of so much oppression and injustice, where is the supposed cruelty of the 'mob'? I am ready to affirm on oath that the mob is not vindictive, that it is not cruel. It may be a bit sharp-tongued, fickle, a bit mischievous, but in the heart of the crowd there is no evil pa.s.sion. The evil comes from the leaders, the demagogues, the professional distorters of right thinking and right feeling. The crowd in the bleachers is not the clamorous, brute mob of tradition. I have watched faces in the bleachers and in the grand-stand and seen little of that fury which is supposed to animate the fan. For the most part he sits there with folded arms, thin-lipped, eager, but after all conscious that there are other things in life besides baseball. No, it is the leaders, the baseball editors, the cartoonists, the humorists, the professional stimulators of 'local pride,' with their exaggerated gloatings over a game won, their poisonous attacks upon a losing team, who are responsible. It is these demagogues who drill the crowd in the gospel of loving only a winner--but if I keep on I shall be in politics before I know it.

If you see in the homeward crowd in the Subway a face over which the pall of depression has settled, that face very likely is bent over the comic pictures in the evening paper. I cannot recall seeing any one smile over these long serials of humorous adventure which run from day to day and from year to year. I have seen readers turn mechanically to these lurid comics and pore over them, foreheads puckered into a frown, lips unconsciously spelling out the long legends which issue in the form of little balloons and lozenges from that amazing portrait gallery of dwarfs, giants, shrilling viragos and their diminutive husbands, devil-children, quadrupeds, insects,--an entire zoology. If any stimulus rises from these pages to the puzzled brain, the effect is not visible.

I imagine that by dint of repet.i.tion through the years these grotesque creations have become a reality to millions of readers. It is no longer a question of humor, it is a vice. The Desperate Desmonds, the Newly-weds, and the Dingbats, have acquired a horrible fascination.

Otherwise I cannot see why readers of the funny page should appear to be memorizing pages from Euclid.

This by way of antic.i.p.ation. What the doctor has said of exercise being a habit which grows easy with time is true. It is the first five minutes of walking that are wearisome. I find myself strolling past Fourteenth Street, where I was to take my train for Belshazzar Court. Never mind, Forty-Second Street will do as well. I am now on a different Broadway.

The crowd is no longer north and south, but flows in every direction. It is churned up at every corner and spreads itself across the squares and open places. Its appearance has changed. It is no longer a factory population. Women still predominate, but they are the women of the professions and trades which centre about Madison Square--business women of independent standing, women from the magazine offices, the publis.h.i.+ng houses, the insurance offices. You detect the bachelor girl in the current which sets in toward the home quarters of the undomesticated, the little Bohemias, the foreign eating-places whose fixed _table d'hote_ prices flash out in illumined signs from the side streets. Still farther north and the crowd becomes tinged with the current of that Broadway which the outside world knows best. The idlers begin to mingle with the workers, men in English clothes with canes, women with plumes and jeweled reticules. You catch the first heart-beat of Little Old New York.

The first stirrings of this gayer Broadway die down as quickly almost as they manifested themselves. The idlers and those who minister to them have heard the call of the dinner hour and have vanished, into hotel doors, into shabbier quarters by no means in keeping with the cut of their garments and their apparent indifference to useful employment.

Soon the street is almost empty. It is not a beautiful Broadway in this garish interval between the last of the matinee and shopping crowd and the vanguard of the night crowd. The monster electric sign-boards have not begun to gleam and flash and revolve and confound the eye and the senses. At night the electric Niagara hides the squalid fronts of ugly brick, the dark doorways, the clutter of fire-escapes, the rickety wooden h.o.a.rdings. Not an imperial street this Broadway at 6.30 of a summer's afternoon. Cheap jewelry shops, cheap tobacconist's shops, cheap haberdasheries, cheap restaurants, grimy little newspaper agencies and ticket-offices, and 'demonstration' stores for patent foods, patent waters, patent razors.

O Gay White Way, you are far from gay in the fast-fading light, before the magic hand of Edison wipes the wrinkles from your face and galvanizes you into hectic vitality; far from alluring with your tinsel shop windows, with your puffy-faced, unshaven men leaning against door-posts and chewing pessimistic toothpicks, your sharp-eyed newsboys wise with the wisdom of the Tenderloin, and your itinerant women whose eyes wander from side to side. It is not in this guise that you draw the hearts of millions to yourself, O dingy, Gay White Way, O Via Lobsteria Dolorosa!

Well, when a man begins to moralize it is time to go home. I have walked farther than I intended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and tired.

The romance of the crowd has disappeared. Romance cannot survive that short pa.s.sage of Longacre Square, where the art of the theatre and of the picture-postcard flourish in an atmosphere impregnated with gasolene. As I glance into the windows of the automobile salesrooms and catch my own reflection in the enamel of Babylonian limousines I find myself thinking all at once of the children at home. They expand and fill up the horizon. Broadway disappears. I smile into the face of a painted promenader, but how is she to know that it is not at her I smile but at the sudden recollection of what the baby said at the breakfast-table that morning? Like all good New Yorkers when they enter the Subway, I proceed to choke up all my senses against contact with the external world, and thus resolving myself into a state of coma, I dip down into the bowels of the earth, whence in due time I am spewed out two short blocks from Belshazzar Court.

Fas.h.i.+ons in Men

By Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Never, I fancy, has it been more true than it is to-day, that fiction reflects life. The best fiction has always given us a kind of precipitate of human nature--_Don Quixote_ and _Tom Jones_ are equally 'true' and true, in a sense, for all time; but our modern books give us every quirk and turn of the popular ideal, and fifty years hence, if read at all, may be too 'quaint' for words. And to any one who has been reading fiction for the last twenty years, it is cryingly obvious that fas.h.i.+ons in human nature have changed.

My first novel was _Jane Eyre_; and at the age of eight, I fell desperately in love with Fairfax Rochester. No instance could serve better to point the distance we have come. I was not an extraordinary little girl (except that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate in being permitted to encounter the cla.s.sics in infancy), and I dare say that if I had not met Mr. Rochester, I should have succ.u.mbed to some imaginary gentleman of a quite different stamp. It may be that I should have fallen in love--had time and chance permitted--with 'V. V.' or The Beloved Vagabond. But I doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer a.s.sume that it is the prime business of the female heart (at whatever age) to surrender itself completely to some man. Consequently, the men in the novels of to-day are not calculated, as they once were, to hit the fluttering mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be taken, as modern tactics direct the a.s.sault.

People are always telling us that fas.h.i.+ons in women have changed: what seems to me almost more interesting is that fas.h.i.+ons in men (the stable s.e.x) have changed to match. The new woman (by which I mean the very newest) would not fall in love with Mr. Rochester. It is therefore 'up to' the novelists to create heroes whom the modern heroine will fall in love with. This, to the popular satisfaction, they have done. And not only in fiction have the men changed; in life, too, the men of to-day are quite different. I know, because my friends marry them.

It is immensely interesting, this difference. One by one, the man has sloughed off his most masculine (as we knew them) characteristics. Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel with the vicomte at dawn, and Burgo Fitzgerald (the only love of that incomparable woman, Lady Glencora Palliser), who breakfasted on curacao and pate de foie gras. No longer does Blanche Ingram declare, 'An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit, and that could only be surpa.s.sed by a Levantine pirate.' Blanche Ingram wants--and gets--the Humanitarian Hero; some one who has particular respect for convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite author is Tolsto. He must qualify for the possession of her hand by long, voluntary residence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral acres only if he has, concerning them, socialistic intentions. He must be too altruistic to kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to-date, he must refuse to eat them. He must never order 'pistols and coffee': his only permitted weapon is benevolent legislation.

I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop--'muscular Christianity' has at least taught us that it is well for the hero to be in the pink of condition, as he may any day have a street fight on his hands. And he should have the tongue of men and of angels. Gone is the inarticulate Guardsman--gone forever. The modern hero has read books that Burgo Fitzgerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Rochester never heard of. He is ready to address any gathering, and to argue with any antagonist, until dawn. He is, preferably, personally unconscious of s.e.x until the heroine arrives; but he is by no means effeminate. He is a very complicated and interesting creature. Some mediaeval traits are discernible in him; but the eighteenth century would not have known him for human.

What has he lost, this hero, and what has he gained? How did it all begin? In life, doubtless, it began with a feminine change of taste.

Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; and, I suspect, the peac.o.c.k's tail, as much as the anthropoid ape's, is destined to elimination. We women of to-day are distrustful of the peac.o.c.k's tail. We are mortally afraid of being misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that the peac.o.c.k's soul is not quite the thing. Never has there been among the feminine young more scientific talk about s.e.x, and never among the feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. Before a young woman suspects that she wants to marry a young man, she has probably discussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, white slavery, eugenics, and race-suicide. The miracle--the everlasting miracle of Nature--is that she should want, in these circ.u.mstances, to marry him at all. She probably does not, unless his views have been wholly to her satisfaction. And with those views, what has the perpetual glory of the peac.o.c.k's tail to do?

So much for life. In our English fiction, I am inclined to believe that George Eliot began it with Daniel Deronda. But, in our own day, Meredith did more. Up to the time of Meredith, the dominant male was the fas.h.i.+onable hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Fairfax Rochester, and 'Stunning' Warrington are as different as possible; but all of them, in their several ways, keep up one male tradition in fiction. It is within our own day that that tradition has entirely changed. Have you ever noticed how inveterately, in Meredith's novels, the schoolmaster or his spiritual kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont cannot stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleetwood against Owain Wythan, Sir Willoughby Patterne against Vernon Whitford. The little girl who fell in love with Mr. Rochester would have preferred any one of these gentlemen (yes, even Sir Willoughby!) to his rival; but I dare say the event would have proved her wrong. Certainly the wisdom of the ladies'

choice was never doubtful to Meredith himself. The soldier and the aristocrat cannot endure the test they are put to by the sympathetic male with a penchant for the enfranchised woman. Vain for Lord Ormont to accede to Aminta's taste for publicity; vain for Lord Fleetwood to become the humble wooer of Carinthia Jane: each has previously been convicted of pride.

Now, in an earlier day, no woman would have looked at a man who was not proud--who was not, even, a little too proud. Pride, by which Lucifer fell, was the chief hall-mark of the gentleman. Moreover, in that earlier day, women did not expect their heroes to explain everything to them: a certain amount of reticence, a measure of silence, was also one of the hallmarks of the gentleman. If a bit of mystery could be thrown in, so much the better. It gave her something to exercise her imagination on. Think of the Byronic males--Conrad, Lara, and the rest!

If they had told all, where would they have been? Think of Lovelace and Heathcote and Darcy and Brian de Bois Guilbert!

Heroes, once, were always disdaining to speak, and spurning their foes.

Nowadays, no hero disdains to speak, and no hero ventures to spurn anyone--least of all, his foes. He is humble of heart and very loquacious. Mrs. Humphry Ward has inherited from George Eliot; and the latest heroes of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Hewlett, for example, are the children of Vernon Whitford, Matey Weyburn, and Owain Wythan (of whom it is not explicitly written that they had any others). They are humanitarian and democratic; they are ignorant of hatred; they are inclined to think the ill-born necessarily better than the well-born; and they are quite sure that women are superior to men. True, Mr.

Galsworthy always seems to be looking backward; he never forgets the ancient tradition that he is combating. His young aristocrats who eschew the ways of aristocracy are unhappy, and virtue in their case is 'its only reward.' Perhaps that is why his novels always leave us with the medicinal taste of inconclusion in our mouths. But take a handful of heroes elsewhere: the Reverend John Hodder, the ex-convict,'Daniel Smith,' 'V. V.', or even Coryston, the Socialist peer. Where, in the lot of them do you find either pride or reticence in the old sense? Where, in any one of them, do you find the Satanic charm? Which one would Harriet Byron, or Jane Eyre, or Catherine Earnshaw, or Elizabeth Bennett, have looked at with eyes of love?

The 'Satanic charm.' The phrase is out. Milton, I suspect, is responsible for the tradition that has lasted so long, and is now being broken utterly to pieces. Milton made Satan delightful, and our good Protestant novelists for a long time followed his lead, in that they gave their delightful men some of the Satanic traits. Proud they were and scornfully silent, as we have recalled; and conventional to the last degree. 'Conventional,' that is, in the stricter sense; by which it is not meant that as portraits they were unconvincing, or that, as men, they never offended Mrs. Grundy. They were conventional in that they followed a convention; in that they were, to a large extent, predicable.

They were jealous of their honor, and believed it vindicable by the duel; they had no doubt that good women were better than bad, and that pedigree in human beings was as important as pedigree in animals; and though they might be quixotic on occasion, they were not democratic _pour deux sous_. The barmaid was not their sister, nor the stevedore their brother. (The Satan of _Paradise Lost_, as we all remember, was a splendid sn.o.b.)

Moreover, they were sophisticated--and not merely out of books. The Faust idea, having prevailed for many centuries, has at last been abandoned--and perhaps, our sober sense may tell us, rightly; but not so long ago there was still something more repellent to the female imagination about the man who chose not to know than about the man who chose not to abstain. I do not mean that we were supposed always to be looking for a Tom Jones or a Roderick Random--we might be looking for a Sir Charles Grandison, no less; but at least, when we found our hero, we expected to find him wiser than we. Nowadays, a girl rather likes to give a man points--and often (in fiction, at least) has to. Meredith railed against the 'veiled virginal doll' as heroine. Well: our heroines now are never veiled virginal dolls; but sometimes our heroes are.

Lancelot has gone out, and Galahad has come in. I suspect that there is a literary law of compensation, and that, Ibsen and Strindberg to the contrary notwithstanding, there has to be a veiled virginal doll somewhere in a really taking romance. Perhaps it is fair that the sterner s.e.x should have its turn at guarding ideals by the hearthstone, while women make the grand tour.

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not referring particularly to that knowledge which any man is better without, but to the Odyssean experience which, in their respective measures, heroes were wont to have behind them:--

And saw the cities, and the counsels knew ... ... . .

Of many men, and many a time at sea Within his heart he bore calamity.

They had at least seen the towns and the minds of men, and their morals were the less likely to be upset by a conventional a.s.sault upon them.

Does any one chance to remember, I wonder, Theron Ware, led to his 'd.a.m.nation' by his first experience of a Chopin nocturne? It would have taken more than a Chopin nocturne to make any of our seasoned heroes do something that he did not wish to. They knew something of society, and _ergo_ of women; they had experienced, directly or vicariously, human romance; and they had read history. Nowadays, they are apt to know little or nothing--to begin with--of society, women, or romance, except what may be got from brand-new books on sociology; and they pride themselves on knowing no history. History, with its eternal stresses and selections, is nothing if not aristocratic, and our heroes nowadays must be democratic or they die. It is an age of complete faith in the superiority of the lower cla.s.ses--the swing of the pendulum, no doubt, from the other extreme of thinking the lower cla.s.ses morally and aesthetically negligible. 'Privilege' is as detestable now in matters of intellect and breeding as in matters of finance and politics. The man with the muck-rake has got past the office into the drawing-room. If your hero has the bad luck not to have been born in the slums, he must at least have the wit to take up his habitation there as soon as he comes of age. We have learned that riches are corrupting, but (except in the special sense of vice-commission reports) we have not yet learned that poverty is rather more corrupting than wealth.

Sophistication, whether social, intellectual, or aesthetic, is now the deadly sin. If we are sophisticated, we may not be good enough for Ellis Island. And there goes another of the hallmarks of the gentleman as he was once known to fiction. Our hero in old days might not have condescended to the glittering a.s.semblies of fas.h.i.+on, but there was never any doubt that, if he had, he would, in spite of himself, have been king of his company as soon as he entered the room. He might have been hard up, but his necktie would not have been 'a black sea holding for life a school of fat white fish.' He might have been lonely or gloomy, but he would not have been diffident, and he would never, never, _never_ have 'blinked' at the heroine. 'My G.o.dlike friend had carelessly put his hair-brush into the b.u.t.ter' says Asticot, at the outset, of the Beloved Vagabond. Now in picaresque novels, we were always meeting people who did that sort of thing; but they were not gentlemen. Whereas, the Beloved Vagabond is of n.o.ble birth, and despite his ten years'