The Patient Observer Part 2

VII

THE SOLID FLESH

Physical culture as pursued in the home probably benefits a man's body; but the strain on his moral nature is terrific. I go through my morning exercise with hatred for all the world and contempt for myself. Why, for instance, should every system of gymnastics require that a man place himself in the most ridiculous and unnatural postures? A stout, middle-aged man who struggles to touch the floor with the palms of his hands is not a beautiful sight. Equally preposterous is the practice of standing on one leg and stretching the other toward the nape of one's neck. In the confines of a city bedroom such evolutions are not only ungraceful but frequently dangerous. Harrington tells me that every morning when he lunges forward he sc.r.a.pes the tips of his fingers against the edge of the bed and the tears come into his eyes. When he throws his arms back he hits the gas jet. Harrington's young son, who insists on being present during the ordeal, believes that the entire performance is intended for his amus.e.m.e.nt, and laughs immoderately. I cannot blame him. Morning exercise is incompatible with the maintenance of parental dignity. Were I a child again I could neither love nor respect a father who placed two chairs at a considerable distance from each other and mounted them horizontally like the human bridge in a melodrama.

I admit, of course, that home exercises have the merit of being cheap.

No special apparatus is required. The ordinary household furniture and such heirlooms as are readily available will usually suffice. An onyx clock will do instead of chest weights. Any two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica will take the place of dumb-bells or Indian clubs. Many a time I have stood still and held a bronze lamp in my outstretched right hand for a minute and then held it in my left hand for half a minute. I know of one man who skipped the rope one hundred times every morning. Within four months he had lost three and a half pounds, and driven the family in the flat below into nervous prostration. I have even been told that there are systems of exercise which show how physical perfection may be attained by scientifically manipulating, for fifteen minutes every day, a couple of fountain pens and a paper cutter. But I cannot reconcile myself to such methods because of the confusion they introduce into the world of common things.

A table is no longer something to write upon or to eat upon, but something to lie down upon while one flings out his arms and legs fifty times in four contrary directions. A broom-stick is an instrument for strengthening the shoulder muscles. When I see a transom, I find myself estimating the number of times I could chin it.

The intimate connection between the hygienic life and the temptation to tell lies is a delicate subject to touch upon; but the facts may as well be brought out now as later. People of otherwise irreproachable conduct will lose all sense of truthfulness when they speak of physical culture and fresh air. They will exaggerate the number of inches they keep their bedroom windows raised in midwinter; they will quote ridiculous estimates of the doctors' bills they have saved; they will represent themselves as being in the most incredibly perfect health. I know one sober, intelligent business-man who not only habitually understates, by ten degrees, the temperature of his morning tub, but gives an altogether distorted impression of the alacrity with which he leaps into his bath every morning, and the reluctance with which he leaves it. This same man a.s.serts that he can now walk from the Chambers Street ferry to his office in Wall Street in astonis.h.i.+ng time. And not only that, but since he took to walking as much as he could, he has cut down his daily number of cigars to one-fourth (which is untrue). And not only that, but since he has gone in for exercise and fresh air and has given up smoking, his income has increased by at least 50 per cent., owing to his improved health and clearer mental vision. But that again, as I happen to know, is untrue.

But there is another, much more subtle form of prevarication. Smith meets you in the street and remarks upon your flabby appearance. He argues that you ought to weigh twenty-five pounds less than you do, and that a long daily walk will do the trick. "Look at me," he says, "I walk ten miles every day and there isn't an ounce of superfluous flesh on me." And so saying, he slaps his chest and offers to let you feel how hard the muscles are about his diaphragm. Of course, there is no superfluous flesh on Smith. And if he abstained entirely from physical exertion and guzzled heavy German beer all day and dined on turtle soup and roast goose every day, and ate unlimited quant.i.ties of pastry, he would still be what he describes as free from superfluous flesh. _I_ call it scraggy. Smith is one of the men set apart by nature to perpetuate the Don Quixote type of beauty, just as I am doomed with the lapse of time to approximate the Falstaffian type. Smith's five sisters and brothers are thin. His father was slight and neurasthenic. His mother was spare and angular. Little wonder the Smith family is fond of walking. Friction and air-resistance in their case are practically nonexistent.

I do not, of course, mean to deny the ancient tradition that a sound body makes a sound mind. But I would only point out that we are just beginning to wake to the truth of the converse proposition, that a sane, equable, easy-going mind keeps the body well. Hence there are really two kinds of exercise, and two kinds of hygiene, a physical kind and a spiritual kind. Which one a man will choose should be left entirely to himself. It is only a question of approaching the same goal from two different directions. Smith is welcome to make himself a better man by exercising his legs three hours a day. But I prefer to sit in an armchair and exercise my soul. Smith comes in refreshed from a half-day's sojourn in the open air, and I come away refreshed from a roomful of old friends talking three at a time amidst clouds of tobacco smoke.

The trouble with so many of the physical-culture devotees is that they tire out the soul in trying to serve it. I am inclined to believe that the beneficent effects of the regular quarter-hour's exercise before breakfast, is more than offset by the mental wear and tear involved in getting out of bed fifteen minutes earlier than one otherwise would.

Some one has calculated that the amount of moral resolution expended in New York City every winter day in getting up to take one's cold bath would be enough to decide a dozen munic.i.p.al elections in favour of the decent candidate, or to send fifty grafting legislators to jail for an average term of three and a half years. The same specialist has worked out the formula that the average married man's usefulness about the house varies inversely with his fondness for violent exercise. Smith's dumb-bell practice, for instance, leaves him no time for hanging up the pictures. After his long Sunday's walk he is invariably too tired to answer his wife's questions concerning the influence of the tariff on high prices.

By this time it will be plain that I am no pa.s.sionate admirer of the gospel of salvation by hygiene. So many things that the world holds precious have been developed under the most unhygienic conditions.

Revolutions for the liberation of mankind have been plotted in unsanitary cellars and dungeons. Religions have taken root and prospered in catacombs. Great poems have been written in stuffy garrets. Great orations have been spoken before sweating crowds in the foul air of overheated legislative chambers. Lovers are said to be fond of dark corners and out-of-the-way places. It is not by accident that children, said to be the most beautiful thing in the world, are so inordinately fond of dirt. Every great truth on its first appearance has been declared a menace to morals and society; in other words, unhygienic. And yet one would imagine that truth, from its habit of going naked, would appeal strongly to the ardent fresh-air pract.i.tioner.

VIII

SOME NEWSPAPER TRAITS

At Cooper's house last winter I met Professor Grundschnitt of Berlin, who has been making a study of American newspaper methods in behalf of the German government. For some time after the professor's arrival in this country, he told me, he found himself completely at sea. American newspapers, it appeared to him, were written in two languages. One was the English language as he had studied it in the writings of Oliver Goldsmith, John Ruskin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In America it seemed to be used chiefly by auctioneers, art critics, and immigrants. The other was a dialect, evidently English in origin, but sufficiently removed from the parent stock to be quite unintelligible. The professor spent many painful hours over such sentences as "Jeffries annexes the Brunette Beauty's Angora," and "Sugar Barons hand Uncle Sam a lemon." This dialect, he found, was extensively employed by truck-drivers, playwrights, and college students.

It did not take the professor very long, however, to overcome this initial difficulty. His education proceeded rapidly. One of the first things he learned, so he told me, is that some American newspapers are printed in black ink and some in red. As a rule, the former tell more of the truth, but the latter sell many more copies. On Sunday, which in America is observed much more rigorously than in Europe, the red ink predominates. The professor suggested that this might be a survival of primitive times when the British ancestors of the present-day Americans tattooed themselves in honour of their G.o.ds. It is universally accepted that the American business man reads so many papers because he has neither the time nor the energy to read books. But this would seem to be contradicted on Sundays, when every American business man reads two or three times the equivalent of the entire works of William Shakespeare.

Herr Grundschnitt was inclined to believe that carrying home the Sunday paper is the most popular form of physical exercise among our people.

A very curious circ.u.mstance about the press in all the great American cities, the professor thought, is that every newspaper has a larger circulation than any other three newspapers combined. According to the arithmetical system in use among all civilised peoples, that would be manifestly impossible. But the professor imagines that the methods of calculation by which such results are obtained are the same as those employed by politicians in estimating their majorities on the eve of election day, by millionaires in paying their personal taxes, and by operatic sopranos in figuring out their age. The influence of a newspaper depends, of course, upon its circulation. Such influence is exercised directly in the form of news and editorial comment, and indirectly in the form of wrapping paper.

Still another curious trait about all American newspapers, this learned German found, is that they tell a story backward. This arises from the desire to put the most important thing first; and in this country it is the rule that the thing which happens last is the most important. As an ill.u.s.tration Herr Grundschnitt read the following brief account clipped from one of the princ.i.p.al newspapers in New York city:

"Arthur Wellesley Jones died in the munic.i.p.al hospital last night as the result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident. The end was peaceful. Mr. Jones was driving his own machine down Fifth Avenue when he ran into a laundry-wagon at Twenty-first Street. He had left his home in New Roch.e.l.le an hour before. Mr. Jones was an enthusiastic motorist.

In 1905 he won the Smithson cup for heavy cars. In 1903 he was second in the Westchester hill-climbing contest. In 1899 he helped to organise the first road race in New York State. He was in Congress from 1894 to 1898, and was elected to the Legislature in 1889, the same year that his eldest son was born. Two years before that event he married a daughter of Henry K. Smith of Philadelphia. He was graduated from Yale, having prepared for that inst.i.tution at Andover, where he played right tackle on the football team. As a child he showed a decided taste for mechanics. He was born in 1861."

The daily press in America, the professor went on to say, takes extraordinary interest in visitors from abroad. He referred, as an instance in point, to the recent arrival in New York of a nephew of the Dalai Lama of Tibet. As the s.h.i.+p was being warped into the dock, a young man with a notebook asked the distinguished visitor if it was true that his Holiness, the Dalai Lama, had been found guilty of converting the temple treasures at Lha.s.sa to his own use. Upon receiving a reply in the negative, the young man asked what progress the suffrage movement had made in Tibet. He was told that inasmuch as every woman in Tibet must take care of several husbands instead of one, as among the more civilised nations, women there were not interested in the question of votes. Thereupon the young man asked whether Tibet offered a promising market for automobiles. He was pleased to learn that Tibet, with its extremely spa.r.s.e population and its very precipitous cliffs, was an ideal place for the automobilist.

These, however, were superficial characteristics. What the professor was anxious to learn was just how the newspapers influence the national life to the remarkable extent they undoubtedly do. He knew, of course, that the Americans are a free people, and that they select their own lawmakers and magistrates. He soon discovered that when the people desire to choose some one to rule over them, they name two, three, or more men for the same office. The newspapers then proceed to accuse these men of the vilest crimes, and the one who comes out least besmirched is declared to be elected. After he has been put into office the people no longer pay attention to him, leaving it to the newspapers to see that he conducts himself properly. When a high official is caught stealing the people rejoice, because it shows that the newspapers are doing their duty.

In the sphere of social relations, Herr Grundschnitt learned, the newspapers are mainly concerned with safeguarding the purity and integrity of the home. Most of them do this by printing full accounts of all murder and divorce trials. The professor told me that he could recall nothing in literature that quite equals the white heat of indignation with which the editor of the _Star_ once spoke of "the festering national sore revealed in the proceedings of the Dives divorce suit, the nauseous details of which the reader will find in all their hideous completeness on the first three pages of the present issue, together with all the photographs ruled out of evidence on the grounds of decency." The press also serves the cause of public morals by holding up to scorn the vices and extravagances of the vulgar rich, whose ill-used millions, as they hasten to point out elsewhere, are nothing more than what any American may look forward to, provided he has courage and energy.

The same ingenious method of promoting virtue by holding up vice to obloquy is pursued in every other field, the learned German told me. The newspapers do not print the names of men who support their wives, but they print the names of men who do not, or who support more than one.

They do not publish the photographs of honest bank clerks, but of dishonest ones, and of these only when they have stolen a very large sum. They pay no attention to a clergyman as long as he advocates the brotherhood of man, but they have large headlines about the minister who believes in the moderate use of the Scotch highball. They overlook a college professor's epoch-making researches in American history, and take him up when he comes out in favour of an exclusive diet of raw spinach. From the newspaper point of view, a college professor counts less than a professional gambler; a gambler counts less than an actress; a good actress counts less than a bad one; a bad actress counts less than a prize-fighter; a prize-fighter counts less than a chimpanzee that has been taught to smoke cigarettes; and an educated chimpanzee counts less than a millionaire who suffers from paranoia. By continuously pondering on the horrors of crime and vice as depicted in the newspapers, the American people are roused to such a hatred of evil that some editors receive a salary of $100,000 a year.

Oddly enough, the American people freely criticise their newspapers. One of the commonest charges is that their editors write with great haste and little accurate information. But, Herr Grundschnitt argued, it is unfair to insist that newspapers shall be both forceful and accurate.

It is true that the editors who supply the American people with their opinions think fast and write fast, but it is absurd to maintain that as a cla.s.s they are unreasonably set in their own beliefs. Editors, as a matter of fact, change their opinions every little while. In such cases they usually have no difficulty in proving that, while their present views are right, their previous views were also right. This makes for consistency. Nor is there any reason for maintaining, as is often done, that editors are restive under criticism. The professor declared that there are very few newspapers in the United States that will refuse to print a letter from any one who believes that the paper in question is the only one in town with courage and honesty enough to tell the truth and that it is the best newspaper in the country at the price.

As for the old-fas.h.i.+oned critics who maintain that not even the best newspaper tells more than half the truth, my informant pointed out that every town and village in the United States has at least two daily publications. The conscientious reader who buys both is thus saved from error.

When I rose to say good-night the professor accompanied me to the door, and would not let me go till he had p.r.o.nounced a final eulogy on the press in general, and the American newspaper in particular. He expatiated on its omnipresence. The printed sheet is with a man when he wakes in the morning, and when he falls asleep at night, and when he is at the breakfast table with his wife. The newspaper breaks up families and reunites other families, though it usually misspells their names. It chastises the rascal, and worries the honest man. It can make a reputation in a day, and destroy a reputation in ten minutes, sending its owner into the grave or upon the vaudeville stage. It teaches Presidents how to rule, women how to win husbands, the Church how to save souls, and middle-aged gentlemen how to reduce weight by exercising ten minutes every day. It knows nearly everything and guesses at the rest. It will say almost anything and publish the rest at advertising rates. Without it, democratic government would be difficult and travelling in the Subway quite impossible. The newspaper is the only inst.i.tution since the world began that succeeds in being all things to all men for the moderate sum of one cent a day. The only universal things that come cheaper, the professor told me, are birth and death.

IX

A FLEDGLING

A soph.o.m.ore's soul is not the simple thing that most people imagine. I am thinking now of my nephew Philip and of our last meeting. This time, he was more than usually welcome. I was lonely. The family had just left town for the summer and the house was fearfully empty. I sat there, smoking a cigarette amid the first traces of domestic uncleanliness, when I heard him on the stairs. The dear boy had not changed. Dropping his heavy suitcase anyways, he seized my hand within his own huge paw and squeezed it till the tears came to my eyes. His voice was a young roar. He threw his hat upon the table, thereby scattering a large number of papers about the room, and then sat down upon my own hat, which was lying on the armchair, on top of several July magazines. I had put my hat down on the chair instead of hanging it up, as I should have done, because the family was away and I was alone in the house.

Might he smoke? He was busy with his bull-dog pipe and my tobacco jar before I could say yes. He explained that he was sorry, but he found he could neither read, write, nor think nowadays without his pipe. He admitted that he was the slave of a noxious habit, but it was too late, and he might as well get all the solace he could out of a pretty bad situation. But, as I look at Philip, I cannot help feeling that his fine colour and the sparkle in his blue eyes and his full count of nineteen years make the situation far less desperate than he portrays it. Philip is not a handsome lad, but he will be a year from now. At present he is mostly hands and feet, and his face shows a marked nasal development.

Before Philip has completed his junior year, the rest of his features will have rea.s.serted themselves, and the harmony of lineament which was his when he was an infant, as his mother never tires of regretfully recalling, will be restored. Until that time Philip must be content to carry the suggestion of an attractive and eager young bird of prey.

Philip lights pipe after pipe as he dilates on his experiences since last I saw him. The moralising instinct is very weak in me. I cannot find it in my heart to censure Philip's constant mouthing of the pipe.

I, too, smoke, and I am not foolish enough to risk my standing with Philip by preaching where I do not practise. Besides, I observe that the boy does not inhale, that his pipe goes out frequently, and that his consumption of matches is much greater than his consumption of tobacco.

So I say nothing in reproof of his pipe.

But it is different with his language. Philip, I observe regretfully, is profane. I am not mealy-mouthed myself. There are moments of high emotional tension when silence is the worst form of blasphemy. But Philip is profane without discrimination. His supply of un.o.bjectionable adjectives would be insufficient to meet the needs of the ordinary kindergarten conversation. He uses the same swift epithet to describe certain brands of tobacco, the weather on commencement day, the food at his eating-house, his professors of French and of mathematics, the spirit of the incoming freshman cla.s.s, and the outlook for "snap"

courses during the coming year.

It is not my moral but my aesthetic sense that takes offence, so I ask Philip whether it is the intensity of his feelings that makes it impossible for him to discuss his work or his play without continual reference to the process of perdition and the realm of lost souls; or whether it is habit. No sooner have I put my question than I am sorry.

There is nothing the young soul is so afraid of as of satire. It can understand being petted and it can understand being whipped; but the sting behind the smile, the lash beneath the caress, throws the young soul into helpless panic. It feels itself baited and knows not whither it may flee. I have always thought that the worst type of bully is the teacher in school or in college who indulges a pretty talent for satire at the expense of his pupils. It is a cowardly and a demoralising practice. It means not only hitting some one who is powerless to retort, it means confusing the sense of truth in the adolescent mind. Here is some one quite grown up who smiles and means to hurt you, who says good and means bad, who says yes and means no. The young soul stares at you and sees the standards of the universe in chaos about itself.

And I feel all the more guilty in Philip's case because I know that the lad speaks only a mechanical lingo which goes with his bull-dog pipe and the aggressive shade of his neckwear and his socks. The very pain and alarm my question raises in him shows well enough that his soul has kept young and clear amid his world of "muckers" and "grinds" and "cads" and "rotten sneaks," and all the men and things and conditions he is in the habit of depicting in various stages of d.a.m.nation. "Now, you're making fun of me," says Philip. "We fellows don't know how to pick out words that sound nice, but mean a--I beg your pardon--a good deal more than they say. Anyhow, I suppose, if I try from now on till doomsday I shall never be able to speak like you."

Bless his young soph.o.m.ore's soul! With that last sentence Philip has seized me hip and thigh and hurled me into an emotional whirlpool, where chills and thrills rapidly succeed each other. Because I am fifteen years older than Philip the boy invests me with a halo and bathes me in adoration. I am fifteen years older than he, I am bald, obscure, and far from prosperous, and there is unmistakably nothing about me to dazzle the youthful imagination. Yet the facts are as I have stated them.

Philip likes to be with me, copies me without apparently trying to, and has chosen my profession--so he has often told me--for his own. I am pretty sure that he has made up his mind when he is as old as I am to smoke the same brand of rather mediocre tobacco which I have adopted for practical reasons. I am sometimes tempted to think that Philip, at my age, intends to be as bald as I am.

Hence the alternate thrills and chills. I am by nature restless under wors.h.i.+p. The sense of my own inconsequence grows positively painful in the face of Philip's outspoken veneration. There are people to whom such tribute is as incense and honey. But I am not one of them. I have tried to be and have failed. I have argued with myself that, after all, it is the outsider who is the best judge; that we are most often severest upon ourselves; that if Philip finds certain high qualities in me, perhaps there is in me something exceptional. I even go so far as to draw up a little catalogue of my acts and achievements. I can recall men who have said much sillier things than I have ever said, and published much worse stuff than I have ever written. I repeat to myself the rather striking epigram I made at Smith's house last week, and I go back to the old gentleman from Andover who two years ago told me that there was something about me that reminded him of Oliver Wendell Holmes. By dint of much trying I work myself up into something of a glow; but it is all artificial, cerebral, incubated. The exaltation is momentary, the cold chill of fact overtakes me. There is no use in deceiving one's self.

Philip is mistaken. I am not worthy.

But that day Philip rallied n.o.bly to the situation. My little remark on strong language had hurt him, but he saw also that I was sorry to have hurt him, and he was sorry for me in turn. "I don't in the least mind your telling me what you think about the way we fellows talk," he said.

"That's the advantage of having a man for one's friend, he is not afraid of telling you the truth even if it hurts. And then, if you wish to, you can fight back. You can't do that with a woman."

"Have you found that out for yourself!" I asked him.

He looked at me to see if again I was resorting to irony. But this time he found me sincere.

"Women!" Philip sniffed. "I have found it doesn't pay to talk seriously to a woman. There is really only one way of getting on with them, and that's jollying them. And the thicker you lay it on, the better." He put away his pipe and proffered me a cigarette. "I like to change off now and then. I have these made for me in a little Russian shop I discovered some time ago. They draw better than any cigarette I have ever smoked.