A lover of the chair

Preface

WHAT I have tried to treat with consistent seriousness in these essays is the point of view of the central figure, whose outlook was intended to give to the series some measure of continuity and singleness of purpose. A fling at the spirit of one's age is not to be indulged in lightly, though it may, I hope, be undertaken with good humor. That, at all events, was the point of view of the Lover of the

Chair.

S. B. G.

June 2S, igig vii

CONTENTS PART ONE

PAGE

I. A Lover of the Chair i

II. Chair and Saddle 28

III. A Liberal Experience 43

IV. A Modern Paradox 90

V. In Pursuit of the Arts 142

I. CUDGELS and COMMON SENSE . . 1 43 II. SENSE AND THE SOUL . . . .153

III. ART AND THE REASONERS . . . 1 67

IV. MADAME's TASTE 1 79

Part Two

I. Poor Richard 209

II. The Awkward Age 232

III. PSEUDODOXIA EpIDEMICA 255

IV. In Quest of the Center 272

IX

I

ONCE over the border of a stormy youth — the wrong border, alas, he was none the less inclined to say — he felt a curious serenity of spirit, which gave him for a brief searching birthday a disturbing qualm. It came over him suddenly that his present restful content was the sign of approaching age. He was concerned that he was not more concerned about certain losses that those storms had involved him in — certain shores that they had beaten him back from. They had driven him far enough about, sometimes into ports he had little pride in remembering. But he was out of it now, he told himself. His youth was over, he was as he was, and there was nothing for it but to take himself so. He could settle back upon an ironic survey of life and find a pleasant spice in his aloof contentment.

Whatever the quality of his aloofness, his irony was real enough to flash back upon himself; and presently he found it smiling with the perception that his losses were being accorded more than a scornful hearing, and being dismissed with but a feminine no. The occasional flashes of old moods that now after a long period came back upon him were making him linger over the sense that there were starry parts of the common life that had slipped by him and left him untouched. He had the spirit, however, to combat his regrets, and he settled back not uncomfortably upon the serenity of his new-found leisure.

He had the materials for contentment. There were inbred habits of simplicity, and the thrill of adventure in expenditure that are essential to wringing luxury from any income, and can wring it from any; and a taste that could find its pleasure in lining his study with books and brooding among them buried in one and at arm's length from the rest. He had toned his library with the deep oranges and browns that bound his present to certain serene years of his childhood and overleaped the interval of troubled youth. There was enough of an income to give him travel when he cared for it. There was, perhaps above all, the rich heritage of an improvident family — an unconcern for a possible rainy day. Add to all this a habit of detachment that left him free to meet the present humor for humor and his equipment for content was reasonably complete.

He had indeed some mental reservations as to this humor of his. He knew that it had little outward wit to match the subtlety of his inner perceptions of the foibles and inconsistencies of his own and others' dancing to the spasmodic tune of life. And he saw in this lack of explicit wit the explanation of a characteristic of his — the fewness and intensity of his friendships. For with perhaps less than the normal ability to flash out the quality of his perceptions, he could reveal himself only to the rare and old acquaintances whose outlook was enough like his own to make a word or an allusion carry the quality of his thought. With more expressiveness he could have won a more universal response, and would have been no doubt content with less delicately appreciative ears. As it was, he put a value upon the friends he had that was the greater for their necessarily deeper thrust.

It was the quality of his humor, however, that it could be amused at his own foibles, and thus, as he could smile to observe, it was rarely likely to be graveled for matter. It served, at least, its inner purpose with him in keeping his temper unsoured, in relieving the somberness of reflection, and of keeping him amused at the spectacle of a life that seemed to him none too heartening in itself.

All in all he prized the fortune that had brought him to his present station. It gave him a competence with leisure, work that he could look upon as of decent importance, and an attitude to life that commanded as well as permitted his indulgence in the kind of exercise for which leisure is the convenient term.

He paid for this fortune, indeed, by a seclusion that at moments, in late afternoons when the sun fell warmly upon the deepening colors of his library, or in winter when the lights were lit before the dinner hour called him away to bleak boarding houses — a seclusion that at such moments mounted to a poignant loneliness. Tactful suggestions had come to him from time to time that there was a common mode of relief from such a state. But he had what comfort there was in the reflection that this normal escape from loneHness was prohibited as much by the meagerness of his income as by its incompatibility with the humorous detachment that he so prized. The soldier, the priest, and the scholar — he knew the ancient wisdom.

He had an amused outlook about him over the devastations that this escape had entailed upon some of his colleagues — the addition of domestic duties that were sometimes more than Omphalean in their indignity, the addition of domestic membership that promised crying distractions for years to come, the addition of expenses that superinduced pot-boiling and politics — the entrance of the personal equation destructive of scholarly calm and productive of the multiplex irrelevant motives that made futile so much of the life about him.

He knew, indeed, that he was open to the charge of selfishness, and he squirmed at the accusation. For he had the sentiment to be touched and won by the spectacle that took place courageously, now among his friends and now more remotely in some romance that fell under his eye, of a brave launching out into the double struggle. But he knew that the life that he proposed to himself was not to be one of ease, and that however poor a performer he was to be, it was, generically, to be performed the better alone.

As for the lyric aspect of the matter he had his reserves there too; and though he could smile at a touch of pedantry in his necessarily aloof point of view, he had the rational assurance of common sense that the aloof point of view was probably the saner — that the mad themselves were not the best

A Lover of the Chair S

judges of madness. His own observations had made him suspect a certain sentimental falseness in the reputed attitude of all the world toward the concrete instance of the malady — certainly of the masculine part of it at all events. The instinct to hide the emotion, increasingly strong the richer the nature, rather suggested the older classic view of love as a sickness to be suffered in patience, a walking fever to be endured in as much silence as a resolute manliness could command — not a thing to be courted and fostered. And as he looked back upon a century that in its literature and in its current interpretation of life had lifted love to the highest place, he was struck with the spectacle of an almost unprecedented bankruptcy. The age that had apotheosized love was ending vulgarly as an age of divorce.

For all his smiles, and his perceptions, and his rationalizations, however, the sense that his youth had slipped by, often in futile experiences that he might better have missed altogether, and that he had missed this one experience, was a matter of underlying regret. However much a malady it might be, and however bitter its endurance, still it was too universally human to let him be normal in so wholly escaping it. His understanding of life was by so much the less complete, for though he had felt the vicarious passions of literature, he knew enough of the comparative paleness of literature even at its best to realize its insufficiency alone. And there was too, in his exemption, the lurking suspicion of something deficient in his own make-up, a suspicion more disconcerting than the mere escape from the external experience.

It was therefore with a curiously complex consciousness that he found himself, after a slow induction, wholly enmeshed. He had at first a more than ordinarily objective view of his own impulses, and a perception that found some of its actual enjoyment in the spectacle of his own foible. He had a rational idea of the place of this passion in the half-conflicting, half-cooperating schemes of nature on the one hand and humanity on the other. But presently this idea began to change its proportions. His freedom began to seem less supremely desirable. The malady began to seem an unwonted state of health. He had once told himself that he had all the wisdom about love except a knowledge of the thing itself; and now he had a sudden sense of the vanity of this wisdom. He caught his own downward drift, and warned himself in amusement how desperately he would have to cling to his pale wisdom to keep him, in his inexperience, from a more than common donning of the motley.

In the beginning, before he had ceased to spend certain moments in his aloof conning tower, he was whimsically dismayed at his plight, and at rebellious rejoicings within him that the springs of his sensibilities were not dried up. He had recently had another experience that- had thrilled him with a parallel though necessarily paler satisfaction — he had been for the first time in Italy. He might have learned from that that his sentiment was still quite capable of tears.

He had gone reluctantly, and with misgivings, for Italy had been the Arcadia of his dreams, and he had known, in other spots less tenderly cherished but still looked forward to with hope, the chill of disillusionment on the spots themselves. He had paid before the penalty of too vivid a prefiguring and too keen an anticipation. Even Paris, wrapped in its magic past, and appealing, through a hundred avenues of approach, to his idea, composite of scenes and personages and dreams and hopes and accomplishments of the luminous moments of many centuries — even Paris itself in the reality had stood between him and his vision. He had indeed, in repeated visits, learned to see, beneath the cloak of its modern instantaneity, the Paris of his idea — even to see in the cloak itself, with its stains and its dinginess of daily wear, something of the eternal vitality which scorned his too aesthetic demand that it be laid away for him in lavender. None the less he had had to let custom stale and obliterate much of the ephemeral before the real Paris had emerged; and by then the first thrill of perception had passed — passed into something more substantial no doubt, but too completely passed ever to command a perfect moment of rapture.

He had thrust off Italy, therefore, into the vague future, hesitant to put it to the touch. It was for him a state of mind peculiarly luminous, a clear and simple vision to which he had clung with whimsical hope, a bright limbo of soft skies, an aged earth still fresh with verdure, hillsides terraced and vine-clad, molded by ages of cultivation, ruins crumbling back into the welcoming soil, old gardens with marble balustrades and statues mellowing to their ancient kinship with the earth, a people himiane of the South, looking at him through eyes saddened with the reminiscence of old centuries — a land where human experience had risen to the highest and left its mark deepcut but harmonious upon a still dominant nature. And he had wanted to save this luminous corner of his mind from the disappointing touch of reality, fearful lest he, unlike those others whose susceptibility still kept their spirits fresh, should prove his lyric vein grown dry with the prose of his reason.

When he did enter upon it, it was almost by accident. He had come afoot, with staff and pack and a good companion, from the homely Tyrol, Teutonic in its gross beverages, its broken-kneed crucifixes, its flesh, its comfort, its frank coarseness. And he found himself, after a loitering week, at the head of the Engadin. Forgetting to be charmed he had been charmed, in a lingering sunset after a day of storm, by the beauty of the Silser See, cloud mass and mountain mass in the sunset towering upward and downward from its clear surface. The emotion of the moment had broken the intransigence of his resolve; and in the waywardness of his travel it was an added adventure to decide in the whim of a moment's desire to turn toward Italy instead of backward to the North.

The point of their decision, when they came to the real moment of divergence, embodied itself prophetically in the view that stretched behind and before them on the next morning from the top of the pass. Behind, in the valley of the Inn, the lake, the mountains, the whole region of their Teutonic pilgrimage, and in their minds the whole past of their Teutonic reminiscences, lay in heavy fog, obscure, forbidding, chilling. And before them, down the long defile of the Val Bregaglia, the uplifting snowy peaks, the green lower slopes, the winding thread of the stream strung with gleaming villages, lay warm in the sunshine beneath a clear, hopeful sky drifting with headlong clouds. The spell fell upon them there, and they knew it, and it still held them.

They had indeed but a touch of Italy, but they had it on the intimate terms of the foot traveler. Their knapsacks, that elsewhere had been the insignia of leisure, here seemed to put them in friendly touch with the workaday life of the valley — with a similarly harnessed population, men and women, children of ten and age-bent elders, hewers of wood and drawers of water, hay-harvesters and peddlers — many a gay-tongued Autolycus, and one young girl, wearied and resting by her pack, whose face long afterwards haunted them with its sadness and its beauty. It was indeed the inveterate world of their old knowledge, a world of hard toil, of meager rewards, of a life hard-wrung from a reluctant earth. But it was a world transmuted. Its thousand times repeated Buon giorno, Buona sera, from singing children and from warped and wrinkled age, touched their common humanity; and the earth itself, instinct with the accumulated life of all their traditions and all their civilization, spoke to them on every hand no less tenderly and no less humanly.

They knew afterwards how merely scenically they had taken their first day as they plodded down the long incline of the valley — the white villages crowded upon the narrow cobbled street, the drowsy tinkle of the scythe sharpeners seated by the open doors, the hamlets high up the mountainsides — houses huddled like sheep around their shepherd churches — other hamlets still higher up on slopes that seemed inaccessible, and higher yet still other hamlets to the very edge of the summer snows — terraces of vines, terraces of short hay under the low branches of chestnut groves — deep shady vistas where the scythe and the bent mower forever reaped the scant harvest — wayside shrines that harbored here no broken-kneed Christs, but where the tender Virgin won an unremitting homage of simple flowers — stretches of old Roman roadway, and medieval ruins, and the swarming albergo, there at once side by side without clash, harmonious, in the presence of a life so simple and so unaltering that Virgil and St. Francis might have passed that way with them unshocked by change.

They had taken it all with the objective, welcoming eyes of travelers; but they had been moved, and the spell of Italy, drawing from their sense of the past and their vision of the present, had fallen upon them and taken them captive. For one of these travelers, at least, with his fears and his hopes, the pilgrimage was doubly endeared. He was exultant that the springs of his sensibilities were not wholly dried up; and he found himself dangerously making an attempt to adjust more leniently within him the momentous proportions of his reason and his heart.

So that now, when he saw himself ensnared in a new and deeper emotion, he was complexly but the more guarded against its mastery as he found himself the more inclined to indulge and test the new depths of his spontaneity. His conscious dualism

A Lover of the Chair ii

never left him, however — never so wholly that he could think of himself, after the manner of the world's beloved, as foregoing principles, ambitions, and native tastes as the price of attainment. And he kept, even in the moments of stress, enough of his objective humor to detect and smile back the unconscious egotisms of the lover in him.

He would have doubted, indeed, the probability of his being really in love had there not come upon him a vivid light that had never before illuminated his perceptions even in imagination, even in moments of transcendent emotion. Long ago he had had diverse experiences that had set him ruminating on his attachment to life. He had come near enough to death more than once in perils by sea and land to know that his physical clinging to life was a different thing from his conscious sense of attachment to it. As for his conscious attachment, his ultimate findings came to him, as he might have anticipated, not out of his reason but out of experience and an intuition sensitive to the subtle imagery of emotion.

One of the friends who had given to his college life the principal value that it had had for him, and who had shared with him a year of prodigal wanderings, had afterwards gone away in search of health, and then died. For five or six vital years they had been together, conscious together of what had been significant to each, filled with common tastes, often differing in opinion, but with a common vocabulary and a common understanding — phrases that meant philosophies, gestures that meant attitudes to life, smiles that summarized old experiences and old readings, a rapport that included the whole of the structure that each in that period had built, in his consciousness, of life as he knew it.

In the bleak period that had followed the first departure, he had wandered through the empty rooms of that house of friendship desolately enough, yet forlornly comforted with the sense that still, though from a distance and with only a word now and then to break the loneliness, his habitation there was still shared. Hope kept those rooms habitable for lingering months. But when the end came, and the first hot grief had burnt to ashes, he knew that death had forever locked those doors. No one else could enter there, and the part they had built together, detail by detail, he himself could never live in again. New parts he could build, he knew, if he should have the heart, but the years of his old building were gone, and the completed structure of his life would forever be the less for the closing of those silent chambers.

It was the way of life, he knew. And in the desolate reflections that followed he knew that the conscious attachment to life lay, negatively, in an escape from an utter detachment, from isolation; and positively, in a sense that the intangible structure of life as he grasped it was shared with someone whose sympathy and understanding could confirm it, and rescue it from the haunting suspicion of nothingness.

He had secluded himself for a time, disheartened. To begin anew, to build again, was more than he could bring himself to at once. He had no wish for other friends. He found indeed that it was not in him to hunt them out, to choose and cultivate them.

His turn of mind, the quality of his appreciations, made a demand upon circumstances that if he have friendship it must grow organically from the process of life. Nothing else could produce what he understood by that term. He had no care for casual acquaintance. He had, however, the solace that comes nearest to friendship — he had books; and with them he spent his time for a year or two. And then he found, growing out of the new life he had made for himself, the beginning of new friendships. Living again had zest for him. This led him into franker and fuller associations, and these in turn to his curiously eventless romance.

The girl who fanned the sudden flame in him was, he knew at once, disconcertingly unlike the type of women who in lonely moments had peopled his fancy. They had been calm-mannered and friendly, vital but contained. They had not been clever, perhaps, but had grown up with ripe traditions into whose ways they had richly fallen. In their pleasant and wholesome benevolence they had been, above all, restful and serene, with a frank and tender humor, a refuge from life and from a troubled spirit.

The girl herself was wholly otherwise. He first met her in the drawing room of acquaintances whither he had gone to make a rare call. There was a silence when he entered, not embarrassed but intense, as though he had come upon a moment of strong feeling in which, though he took no part, his presence struck no discordant note. He was introduced to her then, simply; and in the high tension of her clear regard, in her elevation above the commonplace, he caught a wistful appeal in her inquiring eyes. He did not know to what impassioned question he was responding or to what doctrine he was assenting. He only saw her there, very young and very slender and very erect, her head quiveringly high, her eyes burning with indignant wonder, her color very pure and heightened with emotion, and her thoughts lifted above the conventions of the moment. His blood leapt, without asking leave and without giving reasons.

He had no word with her then, except her look of baffled inquiry too impersonal he thought to have distinguished him; and yet in his unchallenged admission into the circle of her feelings he nourished a hopeful interpretation against the waiting smile of his later reflections. He put off impatiently the mocking intrusion of those reflections, and listened, when she had gone quietly and without apology from the room, to the explanations of his friends. She had been reading, they said with a lightness that had no flippancy, some of those modern writers who had discovered that life was hard, and harder for some than for others. And she had gone out to see for herself. What she had looked for had not been hard to find, real and heart-rending. At the end of her endurance she had come upon a pitiful case of ejection, squalid household goods crying their shame at the curbstone, a drunken father, a sad, starved mother nursing a baby at her flat breast, and half-clad, dirty children shivering about her. It was a typical case, they said, as they sat in the comfortable drawing room before the blazing fire; and they looked at each other wretchedly and in silence, moved by the pure young sympathies of the girl, her generous indignation, the revival of old feelings and old problems, and the reminder of old wounds that had never healed.

He went away troubled, his quickened pulse at the thought of the clear generous eyes of the girl rebuked by the unselfish wistfulness of her emotion. His mind moved along sudden unwonted paths. Bright visions flashed out upon him. But he told himself pityingly that he was too old. He had struggled with the horror of that experience that had now so suddenly blighted the joy of her normal girlhood, and he had come out of the struggle, not on the side of youth and hope and ardor and generosity, and of confidence that he could take the world in his two eager hands and shape it anew in some less hateful mold. He had come out, alas, on the side of middle age, less hopeful, less eager, in the measure of his despair; and now as he looked back on the years since his Utopia had faded for him, he knew that in the vision of ardent youth, with the sight of the world's misery before its eyes, he must be accounted by so much the less generous. He was spending his years among books, in the pleasant warmth of his study, shut off from the sight of suffering in the elegant pursuit of learning, or looking at it in strange foreign cities, in Italian countrysides, in gaunt fishing villages on desolate French coasts, with the curious, objective, aloof, picture-hunting eyes of the traveler. With the friends he had left but now he had talked of this problem, trying against the incessant pressure of the age to keep clear the point of view that he had gained. He knew that whatever the evils of life, not sympathy alone could better them; that learning and thought must have their silent place in the regenerative forces that should bring about a better future. And he had committed himself to the latter forces.

He went away from his friends glooming among his own reflections. His humor deserted him. The little personal charities that he had sneakingly maintained against the wisdom of his organizing age suddenly looked paltry and feeble in the face of that sweeping grasp which the young hopes of the new generation seemed to have attained. They rose up and mocked him. And when at the door of his own chambers he passed the humble figure of an old pensioner of his, he strode in without a smile of recognition and slammed the door. He was down with the malady.

Seated by his window he looked afresh at the problem from the point of view he had won in his old wrestling with it. Surely for that less cruel future toward which the present was aiming there must be saved what good things had been accumulated in the past; old traditions must go on, the love of art, the love of books, the love of wisdom; the human chain must remain unbroken; the torch must be kept alight and handed on.

How trite it all sounded! To what feeble phrases, now suddenly, he was reduced, as he came again to view the problem from the ardent angle of youth and generosity, and illusion, and hope! He saw it all anew out of the dreaming eyes of girlhood — and it struck him how drab and wintry were the colors of his own vision. His own vision assumed all at once a dwindling remoteness. It lacked the warm, heartening touch of immediacy, the quickening contact of life. He seemed to be trying, from aloof, and with averted eyes, to do what only a direct vision and courageous bodily presence could hope to do. And he saw embodied in this girl the spirit of a new age, with eyes open, with quick sympathy, touching the wound with its own hands, devoting itself to the healing service. Every instinct in him tugged at his assent to this call of life.

He sat on in his window, ruminating in gloomy rebellion. Why he should thus twist the fancies that a fair face had set free in him into a grotesque picture of despair he had not, for the hour, the humor even to question. It was indeed a rebellion against growing up, a crying out against the years, an old ember of his youth that had not gone out, glowing through the ashes it had been buried among. But he had lost his detachment, his perspective, his humor; and the particular circumsta.nce of the moment absorbed and embodied the universal protest — keen in him, for he loved the human aspects of life — against the hardening changes of maturity.

He went on savagely reflecting. He knew the intransigence of youth, and the hardness of its generosity. And besides she was a woman. There came into his mind a sally of an old humanist — La Bruyere — which he knew to be true to his own observation — that women cared nothing for the past. They did care nothing for it — nothing for the slow structure of accumulating wisdom built upon the experience of peoples and ages that were gone. There were almost no women historians, almost no women philosophers, almost no women humanists, though there were women poets and women novelists in profusion, and a growing body of women scientists, business women, and soon perhaps of politicians. Their concern was with the present and the immediate and the expedient. Their sensitive sympathies, touched quickly with the present reality, did much to mollify and humanize and warm a life left cold by the remoter rational dreams of men.