Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

I have fought my fight, I have lived my life,

I have drunk my share of wine;

From Trier to Köln there was never a knight

Had a merrier life than mine.

—CHARLES KINGSLEY.

BETWEEN the ages of ten and sixteen my social environment changed twice so sharply as almost to suggest von Humboldt’s observation that no one could pass from Siberia into Senegal without losing consciousness. When I was just past ten my father accepted an unusually attractive professional opportunity offered him from a town on the upper shores of Lake Huron, so we pulled up from Brooklyn, bag and baggage, which was a herculean chore in those days when long-distance trucking was unknown. We and our belongings went by rail to Detroit, and thence by steamboat to our journey’s end. Our new home was forty-five miles from a railway, and our only means of communication with the outside world was by steamboat in summer, and in winter by a mail-stagecoach, or oftener a sledge, which covered those forty-five miles daily over what was no better than a logging-road.

No one ever took this hideous ride except on an errand of life or death. From the day navigation closed to the day it opened we were shut in tight, a community of some seven or eight thousand persons utterly isolated, thrown flat on their own social resources throughout a winter that was nothing to trifle with. When you saw how much of those winters there was and how much in earnest they were, you got up a deal of wholesome respect for them. Every year regularly the bay would show a blanket of ice ten miles long, ten miles wide, and five feet thick. Shopkeepers stocked up in the autumn, but usually missed their guess, so when a housekeeper wanted a spool of thread or a pound of crackers in the late spring, she would be told that “we are just out of that, but we’ll have some in as soon as navigation opens.” My mother used to say she heard that refrain so often that if she heard it once more before the boats ran she would be out of her mind. The whistle of the first steamboat was the event of the year, literally. No matter at what time of day her whistle blew, everyone would let go all holds and rush for the wharf; and if she came in at night, she would find the whole population awake and on hand. If the county court were in session, it would adjourn; and if the churches were in session, as happened once at least to my knowledge, the congregations, choirs, janitors, probably the parsons also, though I did not wait to notice, all promptly quit the way of salvation and joined dogs with the ungodly in a joyous stampede.

One night when the first boat was more or less expected, for we could never be sure of her until we heard her whistle, four or five of my father’s pet cronies were smoking and lying and having a general good time with him downstairs, while my mother, who was upstairs with me, saw the prospect of their keeping the household astir until all hours, and said she wished they would clear out and go home. I said I thought it might be managed; so I hunted up an empty quart bottle with a thick lip, went to the back of the upper hall to give the illusion of distance, and blew three long deep blasts on the bottle. Before the sound ceased the men had gone through the front door like a football-rush, struggling into their overcoats as they went. The boat did not come in until the next afternoon, and though the incident caused considerable talk and speculation in the town, the whistlings were never satisfactorily accounted for. Some, remembering that the air was fresh that night, said they might have been the sounds of wind rumbling in a chimney; while another school of thought, somewhat more cynical, held to a theory based on the well-known properties of Ben Kaichen’s whisky; but nothing was ever actually determined.

The economic climate was as sharp a change from Brooklyn’s as the physical climate. Living in Brooklyn, one was at arm’s-length from the nearest thing to a metropolis that America could show; one rubbed elbows with a great variety of interests and occupations. Here there was only one primary interest and occupation—lumber. Brigades of lumberjacks went into camp each winter, felling and stripping trees and rolling the logs to the river. In summer the logs were floated down to the town, sorted, made up into rafts and towed to the various sawmills to be cut. The lumber was then piled on great docks, inspected, and loaded on barges which were towed, two or three in a string, behind a steambarge to Buffalo, Cleveland, or some other Lake port where their market lay. Except for a fairish industry in frozen fish, this was the whole economic life of the town. When we returned to the East after eight years the pine timber was near exhaustion, and pessimists were saying that the place would soon become a ghost-town, as so many single-industry towns had done and are still doing; but this did not happen. A railway came in, followed by other industries, and though I have never since been there to see how the town is getting on, I have heard it is doing well, though hardly anything that an old resident would recognise is left. I have even heard that no steamboats touch there now, which seems utterly incredible and impossible. The railway drove them off, as it drove them off the Mississippi.

Curiously, the social and cultural climate was not so great a change from Brooklyn’s as one might suppose. Our town was a first-generation affair, like Jamestown and Plymouth in their early days; it had no history, no tradition. The inhabitants had come in full-grown, mature, and were still in full vigour, not old enough to give way, still less die off. The children they had brought with them were as yet young, and those who had been spawned here were quite young. This matter of settlement by adults gave rise to a rather interesting peculiarity. We were exceptional among American towns in having no Main Street. The business section lay in a rectangle marked by the conjunction of Second and River Streets. Our Main Street, what there was of it, lay along the shore, quite off to one side, and was devoted to the more pretentious residences of the well-to-do. Actually, however, it was not Main Street at all, though the spelling did become corrupted into the conventional form. It was Maine Street, short for State-of-Maine Street, so-called originally because so many of those who had built their fine houses there were lumbermen from Maine.

In this remote, isolated, unsightly region, a wilderness of stumps and sand-barrens, and in a settlement so new which seemed to have no more stability than a mining-camp, one would have expected to find only the ill-favoured and repellent social life of an American frontier town. By some odd freak of chance this was not the case. The millowners and those directly concerned with the production of lumber were a hardheaded, hardfisted lot, with no interest in the amenities of existence, but displaying an amused and rather generous tolerance towards any effort to promote them. They were a good lot, too, as far as their lights led them; self-reliant, hard-working, honest, hating restraint, fiercely independent, yet friendly, kindly, and in many unexpected ways, liberal. In a word, they were standard specimens of the kind that one of my friends speaks of in a nostalgic strain as the old-fashioned, free-thinking, free-speaking, free-swearing American. They interested me immensely; I had never seen anything like them, and I studied their ways with delight. Their virtues,—and they were great virtues,—gave our society its prevailing tone of wholesome vigour which I look back upon as something uniquely formative in my experience.

But our society had an overtone as well. Many of our immigrants were not directly concerned with lumber, but had come to town in the wake of the industry as professional men or tradesmen; and among these an astonishing number were intelligent, thoughtful, and fairly well read. Their conversation was excellent, they had good taste, good manners, and a good attitude towards life’s amenities. I have seldom seen so small a town with anything comparable to our array of musical talent; there were so many who not only had superb voices, but who also knew how to sing and were musically literate to a remarkable degree. We had a lyric tenor, a lumber-inspector, who could have made his everlasting fortune in a Continental centre, practically as he stood; also two baritones, both in the insurance business, and a magnificent bass, a lawyer, who could have turned the trick almost as easily. The pretty wife of one of our tradesmen,—a charming couple, I think from Boston,—got extraordinary effects out of whistling; her lower register had something very near the real wood-wind timbre. Visiting connoisseurs of vaudeville who had listened to the best that professional whistlers could do, said they had never heard her equal. The odd thing about our fortuitous aggregation of talent was that it had no root in any established tradition. None of it came of any Continental stock where music was a fixed and necessary part of life. These people were all of the Anglo-Saxon breed, some New Englanders, some “York State Yankees,” some from the Western Reserve; and their only traditional music was the ensemble of the bucksaw, the anvil and the flail.

Our choral society, about forty in number, kept hard at it all winter, giving excellent concerts. Their programmes conceded nothing to popular taste, for there was hardly any popular taste to be considered. Our leading citizens, the millowners and their entourage, all turned out handsomely in support of the society, not because they knew much about its work or enjoyed it particularly, but because it reflected uncommon credit on the town and was something to be proud of. They took more actual pleasure out of the shows that our rather meagre dramatic talent vamped up from time to time. These were unpretentious, for we were as weak on the dramatic side as we were strong on the musical side. But, like our concerts, they were undertaken purely for the fun of the thing. The playlets and farces were clever, all hands did the best they could, the audiences were in a mood to be pleased, and things went off as well as one would wish.

When all came to all, I am inclined to think that my parents were socially better off here than they were in Brooklyn. One missed the occasional larger opportunities of a semi-demi-metropolis, but on the other hand, our isolation and our long stretches of enforced leisure kept the congenial elements in our society together in a closer, more sustained, and more intimate association. One thing that gave a perennial freshness to our family life was that my father could indulge to his heart’s content his gregarious fancy for cultivating rare and fruity characters. There was no end of such; the town was simply crawling with them, all of the very first order, and positively guaranteed no two alike. Each of them was an inexhaustible mine of diversion for one of my father’s peculiar taste. Their incessant pranks, the practical jokes they thought up to play on one another, were a marvel of devilish ingenuity. They were in all stations of life, some rich, some well-to-do, some less so; we had no poor; the grisly social phenomenon which Mr. Dooley called the prolotoorio, (“A prolotoorio, Jawn, is the same thing as a hobo”), had not yet appeared among us. All these congenital nonconformists uproariously clave to my father at first sight, and kept seeing to it that he never had a dull day while he was in their midst; and save for those caused by failing health, I truly think he never had one. If he went out no farther than around the block, he would come back roaring with laughter over some absurd rencontre. My mother did not take so much stock in these rugged individualists. She told me once in a burst of confidence that they were the finest assortment of human sculch she had ever laid eyes on. But her sense of humour being what it was, she had to admit, when I pinned her down to it, that they were also probably as diverting as anything in the whole anthropoid creation that was ever allowed to run at large.

Life here gave me a close view of qualities which I was of course too young to appraise at their full value, but when I came to review them in later life I saw that my impression of them had been clear and germinal. Independence, self-respect, self-reliance, dignity, diligence,—often narrow and primitive in their manifestations, if you like, ill-rounded, not at all durchgearbeitet, but there they were, the virtues that once spoke out in the Declaration of Independence. It was noticeable, too, that these virtues flourished as well as they did in a state of freedom. Our life was singularly free; we were so little conscious of arbitrary restraint that we hardly knew government existed. Aside from the county sheriff and one deputy, the town had no police, nor seemed to need any; I heard of no crime being committed there in my time. On the whole, our society might have served pretty well as a standing advertisement for Mr. Jefferson’s notion that the virtues which he regarded as distinctively American thrive best in the absence of government. I am quite sure that John Adams, George Mason, John Taylor, Mercer of Maryland, Jackson of Georgia, Jones of North Carolina, would have found something admirable and congenial in the Americanism of our citizenry at large; more congenial and far more admirable than anything they could find in the shoddy article now on sale everywhere under that name. I use the words “now on sale” deliberately and advisedly.

II

During my first four years of life in these new surroundings, only two matters out of many which came my way are entitled to a place in this narrative. One was my scraping up a couple of valuable acquaintances; valuable because it was through them that I got up not only a great lot of first-class conversational German, but also considerable insight into German life and character; and all with virtually no effort. Certain inhabitants of our town seemed strangely above their station; above it in education, breeding, culture, views of life. No one knew why or how they came to be where they were, and no one asked. The town kept to the admirable unwritten rule of frontier etiquette which regarded a person’s antecedents as quite beyond question. “All I care to know,” said Mark Twain, himself a product of the frontier who lived always in its spirit, “is that a man is a human being; that is enough for me—he can’t be any worse.” Such was the invariable attitude of our society.

Among these misplaced people were a ci-devant German-Polish count and his wife. He did some sort of routine work, I forget what; something in the insurance way, I think. He was a taciturn unsmiling person, while she was a lively bright little soul, happy when she had some one to chatter with. For some reason, the epitaph that Callimachus wrote for the sweet-spirited Samian girl who died so young, τήν πολύμυθον, ἐπισταμένην καλὰ παίζειν, ἡδίστην συvέpιθov, ἀεὶ λάλον always puts me in mind of her. Finding that I knew a word or two of German, this childless and more or less companionless woman made friends with me and kept me with her whenever she could, telling me about the charms of her native country and the attractions of life there. She gave me an impression of Warschau as being truly a civitas Dei, one of the world’s wonders, and I forthwith resolved to see it, which I have never done, and now of course never shall.

Another misplaced person was of a military type somewhat gone to seed, and well on the far side of middle age; tall, large, extremely handsome, and speaking the true pure German of the Hanoverian aristocracy. Whether or not a titular aristocrat, he had every mark betokening generations of good breeding. He seemed singularly content in the humblest of occupations,—he was the janitor of a church,—apparently seeking nothing beyond a very poor living and a maximum of leisure. He had a room somewhere in which he cooked his food and slept, but he had also converted the church’s rear basement into a large neat Gesellschaftszimmer, where he spent most of his time, and where I too spent many hours in his witty, humorous, philosophical company. I recall him now as one whom experience had shown, as it showed Montaigne, that human beings are very much what they are, that the collective character of their society is very much what it is, and that nothing of any conceivable consequence can be done about either, save to entertain oneself with the kaleidoscopic spectacle of their incredibly absurd exorbitances and divagations. The man suddenly disappeared one day, and we never heard of him again. Probably some turn in his affairs took him back to the Fatherland; I hope so. He got letters and newspapers regularly from Germany, so it seems likely that some arrangement for his return had been managed, though it would be impossible to say on what grounds. One could never think of him as a political refugee, for the Politiker of whatever stripe would be no more to him than a creature of sheer obscenity, more or less amusing. He was too honest and upright to have been concerned in any scandal, unless perchance somehow victimised. Since he was a man of deep and simple-hearted sentiment, a true German, I have sometimes thought that in his earlier days an untoward sentimental attachment might have made him break with his surroundings. Once indeed, I remember, he spoke casually of having had a sweetheart in Germany, and when I thoughtlessly asked what had become of her, he replied, “Sie ist längst im Grabe.”

So much for these two dear and good friends of my boyhood. I shall always love their memory, and always be grateful for their influence in enlarging my views of life and shaping my demands on life.

The second matter pertinent to this record was a matter of bad luck with my studies. At twelve or thereabouts, for my sins I was sentenced to do time over the “standard authors” which a schoolboy at my stage of progress was supposed to read,—Cæsar, Xenophon, Homer, Virgil, Cicero,—and God wot it was the dullest, dreariest, most unrewarding task I ever set my hand to. If the language-difficulties attendant on it had been even a shade more obstructive than they were, I would have thrown Greek and Latin to the winds forever. These were the least of my troubles; my tribulations rose from the substance of what these wretched men wrote about; it was all so far over my head. I was not interested in bridge-building, in Ariovistus or Vercingetorix, or in what the father of the gods and king of men had done for Æolus. Like Pet Marjorie’s turkey, I “did not care a single dam” about the gardens of Alcinous, the Manilian law, or the fate of the poet Archias. The only clear impression made on me by the Catilinian orations was that the great orator was a good deal of a stuffed shirt; an impression which abides with me to this day.

The schools in our town were somewhat worse than none, and I did not attend them, but had hitherto gone on with my studies in the same happy-go-lucky fashion as in Brooklyn. My readings in Greek and Latin had consisted of scraps culled from various works; they were mostly short, and all were appropriate to my age. They dealt with matters well within the compass of a child’s understanding, affairs of ordinary life, ordinary experience; many of them were light, amusing, humorous. This slipshod curriculum was invaluable to me in one respect. It set me on my way to see the men and women of antiquity as I have always since then seen them, not as story-book heroes and heroines, but as people exactly like us, each with twenty-four hours a day to get through somehow or other, and for the most part getting through them quite as we do; people of the same instincts, passions, desires, ambitions, abilities, as ourselves, and employing them precisely as we employ them. This may seem a commonplace observation, perhaps a stupid commonplace; yet it does point straight to the enormous difference between knowing history and understanding history. One is often astonished to see how many there are who seem to know a vast lot of history, but to understand hardly any of it. Nine-tenths of the value of classical studies lies in their power to establish a clear commonsense, matter-of-fact view of human nature and its activities over a continuous stretch of some twenty centuries. If one gravitates into that view at an early age, as I did, naturally, unconsciously, not knowing that there is any other view to take, so much the better.

But my parents had the notion of some day sending me to college. They had one particular college in mind for me, and to enter it one had to comply with some of the most preposterous requirements that a hidebound traditionalism could devise. They might well have come down from the curriculum which master Tubal Holophernes imposed upon Gargantua. Their intention was sound enough, probably, but their prescriptions were redundant, pointless. Early in the last century Harvard College required its candidates to show on examination that they were able “extempore to read, construe and parse” any Latin prose or poetry presented to them, and also “to write true Latin in prose, and to be skilled in making Latin verse”; and the same with Greek. This was exactly right, exactly as it should be, for the best way to find out whether or not a person can do something is to set him at it; and that should end the matter, then and there. Why should a poor little devil be required, over and above this proof of competence, to have read through a dreadful slather of what must be to any child the most uninteresting, unassimilable and odious literature that could be put before him? If he had got his facility by unwonted ways, out of Aulus Gellius’s scrapbook, Pliny’s letters, bits from Cornelius Nepos and Eutropius; epigrams of Martial, Ausonius, the Anthology; fables out of the Græca Minora, stories out of the Vulgate,—what odds, so long as he has it? The authors whom tradition has labelled “preparatory” have a great place in literature, but that place is far out of a child’s reach. My notion is that Cæsar and Cicero come in with Tacitus, Sallust and others, far along in one’s course, as topical reference-reading in a critical study of Roman political history, as Homer and Virgil should in a critical literary study based on Aristotle’s Poetics. Taken thus, the student will read and re-read them with understanding and pleasure, but taken as a corpus vile of “preparatory” material, he will detest them. I have not read a word of Cicero’s speeches since my schooldays, (though I have read his philosophical treatises with great attention); nor have I looked into a copy of the Gallic War but once, and that was to settle a bet.

III

When I was just turning fourteen I was sent off to boarding-school, a long way from home, down in the prairie country on the banks of the Illinois River, where again I was plumped into a brand-new set of physical and social surroundings. The town had about ten thousand people; it made its living out of agriculture and miscellaneous manufactures, the principal products being organs, ploughs, alcohol and corn whisky. It had been settled by ‘forty-eighters, the best stock that Europe ever exported here, and the descendants of those superb people were keeping very closely to the old ways and traditions. All their social activities and amenities were German. They had three flourishing musical societies; a Männerchor, a Liederkranz of mixed voices, and a less formal Gesangverein of younger folk from whom in course of time I learned practically the whole Kommersbuch pretty well by heart. Also with the help of some of them I learned to read music as an extra-curricular activity, with no idea of doing anything with it in a practical way, but only with a vague notion of some day becoming musically literate. The theory and history of music has always interested me, and I have kept at them in a desultory fashion all my life. For some reason there was no instrumental music, except for the piano. In a town brimming over with vocal music of a high order, and harbouring excellent pianists, one would at least look for a string quartette of sorts, but I can not recall a single person who had ever scraped a string.

A great deal of social interest centred in the Turnverein, which was an exclusive institution. One had to have credentials running back as far as Henry the Fowler to belong to it, so I got my knowledge of its doings mainly by hearsay. It put on two or three really remarkable gymnastic exhibitions each winter, which were invitation-affairs, though a few plebeians with a “pull” were sometimes grudgingly allowed to crash the gate for standing-room, and were promptly hunted out again when the show was over and the festivities beginning. Some of the beauty and chivalry off the very top layer of two neighbouring cities were usually on hand to grace the occasion; and speaking of beauty, this region blossomed with more pretty girls than I would have supposed there were in the world. They were somewhat on the alfalfa-fed order, innocent of cosmetics, and making an excellent appearance, whether singly or in groups. They gave me the beginnings of a critical taste in such matters, for outside of my own family I had not seen any female beauty worth speaking of, except in some older women. Since then I have been in regions which I thought were a shade or two more productive, and the product rather better. Belgium, for example, seemed on long acquaintance to be keeping up to its mediaeval record in this respect, as appears in the old monastic hexameters,

Gandavum laqueis, formosis Bruga puellis,

Lovanium doctis, gaudet Mechlinia stultis.

Of course one can’t know exactly what sort of thing Bruges kept in stock to fluster the monks of the Middle Ages, but at any time these thirty years I would have put Brussels far and away ahead of Bruges or any other town in the kingdom. I understand, however, that connoisseurs unite nem. con. in giving the first prize for this pleasing commodity to Poland, but I have never been in Poland or seen more than a very few Polish girls, so I can have no opinion.

I also acquired, quite unconsciously, the beginnings of a creditable taste in beer. The town had a small brewery which brought forth a most superexcellent product, and the proprietor’s son being a day-pupil in our school, its hospitalities were open to us. It was an impressive experience to go down to the brewery when the bock-beer season opened, and see a jury of grave old pundits assembled, austere colossi of learning, taciturn, profoundly scrupulous, sampling the new brew with reverent care and finally delivering judgement. With such a start, I quite naturally grew up in the prevailing superstition that all German beer is good, but when I went into Germany I found a great deal that was bad. I also found that our little brewery was an exception to the rule discussed by Herbert Spencer, that the worst place to look for a product is the place where it is produced. In my day Brussels imported beers from Munich and Dortmund that were beyond belief; they were too good to drink; yet in Munich and Dortmund the same brands of beer were not nearly so good. Thirty-five years ago, the dark beer one got at Lüchow’s in New York, and especially the Bavarian black beer that Jansen imported, were far better than anything I found under the same name in Würzburg and Kulmbach, where they were made.

Our school ran to a dozen or fifteen boarders and as many day-pupils, all from good substantial families. It was a strange affair in some ways. Its material equipment was poor and primitive; well-to-do parents today would not dream of putting boys in such a place, though it was well-kept in the sense that nothing was let go dirty or slovenly. Our food was abundant and good; quite on the coarse side and thoroughly uninteresting, but we got on with it and saw no reason to complain. But our living-quarters, dormitory, schoolrooms, were bare, bleak, repellent, as anything one would find in a county jail. One could get up as tear-compelling a story as Copperfield’s about our discomfort and wretchedness,—breaking a skin of ice in our wash-pitchers mornings, and all that sort of thing,—but it would hardly go down with us, for we were not conscious of being uncomfortable and wretched; on the contrary we were having a very good time out of our situation. We had all known better things, but not so much better that the contrast was heartbreaking. I sometimes think a superheated passion for the Uplift rather overplays the sense of hardship and misery ensuing upon circumstances like ours; at all events, we laboured under no such distress.

With regard to my studies at the school, my extraordinary luck still held good. Poor as the place would seem if judged by modern notions of the American standard of living, whatever that is, it was just the place for me. I wish now that I had thought to ask my parents how they came to hear of it and what had moved them to send me there. The head of the school was wise, capable, kind, hard-working, and had an excellent literary sense. He woke me up to the fact that Greek and Roman poetry really has some merit; he even caused my detestation of Homer and Virgil to fade out; and he introduced me casually to a great deal that is good in English verse. He had three assistants. One of them managed to sluice some arithmetic and algebra into my head, but it all promptly seeped out again, so that I had to do an extra year’s preparatory work in order to enter college, which was humiliating. All I did in mathematics, then or ever, was done by sheer effort of unintelligent memory. Today I am unable to add a column of ten figures and get the same result twice, unless by chance, and the simplest sum in long division is as far beyond me as driving a locomotive.

Like my two friends at home, the other assistants gave the curious impression of not belonging where they were, and one could not help wondering how they had found their way there. One was a cripple, moving about on crutches. He bore one of the most distinguished names to be found in the academic circles of Massachusetts, and everything about him betokened the indefinable quality of distinction. His culture, manners, humour, easy affability, delightful conversation, all had the unmistakable mark of superiority. We had boundless respect for him, and great affection; whatever he might want from us was his. In return, he liked us, treating us as friends, and above all invariably as gentlemen. It was his influence in particular, even above that of the head-master, which set the social tone of the school.

The other master was a gentle-spirited young German, an excellent musician, (though he taught no music), who seemed always very sad. He was a capable teacher, but outside of his work and his music there seemed little that he had the heart to care for. He rather took to me, mainly on the score of music in the first instance, but we soon established a friendship on general grounds. His conversation taught me a great deal about music and musicians, and when I left school he gave me a book of musical exercises to remember him by, seeming to set a great deal of store by it, much more than the book was actually worth. It bore a blue bookplate with a woman’s name printed in heavy, bold German script, Welda Reichels. I have sometimes wondered whether it was connected with some romance that had missed fire.

It appears to me now that the most unusual and salutary thing about our life in that school was its atmosphere of freedom. Within our hours of work the discipline was strict enough to keep things going as they should, but it was not unkind, unreasonable, or on a proper occasion, inflexible. Out of hours we had all the range there was, free to wander in the fields, row on the river, hob-nob with the townspeople, and strike up acquaintances where we chose. The policy worked well enough. We were never cautioned against putting beans up our noses, or subjected to any snivelling talk about being on our honour, or keeping up the credit of the dear old school, or any such odious balderdash. Nevertheless we somehow managed to behave decently, no doubt because we had no overweening inducements to behave otherwise. I do not recall any pranks serious enough to come in for more than a good-natured reprimand. Yet we were not holding any brief for Condorcet’s or Rousseau’s views on the essential goodness of human nature. There was always plenty to do that was legitimate and more interesting than anything likely to land us in trouble, so why get in trouble? This was all there was to it; this was the sum of our ethical imperative.

Indica tigris agit rabida cum tigride pacem Perpetuam.

—but, I said to myself, that is just what she doesn’t do. She keeps the peace only unless and until some circumstance arises which in her opinion justifies her in breaking it. I thought that if Juvenal had been a better observer he could not have helped seeing that his tigresses and bears behave precisely as men and women do, and for the same reason. There seemed to me to be some principle at work here, some general law of conduct prevailing throughout the animal world. But all this was casual at the time, something that popped into my head and at once popped out again to stay gone for years. I scribbled a ribald note on the margin of a Tauchnitz text, and was amused by it in my subsequent re-readings of Juvenal, but gave the matter no further thought. My mind reverted to it immediately, however, when long afterwards I learned that there is indeed such a law, though its universality had not been established at that time, nor its implications fully apprehended. I found that Aristippus, Epicurus, Aristotle and St. Augustine had brushed elbows with this law without clearly recognising it, and so in modern times had Bishop Butler. Bentham and Mill had occasional glimpses of it. Spencer’s view of it and Henry George’s was clear but limited; they did not go the full length it should have led them. Not for a long time did I come upon a competent exposition of that law and its effects; and when I did, curiously, I did not get it from an academic philosopher, but from a retired businessman. I shall have something more to say of this hereafter.

IV

My summer vacations I spent at home in the Lake region, and also the eighteen months intervening between my leaving school and entering college. During these periods I went pretty well on furlough from routine study, reverting to my old practice of desultory reading, and not too much of that. One book, Tylor’s Primitive Culture, which I read at this time, did set a line of permanent interest; it got me into a hospitable frame of mind towards the works of Darwin, Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and other expositors of progressive evolution, when I came upon them some years later.

As for my other pursuits, I edged my way into baseball of the bush-league type, doing so well that I was thought to have a promising professional future ahead of me if I stuck at it; but although I toyed with the idea, I never went farther with it than playing now and then irregularly, at college and elsewhere, for a number of seasons. I fished a bit, and shot a bird or two sometimes, but only for food; never any large game, though it was plentiful enough. Hunting as a sport was not much done, for some reason, so the bears and deer remained quite tame and friendly. Once at sunset of a winter’s day, I remember, a bear and two large cubs strolled through the middle of town, crossed the Second Street bridge and went out again, all quite nonchalantly, tourist-fashion, as people who were out merely to see the sights.

Occasionally I worked at various jobs around the sawmills, partly for something to do, but mainly because I found a fascination in the process by which large wet logs were converted into handsome pine lumber; there was something rather pretty about it. I especially liked the niceness of swift calculation of the way each individual log should be trimmed and cut to insure the least wastage. The foreman had only a moment or two to make up his mind about this, while the logs were coming up the “brow” three or four at a time, so it was a skilled job. Then too it is always a pleasure to see a process all the way through, complete, instead of some mere fraction of it. Here one’s eyes could follow the history of a piece of lumber from its origin in a standing tree down to its final state as a two-by-four on the deck of a barge outward-bound to market. It is an amusing thought to me nowadays that as far as knowledge goes, not physical strength, I still could do anything there is to be done around a sawmill, except filing the saws. I should not know how to do that, but I doubt it would take me long to learn.

I was in the timber-woods only once or twice; it was all very still and sombre in their depths, and probably poetic, but the only thing that interested me was that one could look up and see the stars in the daytime, as one does from the bottom of a well. The absence of underbrush and the flatness of the land gave me somewhat the feeling of being in church, so I suppose I should have been touched by the religious awe which poets write of, but somehow I was not. Yet our woods had a lore of their own, and even a mythology. A few years ago, when there was quite a run of research into the tales of Paul Bunyan and other legendary creatures of the timberlands, I was astonished to see no mention of the principal figure in our mythology, the hodag. I was astonished, because in my time the horrific deeds and prowesses of this creature were known ubique et ab omnibus in our region, wherever lumber was cut.

Like the fourth beast of Daniel, the hodag was “dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it.” It also had a long flat tail of bone with serrated edges, thin as a band-saw and hard as steel. The hodag subsisted on bears, deer, wildcats and such, but its favourite article of diet was landlookers; these being men whom the millowners sent out to explore and report on unexploited areas of timberland. When the hodag got on trail of a landlooker, nothing could be done; it was just too bad. On the ground, escape was impossible; and if the landlooker climbed a tree, the hodag would saw the tree down with its tail, and that was the end of the landlooker. I never saw the hodag, but land-lookers have entertained me by the hour with lurid stories of its doings. I suggest that students of American mythology look into this matter and give the hodag its proper place in their pantheon.

The nearest I came to feeling the divine afflatus was in my sixteenth summer when I was making a long, slow, lazy trip on a steambarge. The millowners used to let me travel on them when I could persuade my father to exercise his “pull,” which was seldom. On this particular trip we passed Port Huron at sunset and were all night going through the Detroit and St. Clair rivers and Lake St. Clair, out into Lake Erie. The night was clear and warm, there was no wind, the moon was full, and I was so delighted by the resultant fine effects that I sat up all night to enjoy them. Perhaps something might have been made of me in a poetic way if the charm of the picture had not been so largely due to the works of man; the farms, the houses, voices on the shores, the lights of towns and villages, the passing boats. With these taken away and the landscape left in a state of nature, I am quite sure I should have looked at it for a while, said it was all very fine, very good, then turned in for a night’s sound sleep, and afterwards thought no more about it.

1 Sat. xv, 159-171.

2 Dulcius urbe quid est? An villa sit apta puellae?

• 1Not so long afterwards I began to suspect that this might also be the sum of the ethical imperative affecting the conduct of mankind-at-large. What first drew my attention that way was the very eloquent and splendid passage of poetry in which Juvenal contrasts the social behaviour of other animals with that of man. On a first reading it struck me that for a first-class satirist Juvenal must have been a shocking poor observer. When he said that there is greater concord among serpents than among men, that the stronger lions and boars always spare the weaker, he was saying something which I made bold to believe simply wasn’t so.
• 2In those years I undoubtedly built up and fortified the singular immunity to infirmity and disease which has lasted all my life; but in those years also my congenital indifference to nature in the wild, natural scenery, rocks, rills, woods and templed hills, hardened into permanent distaste. Like the Goncourts, I can see nature only as an enemy; a highly respected enemy, but an enemy. “I am a lover of knowledge,” Socrates said, “and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country.” The great Guizot never saw the ocean until he was forty-four, and would not have seen it then if he had not had an errand in a part of Normandy where he could not help seeing it. “At that time,” he said, “I would not have gone a couple of miles to see the most magnificent bit of natural scenery. I would have gone a thousand to see a man of talent.” This sentiment being so precisely mine, I am wholly unable to understand the passion for rusticity and rural life. In England and the United States, urban life is so deplorably ill-organised that one must exist in the country as best one can; but this is a forced put. In Europe, where urban life is better organised, one views a sojourn in the country as more or less something to be got through with. Apparently it was always so. “What is pleasanter than the city?” cries Tibullus, “What kind of place is a farm-house to park your best girl in?” True, some of the Roman poets, even Tibullus himself, now and then dutifully churned out praises of rural life, but they do not carry the tone of complete conviction to my ears. In a denizen of an American city one can understand a slight exaggeration of the joys of life “up at my little place in the country,” but in one accustomed to the urban society of Rome, it sounds a trifle effortful and strained. My notion is that for the moment Horace and Virgil were perhaps not quite serious, perhaps saying somewhat the conventional thing; but even so, one must admit that, like the House of Lords in Gilbert’s delightful satire, “they did it very well.”