Journeys to Bagdad
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Charles S. Brooks >> Journeys to Bagdad
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If by further fortunate chance, you are addicted, let us say, in the
quieter hours of winter, to writing of any kind--and for your joy, I pray
that this be so, whether this writing be in massive volumes, or obscure
and unpublished beyond its demerit--if such has been your addiction, you
have found, doubtless, that your case lies much like the fat woman's; that
it is the show you give before the door that must determine what numbers
go within--that, to be plain with you, much thought must be given to the
taking of your title. It must be a most alluring trumpeting, above the din
of rival shows.
So I have named this article with thought of how I might stir your learned
curiosity. I have set scholars' words upon my platform, thereby to make
you think how prodigiously I have stuffed the matter in. And all this
while, my article has to do only with a certain set of Shakespeare in nine
calfskin volumes, edited by a man named John Bell, now long since dead,
which set happens to have stood for several years upon my shelves; also,
how it was disclosed to me that he was the worst of all editors, together
with the reasons thereto and his final acquittal from the charge.
John Bell has stood, for the most part, in unfingered tranquillity, for I
read from a handier, single volume. Only at cleaning times has he been
touched, and then but in the common misery with all my books. Against this
cleaning, which I take to be only a quirk of the female brain, I have
often urged that the great, round earth itself has been subjected to only
one flood, and that even that was a failure, for, despite Noah's
shrewdness at the gangway, villains still persist on it. How then shall my
books profitably endure a deluge both autumn and spring?
Thereafter, when the tempest has spent itself and the waters have returned
from off my shelves, I'll venture in the room. There will be something
different in the sniff of the place, and it will be marvelously picked up.
Yet I can mend these faults. But it does fret me how books will be
standing on their heads. Were certain volumes only singled out to stand
upon their heads, Shaw for one, and others of our moderns, I would suspect
the housemaid of expressing in this fashion a sly and just criticism of
their inverted beliefs. I accused her on one occasion of this subtlety,
but was met by such a vacant stare that I acquitted her at once. However,
as she leaves my solidest authors also on their heads, men beyond the
peradventure of such antics, I must consider it but a part of her
carelessness, for which I have warned her twice. Were it not for her
cunning with griddlecakes, to which I am much affected, I would have
dismissed her before this.
And now this Bell, which has ridden out so many of my floods, is
proclaimed to me a villain. We had got beyond the April freshets and there
was in consequence a soapy smell about. It is clear in my mind that a
street organ had started up a gay tune and that there were sounds of
gathering feet. I was reading at the time, in the green rocker by the
lamp, a life of John Murray, by one whose name I have forgotten, when my
eyes came on the sentence that has shaken me. Bell, it said, Bell of my
own bookshelf, of all the editors of Shakespeare was the worst.
In my agitation I removed my glasses, breathed upon the lenses, and
polished them. Here was one of my familiars accused of something that was
doubtless heinous, although in what particulars I was at a loss to know.
It came on me suddenly. It was like a whispered scandal, sinister in its
lack of detail. All that I had known of Bell was that its publication had
dated from the eighteenth century. Yet its very age had seemed a patent of
respectability. If a thing does not rot and smell in a hundred and forty
years, it would seem to be safe from corruption: it were true peacock. But
here at last from Bell was an unsavory whiff. My flood had abated only a
fortnight since, and here was a stowaway escaped. Bell was proclaimed a
villain. Again had a flood proved itself a failure.
[Illustration]
Now, I feel no shame in having an outsider like Murray display to me these
hidden evils; for I owe no inquisitorial duty to my books. There are
people who will not admit a volume to their shelves until they have thrown
it open and laid its contents bare. This is the unmannerly conduct of the
customs wharf. Indeed, it is such scrutiny, doubtless, that induces some
authors to pack their ideas obscurely, thereby to smuggle them. However,
there being now a scandal on my shelves, I must spy into it.
John Murray, wherein I had read the charge, had been such a friendly,
tea-and-gossip book, not the kind to hiss a scandal at you. It was bound
in blue cloth and was a heavy book, so that I held it on a cushion. (And
this device I recommend to others.) It was the kind of book that stays
open at your place, if you leave it for a moment to poke the fire. Some
books will flop a hundred pages, to make you thumb them back and forth,
though whether this be the binder's fault or a deviltry set therein by
their authors I am at a loss to say. But Shaw would be of this kind,
flopping and spry to mix you up. And in general, Shaw's humor is like that
of a shell-man at a country fair--a thimble-rigger. No matter where you
guess that he has placed the bean, you will be always wrong. Even though
you swear that you have seen him slip it under, it's but his cunning to
lead you off. But Murray was not that kind. It would stand at its post,
unhitched, like a family horse.
Here was quandary. I looked at Bell, but God forgive me, it was not with
the old trustfulness. He was on the top shelf but one, just in line with
the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. I had set him thus
conspicuous with intention, because of his calfskin binding, quite old and
worn. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. A set of
British Essayists, if disordered, takes you back of the black walnut. To
what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence?
(I had bought Bell, secondhand, on Farringdon Road, London, from a cart,
cheap, because a volume was missing.)
And now it seemed he was in some sort a villain. Although shocked, I felt
a secret joy. For somewhat too broadly had Bell smirked his sanctity on
me. When piety has been flaunting over you, you will steal a slim occasion
to proclaim a flaw. There is much human nature goes to the stoning of a
saint. In my ignorance I had set the rogue in the company of the decorous
Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell. It is not that I admire
that chaste assembly. But it were monstrous, even so, that I should
neighbor them with this Bell, who, as it appeared, was no better than a
wolf in calf's clothing. It was Little Red Riding Hood, you will recall,
who mistook a wolf for her grandmother. And with what grief do we look on
her unhappy end!
My hand was now raised to drag Bell out by the heels, when I reflected
that what I had heard might be unfounded gossip, mere tattle, and that
before I turned against an old acquaintance, it were well to set an
inquiry afoot. First, however, I put him alongside Herbert Spencer. If it
were Bell's desire to play the grandmother to him, he would find him tough
meat.
Bell, John--I looked him up, first in volume Aus to Bis of the
encyclopedia, without finding him, and then successfully in the National
Biography--Bell, John, was a London bookseller. He was born in 1745,
published his edition of Shakespeare in 1774, and after this assault, with
the blood upon him, lived fifty years. This was reassuring. It was then
but a bit of wild oats, no hanging matter. I now went at the question
deeply. Yet I left him awhile with the indigestible Herbert.
It was in 1774 that Bell squirted his dirty ink. In _The Gentleman's
Magazine_ for that year appear mutterings from America, since called the
Boston Tea Party. I set this down to bring the time more warmly to your
mind, for a date alone is but a blurred signpost unless you be a scholar.
And it is advisedly that I quote from this particular periodical, because
its old files can best put the past back upon its legs and set it going.
There is a kind of history-book that sorts the bones and ties them all
about with strings, that sets the past up and bids it walk. Yet it will
not wag a finger. Its knees will clap together, its chest fall in. Such
books are like the scribblings on a tombstone; the ghost below gives not
the slightest squeal of life. But slap it shut and read what was written
hastily at the time on the pages of _The Gentleman's Magazine_, and it
will be as though Gabriel had blown a practice toot among the headstones.
It is then that you will get the gibbering of returning life.
So it was in 1774 that Bell put out his version of Shakespeare. Bell was
not a man of the schools. Caring not a cracked tinkle for learning, it was
not to the folios, nor to any authority that he turned for the texts of
his plays. Instead, he went to Drury Lane and Covent Garden and took their
acting copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very
plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for
word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with
pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to draw the gallery laugh.
A few nights later, having by grace of God escaped a dinner out, and being
of a consequence in a kindly mood, the scandal, too, having somewhat
abated in my memory, I took down a brown volume and ran my fingers over
its sides and along its yellow edges. Then I made myself comfortable and
opened it up.
There is nothing to-day more degenerate than our title-pages. It is in a
mean spirit that we pinch and starve them. I commend the older kind
wherein, generously ensampled, is the promise of the rich diet that shall
follow. At the circus, I have said, I'll go within that booth that has
most allurement on its canvas front, and where the hawker has the biggest
voice. If a fellow will but swallow a snake upon the platform at the door,
my money is already in my palm. Thus of a book I demand an earnest on the
title-page.
Bell's title-page is of the right kind. In the profusion and variety of
its letters it is like a printer's sample book, with tall letters and
short letters, dogmatic letters for heaping facts on you and script
letters reclining on their elbows, convalescent in the text. There are
slim letters and again the very progeny of Falstaff. And what flourishes
on the page! It is like a pond after the antics of a skater.
There follows the subscribers' list. It is a Mr. Tickle's set that has
come to me, for his name is on the fly-leaf. But for me and this set of
Bell, Mr. Tickle would seem to have sunk into obscurity. I proclaim him
here, and if there be anywhere at this day younger Tickles, even down to
the merest titillation, may they see these lines and thus take a greeting
from the past.
Then follows an essay on oratory. It made me grin from end to end. Yet, as
on the repeating of a comic story, it is hard to get the sting and rollic
on the tongue. And much quotation on a page makes it like a foundling
hospital--sentences unparented, ideas abandoned of their proper text.
"Where grief is to be expressed," says Bell, "the right hand laid slowly
on the left breast, the head and chest bending forward, is a just
expression of it.... Ardent affection is gained by closing both hands
warmly, at half arm's length, the fingers intermingling, and bringing them
to the breast with spirit.... Folding arms, with a drooping of the head,
describe contemplation." I have put it to you and you can judge it.
Let us consider Bell's marginalia of the plays! Every age has importuned
itself with words. _Reason_ was such a word, and _fraternity_, and
_liberty_. _Efficiency_, maybe, is the latest, though it is sure that when
you want anything done properly, you have to fight for it. It is below the
dignity of my page to put a plumber on it, yet I have endured occasions!
This word _efficiency_, then, comes from our needs and not from our
accomplishment. It is at best a marching song, not a shout of victory. It
is when the house is dirty that the cry goes up for brooms.
So Bell in the notes upon the margins of his pages echoes a world that is
talking about _delicacy_, about _sentiment_, about _equality_. (For a
breeze blows up from France.) It was these words that the eighteenth
century most babbled when it grew old. It had horror for what was low and
vulgar. It wore laces on its doublet front, and though it seldom washed,
it perfumed itself. And all this is in Bell, for his notes are a running
comment of a shallow, puritanistic prig, who had sharp eyes and a gossip's
tongue. This was the time, too, when such words as _blanket_ were not
spoken by young ladies if men were about; for it is a bedroom word and
therefore immoral. Bell objected from the bottom of his silly soul that
Lady Macbeth should soil her mouth with it. "Blanket of the dark," he
says, "is an expression greatly below our author. Curtain is evidently
better." "Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself?" Whereat Bell
again complains that Lady Macbeth is "unnecessarily indelicate." "Though
this tragedy," says Bell, "must be allowed a very noble composition, it is
highly reprehensible for exhibiting the chimeras of witchcraft, and still
more so for advancing in several places the principles of fatalism. We
would not wish to see young, unsettled minds to peruse this piece without
proper companions to prevent absurd prejudices."
It must appear from this, that, although one gains no knowledge of
Shakespeare, one does gain a considerable knowledge of Bell and of his
time. And this is just as well. For Bell's light on Shakespeare would be
but a sulphur match the more at carnival time. Indeed, Shakespeare
criticism has been such a pageantry of spluttering candle-ends and
sniffing wicks that it is well that one or two tallow dips leave the
rabble and illuminate the adjacent alleys. It is down such an alley that
Bell's smoking light goes wandering off.
As I read Bell this night, it is as though I listen at the boxes and in
the pit, in that tinkling time of 'seventy-four. The patched Laetitia sits
surrounded by her beaux. It was this afternoon she had the vapors. Next to
her, as dragon over beauty, is a fat dame with "grenadier head-dress."
"The Rivals" has yet to be written. London still hears "The Beggar's
Opera." Lady Macbeth is played in hoopskirts. The Bastille is a tolerably
tight building. Robert Burns is strewn with his first crumbs. It is the
age of omber, of sonnets to Chloe's false ringlets, of odes to red heels
and epics to lap dogs, of tinseled struttings in gilded drawing-rooms. It
was town-and-alley, this age; and though the fields lay daily in their new
creation with sun and shadow on them, together with the minstrelsy of the
winds across them and the still pipings of leaf and water, London, the
while, kept herself in her smudgy convent, her ear tuned only to the
jolting music of her streets, the rough syncope of wheel and voice. Since
then what countless winds have blown across the world, and cloud-wrack!
And this older century is now but a clamor of the memory. What mystery it
is! What were the happenings in that pin-prick of universe called London?
Of all the millions of ant hills this side Orion, what about this one?
London was so certain it was the center of circumambient space.
Tintinnabulate, little Bell!
So you see that the head and front of Bell's villainy was that he was a
little man with an abnormal capacity for gossip. If gossip, then, be a
gallows matter, let Bell unbutton him for the end. On the contrary, if
gossip be but a trifle, here were a case for clement judgment.
In the first place, there is no vice of necessity in gossip. This must be
clearly understood. It is proximity in time and place that makes it
intolerable. A gossip next door may be a nuisance. A gossip in history may
be delightful. No doubt if I had lived in Auchinleck in the days when
Boswell lived at home, I would have thought him a nasty little "skike."
But let him get to London and far off in the revolving years, and I admit
him virtuous.
A gossip seldom dies. The oldest person in every community is a gossip and
there are others still blooming and tender, who we know will live to be
leathery and hard. That the life-insurance actuaries do not recognize this
truth is a shame to their perception. Ancestral lesions should bulk for
them no bigger than any slightest taint of keyhole lassitude. For it is by
thinking of ourselves that we die. It leads to rheums and indigestions and
off we go. And even an ignoble altruism would save us. I know one old lady
who has been preserved to us these thirty years by no other nostrum than a
knot-hole appearing in her garden fence.
[Illustration]
It is a matter of doubt whether at the fashionable cures it is the water
that has chief potency; or whether, so many being met together each
morning at the pump, it is not the exchange of these bits of news that
leads to convalescence. It is marvelous how a dull eye lights up if the
bit be spicy. There was a famous cure, I'm told, though I answer not for
the truth of this, closed up for no other reason than that a deeper
scandal being hissed about (a lady's maid affair), all the inmates became
distracted from their own complaints, and so, being made new, departed. To
this day the building stands with broken doors and windows as testament to
the blight such a sudden miracle put on the springs.
This shows, therefore, that gossipry must be judged by its effects. If it
allay the stone or give a pleasant evening it should have reward instead
of punishment. And here had Bell diverted me agreeably for an hour. It is
true he had given me no "chill and arid knowledge" of Shakespeare, but I
had had ample substitute and the clock had struck ten before its time. It
were justice, then, that I cast back the lie on Murray and give Bell full
acquittal.
No sooner was this decision made than I lifted him tenderly from the shelf
where I had sequestered him. Volume seven was on its head, but I set it
upright. Then I stroked its sides and blew upon its top, as is my custom.
At the last I put him on his former shelf in the company of the chaste
Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell.
He sits there now, this night, on the top shelf but one, just in line with
the eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. A decayed Gibbon, I
had thought, proclaims a grandfather. To what length, then, of cultured
ancestry must not this Bell give evidence?
[Illustration]
THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS
[Illustration]
THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS
It sounds like the tinkle of triviality to descend from the stern business
of this present time to write of night-caps: And yet while the discordant
battles are puffing their cheeks upon the rumbling bass pipes, it is
relief if there be intermingled a small, shrill treble--any slightest
squeak outside the general woe.
There was a time when the chief issue of fowl was feather-beds. Some few
tallest and straightest feathers, maybe, were used on women's hats, and a
few of better nib than common were set aside for poets' use--goose
feathers in particular being fashioned properly for the softer flutings,
whether of Love or Spring--but in the main the manifest destiny of a
feather was a feather-bed.
In those days it was not enough that you plunged to the chin in this hot
swarm of feathers, for discretion, in an attempt to ward off from you all
snuffling rheums, coughings, hackings and other fleshly ills, required you
before kicking off the final slippers to shut the windows against what
were believed to be the dank humors of the night. Nor was this enough. You
slept, of course, in a four-post bed; and the curtains had to be pulled
together beyond the peradventure of a cranny. Then as a last prophylaxis
you put on a night-cap. Mr. Pickwick's was tied under the chin like a
sunbonnet and the cords dangled against his chest, but this was a matter
of taste. It was behind such triple rampart that you slept, and were
adjudged safe from the foul contagion of the dark. Consequently your bed
was not exactly like a little boat. Rather it was like a Pullman sleeper,
which, as you will remember, was invented early in the nineteenth century
and stands as a monument to its wisdom.
I have marveled at the ease with which Othello strangled Desdemona.
Further thought gives it explanation. The poor girl was half suffocated
before he laid hands on her. I find also a solution of Macbeth's enigmatic
speech, "Wicked dreams abuse the curtain'd sleep." Any dream that could
get at you through the circumvallation of glass, brocade, cotton and
feathers could be no better than a quadruplicated house-breaker,
compounded out of desperate villainies.
Reader, have you ever purchased a pair of pajamas in London? This is
homely stuff I write, yet there's pathos in it. That jaunty air betokens
the beginning of your search before question and reiteration have dulled
your spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle in your eye. What! Do not
the English wear pajamas? Does not the sex that is bifurcated by day keep
by night to its manly bifurcation? Is not each separate leg swathed in
complete divorcement from its fellow? Or, womanish, do they rest in the
common dormitory of a shirt _de nuit_? The Englishman _does_ wear pajamas,
but the word with him takes on an Icelandic meaning. They are built to the
prescription of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and the width of a
finger thick. If I were a night-watchman, "doom'd for a certain term to
walk the night," I should insist on English pajamas to keep me awake. If
Saint Sebastian, who, I take it, wore sackcloth for the glory of his soul,
could have lighted on the pair of pajamas that I bought on Oxford Circus,
his halo would have burned the brighter.
Just how the feathery and billowy nights of our great-grandparents were
changed into the present is too deep for explanation. Perhaps Annie left a
door or window open--such neglect fitting with her other heedlessness--and
notwithstanding this means of entry, it was found in the morning that no
sprite or ooph had got in to pinch the noses of the sleepers. At least,
there was no evidence of such a visitation, unless the snoring that
abounded all the night did proceed from the pinching of the nose (the
nasal orifice being so clamped betwixt the forefinger and the thumb of
these devilish sprites that the breath was denied its proper channel).
Unless snoring was so caused, it is clear that no ooph had clambered
through the window.
Or perhaps some brave man--a brother to him who first ate an oyster--put
up the window out of bravado to snap thereby his fingers at the forms of
darkness, and being found whole and without blemish or mark of witch upon
his throat and without catarrhal snuffling in his nose, of a consequence
the harsh opinion against the night softened.
Or maybe some younger woman threw up her window to listen to the slim
tenor of moonlight passion with such strumming business as
accompanied--tinkling of cithern or mandolin--and so with chin in hand,
she sighed her soul abroad, to the result that the closing was forgotten.
It is like enough that her dreams were all the sweeter for the breeze that
blew across her bed--loaded with the rhythmic memory of the words she had
heard within the night.
It was vanity killed the night-cap. What aldermanic man would risk the
chance of seeing himself in the mirror? What judge, peruked by day, could
so contain his learned locks? What male with waxed moustachios, or with
limpest beard, or chin new-reaped would put his ears in such a compress?
You will recall how Mr. Pickwick snatched his off when he found the lady
in the curl papers in his room. His round face showed red with shame
against the dusky bed-curtains, like the sun peering through the fog.
As for bed-curtains, they served the intrigue of at least five generations
of novelists from Fielding onward. There was not a rogue's tale of the
eighteenth century complete without them. The wrong persons were always
being pinned up inside them. The cause of such confusion started in the
tap, too much negus or an over-drop of pineapple rum with a lemon in it or
a potent drink whose name I have forgotten that was always ordered "and
make it luke, my dear." Then, after such evening, a turn to the left
instead of right, a wrong counting of doors along the passage, the
jiggling of bed-curtains, screams and consternation. It is one of the
seven original plots. Except for clothes-closets, screens and
bed-curtains, Sterne must have gone out of the novel business, Sheridan
have lost fecundity and Dryden starved in a garret. But the moths got into
their red brocade at last and a pretty meal they made.
A sleeping porch is the symbol of the friendly truce between man and the
material universe. The world itself and the void spaces of its wanderings,
together with the elements of our celestial neighborhood, have been viewed
by man with dark suspicion, with rather a squint-eyed prejudice. Let's
take a single case! Winds for a long time have borne bad
reputations--except such anemic collateral as are called zephyrs--but
winds, properly speaking, which are big and strong enough to have rough
chins and beards coming, have been looked upon as roustabouts. What was
mere humor in their behavior has been set down to mischief. If a wind in
playfulness does but shake a casement, or if in frolic it scatters the
ashes across the hearth, or if in liveliness it swishes you as you turn a
corner and drives you aslant across the street, is it right that you set
your tongue to gossip and judge it a son of Belial?
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