As I Laye a-Thynkynge

IT is very salutary now and then to let the mind run whither it listeth.

I waked this morning out of a dream in which I had been harkening to a voice cry in dolorous accents, —

The voice had been pursuing me, I would have said, for hours, through tortuous corridors, in and out of postern gates, along battlements, and into subterranean dungeons. Suddenly it was arrested by the clangor of a bell.

I waked, as I have said. My alarmclock was hammering away on the chair at my side. It was seven o’clock.

I reached over and silenced the detestable thing. Rain was splashing somewhere, and the piece of sky visible was leaden, ‘I must get up,’ said I to myself; and then, of course, turned over and looked at the wall-paper.

And so I laye a-thynkynge.

It was no cause for surprise that I had dreamed of Macbeth’s castle. Only yesterday in class I read the very lines I have quoted, noting with pleasure how little Miss B—— sat on the edge of her chair, shivering, with speculative eyes, as if she saw the trembling thane with his hangman’s hands. What is surprising is that now, as I looked at the wall-paper, I thought, not of the class of yesterday, but of incidents of — no, I will not say of how many years ago. Thought laughs at time, as at space, and performs greater miracles than Ariel’s in the twentieth part of a minute.

As I lay between waking and sleeping, I was back in the corridor of a college hall, watching a lank figure, all arms and legs, that moved along before me ‘with Tarquin’s ravishing strides,’ and ever and anon cast over its shoulder a look of unutterable horror.

said a voice as from the grave. The figure paused. I could see the shaggy brows, the high-bridged nose, the black eyes fixed on space; and below, the loose-jointed body and shaking knees. A moment the form stood rigid, and then shot into the air with a swoop of a long arm and a howl like a coyote’s, —

And so disappeared in a series of leapings and swoopings so purposely ungainly that I leaned against the wall in laughter. I had been sole spectator of a part of Shaughnessy’s locally famous parody of the murder of Duncan.

I wish I could describe that parody, but find I cannot. Charlotte Cushman once said that Macbeth is the great ancestor of all the Bowery ruffians, — ‘a foolish word,’ but an excellent hint for parody, and one that Shaughnessy must have chanced upon. He went to classes seeing air-drawn daggers and clutching at them with the gesture of one catching flies; he pounced upon us hissing, ‘There’s blood upon thy face!’ he scared under-classmen out of their wits by screaming at them, ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon! Where got’st thou that goose look?’

I have not decided yet whether or not Shawn, as we called him, was a genius; but I had no doubt then. There was a little group of us, — Hetherington and Mangan and Winckelmann were the others, — each, doubtless, except possibly Mangan, queer enough in his own way. Because genius is often queer, it is the part of sanguine youth to think that queerness denotes genius; and I suppose that we were queer to the top of our bent. Shaughnessy, six feet two, of northern Irish, dark Irish, extraction, gaunt of face and loose of limb, was the versatile member of our circle. He could act, and play the ’cello, and sing baritone, and draw in charcoal, all so well that he was despondent of ever choosing among his talents one which he could bear to cultivate at the expense of the rest.

I remember my admiring envy of him one day as we sat in the studio on the top floor under old Professor Hertz, drawing from the plaster cast of a foot. It was a Greek foot that had never known a shoe, round and beautiful. Shaughnessy’s charcoal sketch grew as if by magic, in black lines, muscular, until Old Hertzy, as we lovingly called him, exclaimed with lifted hands, ‘ Mein Gott, dot foot could kick!’ My sketch, which before had seemed plump and soft and ‘Grecian,’ suddenly came to look like a pincushion; although Old Hertzy, gentle always as a woman, sought to comfort me by declaring that there were plump and skeeny feet, and which one liked best was a ‘ madder of dasde.’ He did not see the point. The point was that I had merely drawn the cast, while Shaughnessy, looking at the same plaster, had seen the straining ground-spurning foot of Atalanta or Diana, and had drawn that. It was useless to argue with me. I knew. Shaughnessy had what I called genius.

Hetherington had it, too; but his ran to literature. He could write you a poem, an essay, a story, or make you a speech, at a moment’s notice. He could speak French like a Frenchman. He could lead all his classes, and yet never be detected studying. I was quite sure that he, too, was a genius, though his special abilities were more within my apprehension.

And Winckelmann had it, perhaps more truly than either of the others. He was a German, thorough, burningly sincere. His industry was terrifying. He was a glutton in his reading. At one time he read Carlyle through, — Sartor, Frederick, the Revolution, the Essays, — every word. It took him six months, but he did it. He read Sir Thomas Browne through, too, even to the Vulgar Errors. And of course he smoked. All men who love Sir Thomas smoke, usually immoderately. He was philosophically inclined and was ready at any time to argue you up hill and down dale, all day and all night, on any subject in metaphysics or morals you cared to propound. In college, I remember, his hobby was convictions. Just to get him to talk, I used to scoff at convictions as a source of action, declaring that all my best decisions were the fruit of chance or impulse. Such heresy was all that was needed to set him going; and many a night we talked ‘the low moon out of the sky’ and ‘drummed up the dawn,’ amid clouds of smoke and thicker clouds of speculation. When he was in fettle, he was superb; his face was suffused, his eyes flashed, his hands beat the air, he shouted, he roared with laughter, he all but wept.

We men are accustomed to deride the garrulity of women; yet I doubt if any women under the sun could compete in loquacity with a pair or trio or quartette of young men engaged in the exchange of views on metaphysics, literature, or art. We two or three or four — for Mangan seldom joined us — spent ambrosial nights. There were no problems too knotty, no reaches of hypothesis too vast, for us to attempt. Agreeing on nothing else, we agreed on a love of Shakespeare the all-inclusive, the metaphysician, artist, naturalist, poet; and chanted his praises, and listened to Shaughnessy read him and Winckelmann expound his thought and Hetherington analyze his stage-craft, many a time till second cock-crow — which is, as the bard himself tells us, three o’clock in the morning.

Mangan, when he found time from his social engagements to appear, smoked his pipe. Mangan was so Irish that he lapsed into brogue on occasion, and wit dripped from his tongue. No one could puncture a metaphysical balloon more adroitly than he. It was his custom to turn, the conversation from æsthetical heights or depths to the growing of potatoes or the feeding of pigs. He was touched with socialism and we all caught it from him a little. He talked but seldom, but when he did, there was no stopping him. We rolled in merriment and begged him to have done, even while we prayed that he would go on.

We were always discovering somebody in those days. We discovered Maeterlinck, — or rather, Hetherington, who had spent a summer in Paris, introduced him to us. The Belgian had already written L’Intruse and Les Aveugles, I think, and Les Sept Princesses and Pelléas et Mélisande —what names to set youth mad! We all took to writing in the staccato somnambulistic style; except Mangan, who never took to anything except pipe-smoking and socialism. He said he preferred Mother Goose. I remember, too, how proud I was to discover Henley, and how we shouted, —

and how we crooned, —

Even Mangan liked that.

One day we all went to the Metropolitan Museum, and for the first hour Shaughnessy refused to look at anything but Millet’s The Sower. That picture served as an excuse for more interminable arguments. Mangan pronounced it a mud-daub, more to tease Shaughnessy than from conviction. And we fell out over Rubens, whom Winckelmann considered vulgar; and we agreed to admire Corot, and almost came to blows over Burne-Jones. It was during the rage for Manet and Monet, and we took them very seriously, as they deserved. We were somewhat scornful of Meissonier and Détaille, and dismissed David and his contemporaries with a sniff, as we always did the whole eighteenth century in all its manifestations.

And then came Wagner. Winckelmann attended seventeen Wagner operas in one season, sitting in the uppermost gallery, yearning like a god in pain, and finding in the music the answers to all the problems that beset him. He expounded the Ring cycle to us, humming motifs, and excited our wonder by really appreciating Tristan and Isolde, which was all Greek to us. His exposition of Wagner, with illustrations drawn from Shakespeare and Browning, remains in my memory as a purple cloud through which I see dimly his ruddy face and flaming eyes and a hand forcibly waving a cigar long since burned out.

That was a time of life to remember, when the mind was growing like corn in hot weather. It is a pleasant thought that all over the land there are little bands of youths doing as we did. I get wind of one now and then — some boy with all the fire and foolishness, some girl with all the sensibility and sentimentality, by a chance look or word carries me back, as a whiff of lilacs or mignonette can transport us into our childhood.

He is a poor man who never was foolish. It is appalling to think over what he has missed. I am glad that there was a time when I was omniscient; that there was a time when an opinion was attractive because it was radical, and the ‘miserable little virtue of prudence’ was not a part of my moral code. I think it makes me more charitable toward youth. Whether it does or not, there can be no doubt that the surest corrective and sweetener of life is a vivid memory.

We all wrote, simply wrote, as an outlet for exuberance. I have forgotten the lists of primary and secondary instincts which we used to learn in psychology, but the cacoethes scribendi certainly ought to be among them. The more I talk intimately with boys and girls who have the conviction of genius, the more I am inclined to believe that every one of them has locked away somewhere, in his desk or his heart, a tragedy or an epic or a novel. To have that is normal to their age and temper. We had passed the tragedy-novel-epic stage, I think, and had taken to sonnets and ballades and short stories, the natural evolution. Sonnets to the moon, ballades on some refrain of fate or death, stories in the manner of Poe and Maupassant, — these were our avocation at the moment; a little later to give way to Ibsen and Zola and realism, with the Russians as the ‘discovery’ of the year. We went to the ends of the earth and of history for our subjects, and found our inspiration in ancient Egypt, India, Iceland, Cathay, the land of Prester John.

It is a commonplace of the rhetorical textbooks that the student should ‘find his material in his own observation and experience’; but that is often the last place in which he wishes to look for it. We teachers seek to impose on generous youth the realism that only middle age really likes. We are agitated if our students love Poe and Hoffmann and wish to write stories of mystery, horror, and sudden death. We hold up as models Wordsworth and Arnold and Hardy and Howells, whom no vigorous youth can tolerate. We do not see the significance of the fact that, of all the books read in preparatory school and college, the ones most loved are such as Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Faust, Les Misérables, Tales of the Grotesque. We forget that every worthwhile boy has to go through his Queen Mab or Locksley Hall or Childe Harold period — live it, I mean, as well as read the books. These are the books of youth and that move youth; books that it will read (or others like them) somewhere, somehow; morbid, of course, but recording a step in development without which life is a poor thing.

It is a glorious faculty of youth to detest things as they are and love things as they are not, the old, the unusual, the remote. Only to-day I said to an ingenuous sophomore who desired to write a story about the ancient Persians, ‘But, Miss So-and-so, do you know anything about the ancient Persians?’ ‘Only what I have read,’ said she. And then dutifully I proceeded to point out the superior value of direct observation, personal experience, ending by holding up as possible material for fiction her friends, her neighbors, the local policeman, the corner grocer. ‘If I have to write about corner grocers,’ said she, ‘I’d rather not write at all.’

It was a feminine answer, but rightly understood was sound enough. For her the ancient Persians were probably more real than the corner grocer, and it may be that she had seen them more truly.

Foolishness, radicalism, morbidity are marks of promising youth, the obvious signs of inward ferment. The melancholy pose, the affectation of pessimism and cynicism, the sentimentality, the conviction of genius, that many of us deplore or deride in certain young people, may be as natural to their age and disposition as the sense of immortality of which Hazlitt writes so feelingly in one of his essays. We should rejoice to find them. They are among the indications of spiritual growth. They are at any rate not to be looked for in the pragmatic, the commonplace, the inane.

I often wonder what we should see if we could lift the parietal bones of our young people and take a peep at their thoughts, as the Devil on Two Sticks took off the roofs of the houses. If thoughts were visible, we might make some surprising discoveries. Once in a while the student, who usually talks about anything but his best thoughts, speaks out with startling distinctness.

‘ What right has he to usurp the office of providence ? ’ said an intelligent and indignant boy to me the other day, referring to a teacher. The teacher, feeling that said boy needed ‘sitting on,’ had, as is the way of conscientious teachers, promptly sat on him. ‘He said,’ continued the student in a tide of words that would not be stemmed, ‘that I think I’m a genius, but am not. How does he know? Stupider people than I have proved to be geniuses. If I think I ’m one, what business is it of his? If I get any fun out of it, it’s a harmless obsession. Is n’t it better to have thought so and been mistaken, than never to have thought so at all?’

I could only reply heartily, ‘By all means.’

I do not know who the teacher was, but his name is certainly Legion. ‘A teacher,’ says Julius Hare, in Guesses at Truth, ‘is a kind of intellectual midwife. Many of them too discharge their office after the fashion enjoined on the Hebrew midwives: if they have a son to bring into the world, they kill him; if a daughter, they let her live. Strength is checked; boldness is curbed; sharpness is blunted; quickness is clogged; height is curtailed and depressed; elasticity is damped and trodden down; early bloom is nipped; feebleness gives little trouble, and excites no fears; it is let alone.’

Not many of us are like that, I think, nowadays. Most of us are on the lookout for strength and sharpness and the rest of the category, down to early bloom. We are only following the law of kind if it is our tendency to propagate teachers and scholars, like ourselves. The amount of genius, real or dubious, in any college must always be small. It is an interesting speculation, however, whether it might not be larger if we were not afraid of it. I have been much impressed by the difference of attitude to be discerned among teachers toward scientific industry, on the one hand, and creative originality, on the other. If a boy makes a hobby of scientific invention, we applaud; but are notoriously suspicious of a hobby for creative invention. Here we hasten to mew up the would-be eagle. Why should there be more joy in academic circles over one student who wins a scholarship than over a dozen who write good stories? It requires some courage to advance the theory that the latter may show the higher qualities. In moments of aberration I have a vision of the day when a creditable novel or book of verses will be adjudged to represent as much brain-power as a doctor’s thesis, — But let us return to our wethers.

Hetherington and Winckelmann and the rest of our band perceived these things obscurely. We had a faculty of white-haired old men, ripe and mellow, who, as I look back at them, seem to have had unlimited charity for the foolishness of youth. I have a theory that old age is in better touch with youth than middle age. The grandsires and grandams of all time are evidence. Through a beautiful foresight of nature the old folk are living their young days over again in memory, and yet have lived long enough to see that if youth is full of joyance and age of care, the care is a matter of no great account while the joyance was the rich reward of life. The old men of the faculty seem to have worried very little about us, academically, dealing more in good advice than in hard lessons. I remember the anecdotes and reminiscences in which they were wealthy and with which they pointed their advice, far better than their facts and theories.

As I look back at them, — Rufy and Hertzy and Brainy and Plymp and Kimby (these were their pet-names behind their backs), — one characteristic common to all comes to me strongly. They were all happy. They chirped and chuckled. Rufy loved to call us ‘a pack of gumps,’ and Brainy never tired of telling us that we were very young; yet I think that they enjoyed us almost as much as we did them. I have no impression that they lost any sleep over us, or ever conducted any extended investigations to find out whether or not we were studying. But they did succeed in conveying to us the feeling that the acquisition of knowledge is a joy. The most important lesson they taught us was that a man might be a scholar and be old and yet be happy — an impression we should never have gathered from our middle-aged teachers.

We never heard the word efficiency in those days, so far as I can remember, outside the physics laboratory. Would to heaven it had stayed there! It must not be supposed, however, that we did not work when we did work. As I look about me, I do not see many young men under our present efficient systems who seem to be working harder. Somehow we derived from the old men a thirst for knowledge, a restless curiosity, a joyous knight-errantry in the quest for truth. Surely, that teaching which can induce students to pursue their researches voluntarily outside of the classroom is the very best kind of teaching.

I get the impression to-day that most of the joy of college life is confined to the student body, and that that is often hectic. The faculties seem to me overworked, over-serious, lacking in what I call pedagogic faith — faith that the student may be trusted to get some good out of leisure. I suppose that we shall have to blame, as usual, the Zeitgeist. Crowded curricula, multiform ‘student activities,’ and all the full steam and weighted throttles of modern efficiency are pushing out of college life just the one element that should be characteristic of it — time; time for rumination, day-dreaming, thought.

It occurs to me that rumination was Brainy’s favorite word. ‘ Rumination, young gentlemen,’ he was wont to say, ‘means chewing the cud. Have you chewed the cud of this lesson, or have you simply bolted it?’ He knew. It is only at this late day that I begin to discern a wise philosophy underlying the leisurely methods of the old men.

When I had reached this point of my ruminations I was compelled to get up. But this is what I thought as I laye a-thynkynge.