Meek Americans and Other European Trifles/Bucolic Beatitudes
by . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1925. Small 12mo. xii+222 pp. $2.00.
Two little books, suggesting two good ways of passing a summer, or even a life. Rusticus spends his days learning relaxation from his dog, humor from his pig, resolution from his hen, contemplation from his cow, good habits from his horse, and tact from his toad, and upon these instructive friends he pronounces his beatitudes. He enriches life by simplifying it. He ‘paints the prospect from his door.’ He studies the home acre.
His six essays are the quiet record of a ruminative life such as has most, virtue when, as he says, ‘you begin to suffer from the chronic irritability of a man over fifty.’ He agrees with Samuel Butler, who long ago observed that for the good of one’s nerves association with animals is a better prescription than a rest cure in a sanatorium. And he makes the quiet life very attractive as he stands with elbows on a fence and talks to the pig, or watches the hired man rub down a horse or milk a cow, or prepares to whitewash the henhouse, or indulges in his one excitement of a glorious ride with the children. He has tried the active life, but has found it wanting; and ‘since then,’ he tells us, ‘with what I have I live content. A dog, a horse, a cow, a pig or two, some fowls, and rabbits for full measure; with these I need not traffic or exchange; no trading this for that, no buying cheap and selling dear, no asking more than what I think is right. An empty life, you cry. Mayhap for you, but not for me. It is a life so full that half cannot be done.’ He may not be able to convince youth that it is sufficing, but then, he is nol writing for youth.
Professor Beach is not writing for youth, either, but his book is full of youthful activity and spirit of adventure. He calls his essays trifles, because they deal in part with such subjects as dancing, tipping, and the handling of Italian beggars, but what raises them above triviality is that their real subject throughout is human nature. And it is this that gives originality to his book and keeps it from being ‘only one more book’ about European travel. For, whether he is in Paris or Limoges, Rome or Naples, on the Riviera or the shores of Lago Maggiore, he is no mere sight-seeing tourist, but a student of humanity with a keen eye for international contrasts. His zest is unflagging, his style good, and his comments acute, liberal, and good-humored.
Perhaps the best essays are the first two, — ‘Meek Americans’ and ‘On the Depravity of Europeans,’ — in which he amusingly analyzes, on the one hand, American pusillanimity in the presence of foreign cultures and, on the other, the American woman’s dilemma in the presence of Latin morals. In the latter essay we are given a masterly picture of Alice aud Rachel in Paris and Monte Carlo, shocked by the depravity of Latin man and yet inordinately curious to discover — of course, well within the bounds of safety — just how depraved he is. Almost as good are the papers entitled ‘International’ — with its scenes on a European railway train — and, in a vein of delicate irony, ‘The Model,’ in which the scene is laid in the ‘life class’ of an art school.
Professor Beach is known as the author of three books of criticism, on Meredith, Hardy, and James. They are good books of their kind, but this one is of a better kind, because the criticism of life is a step nearer original creation than is the criticism of books. ‘These essays,’ he says, ‘are the records of moods, and sometimes contradict each other. The only thing I hate is prejudice.’ One hopes that he will continue his amusing researches in the same spirit.
R. M. GAY