Читать книгу The World Does Move - Booth Tarkington - Страница 6

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IN the fine arts and literature American apprentices knew then that names of true masters shone high above them. In literature we had Howells, James and Mark Twain, fixed stars no matter what later ephemeral fashions in reading and criticism might temporarily make of them. We had Joel Chandler Harris, Stockton, Cable, James Lane Allen, Miss Wilkins, the exquisite Bunner, Thomas Nelson Page; we had a people’s great poet, Riley; Bret Harte, outliving his vogue but not his enormous influence upon the short story, was a consul in Britain. Over the water, two surpassing novelists were writing, Meredith and Hardy, and in the South Seas the master craftsman of writing, Stevenson, was dying. Kipling had emerged over the Far Eastern horizon; and a lively Irishman named Shaw was beginning to puzzle London with its own laughter, though he had yet to wait for an American actor, Mansfield, to awaken general audiences to a first comprehension of his plays.

“There were giants in those days”. It is a fashion among the vulgar now to fall upon the body of the giant and rend it the moment he is dead; and in Paris the young vultures, screeching to be talked about for their daring and their originality in following the fashion, feared to wait until Anatole France was buried; eagerer vultures might have flown in ahead of them and stolen the advertising.

What aids the vultures is Nature’s technique in the production of progress. We are carefully so constituted that the generation just passed must ever appear ridiculous to us, its thought both pretentious and primitive, its taste abhorrent, its manners absurd and its fashions ludicrous. Our own generation, we feel, is the only one truly sophisticated; that of our parents must be picked to pieces, though that of our grandfathers, dimmed and prettily remote, cannot threaten our new ideas or our revolt against everything from which we are struggling to emerge; and so we look upon it more leniently, investing it with a captivating air of quaintness and buying what remains of its furniture and ornaments. And in its art and literature the rediscovery of beauty begins.

This present new generation, obedient to that ancient mechanism of progress, has found a word to express its hatred of the musty absurdities preceding its own enlightenment—a word curiously sprung out of Anglomania and inappropriate in the Western Hemisphere—“Victorian”. Our “young intellectuals” have a habit of using it as an eraser; and with a lively historical and geographical recklessness they will tell you that the United States of America, during the reign of Edward VII in Britain, was Mid-Victorian. Almost the wickedest of their printable words is “Mid-Victorian”; and what they mean, usually, is something their fathers and mothers believed in or liked.

Thus those giants we revered are now “Victorians” and “Mid-Victorians”, obsolete to the young, along with the mansard roof, the tandem bicycle and the two-step. The new generation lumps together the great men, the songs, the dances, the manners and the clothes of the fin de siècle, and, with the derision of established superiority, laughs at all. The fin de siècle was less sweeping and more courteous; we did not scorn great men lately dead; though we did laugh—among ourselves—at the songs and the dancing of our elders; we laughed at their photograph albums, at the clothes and whiskers there portrayed; we laughed at their sports; we were beginning to laugh at croquet.

When the young gentlemen of the top floor went down to the mission to sing for the entertainment of the missionary’s protégés, they did not sing “To-night You Belong to Me”; they sang “Workin’ on the Railroad”, medleys from Robin Hood and college nonsense jingles. When we went forth to dance we dressed almost precisely as youths lately graduated would dress to-day, except that our collars were circular walls of linen three inches high. We kept a distance between us and our partners (it was the fashion just then to make the distance as great as possible) and we danced—glidingly, not wriggling or hopping—only waltzes and two-steps. Square dances had disappeared except from pastoral and proletarian fêtes where the lancers and quadrilles might still sometimes be capered through for the benefit of middle-aged or old-fashioned people. The polka and the schottische were dropped early in the decade.

The girls with whom we danced had hourglass figures. Tiny feet and hands were adjuncts to beauty, but the small waist was a necessity. School-girls, not yet allowed to wear stays, sometimes secretly strapped torturing belts night and day about their middles to prepare for the hourglass fashion they would follow when they “came out”. Physicians attacked the hourglass bitterly and persistently, with complete futility. The race was being ruined by this abominable harnessing, they said; and they had no more effect than did the moralists who scolded when the girls, long after, left off the rigid harness entirely and made themselves into slim sacks with no waists at all.

The hourglass girls danced gracefully in spite of their harness; indeed, they danced more gracefully than do their sack-shaped daughters and granddaughters; for dignity, which may still be maintained in consonance with the airiest lightness, is ever a part of grace; and dignity vanished when the tight clasp and the negroid and Oriental dancing began with the incredible turkey trot. Moreover, the hourglass girls, apparently not incommoded, played tennis; they rode horses and bicycles; they were known to sail catboats and paddle canoes; and even the ladies of the ballet and those of the circus were hourglasses. But of course the girl with stiffly armoured body, balloon sleeves upon her upper arms, and her sacred and mysterious legs lost in petticoats and skirts that touched the ground, was not easily an outdoor girl. To be, even moderately, an athlete was not part of her destiny.

She was still, even that little time ago, the sheltered dependent—and therefore the diplomat—that she had been through all the Christian centuries. We of the top floor were well-brought-up young men; which means that we revered her and had no idea she was a human being. For us she was a lady, and that was something higher, finer and more ethereal than no matter how good a gentleman. Bodily, she consisted for us of a head of hair, a face, an hourglass of silk or satin or cloth, gloved hands and multiplex bells of stuffs that hung from the squeezed middle of the hourglass to the ground. Within these her locomotion was somehow mysteriously accomplished; it was not permissible to imagine how, and the nearest we came to that was in our verses about the “rustle of her skirts upon the stair”. She had no feet—that is to say, she had slippers and at the most an instep. At a dance she had actual arms and shoulders and coquettish hints of bosom. Spiritually, she consisted of perfection—that was a matter of course—and mentally she consisted of mystery, which we had no great concern to solve.

Ourselves being of clay, we could only try to atone to her by the utter respect we paid her. No one except a “mucker” had any other view of her; and yet, as we knew that there were “muckers” here and there among our own sex, so we knew that there were members of hers who had forfeited public respect, exchanging it for contempt from some and compassion from others. That is to say, there distinctly appeared to be two classes, or castes, of girls. There were the “girls we knew”—the sheltered, perfect and revered girls, whom we and our comrades would one day marry—this was one class; and the other consisted of all the other kinds of girls.

Sometimes a girl of the upper caste was forced by family misfortunes to go to work; and there were a few kinds of genteel employment—governessing and teaching principally—that she could accept without descending substantially out of her caste; but work that brought her much into contact with men was thought roughening, at the best; it was not advisable. Something was pardoned to a girl of special talent; she might be admired and fêted, but even in such case the word “Bohemian” threatened her if her gift made her professional. Her talents were best confined to the amateur field, it was felt; and, if she must have ambitions at all, the single correct and useful one was to fit herself to be the inspiration and helpmeet of the man she would wed. Her true business, of course, was to get herself satisfactorily married, though that was the last thing in all the world she must permit to become visible.

Sometimes, when we went to dinners given by the mothers and fathers of the hourglass girls, sherry and claret were served, though sparingly; sometimes, at the more plutocratic dances, there was champagne with the supper; but usually both dinners and dances were “dry”. There was a general prejudice against offering even the milder intoxicants to young men, and it was thought better not to put temptation in their way. There was no feeling about the girls in this matter; they were out of the question entirely; for they were not conceivably affected by temptations of any kind whatever. Cocktails and potent distillations were unknown at the dinner for young people, except among hosts willing to be called “fast”, or here and there in the South, where Eighteenth Century hospitality still lingered in the mint julep. In general, when a young man appeared among ladies, his breath could not be aromatic of alcohol without damage to his reputation.

Our boarding house top floor had no concern in such a matter. At remote intervals we spent a temperate evening in a respectable big German beer hall where there was a good orchestra; but most of our evenings, like our days, meant work; and the literary aspirant, who was arriving nowhere in spite of his struggles, burned gas latest of all. This was hard on the law student, who roomed with him; for the writing frequently went on until three in the morning and sometimes even later. The law student didn’t mind the cigarette smoke that accompanied the writing; but he couldn’t sleep with the gaslight full on his eyes, and he was too chivalrous to insist upon its being extinguished; so he developed a technique to meet the difficulty successfully. At eleven, his customary hour, he amicably opened two large black umbrellas, placed them upon his couch and retired to sleep in peace within their shadow. Quiet would settle down upon the boarding house and upon the street outside; and except for the far-away rumble of Elevated owl trains and the spasmodic tootings of distant ferryboats in the river, there would be silence. There was no Subway, there were no taxicabs; building went on in daytime; New York had only a million people then, and nearly all of them went to bed at night. The great modern night roar of the metropolis had not developed; strangers could sleep in quiet in almost any part of the city not too close to the “L”; and for hours the scratching of the thin aspirant’s pen would be, barring expressions of feeling from an occasional cat in a brownstone are away, the noisiest sound on our whole street. So the gaslit windows of our top floor front were the only windows bright after midnight on that street, while the unfortunate thin young man went on writing and rewriting and rewriting and getting thinner and thinner.

At last, when there were hints of coming summer upon the winds of the city and evening sunshine began to linger upon the roof of the church opposite the top floor windows, he perceived that instead of approaching the thresholds he had come to cross—those forbidden entrances to editors and managers and publishers—he had slid even backward from them; and he was now so thin he feared that if he lost any more weight he would alarm his relatives when he went home. Therefore, ere this might happen, he thoughtfully packed his new rejected manuscripts in a parcel with the old, and one rainy morning went down on the Ninth Avenue “L” to recross the Cortlandt Street Ferry, going West.

Thus the top floor had a vacancy, but the companions did their best to provide a substitute. The medical student had long desired an articulated skeleton; when I left he bought one, and the law student and the engineer went with him on a drizzly evening to bring it home. They put a raincoat upon it and carried it through the streets, not without arousing comment and being somewhat earnestly questioned; but they brought it successfully to the top floor.

They attached it to the wall, supplied it with a cigarette, and gave it my college nickname. It had only one defect, the engineer wrote me—the law student couldn’t argue with it.