Читать книгу The Observations of Professor Maturin - Clyde Bowman Furst - Страница 7

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“I THANK you,” said Professor Maturin, laying aside the manuscript he had been reading me, in order to test its appeal,—“I thank you. I am only afraid that you are too generous. But, in any case, I am very grateful, and I hope that you will allow me to be at your service during the remainder of the evening. Do I not see you looking somewhat dispirited again? Are you not neglecting your mental hygiene?” and, leaning forward from his circle of lamplight, he peered at me anxiously.

I replied with one affirmative for both queries, but pleaded misfortune rather than fault. I knew that I was in serious need of variety, but I had found that the specific he had recommended—the atmosphere of foreign travel—no longer satisfied the demand. On the contrary, it aggravated my distemper, by adding to an already overpowering sense of monotony an impossible desire to fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. Books of travel and my friends’ discussions of their coming journeys merely increased my distress.

“So-o?” said Professor Maturin. “So-o-o?” leaning back in his huge leather chair, and putting his finger and thumb tips together. “Well, I suspected as much, and I fear that I am at least partly to blame for your condition. I prescribed a remedy that you have come to find worse than the disease, and, apparently, you have come at the same time to a new realization of Stevenson’s saying that ‘books are all very well in their way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life’—not that I would be disrespectful to my best friends,” and he smiled at the well-filled shelves which extend around his admirable library.

“You will not think me unsympathetic when I say that I have been waiting for this symptom,” he continued. “It is an important part of your cure. Some day I will explain to you my entire system of mental hygiene, but there is not time for that to-night, nor are you quite ready for it until you act upon my next and final recommendation.

“You will remember that Emerson said, ‘Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. The truest visions, the best spectacles I have seen, I might have had at home.’ He did not himself practice his preachment, but that does not invalidate it. Kant, however, I believe, never travelled more than forty miles from Königsberg; and Sainte-Beuve for fifty years seldom left Paris. What, of course, one wants is not to subject himself to the miscellaneous and often distracting impacts of foreign travel, but to realize What essential elements he needs, where to find, and how to apply them. As one of our poets has put it:

Who journeys far may lack the seeing eye:

Stay, thou, and know what wonders round thee lie.

“At one time in my life I travelled continually. But now that I am older and wiser, I know that I can find practically everything I want here at home. At different times I want an almost infinite variety of things, but they are all here in New York. This city is the true cosmopolis: eighty nations are represented in its public schools; four-fifths of the parents of its citizens came from the ends of the earth; there are more than a million Germans; more than a million Irish; more, and vastly more fortunate Hebrews than in all Palestine; and so on—you know the figures.

“Now, I need not insist that what is most important in foreign travel is not the novel sensations to which it gives rise,—the sense of a different climate, the flavor of new dishes, the fragrance of strange flowers, the sound of unfamiliar music, even the sight of ancient buildings or famous pictures—pleasurable and profitable as all of these are; and, fortunately, most of them may be enjoyed here, directly or indirectly. The fundamental value of travel is in the realization that it gives of ways of feeling, thinking, and acting, other than our own; and these, along with many of their outward manifestations, our new Americans bring with them.

“Thus, for example, if you are weary of the physical and mental traits of a land where all things are yet new, you may find the inscrutable calm of the immemorial East in Chinatown, where life flows as it did before Confucius. The ceremonial prescribed by Moses is still carried out here in many synagogues, and I can introduce you to more than one turbaned swami who will talk like Buddha. Unfortunately, our best illustration of the rigid solidity of the Egyptian spirit vanished when the old Tombs prison was torn down, but there is still the obelisk in the Park; and if you read Rossetti’s poem in the midst of the New York Historical Society’s Assyrian marbles, you will surely feel yourself in ancient Nineveh.

“If material crudities or social unrest distress you, you have but to reopen your Aeschylus or your Cicero to recall the balanced strength and fineness of Greece, the early law and order of Rome. Our nearest approaches to Greek architecture are perhaps the porticoes of the Sub-Treasury and the Columbia Library, or the choragic Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Riverside Drive. But from time to time the local Greeks revive their ancient games and enact their classic dramas—for particulars, see their newspaper, Atlantis, if you read modern Greek. As for Rome, High Bridge might fitly stand on the Campagna, or Washington Arch by the Forum; and for both, the Metropolitan Museum is full of casts of sculpture and of actual remains, from the Etruscan chariot to whole walls from Pompeii.

“Would you reap anew the fruits of the Teutonic invasion, you need only observe how it has brought force and endurance, solidity and creature comfort, family affection and social sentiment, good humor and good sense, to New York, as it did to Rome. The city would not be itself, without its delicatessen shops or its Christmas trees; much less without German scholarship or German music—Wagner and Beethoven having become ours even more than Berlin’s.

“Or, if you prefer oil to butter,—that is, are Latin rather than Teutonic in temper,—you may cultivate your mood by a morning with the tower of Madison Square Garden, which is a copy of the Giralda at Seville, and an afternoon in the new Hispanic Museum in Audubon Park. For mediaeval Italy you need but read your Dante in the Church of the Paulist Fathers. For the Renaissance, as for the Gothic, you may study the architecture of any one of a score of our public buildings, or the sculpture and painting in the Metropolitan Museum. Rome itself has now no more Italian citizens than New York, and it hears far less Italian music. While as for French music, French art, French cookery, and French amenity—we have appropriated them as thoroughly as we have the name Lafayette. Our rich men imitate French châteaux; the rest of us bless or revile the French invention of the apartment house.

“Or, if you hold rather to the Anglo-Saxon temper: the English satisfaction in the serious, the solid, the useful; the English habit of accumulation, experiment, and certain conclusion; and the English ideals of physical and mental health and exercise—these traits and their tangible results are happily still so native to us that they can in no sense be considered foreign.

“But even should your need or desire be for the mere sensations of foreign travel, these also may be had in New York. You may taste strange dishes and hear strange music in more foreign cafés in New York than in any other city in the world. In the local shop of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tobacco monopoly you may smoke a water-pipe, calling it hookah, chibouque, or nargileh, according to the place in which you would like to be. You may eat real spaghetti and see marionettes enact the story of Roland on Macdougal Street. You need go no farther east than the East Side to buy Damascus inlaid metals, or Chinese medallion ware, or Japanese flowered playing-cards. It is possible, even, to become an importer in a small way, by buying for five dollars, on Allen Street, Russian brasses that cost seven dollars and fifty cents when transported to Twenty-second Street, or ten dollars and seventy-five cents when they arrive on Fifth Avenue. You may hear the service of the Greek Catholic Church, celebrated by an archbishop, in a cathedral on Ninety-seventh Street. Bohemians, Syrians, and even Egyptians have made whole sections of the city practically their own, so far as manners and customs are concerned. Nearly one hundred newspapers and periodicals are published in New York in more than a score of foreign tongues. Perhaps you would care to read a New York daily that is printed in Arabic?”

Rising, Professor Maturin drew from a drawer and held before me a copy of Kawkab Amerika, a goodly-sized sheet, in strange characters, but with a pictured heading eloquent to all. There I saw the desert, with mosques to the right, and pyramids and Sphinx to the left. Between were hosts of desert-dwellers, on foot, on horseback, on camel, but all gazing and pointing to the central sky, where appeared a radiant vision of our harbor statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.

“And it is no mirage to them,” said Professor Maturin, after a pause, “and that is the best of it all to me. The strangeness of these newcomers is, indeed, refreshing, but I like better to think of them as most of them really are, or soon will be—the most genuine of Americans. They are so through choice and, often, hard endeavor; you and I, perhaps, only through accident. You know the fundamental loyalty of the typical German-American. The Spanish press of the city was staunchly American during our last war. The Turkish periodicals applauded our demonstrations against the Porte; and Hungarians, Servians, Syrians, and Persians have each formally organized for the purpose of influencing their fatherlands to become more like the land of their adoption.

“And so we come to the most valuable of all the ends of travel—the greater realization and appreciation of home. We return from other nations with relief—for there are few American emigrants—to a yet new land of fertile soil and mineral wealth; to a people varied, yet homogeneous, energetic, aggressive, ingenious, and self-reliant. We face, it is true, problems such as the world has never known before, but with unprecedented belief in idealism, morality, order, and education; not apprehensive of danger, but quick in recognizing and decisive in meeting it. Our successes in transportation, in architecture, and in material well-being in general; our achievement of the welfare of the whole people over that of section or class, of equality of opportunity for each and of benevolence toward all, have already taught the whole world new lessons of peace, tolerance, and faith in the average man. Nor do I see any reason, as we become more and more a new race, blended of many, why our good fortunes should not continue and increase. Anything else would falsify our trust in a wide and a wise humanity—and that is unthinkable.

“But, I beg your pardon,” said Professor Maturin, as I rose to say good-night, “I did not mean to take the stump; and yet, I believe that it is good sometimes to give utterance to these things which all of us feel. Nothing revives the vigor of one’s spirit like the conscious realization of being in harmony with fundamental law.”