Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

Meantime Garrett was succeeding. He had been an absurdly natural, ingenuous youth, and in due process of shaking up and settling down, he became something more than a dull, feeble-aspiring man. He had enthusiasm, and the world loves enthusiasm-if it can understand it. And he had a kind of superb self-confidence which, also, the world loves-if it be tactfully displayed. Stern necessity made him consent "For life, To work with one hand for the booksellers While working with the other for himself And A rt."

And greatly to his surprise, it was not when he was working for himself and what he thought his art, that success came to him. His first book gained him recognition among the few who discern keenly; his second gained for him a fame among the many who acclaim loudly. His third book made him a full-fledged celebrity.

Aurora, teaching and longing at Overbrook, received from him bundles of newspaper clippings in which his work was extolled, and gloried in them so that she tried not to remember that the letters enclosing them were oftentimes hurried and scant.

There was nothing niggardly in the letters she wrote Garrett. She never dreamed it, and he was not aware of it (so gradually had Aurora developed in his knowledge of her), but they were really wonderful letters-the outpouring of a woman's heart such as it is seldom a man's privilege to receive!

Poetry had never tilted futilely against practicality in Aurora's life. Such practicality as she knew was quite mechanical, and no more interfered with her poetry than breathing interferes with love. She lived in a world of the spirit, and her feet touched the homely, familiar earth unconsciously. She read, not widely but searchingly, not so much with intelligence as with passion, and she dreamed exceedingly, without bounds.

In Garrett's presence, on the few occasions when he was able to be with her for a hurried visit, she was constrained in the greatness of her joy. It was when he was away from her and she sat in her schoolroom, after the children were gone, or in her room at home under the eaves, and poured out her heart to him on paper, that she came nearest to satisfying him.

He would have missed her letters sorely; her bodily presence he had learned to do without. Thus it came about that, dependent as he was on her in a way, Garrett had never been impelled to make sacrifices to have her constantly by him.

It was sweet to think of the girl up in the country who loved him and revered him and followed his every move toward his goal with burning, eager interest. It was sweet to get her impassioned letters, full of unconscious beauty. It was sweet to dispatch her the first copy obtainable of each of his books, to inscribe them, "To her who has helped me most of all," and to know that she gloried more in that inscription than in any other the world could have written over against her name. All these were sweet, but his life was very full. One cannot serve two masters at any time, but least of all if one of them be Success.

There was never any hint of reproach in Aurora's letters, nor in her manner when he saw her, never any hint that the waiting was weary to her, that she felt her youth slipping by-the years when she should have come into her kingdom of home and wifehood and motherhood. She never upbraided him when he broke his engagements with her to keep others that seemed more demanding to a man whose face was set determinedly toward success.

And so the years went by, with incredible swiftness to the man in the hurly-burly of tense, nerve-straining life; with intolerable slowness to the woman in the farmhouse at Overbrook.

For two years Garrett Levering had not been to Overbrook. He was working as no slave ever worked, he told herworking on a book that was to be far and away superior to anything he had yet done. Every hour he could get from bread-winning went into the book. When it was finished they would celebrate in long days by the brook in the south meadow, he told her. When it was finished he would give himself a real vacation, would rest on his oars a spell and see how far the momentum of these straining strokes would carry him. She must excuse his hurried letters; he felt that every pen-stroke of which he was capable should go into the book. She must forgive him for forgetting to send her a birthday remembrance; he hadn't torn a page off his calendar pad in weeks.

She excused, she forgave, she condoned neglect and overlooked the grinning grimaces of the monster Self-Absorption. And she counted the weeks until the approximate time he had set for the book's completion.

"In six weeks I'll come," he wrote her, and then, "You may expect me in about three weeks," and then,

"I don't know what you'll think of me, Aurora dear, but I've contracted for another book to be delivered not later than six months from now. I didn't mean to do it, didn't want to, really, but the offer came unsolicited, and it was so flattering I didn't feel I dared refuse. My hand is tired, my brain is tired, I want to see you and I cannot. But I must make a beginning. After that the rest will come, somehow."

That night Aurora lay long on the floor of her little room beneath the eaves, her head on her arms, which were stretched in an abandon half weariness, half wistfulness on the window sill.

Later, when the lights in all the houses in Overbrook had gone out, a lamp burned in the little room that had seen so much, as child and woman, of the travail of a woman's heart.

law of life that we have to keep on in the way our feet are set, and there's no crossing over. I guess that's a law of life too-each to his own side, with the stream between; first, kisses thrown across, then calls of mutual reassurance, then only signals of remembrance, then nothing-void, silence, the sunshine on the broad bosom of the river, cowslips giving place to cities on its brim, the current threading the mazes of commerce instead of the long, sweet grasses of the meadows, and by and by the ocean, the illimitable, the end—and not even the faint flutter of a far white handkerchief discernible when one puts out to sea. Tonight, dear, as I knelt by the window of my little room and looked out, out, out, in fancy over the broad earth and then up at the kindly stars above, it seemed to me that the world is full of men and women who have suffered this great, universal anguish, this letting go of hands . . . and oh, dearest, your signals are already growing faint! I can no longer touch your hand across the little stream, I can hardly hear your old, familiar voice. The cowslips are far, far behind, the masts and spires of the city are looming in the distance; beyond them is the ocean! I know you'll be angry, I know

Still there was no reproach in the letter, you'll call me blind, foolish, selfish-but only sorrow.

"You may remember," she wrote, "the poem of Jean Ingelow's I have often spoken of to you. I can't get it out of my mind to-night. I used to think it was a quarrel that divided them, but I don't think so now -people get over quarrels, even the worst. And I used to think it might be caste, social differences, an ever-widening inequality of means or mind, but I don't think so now; for if the books, which are all my world, speak the truth, love is greater than these. I think it was a career, dear. I think she helped him find it when they were both young and light-hearted and thought only of how they would journey into the great world by its winding flow, and never dreamed how, presently, it would divide them, and how always it would widen the breach between them from thenceforth. I don't know, now, why they don't go back when they see that they must let go each other's hands to follow further or why one of them does not cross over. But I guess there's no going back along the way we've come; I guess it's the

oh! I wish we'd never left the meadows; I wish we'd never let go hands; I wish there were no river, no city of masts and spires.

[ocr errors]

Shortly after noon the next day Jake Russell walked into the little office where Garrett Levering did his writing and laid a letter on the desk where sheets of Garrett's new book lay scattered.

"Rory's sick," said the older man abruptly; "she was took in the night, and I found that letter addressed to you in her room. I've read it," he finished-and waited.

Garrett read the letter, then laid his head in his arms, folded on his desk, and wept. The hard lines about Jake Russell's mouth broke, and his lips twitched as he laid a rough hand on the young man's shoulder. "Thank God fer givin' you this fair notice," he said. "Not many of us git it." And late that night Garrett crept up to the little room under the eaves where Aurora lay, spent with the spirit's weariness, and bent over her and whispered, "Give me your hand to hold, my dear."

THE POINT
POINT OF VIEW

"W

HAT can be more encouraging," asks Stevenson, "than to find the friend who was welcome at one age still welcome at another?" Such satisfaction in a renewed friendship-a rare, and hence a precious experience, as Stevenson hints-is, speaking in the large, oftenest found in the case of college friendships; perhaps oftener also in the case of more recent generations of graduates than of those of the earlier time. Indeed, the unique development of the American college "commencement" has contributed in no small part, by the emphasis it has come to place on the return of the graduates as the feature of the academic festival, to fixing for life the associations of undergraduate days. The late ex-President Woolsey, in his address at the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Yale, delivered now more than a half century ago, described the commencement of that date as having, in this regard, "no counterpart that I know of in the older institutions of Europe." The peculiar feature of graduate participation which differentiated the American commencement then, now dominates it. The other features have passed into eclipse with the "commencement orators," who are either crowded wholly off the stage or else lag superfluous upon it. The significance of the event, which is the ostensible occasion for holding a commencement, that another company of young men is to be "sent out into the world," would be almost lost sight of but for the baccalaureate ser

Modern ege Cult

mon.

The philosophy of the change is not far to seek. The college graduate of to-day is not in a class by himself. The caste of "the three learned professions," an archaic phrase, is no longer recognized. The distinction of an academic degree counts for but little in the diversified activities into which the grad

uate is now increasingly drafted, to meet a competition in which he can "make good" by individual capacity alone. With no limited choice in professional life expected of him, as of course on graduation, and with a very practical world, where the expert alone is listened to, caring little for promising immaturity until it has found itself, the graduating senior has ceased to be a personage, even at his own commencement. But, on the other hand, the traditions of the place still prevail to charm and attract those who in youth came under the spell, however radical the changes in the undergraduate life. These traditions were doubtless born of that fixed curriculum which for four years subjected all to the same conditions of study and discipline. They thus created a double loyalty, the more intense loyalty the English graduate of the public school feels for Eton or Harrow, joined to the less intense loyalty he feels, if also a university man, for Oxford or Cambridge. The development of the big "fitting school," and the making over of the college course on lines of a generous choice of studies, with small groups and occasional contacts in a vastly greater community substituted for the old closeness of association, must, it would be said a priori, strengthen the loyalty which the graduate feels for the school at the expense of the loyalty felt for the college.

Whatever may be true of the future, this menace is as yet unrealized. Schools change, but the college stays. Diversified studies, diversified interests, diversified sports, a richly diversified life, one lived in the atmosphere of the old traditions though almost in defiance of them, have tended, on the whole, to stimulate the spirit of college idealism. The very fact that wide separation of career waits the throng of youth who crowd through the gates at each return of commencement has created a clannishness of college men, a cult of

college associations, as significant as unexpected. In the large cities, the university club and the fraternity club, each twenty years ago an experiment, are each to-day a commonplace. And in the largest cities the alumni association is constantly nursing an ambition, not always according to knowledge, to expand into a club where the younger graduates may find at once a congenial circle, and the older may, on occasion, renew the experiences peculiar each to his own college. On another side, the growing tendency to limit the law department of universities to college graduates recognizes, quite apart from the academic reasons for the proscription in insuring a certain quality of students, the fact that college men are gregarious and will choose that law school, by preference, other things being equal, where they will meet other college men exclusively.

The paradox, then, is that the widely diversified education of the modern college course, and the scattering of the college graduates in numberless diversified activities, is marked by the active cultivation of friendly association as college men and of the

traditional college loyalty. Such cultivation is perhaps an unconscious protest against the narrowness of absorption in a specialty or vocation, the inevitable penalty of success in doing the individual's part of the world's work. The ordinary college friendship has certainly very little in common with Stevenson's thought of a friend once welcome and still welcome, for it is so often, as men get along in life, a friendship reminiscent rather than contemporary. It is a congeniality seeming to result "more from one or two large principles of thought than from any peculiar similarity of taste, to quote a now almost forgotten observer, Sir Arthur Helps. It is a "congeniality"-an excellent word-founded on a certain general sympathy in attitude, in point of view. It realizes Thackeray's injunction: "Cultivate, kindly reader, those friendships of your youth; it is only in that generous time that they are formed. different the intimacies of after years are, and how much weaker the grasp of your own hand after it has been shaken about in commerce with the world, and has squeezed and dropped a thousand equally careless palms!"

[ocr errors]

How

[graphic]

THE FIELD OF ART

CRITICISM

'N Mr. Taft's recently published contribution to the increasing body of literature concerned with American Art (I refer, of course, to his volume, "American Sculpture") there is the following passage, and I can well imagine that moving over it a few readers receive a very distinct jolt: "Mr. MacMonnies has been criticised for lack of spirituality, of depth; and beside certain of our sculptors this deficiency is evident enough; but it is almost as unreasonable to find fault with him for what he lacks as it is to reproach him for his facility, though even this has been done by lovers of conscientious and obvious toil. To learn to appreciate his sincere contribution is better business."

I must confess to an effort in refraining from immediately underscoring certain of those words. Restraint is due to the sense that these sentences obviously should be read lightly, as by nature a parenthesis, particularly as I quote them here not with the view of discussing Mr. MacMonnies, or Mr. Taft's opinion of that clever artist, or even of touching at all upon sculpture, but with the sole object of illustrating by a really authoritative and "up-to-date" example a certain notion now current as to the correct exercise of the critical power.

Mr. Taft, I must hasten to add, is not by any means a notorious exemplar of his own teaching, for his book is in general an excellent essay in straight-forward criticism; but his expression is serviceable to me at this moment on account of its conspicuousness and completeness, and for the very reason that the idea is by no means peculiar to Mr. Taft-nor does he lay more than ordinary stress upon it. His notion that the function of criticism as applied to art should be restricted to appreciation, or chiefly to appreciation as the "better business," is exactly the one that is hardly to be avoided now-a-days in any company wherein artistical matters are topics of ordinary or professional conversation. It is not only that the artist-and by that much-hackneyed word I

mean the serious worker of high and even of eminent attainment-resents any deprecatory criticism as an unnecessary and useless exercise of the critic's office, but even excellent critics themselves apparently have come to sympathize with the artist's disapproval of too wide a critical angle of view. I want to make it quite clear that Mr. Taft is but an example of the common case. Why speak of the deficiencies of a work of art that is generally good? Is it wise, even is it right, to discuss the smaller shortcomings of a meritorious production, evident though these shortcomings may be? Is there not, indeed, at least a trace of impertinence in the extreme effort of the critical faculty? "To learn to appreciate the artist's sincere contribution, is not that the better business?"

Here we have the objection in its gradations. It might be urged, certainly, that these views may be but a whiff of the critical spirit itself blowing from the opposite quarter, or possibly even an expression of a robust reactionary mood from the centres of artistic production. Either supposition, no doubt, might be considered, but unfortunately one hardly derives the impression that the one or the other is the fact one has to deal with from intercourse with artists themselves or with those that are in a position to expound their opinions. One senses rather not so much the return of criticism to the home roost as, to shift our simile a trifle sharply, a change in the artist's atmosphere, as though perchance the Muses had admitted the modern plumber and his steam heat and thereby had acquired a too strong liking for a high and a regulated temperature into which any opening of doors or windows to the free air inevitably intruded a draught. Indeed, in artistical circles to-day criticism has all the pathological effects of a draught. We witness the same buttoning of coats and uplifting of collars and moving of seats, and finally polite isolation of him who persistently occasions the offence. Why does Brown say such things? True? Of course it is all true, but―. Has the man no reticence?

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »