THE ROMANCE OF THE COMMONPLACE

Gelett Burgess

Paul Elder and Morgan Shepard : : : San Francisco

Copyright, 1902 by GELETT BURGESS

Entered at Stationer's Hall London

PRINTED BY THE STANLEY-TAYLOR COMPANY, SAN FRANCISCO

To My Sisters, Ella and Ann: with whom This Philosophy was Proven

THE ROMANCE OF THE COMMONPLACE

Contents

Introduction April Essays Getting Acquainted Dining Out The Uncharted Sea The Art of Playing The Use of Fools Absolute Age The Manual Blessing The Deserted Island The Sense of Humour The Game of Correspondence The Caste of the Articulate The Tyranny of the Lares Costume and Custom Old Friends and New A Defense of Slang The Charms of Imperfection "The Play's the Thing" Living Alone Cartomania The Science of Flattery Romance en Route At the Edge of the World The Diary Habit The Perfect Go-between Growing Up A Pauper's Monologue A Young Man's Fancy Where is Bohemia? The Bachelor's Advantage The Confessions of an Ignoramus A Music-Box Recital A Plea for the Precious Sub Rosa

Introduction

To let this book go from my hands without some one more personal note than the didactic paragraphs of these essays contained, has been, I must confess, a temptation too strong for me to resist. The observing reader will note that I have so re-written my theses that none of them begins with an "I" in big type, and though this preliminary chapter conforms to the rule also, it is for typographic rather than for any more modest reasons. Frankly, this page is by way of a flourish to my signature, and is the very impertinence of vanity.

But this little course of philosophy lays my character and temperament, not to speak of my intellect, so bare that, finished and summed up for the printer, I am all of a shiver with shame. My nonsense gave, I conceit myself, no clue by which my real self might be discovered. My fiction I have been held somewhat responsible for, but escape for the story-teller is always easy. Even in poetry a man may so cloak himself in metaphor that he may hope to be well enough disguised. But the essay is the most compromising form of literature possible, and even such filmy confidences and trivial gaieties as these write me down for what I am. Were they even critical in character, I would have that best of excuses, a difference of taste, but here I have had the audacity to attempt a discussion of life itself, upon which every reader will believe himself to be a competent critic.

By a queer sequence of circumstances, the essays, begun in the Lark, were continued in the Queen, and, if you have read these two papers, you will know that one magazine is as remote in character from the other as San Francisco is from London. But each has happened to fare far afield in search of readers, and between them I may have converted some few to my optimistic view of every-day incident. To educate the British Matron and Young Person was, perhaps, no more difficult an undertaking than to open the eyes of the California Native Son. The fogs that fall over the Thames are not very different to the mists that drive in through the Golden Gate, after all!

Still, I would not have you think that these lessons were written with my tongue in my cheek. I have made believe so long that now I am quite sincere in my conviction that we can see pretty much whatever we look for; which should prove the desirability of searching for amusement and profit rather than for boredom and disillusion.

We are in the day of homespun philosophy and hand-made dogma. A kind of mental atavism has made science preposterous; modern astrologers and palmists put old wine into new bottles, and the discussion of Psychomachy bids fair to revolutionize the Eternal Feminine. And so I, too, strike my attitude and apostrophize the Universe. As being, in part, a wholesome reaction from the prevailing cult, I might call my doctrine Pagan Science, for the type of my proselyte is the Bornese war chief peripatetic on Broadway—the amused wonderer. But I shall not begin all my nouns with capitals, for it is my aim to write of romance with a small "r." Also my philosophy must not be thought a mere laissez faire; it is an active, not a passive creed. We are here not to be entertained, but to entertain ourselves.

I might have called this book A Guide Through Middle Age, for it is then that one needs enthusiasm the most. We stagger gaily through Youth, and by the time Old Age has come we have usually found a practicable working philosophy, but at forty one is likely to have a bitter hour at times, especially if one is still single. Or, so they tell me; I shall never confess to that status, and shall leap boldly into a white beard. A kindly euphemism calls this horrid, half-way stage one's Prime. I have here endeavoured to justify the usage, though I am opposed by a thousand poets.

If some of these essays seem but vaguely correlated to my major theme, you must think of them as being mere illustrations or practical solutions of the commonplace, solved by means of the theory I have developed and iterated. It was hard, indeed, to know when to stop, but, ragged as are my hints, I hope that in all essentials I have covered the ground and formulated the main rules of the Game of Living. One does not even have to be an expert to be able to do that!

THE ROMANCE OF THE COMMONPLACE

April Essays

They were begun in the April of my life, and though it is now well into mid-June, some of the glamour of the Spring yet inspires me, and I am still a-wondering. I have tried every charm to preserve my youth, and a drop of wine and a girl or two into the bargain, but the game is near played out.

But what boots marbles and tops when one is initiated into the mysteries of billiards and chess? It has taken me all these years to find that there is sport for every season, and the rules vary. To make a bold play at life, then, without cheating (which is due only to a false conception of the reward), and with the progress, rather than the particular stage reached, in mind, is my aim. So I have tossed overboard all my fears and regrets, and gone in for the higher problems of maturity.

Still, a few of the maxims I drew from my joys and sorrows in the few calmer moments of reverie persist; and these all strengthen me in the romantic view of life. A man must take his work or his art seriously, and pursue it with a single intent; he must fix upon the realities first of all, but there is room for imagination as well, and with this I have savoured my duties, as one puts sauce to pudding. Enough has been written upon the earnestness of motive, of sobriety and all the catalogue of virtues usually dignified with capital initials. I own allegiance to an empire beside all that—another Forest of Arden—the tinkle of whose laughter is a permanent sustained accompaniment to the more significant notes of man's sober industries.

Must I be dubbed trifler then, because I make a game of life? Every man of spirit and imagination must, I think, be a true sportsman. It is in the blood of genius to love play for its own sake, and whether one uses one's skill on thrones or women, swords or pens, gold or fame, the game's the thing! Surely, it is not only the reward that makes it worth while, it is the problem—the study of each step on the way, the disentangling of the knotted cord of fate, the sequence and climax of move after move, the logical grasp of what is to come upon the chess-board. As it is in the great, then, may it not be in the small? To one of fancy and poetic vision, mere size is an accident, a personal element, a relative, not an absolute quality of things. The microscope reveals wonders to the scientist, as great and as important as does the telescope. To the poet, "a primrose by the river's brim" has the beauty of the Infinite. And so nothing is commonplace, or to be taken for granted. One needs only the fresh eye, the eagerness of interest, and this Universe of workaday things which, with the animals, we get "for a penny, plain," may be coloured with the twopence worth of mind by which we are richer than they.

We have all passed through that phase of art-appreciation in which familiar objects are endowed with an extrinsic æsthetic value. The realist discovers a new sensation in a heap of refuse, the impressionist in the purple shadows of the hills. In weaker intellects the craving for this dignifying of the obvious leads to the gilding of the rolling-pin or the decalcomanie decoration of the bean-pot. With something of each of these methods, I would practice upon every-day affairs, and make them picturesque.

This is, perhaps, a characteristically Oriental point of view of life. Undoubtedly it is the Japanese pose, and it is well illustrated in their art. What by Korin would be thought too insignificant for portrayal? He had but to separate an object, or a group of objects, from its environment and he beheld a design, with line, mass, colour and notan. Art was to him not a question of subject, but of composition. He held his frame before a tiny fragment of the visible world, any fragment, indeed, and, placing that in its true position, not in regard to its surroundings, but in regard to the frame, it became a pattern. May we not, for our diversion, do thus with Life? If we hold up our frame, disregarding the accidental shadows of tradition and establishment, we may see bits of a new world.

It is thus that the man from Mars would view our life and manners. Unsophisticated, he would hold his frame in front of a man, and, cutting him off from his family, his neighbours, his position in Society, he would see a personage as real and as individual as "the Man with the Glove," or "the Unknown Woman" is to us. He would bring an uncorrupted eye and see strange pictures in the facts of our jaded routine. He would see in accustomed meetings and actions hidden possibilities and secret charms. He would witness this drab life of ours as a bewilderingly endless romance. Nothing would be presupposed, nothing foreseen, and each turn of the kaleidoscope would exhibit another of the infinitely various permutations of human relationship.

Such is the philosophy of youth. It denies the conventional postulates of the Philistine. It will not accept the axioms of the unimaginative; two and two may prove to make five, upon due investigation, seemingly parallel cases may widely diverge, and the greater may not always include the less, in this non-Euclidean Geometry of Life. It transmutes the prose of living into the poetry of idealization, as love transmutes the physical fact of osculation into the beatitude of a kiss. It makes mysteries of well-known occurrences, and it turns accepted marvels into simple truths, comprehensible and self-evident.

Civilization refines and analyzes. It seeks the invisible rays of the spectrum and delights in overtones, subtle vibrations and delicate nuances of thought. So this neglected philosophy of enthusiasm also gleans the neglected and forgotten mysteries of humanity. Its virtue is in its economy; it wrings the last drop of sensation from experience. Like modern processes of manufacture it produces good from what was considered but waste and tailings. By a positive contribution to happiness it refutes the charge of trifling, for in the practice of this art one does but pick up what has been thrown away. All's fish that comes to its net.

But it is more than a science; it has more than an economic value for happiness—it is a religion. The creed of hope bids one wonder and hope and rejoice, it teaches us to listen for the whispered voice, to see the spirit instead of the body of the facts of life. But it does more; it is illuminating, and reveals a new conception of beauty. There is an apocryphal legend of the Christ that tells how He with His disciples were passing along a road, when they came upon the body of a dead dog. Those with Him shrank from the pitiful sight with loathing, and drew away. But Jesus went calmly up to the decaying flesh and leaning over it, said gently, "How beautifully white are his teeth!" The customary moral drawn from the story is one of gentleness and pity, the kindness and charity of looking at the good, rather than the evil that is present. But it has a more literal meaning, and teaches clearly the lesson of beauty.

For it has come to this: that even in our pleasures we are influenced by prejudice and tradition. Some things are as empirically branded beautiful or ugly, as others are declared right or wrong, and to this dogma we conform. Korin, when he held his frame before a clothes-line fluttering with damp garments, saw not only an interesting design, but a beautiful one; yet the Monday's wash might be taken as something typically vulgar and ugly to the common mind.

We Anglo-Saxons have debased many facts of life, once rightly thought of as exquisitely beautiful, into the category of the beast. Sexual passion is the great example, but there are myriads of lesser things which, viewed calmly, purely, as some strange god able to see clearly without passion or prejudice, might view them, would take on lovely aspects. When such situations approach the pathetic, as the sight of some forlorn half-naked mother nursing her child on a doorstep, or the housemaid, denied of the chance of seclusion, embracing her lover in the publicity of the park, this diviner phase of common human nature is patent to the casual observer. When they approach the comic, also, it is easier to believe that every scene may have its complimentary phase, and the most careless may read the joke between the lines. But much of the more subtle delight of life escapes us, like the tree-toad in the oak, because it is so much a part of its surroundings; its charm is of so intrinsic a value that we do not notice it. We are used to finding our beauty within gilt rectangles, set off from other things not so denominated as especially worthy of regard; we expect it to be labelled and highly coloured.

Two things alone remain safe from this bias of custom—Love and Youth. To the lover, the tying of a shoe-lace on his mistress's foot may be as sacred a rite and may contain as much sentiment as the most impassioned caress. To the child, the mud-pile has possibilities of infinite bliss. To the one comes eternal beauty, to the other eternal mystery. And so, to touch these forever, and to lose no intermediary sensation of charm, whether it be humour, romance, pathos or inspiration, to be bound by every link that connects Youth to Love, that was my April essay!

Getting Acquainted

Two lives moving in mysterious orbits are drawn together, and for an instant, or maybe for ever after, whirl side by side. We call the encounter an introduction, and we usually proceed to stifle the wonder of it by impersonal talk of art, books or the drama. It is an every-day affair and does not commonly stir the imagination. And yet to the connoisseur in living the meeting may be an event as well as an episode. He is a discoverer come to an unknown shore—it may be the margent of a boundless sea or not, but of a certain it is swung by new tides and currents to be adventured and plumbed.

How can we, supercivilized out of almost all real emotion, develop the potential charm of this first glimpse of a new personality? It is guarded by conventionality; the shutters are down, the door is barricaded; you may knock in vain with polite interrogations, and no one appears at the window. Must we perforce set the house afire, smite or shriek aloud to bring this stranger's soul to his eyes for one searching gaze, face to face? The time is so short—we must greet, and pass on to the next; we exchange easy commonplaces, and so the chance vanishes. Why not defy custom and boldly snatch in that magic moment some satisfactory taste of warm human intercourse?

Curiously enough, this strangeness—this lack of background in new acquaintances—is one of the freshest charms of meeting. Who would not throw off all restraint and talk frankly with a man from the planet Mars or Venus? Could we resurrect an inhabitant of Atlantis we could give him our whole confidence—and even a South Sea Islander, were he intelligent, might be our confessor. Where then shall we draw the line of convention? Mars is some 140,000,000 miles away—San Francisco is but 9,000—the ratio is inadequate but there is a guarantee of candour in mere distance. May we not apply the same rule to nearer neighbours and look upon them in this interesting light?

There is no such stimulating instant possible for old friends for they are bound by preconceived ideals of personality—they are pigeon-holed as this or that—circumscribed by mutual duty and sacrifice; they must reconcile present whims to past vagaries; they are held to strict account of consistency with previous moods; but on our first meeting with another we are free of all this constraint, and if we have courage may meet soul to soul without reserves. We may confess unreliable things in that moment, for there is no perspective of formulated opinion into which the confidence must be fitted—the little secret is safe alone in the new mind, and will not be held to intolerable account. We may even for this once state a brutal truth, for we are unpledged to distressing considerations. We may be in some few sacred thoughts more intimate with a stranger than with an old friend. Such is the divine franchise of this first sudden opportunity. No compact is yet sealed; you must take me as you find me, like me or not, it matters little, since it is for us to say whether or not we shall meet again.

This play is, as Dickens says of melancholy, "one of the cheapest and most accessible of luxuries," for the scene is always ready, set in the nearest drawing-room. Every stranger has a possible fascination and comes like a prince incognito. It is probably your own fault, not his, if the disguise is not dropped during the first impetuous flurry of talk. Children do these things better, making friends not inch by inch, but by bold advances of genuine confidence, yet approaching each new mystery with respect. So we, too, like the child, must dress these our dolls, and put them into their first mental attitudes with sincerity and trust before they will come to life. We must put much feeling into the relation—giving and taking—so much that we cannot only confide our tenderest spiritual aspirations, but invest trifles with unaccustomed worth and significance. These are not impossible sensations even for such accidental fellowship, for nothing is too unimportant to reveal personality and orient one's point of view. But we must proceed from the inside, outward—beginning with truths and thence to fancy. It is the apriori method; not deducing the character of your neighbour from his visible idiosyncracies of taste and habit, but boldly inducing a new conception, making him what you will, and varying the picture by successive approximations as his words and actions modify your theory.

No one is too dull for the experiment, as no mummy is too common to be unwrapped. Granted only that he is newly found, so that you have imagination, romance and sentiment on your palette, you may paint him as you will. The colours may wash, but for the while he is your puppet and must dance to your piping, if, indeed, you do not become his.

There are those, of course, who will but cry "Oh!" and "Ah!" to your essays—dolts with neither wits nor words nor worth, who take all and give nothing; no one can set such damp stuff afire. Well, after all, though you have unmasked, retreat is still possible. With how many duller friends have you given your parole and cannot escape with honour!