THE CRIME OF TALKING SHOP

No greater intellectual service has been rendered in this generation than the development of the interview and special article to their present unique position. A successful manufacturer, in a few unstudied sentences, gives us the explanation of Christian Science; an eminent politician allows a glimpse of unsuspected literary lore; a prosperous novelist solves social and economic problems off-hand; while the hero of a great criminal trial adds to the sum of human knowledge by his utterances on the future of the airship.

Our stupid fathers talked learnedly about 'the argument from authority'; they were blankly ignorant of the omniscience of fame. Just how the attainment of notoriety enriches the mind with stores of facts, is among the mysteries of psychology; but that, in some occult way, the arrival at prominence is synchronous with the possession of expert knowledge, is the experience of every well-read person. Being an editor is thus less occupation than recreation; and serious reading, losing its forbidding aspect, becomes at once education and entertainment. By this advanced method, the greatest thoughts of the greatest minds-which is literature are conveyed without delay to the mass of their contemporaries.

The old, slow process of permeation and percolation had been superseded by the more rapidly fruitful one of inundation. There is a royal road to knowledge, fame. fame. And while the famous one may shed his light upon the path of his own ascent, it is far more interesting and more striking to hear

him discourse upon topics foreign to his native attention or actual research. Prodigies arouse more curiosity than professors, and the gift of tongues is more convincing manifestation than linguistic training. We have a wholesome fear of the man who talks shop.

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The justification of this fear ought to be, and perhaps is, unnecessary. It rests, of course, upon the great democratic principle of equality. There is a dangerous tendency nowadays to apply the higher criticism to the statements of the Declaration of Independence. It is passing strange that the peril in such a procedure should escape the notice of even the most closely immured closet philosophizer. Once let the idea arise that the historic document is not infallible, is, on the contrary, open to discussion and criticism, not simply of what it means, but of whether what it says is true or not, and where will uncertainty end? In what quarter shall American political wisdom be found? We say nothing regarding the patriotism of such a course. Taking, therefore, the words of the Declaration at their obvious and unstrained signification, we know that any man is the born equal of every other man, if not, as has been wisely observed, his superior. The man who talks shop, consequently, undemocratically, if quietly, assumes and asserts a pretended and unfounded superiority which is as irritating as it is un-American. From what did our forefathers flee to the untamed wilderness if not from a baseless assumption of political wisdom? Parliament had to be taught by drastic measures that the science of government is not esoteric.

The person who talks shop, however, does something worse than outrage our democracy: he commits a serious social crime. The one thing that saves conversation from being utterly a lost art is the highly-developed 'small-talk' of modern society. Did not no less a personage than the great Duke of Wellington speak of it as a grave defect that 'I have no small-talk'? Now what would become of this same small-talk if it became the impossible fashion to talk shop? And what would be the inevitable state of affairs intellectual and social if the present custom of saying pretty nothings were superseded by the barbarism of saying profitable somethings? We should shudder if we were not reassured by the prompt reflection that the fearful catastrophe isn't likely to occur in our discreet day.

But the greatest is behind. Think how completely uninteresting it would be to have to listen to Demosthenes tell how he won the crown, or Socrates how he felt as the hemlock went down, or Leonidas the story of the defeat that made him famous (he was so laconic a talker anyway), or Joan of Arc of those days before Orleans and in Rheims, or

No, no. That is n't what we want. Leave these matters to the professionals in history. Let us hear from Cæsar on woman suffrage, Chaucer on the future of radium, and Horatius on bridge. If possible, let us round up Xenophon, the Bacons, Dante, and Buddha, and, between sips of our best tea, engage them in harmless chat anent Lucy Lissome's scandalous elopement with her fiancé, Dr. Gerlock's (reported) attentions to the widow Stimley, the probable outcome of the wonderful serial running in The Upper Ten Thousand, and the marvels of the newest movingpicture show. By tactful management we ought to be able to endow these antique thinkers with some smack of contemporary culture.

WOOD-SMOKE

PSYCHOLOGISTS tell us that of all the senses smell is the quickest to kindle memory. This corroboration of the scientists almost takes away the intimate joy of our discovery that a whiff of mint sauce, even when as yet no nearer than the pantry-door, instantly spreads between us and the damask a green pasture and a sparkling brook. Neither do we like to share with psychologists, or others, the peculiar responsiveness that makes us feel quick tears at the smell of fresh-baked bread tears born of fair dreams and brave resolves in long-ago convent corridors, fragrant of much baking for many hungry girls. It is pleasanter and more delicate to feel that this olfactory sensibility is not every one's, and that in our own case it is due to the fact that what we have to remember is so peculiarly vivid and sweet-so peculiarly sweeter than the green pastures and fragrant corridors of other people's

memories.

And yet, monopolists though we would be of these quick-flashing responses, other people, even Philistines, probably enjoy them in a higher or a lower degree. Indeed, it would be interesting if, after the fashion of autograph albums, we might ask each promising new friend, 'What fragrance is to you most reminiscent, most suggestive?' If the answer were truthful, we might be friends or not friends a little sooner, perhaps. At any rate, I am sure I should want to be friends with any one who would confess to being under the spell of wood-smoke!

Ah, wood-smoke! Thing compounded of the swift run of the sap, of the pricking of the first buds, of the pale shimmer of young leaves, of the swift pallor of storm-tossed summer boughs, of the drop of nut, and the rustle of brown and gold and crimson in the

white rime! No wonder thou art a magician, to bring to life again old springs and summers, old lights and shadows, old sounds and old silences, made as thou art of the very secretest powers of life!

And so, small wonder is it that in a high-built street of a factory town, with trampled gray snow under foot and stark black chimneys against a leaden sky, the wood-smoke from a wayside pile of shavings, tended by shivering children, should sweep the canvas clean, and flash on it a sloping green pasture, a tumbling brook, and, in the deepest dimple of the hillside, a gray-shingled spring-house under a lace-leafed thorn tree. In front of the spring-house crackles a big fire; the smoke curls and blows and fades; little darkies throw yellow chips into the blaze, and Aunt Caroline's red bandana glows out of the gray as she turns the linen in the great kettle. On the mullein and the iron-weed round about, on the little thorn-bushes, on the milkweed and the briers, bloom the pink and blue checked pinafores of the children at the 'Big House,' their white ruffled sunbonnets and snowy frocks; on the grass, sniffed at sometimes by strolling sheep, shine the great white tablecloths and the sheets. By the spring-house door hangs a long gourd dipper. Yellow butterflies flicker in and out of the mint and the pickerel-weed and the rushes. Then a child's voice: 'Law, mammy, look yonder! Ef dar ain't Miss Hallie and Mars Abe comin' down de hill! An' ain't dey comin' slow! De hosses is jes' creepin' along like dey was asleep. I'll run an' open de big gate.'

Flash again! The picture's gone. The steam pours out of the escape valves into the mill-canals! The voice of the machinery drowns the little voice of your dream. And for a moment the wheels of your own life seem to stop and waver backwards, forwards,

before they drop into the tick of forgetfulness.

Another time! Monday morning in the library! You gather up Cæsar's cigar ashes, and put his pipes into the rack; pipes among which he chooses to suit each varying mood. You beat up the pillows in the window-seat, thinking how badly that brown rep has worn. You take down your turkeywing and sweep your hearth, eying casually the dullness of the andirons, inwardly questioning when it would be least dangerous to request the stolid and free-spoken Swede also to eye their dullness and to apply her polish. Presto! The dead embers in the fireplace, cold smoke, the little flurry of ashes!

That's the Loire out there between the poplars, under the pearly, sunrifted sky; and that's Blois, red-roofed, smoke-wreathed, climbing hesitatingly up the narrow crooked streets below you. On the leaded panes of the open casement where you stand, over the great chimney-piece behind you, on a blue background, bristle the gold porcupines of Louis XII. Below the porcupines in the vast fireplace, there is still the black impress of long-ago fires, the faint, close smell of long-vanished smoke in tight-closed rooms.

Ah, ghost of gray smoke-wreaths, spirit of blinking embers, what a magician thou art! The long white hands of Catherine de' Medici herself, in her poison cabinet close at hand, could brew no subtler infusion to stir the blood and fire the brain! In thy train come other ghosts ghosts of those who lived and loved and hated, and flashed and went out in the light of thy long cold fires. In the deep windowseat, looking down over the red roofs to the dove-gray river, sits la Belle Fosseuse, lifting arch eyebrows from her Amadis de Gaul to smile deeply at Amyot. Mary Stuart sweeps a lute with fine white hand, the firelight warm

ing the cold of the bridal pearls in her ruddy hair. De Guise's narrow black eyes ponder the coals, the ivory pallor of his lean cheeks faintly rose-touched. And as the fire dies down, the great Catherine's beruffed head looks palely in at the door.

'Is it chop or steak you will hef for de childer?' says my Swede at my door. And you go from smoke-wreaths and wraiths to the sunny kitchen and the sweet hunger of children.

But another time! In the Palm Garden at the Plaza. There is a mist of warm fragrances: Java, Orange Pekoe, Orriza violet, fresh violets, sandalwood, roses, Havanas! There is a mist of music surging in and out, shot through with women's laughter. There is the sparkling staccato of twinkling gems — the adagio of soft color the cantante of silk on silks.

The man next you strikes a match. A keen wind splashes your cheek, a wind compounded of salt seas, of hemlocks filtered through frost. A flamelight fills your fancy, out of which spring pine trees and night-depths of forest. Your camp-fire crackles. Your dog's cold nose is next your cheek. A great brown antlered thing stretches quiet in the shadows. Above, the sharp black tops of the pines point to white

stars.

vistas that he opened! The austere old New England families were rich in uncles, queer branches of the Massachusetts family tree, sprigs flourishing without roots, in the airs of distant, antipodal cities. The uncles in China threw a richer, more golden, mellower, yellower light into the coldly furnished rooms of the Yankee stay-at-home. He did for Boston and the Atlantic port towns what the India House did for London. Aldrich's Bad Boy loved him as I do.

I never had a rich uncle in China, but I am blessed in having other relatives there. What strange and costly broideries, what fantastic carvings, what ugly and venerable idols, encrusted with age, they send me! What endless soberly-fashioned oddities which speak of a civilization so different from ours! Odd and odder still, they make my rooms their home. And oddest of them all, the shuangh chi'u-er.

The shuangh chi'u-er (an unsuccessful attempt to render the Chinese sounds into English) lie silently upon my desk, but reproach me as audibly as any bland Orientals would ever permit themselves to reproach their host. My sister, who sent them to me, is ridden by the belief that I am a literary man. Every literary man (in China) has shuangh chi'u-er. Hence, the be

SHUANGH CHI'U-ER

HAVE you ever had a rich uncle in China? He is a sine qua non of romance. How the old writers of sea-tales for boys loved him, to use him as a starting-point! 'Our young hero,' they would say, 'was mystified one morning by receiving a letter addressed in an unfamiliar chirography, the India-paper envelope bearing strange Oriental stamps,' etc., etc. Oh, unforgettable

Shuangh chi'u-er, although the name may sound like a disease, is not a form of writer's cramp. On the contrary, 'their' purpose is to prevent it. The words mean 'the double balls,' and shuangh chi'u-er are two iron balls, an inch or so in diameter, which nestle in the right hand of every Chinese man of letters for hours each day, one being revolved about the other until they are worn bright. They are just large enough to make a handful, and the action of shifting one about the other brings the fingers into play and lends

them that suppleness and digital dexterity which is necessary in the manipulation of the Chinese lettering-pen or fine-pointed brush. Of what a simplicity!

They fascinate me. Since I became their owner I can scarcely desist from handling them hours upon end. By some miracle of welding, the shuangh chi'u-er are fashioned hollow, each with a small ball within, which gives forth a gentle, not unmusical clanking, as they are moved. How would our civilization ever have conceived such an appliance? Yet they are precisely the thing which the Chinese littérateur, whose proud profession forbids him any manual labor whatsoever, needs to insure skill in the manual practice of his art. I meditate upon them, and the whole curious ethnology of that great and venerable nation seems to be hidden, and yet clamant, within the shuangh chi'u-er, as the little globes themselves conceal their faintly-sounding iron hearts.

The wife of my friend the novelist says that it is fortunate her husband does not need to juggle two typewriters in his hands.

Her interjection is frivolous, but suggests some analogies. Do you remember Lafcadio Hearn's speaking of the surprise which is occasioned in the Occidental reader by the widespread facility of beautiful metaphor and simile among Japanese school-children? Hearn goes on to say that while this delightful imagery of speech does exist, it is nevertheless merely the repetition of standard catchwords of the tongue, procrustean figures of speech which have been handed down from age to age, and which in reality bespeak no originality of diction in the child who uses them. Name an object of nature, and the Japanese child hands you from its appropriate closet its appropriate poetic clothes. They are hand-me

downs, says Hearn, and not new-tailored suits.

Is Chinese literature open to this same cavil? I am not a student of it, and cannot say; but the little shuangh chi'u-er have suggested that a nation which has been content with old things, old ideas, worn smooth by much handling, may reasonably be supposed to have advanced no further in its literature than it has in its science. I can believe that the long and idle contemplation of the twin spheres might induce a hypnotic stupor, incapacitating the luckless literary grub for any steps along unblazed trails.

And yet who are we Saxons, to sneer at the slaves of the mental shuangh chi'u-er? How many of our men of letters have not been ridden by twin incubi of lifeless ideas? I shall expect a later Taine to show that the whole age of Pope was subtly connected, atavistically perhaps, with the dusty classicism of some ancient Chinese Chesterton, or man playing with blocks. And of individual instances: Look at Swinburne, ceaselessly rotating in his mind the two ideas, White Surf and White Limbs; Kipling, dandling Imperialism and Pixies; G. B. Shaw, bondman to the shuangh chi'u-er Socialism and Shocking! How musically they clink as they are shifted about in our writer's hand- and how far is our world advanced by their clinking?

Nevertheless, I love my sister's gift. There is as much to be said for the constant dwelling upon two ideas, as against it. We are told to beware the strength of the man of one idea, the student of one book. The East has watched one nation after another sink into decay; 'the legions thunder by,' while she remains, strong in the fruitful contemplation of the twin ideas, love of ancestry and love of country. My shuangh chi'u-er are homely little things, heavy, squat; but they reflect from