Letters Home. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
prodigious scale, and it is going on in so many ways at once that the human atom loses the sense of its own little aches and pains, and merges its weakness in the strenuousness of the human mass.
I suppose that is the reason why literature, as a New York interest, affects me less in New York than it did in Wottoma. I know here, as I knew there, that this is a literary center, and now and then I catch a glimpse of authorship in the flesh. But either because the other interests dwarf the literary interests, or because literature is essentially subjective, it is, so far, disappointingly invisible and intangible. Some of the young fellows dine at Lamarque's, and have a table to themselves in one comer, where they talk and smoke; but I don't know any of them yet, and I haven't quite the gall to make up to them. I suppose there must be literary houses where authors meet; but I have not begun to frequent them, and in my dearth of poets I try to make out with the poem which I find more and more in the personality of the divine America.
In fact, I am seeing a good deal of the Ralsons, these days; or they are seeing a good deal of me. I seem to represent home and mother to Mrs. Ralson, and she claims part of every call I make at the Walhondia for a terribly long talk about Wottoma; though, as for calling, I am mostly there by invitation to all the meals of the day, including supper after the theatre or opera.
America has set up a secretary for herself and a companion for her mother in the single person of a girl from western New York, somewhere, who does duty as a dragon when Ralson is away, or cannot be pressed into the service. She doesn't look like a dragon exactly; in fact, with her shyness and brownness of hair and dress, she makes me think of a quail and its dead-leaf plumage; and she has a way of slipping under cover which I think would not be finally inconsistent with an ability to peck. To tell the truth, as nearly as I can make out on such short notice, the secretary-companion and I were born doubtful of each other; though I Should be puzzled to say why. She seems, for reasons of her own, to look with a censorious eye upon America's frank friendliness for me as something very mistakenly bestowed. This naturally puts me on my most cynical behavior; I say nothing but heartless things in the secretary's presence; and if it goes on, I shall turn out a hardened worldling, and be marrying America for her' money before I know it. In view of this novel character, I do not understand how it is that the Mayor has not put me on the committee for the reception of Prince Henry. I think I could be guilty of a base servility that would satisfy the secretary's worst expectation. Toa must not, by the way, imagine that New York is as hysterical about the prince's visit as the newspapers make her appear. Journalism, my dear Lincoln, I do not mind confiding to you, now I have left it, is feminine; it likes to talk, and to hear itself talk, and it does not mind what the topic is: it can be as shrill and voluble about one thing as another. But I assure you that between the morning and the evening editions, there are long moments when we forget the prince altogether and
"Shouldn't hardly notice it at all,"
in the words of Dockstader's latest song, if he forgot to come.
Yours ever,
W. A.
XI.
From Mr. Otis Binning to Mrs. Walter Binning, Boston.
New York, Jan. 11, 1902.
My dear Margaret:
If it surprises you to find this post-marked New York, instead of London, I confess that it rather puzzles me to explain why I have no more taken the steamer for Liverpool than the train for Boston. I can merely say that New York has given me pause, which is the last thing one would expect New York to do. Three weeks ago I might have thought that I knew the place, hut now I am not sure that I can more than conjecture it a little bit, or throw out a vague suggestion or two at it. I might analyze accurately enough, but the fancy of synthetizing has grown upon me, and to synthetize New York is impossible.
At least it is impossible for a Bostonian, of the Boston which, if it was as we believed it, is now certainly no more. "We were (forgive the aoristic preterite; it is cruder for me than it is for you!) immensely, intensely, personal, and the note of New York is impersonality. If you wish to lose yourself, this is the shop; if you wish to find yourself, better go somewhere else. Our quality, and the defect of our quality, in that obsolete Boston, was from the wish to find ourselves, always. Here I feel resolved into my elements at times, in a measure which I do not believe would happen to me even in London or Paris. I am mere humanity; worse, I am mere mortality, as someone said of the people in Maeterlinck's little mysteries, and I meet my fellow mortals in a sort of reciprocal dispersal; and yet, when I freely accept the conditions, the experience is rather pleasing. You will not believe it, or at least you will not believe it of me, and you could not acquire faith without coming here and staying rather longer than you are ever likely to do.
It is not that people do not talk of people in New York, but they do not talk of them in our way, as acquaintance from the cradle up, by their nicknames or pet names, with a constant sense of their lurking cousinship. There is of course, this sort of intimacy here, but it does not quite turn the sojourner out of doors. I have been to your Van der Doeses, and they have been hospitable, but they did not make me feel that I mattered. I did not wish to matter, and yet an expectation of that sort ought to be imagined. They were very light, as people of the old Dutch blood are apt to be (the Dutch Calvinism was so very different from our Puritanism!) and though they had the evidences of refinement about them, I had somehow a fear that they might any moment begin asking conundrums. I do not know how else to put it, and I am afraid my meaning will not be perfectly clear to you. Is it possible that there was something in the air of our elder Boston, breathed from the interstellar spaces where our lights of literature and learning, of poetry and philosophy shone so long, which penetrated our psychical substance as nothing of the kind has the New Yorkers' ?
One curious experience as a Bostonian has come to me from these New Yorkers through their remote verification of the fact that we Bostonians are no longer so literary or philosophic as we once were. In that former time they imagined us lettered pedants or transcendental cranks, and they laughed at their notion of us. Now they have somehow (their unintelligence is baffling) caught on to a change in us, and they no longer smile at our queerness; they no longer think of us at all; we suggest nothing to them. This is putting it rather crudely, and it is saying it in excess, of course, but a sad truth lies at the bottom of the well in which I hope this may not make you wish to drown yourself.
At the Van der Doeses' I could naturally meet none but their own kind; but they have been retrospectively more attentive than they actually were, and they have taken me with them to several functions, and had cards sent me for others, where I have seen a greater variety of my fellow mortals. You know I never scorned those simple at-homes and teas which most men disdain, and now when dinners rather take it out of me, I have been going to afternoon receptions with more than my earlier ardor. I have had my reward, for I have met there some agreeable women (rather too shrieky; but the noise is great) and such men of aesthetic employment as business does not hold in its grip quite till dinner. At the house of an editor who has made so much money with his paper The Signal; its name would say nothing to you; but it has been rather dreadful) that he is now in case to clean up, and who has begun by housing himself, on the East side, rather too magnificently, I found some Perennial men, the other day; and there was an author or two, as authors go in New York, and some painters who, as things go anywhere, are always more interesting than authors. We were not without actors, for it was not a matinee afternoon, and I saw in the flesh the prevailing actress, though in rather less of it than I had seen her on the stage. It was pleasant, or at least piquant; if I were to distinguish so closely I should say that New York always piques rather than pleases, and Boston — well Boston at least does not pique; and it was the more amusing because it was of that provisional character in which what one may roughly call celebrity rather than society played the chief part. The Van der Doeses felt obliged to account for their presence to some of their friends whom they met, and their friends were likewise exculpatory; you know what I mean. The celebrity was nothing to them, or rather worse; I do not care for it much myself, because it is tiresome; it does not know what to do with itself; and you do not know what to do with it; but there were people there