The Wine of Anonymity

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

LET me not be misunderstood. I am not now thinking of the pleasures connected with the anonymous letter —the letter which, in disguised hand, warns Benedick not to trust Beatrice too far, or advises Beatrice to follow up Benedick and find out what he does between eight and nine of a summer evening. In the fashioning of such epistles there may be — there must be — a certain gratification, but it has never come my way. I have never experienced either the thrill of writing such a letter or the pang of receiving one.

Nor do I mean the fierce but coward joy of asserting, in an open letter, unsigned, that Iago is a liar and a villain, and thereby escaping the annoyance of a libel suit in consequence. This pleasure also I have never tasted, though I really have strong opinions about Iago, while disliking libel suits.

No. The wine I speak of is milder than this, and has no bitter after-taste. Having neither officious warnings nor malignant vituperations to utter, I yet find a certain gentle exhilaration in being able to express my thoughts without a signature.

I am, I believe, not the only person to feel this. The other writers in the Contributors’ Club, entering its doors, which close softly behind them and tell no tales, and approaching its social hearth in the cosy club-room whose walls have ears, perhaps, but no tongues — they too, I notice, carry themselves with a more buoyant and jaunty bearing than the Olympians who sit enthroned in the Body-of-the-Magazine. There is a glare of publicity about Olympus that even the gods felt — witness the way they slipped into human disguise or drew on the tarn-helm when they wanted to be really at ease. Often, indeed, this was when they were up to mischief, but not always. And the Club members are never up to mischief, and yet we like to be nameless. We are not saying anything that we are ashamed of, and yet — and yet— it is such fun to wear the tarn-helm!

For there is a certain relaxation that comes when we know that we are not going to be held up to what we have said, that we shall escape the annoyance of being expected to be the kind of person who said it, whatever it may be. When we meet a man who has written things, we expect him to live up to his signature. Usually he does n’t, and then we grumble, “Is n’t he the man who wrote——? I thought so.

Well, he doesn’t look it, does he?” Probably he is tired of being expected to “look it,” and does n’t mean to, and is glad he does n’t.

In spite of Emerson, consistency is a hobgoblin. Most of us cannot help feeling that what we have said one day we must abide by the next, and this makes us careful. We are brought up from youth to think twice before we speak, and so we do. We think, perhaps, three or four times; and when we have done our thinking we have begun to suspect that we are poor creatures anyway and might better not speak at all; which may be the case, or not. Now the joy of anonymity is that we speak twice before we think. Perhaps — oh, mad and forbidden pleasure! — we never think at all, we simply speak. The result is that we are absolutely spontaneous and happy. The wine of anonymity has loosened our tongues, and we prattle on in unchecked and artless fashion, and often more pleasantly than when sobered by the cold gray dawn of responsibility.

It is probably the same thing at bottom that makes people so much better company at a masquerade than under any other circumstances. In the circle of the black mask and the domino we have no name, no past, no future, no self to live up to or down to, and the mood that is uppermost need never impose itself upon a later mood. We can be spontaneous and genuine. No wonder we are good company! For on the whole our spontaneous impulses are kindly and gay. We are almost always ready to love our fellow men for an hour, if we are not thereby committing ourselves to loving them for a lifetime.

It all seems to come back to the same thing — a reluctance to commit ourselves. It is easy enough to be advised, “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again.” To the visionary and the recluse this may be easy, but those of us who live close to our kind, who take color from them, who can never do anything without being conscious of an effect upon them which reacts in turn upon us — such vacillating and feeble chameleonfolk as these love to run to the cover of the anonymous; they wrap themselves snugly in its mantle and mask, and then — ah, then — they step out at ease, they hold the head high, they begin to say, “I think,” instead of, “It is sometimes thought”; and “I doubt,” instead of, “It appears doubtful.” Ideas come to them with a rush. They have so much to say, now that the saying does not commit them to anything in particular. They can confess their souls without being taken too seriously, or, indeed, being “taken ” at all. They can berate the newspapers, and then settle down peacefully to the perusal of the latest murder news, and no one will taunt, ”I thought you said that you never read the papers.” They can write an encomium on Milton, and then take down Sherlock Holmes unchallenged by any one. They can hurl a philippic against magenta, and then choose a winter suit or the dining-room wall-paper of that color, without fear of reproach. Will any one say that this is not as wine to one who falters?

Perhaps the fear of consequences keeps us from a few bad acts, but I am convinced that it also deters us from many good ones. It keeps us from being as disagreeable to people as we should sometimes like to be, but it also keeps us from being as nice to them as we sometimes have the impulse to be.

I often think of this as I stand beside the track in the country and watch a train rush past. The engineer is usually leaning out of his window. I wave to him, he waves back, we smile in most friendly fashion, and the train flashes by. I am the better for the greeting, and I hope he is. Once I stood on a bridge and watched a slow freight creep along under me. The train men stood or lay on the tops of the cars, and as they passed they tossed salutations up to me. I caught them all. It was great fun. But afterwards I reflected, “ What would have happened if that freight had suddenly stopped under the bridge, as freights sometimes do, or if the engine had blown out a cylinder or something, so that the intercourse of the moment threatened to be prolonged for an hour or two?” I fancy all those genial men would have suddenly stiffened into stolid automata, and I should have had a pressing engagement elsewhere.

This is what keeps happening to us all the time in life. Our human intercourse is constantly being thwarted by our consciousness of consequences. It is especially the case when we are young. Young people feel that they can hardly have an intimate conversation without its ending in a promise to correspond, or an invitation to visit. If we keep this attitude as we grow older, the consciousness that a moment’s intimacy may entail so much makes us pause before taking the fateful plunge. How often do we draw back in a moment of expansion because we reflect, “Shall we feel the same way to-morrow, or next month?” How many friendly impulses do we restrain because we are afraid the freight train may stop, and something more be expected of us!

But sometimes as we grow older we come to realize that we have made in part our own burdens, and missed some rare pleasures. We discover that if we are honest and natural, intimate moments may prove to be not millstones but stars. Among my treasures of memory are those flashes of communion with others which have apparently lighted no lamp of friendship needing daily tending. It may have been with an acquaintance, — who ever afterward remained, as before, an acquaintance merely, — it may have been with a stranger, standing beside us for a moment in a crowded shop, or a seatfellow in a railroad train. The moment has come, we have recognized it, enjoyed it, and it has passed, but it is none the less prized.

Perhaps if we had more courage we should shake off the tyranny of our own words and acts, and not need the mask and mantle to set us free. But so long as we are what we are, I cannot but think we are happier, gayer, and no less good, if now and then we drop our names and speak without a thought of our own identity, if now and then we don our mask and cloak and fare forth among our fellows, freed from the restraints of our own personality.

BOOKS AND BOOK-SHELVES

LONG before Dr. Eliot set about constructing his three-foot shelf of books, which he has lengthened out to five; long before Dr. Crothers wrote an essay on the hundred worst books, men of note and men of letters had with such diligence been compiling lists of both kinds that a weary world has more than once cried out, “Sufficiency! enough!” No one less distinguished than the President Emeritus of Harvard could ever have persuaded us to reopen the discussion. As for Dr. Crothers and his list — one can’t help remembering that Boileau preceded him with a tabulation of the world’s worst books. Cervantes, too, drew up a once-famous list of the very worst novels. Whereas the best hundred of them — the goddess Dullness has always had a finger in compiling such statistics: —

I make the quotation without disrespect to Dr. Eliot. Dr. Crothers has made it before me; and I am sure, too, that the original author of the couplet had no thought of applying it to the carpenter of that five-foot shelf we hear so much about to-day.

The hundred best books — the hundred worst books: it is only “emphasis” and the personal equation that determine which of them any list of books is — for reading purposes. I know an oldtime couple in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose favorite reading, of a lamp-lit evening, is Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. They must be arrived by this time at the letter V, — and are strong, doubtless, on the definition of words like vacant, vacuous, vacuum, vain, and vapory. Perhaps these good people include the Dictionary in their list of the best hundred books, — if they ever stopped reading long enough to make one out.

After all, the best collection of one hundred books is that which has got itself together accidentally on my bedroom book-shelf; or on yours, provided you read in bed. Our “libraries” are sadly diluted streams: they float books that have been given to us by injudicious friends at Christmas-time, books left over from our course at the University, books too technical or too dull for real companionship, books got together for some serious purpose or other. It is different with any hundred books whose relation, the one with the other, is unstudied and fortuitous: books that stand on our shelf for no other reason than that we like to read them. Books that have been accumulated in a hodge-podge and pell-mell manner and claim no sort of cousinship are, as it falls out, the books most happily mated. They are like relations in human families: they cannot help themselves. These are the books that one really reads: reads in bed, with a jar of tobacco on a table alongside, and a pipe in one’s mouth; reads on suburban trains; lends over week-ends to one’s friends (and sees no more). Here are the books that are never “taken to town” when we “move in,” at the end of the summer or autumn: books like the Natural History of Selborne, and a certain statistical volume labeled Birds that Prey on Other Birds and Vegetables.

I like the way in which the most incongruous titles and subject-matters drift together on my bedroom shelf. It does me good to see how close a pious tractate and a blasphemous brochure entitled, Les Moines: Comédie Satirique, nestle therein peace. The life of a member of the Society of Friends, long a missionary at home and abroad, jostles the latest sophistry of Anatole France; and when, by a piece of unassisted coincidence, Crèvecœur’s delightful Letters from an American Farmer stands beside William Barnes’s Poems of Ru-ral Life, I am a thousand-fold better pleased than I could ever have been by any intentional arrangement of these books together. What though a Nonsense Anthology, a History of Witchcraft since the Middle Ages, and Principal Shairp’s Poetry and Philosophy rub one another just a little rudely? Such a juxtaposition can do poetry and philosophy no lasting harm, —and it pleasantly piques my sense of the grotesque.

After all, there are no hundred best books — no hundred worst ones. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes, was it not, who owned up to his preference for reading in books to reading through them? “ When I set out to read through a book,” the Autocrat wrote, “I always felt that I had a task before me, — but when I read in a book it was the page or the paragraph that I wanted, and which left its impression and became a part of my intellectual furniture.” If we were only franker, most of us would confess to being like Holmes in this matter of our reading. To be sure, we have an old-fashioned disinclination to set down a book in the middle of it; we feel it our duty to finish whatever we have once begun at the beginning; yet if we yield to our New England conscience herein, we are only deterred from beginning very many books. And by “beginning” books I mean neither reading straight through their tedious opening pages, nor making haste, like a woman, to learn by the concluding chapter how it all “turns out.” Open your book in the very thick of it: that is the true way of getting at its soul.

All of us know Francis Bacon’s aphorism (that is found, not in one of Shakespeare’s plays, but in the essay on Studies); even Macaulay’s schoolboy—in the American limited edition of him — knows it by heart. Not all books are to be digested; that were too much for any one man’s stomach. Taste them, then, and learn to smack your lips. The best hundred books are the hundred that stand on your bedroom book-shell: the hundred that you have never yet “ read through,” but that you are forever reading in, with zest unrelaxed. You are forever stumbling on something new and excellent in opening up these pillow-books, when the house is still. The best hundred books are neither “timely,” as the reviewers say, nor necessarily “compelling,” the next favorite adjective in the English language, now that “strenuous” has gone out. The best hundred books serve to remind us that there’s no such thing as time; time is only the empty space between our reviews of that ragged regiment upon the bedroom book-shelf.