The Delicious Vice by Young E. Allison
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Young E. Allison >> The Delicious Vice
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THE DELICIOUS VICE
Pipe Dreams and Fond Adventures of an Habitual Novel-Reader Among Some
Great Books and Their People
By Young E. Allison
_Second Edition_
(Revised and containing new material)
CHICAGO THE PRAIRIELAND PUBLISHING CO. 1918 Printed originally in the
Louisville Courier-Journal. Reprinted by courtesy.
First edition, Cleveland, Burrows Bros., 1907.
Copyright 1907-1918
I.
A RHAPSODY ON THE NOBLE PROFESSION OF NOVEL READING
It must have been at about the good-bye age of forty that Thomas Moore,
that choleric and pompous yet genial little Irish gentleman, turned a
sigh into good marketable "copy" for Grub Street and with shrewd economy
got two full pecuniary bites out of one melancholy apple of reflection:
"Kind friends around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather,"
--he sang of his own dead heart in the stilly night.
"Thus kindly I scatter thy leaves on the bed
Where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead."
--he sang to the dying rose. In the red month of October the rose is
forty years old, as roses go. How small the world has grown to a man of
forty, if he has put his eyes, his ears and his brain to the uses for
which they are adapted. And as for time--why, it is no longer than a
kite string. At about the age of forty everything that can happen to a
man, death excepted, has happened; happiness has gone to the devil or is
a mere habit; the blessing of poverty has been permanently secured or
you are exhausted with the cares of wealth; you can see around the
corner or you do not care to see around it; in a word--that is,
considering mental existence--the bell has rung on you and you are up
against a steady grind for the remainder of your life. It is then there
comes to the habitual novel reader the inevitable day when, in anguish
of heart, looking back over his life, he--wishes he hadn't; then he asks
himself the bitter question if there are not things he has done that he
wishes he hadn't. Melancholy marks him for its own. He sits in his room
some winter evening, the lamp swarming shadowy seductions, the grate
glowing with siren invitation, the cigar box within easy reach for that
moment when the pending sacrifice between his teeth shall be burned out;
his feet upon the familiar corner of the mantel at that automatically
calculated altitude which permits the weight of the upper part of the
body to fall exactly upon the second joint from the lower end of the
vertebral column as it rests in the comfortable depression created by
continuous wear in the cushion of that particular chair to which every
honest man who has acquired the library vice sooner or later gets
attached with a love no misfortune can destroy. As he sits thus, having
closed the lids of, say, some old favorite of his youth, he will
inevitably ask himself if it would not have been better for him if he
hadn't. And the question once asked must be answered; and it will be an
honest answer, too. For no scoundrel was ever addicted to the delicious
vice of novel-reading. It is too tame for him. "There is no money in
it."
* * * * *
And every habitual novel-reader will answer that question he has asked
himself, after a sigh. A sigh that will echo from the tropic deserted
island of Juan Fernandez to that utmost ice-bound point of Siberia where
by chance or destiny the seven nails in the sole of a certain mysterious
person's shoe, in the month of October, 1831, formed a cross--thus:
*
* * *
*
*
*
while on the American promontory opposite, "a young and handsome woman
replied to the man's despairing gesture by silently pointing to heaven."
The Wandering Jew may be gone, but the theater of that appalling
prologue still exists unchanged. That sigh will penetrate the gloomy
cell of the Abbe Faria, the frightful dungeons of the Inquisition, the
gilded halls of Vanity Fair, the deep forests of Brahmin and fakir, the
jousting list, the audience halls and the petits cabinets of kings of
France, sound over the trackless and storm-beaten ocean--will echo, in
short, wherever warm blood has jumped in the veins of honest men and
wherever vice has sooner or later been stretched groveling in the dust
at the feet of triumphant virtue.
And so, sighing to the uttermost ends of the earth, the old novel-reader
will confess that he wishes he hadn't. Had not read all those novels
that troop through his memory. Because, if he hadn't--and it is the
impossibility of the alternative that chills his soul with the despair
of cruel realization--if he hadn't, you see, he could begin at the very
first, right then and there, and read the whole blessed business through
for the first time. For the FIRST TIME, mark you! Is there anywhere in
this great round world a novel reader of true genius who would not do
that with the joy of a child and the thankfulness of a sage?
Such a dream would be the foundation of the story of a really noble Dr.
Faustus. How contemptible is the man who, having staked his life freely
upon a career, whines at the close and begs for another chance; just
one more--and a different career! It is no more than Mr. Jack Hamlin, a
friend from Calaveras County, California, would call "the baby act,"
or his compeer, Mr. John Oakhurst, would denominate "a squeal." How
glorious, on the other hand, is the man who has spent his life in his
own way, and, at its eventide, waves his hand to the sinking sun and
cries out: "Goodbye; but if I could do so, I should be glad to go over
it all again with you--just as it was!" If honesty is rated in heaven
as we have been taught to believe, depend upon it the novel-reader
who sighs to eat the apple he has just devoured, will have no trouble
hereafter.
What a great flutter was created a few years ago when a blind
multi-millionaire of New York offered to pay a million dollars in cash
to any scientist, savant or surgeon in the world who would restore his
sight. Of course he would! It was no price at all to offer for the
service--considering the millions remaining. It was no more to him than
it would be to me to offer ten dollars for a peep at Paradise. Poor as I
am I will give any man in the world one hundred dollars in cash who will
enable me to remove every trace of memory of M. Alexandre Dumas' "Three
Guardsmen," so that I may open that glorious book with the virgin
capacity of youth to enjoy its full delight. More; I will duplicate the
same offer for any one or all of the following:
"Les Miserables," of M. Hugo.
"Don Quixote," of Senor Cervantes.
"Vanity Fair," of Mr. Thackeray.
"David Copperfield," of Mr. Dickens.
"The Cloister and the Hearth," of Mr. Reade.
And if my good friend, Isaac of York, is lending money at the old
stand and will take pianos, pictures, furniture, dress suits and plain
household plate as collateral, upon even moderate valuation, I will go
fifty dollars each upon the following:
"The Count of Monte Cristo," of M. Dumas.
"The Wandering Jew," of M. Sue.
"The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.," of Mr. Thackeray.
"Treasure Island," of Mr. Robbie Stevenson.
"The Vicar of Wakefield," of Mr. Goldsmith.
"Pere Goriot," of M. de Balzac.
"Ivanhoe," of Baronet Scott.
(Any one previously unnamed of the whole layout of M. Dumas, excepting
only a paretic volume entitled "The Conspirators.")
Now, the man who can do the trick for one novel can do it for all--and
there's a thousand dollars waiting to be earned, and a blessing also.
It's a bald "bluff," of course, because it can't be done as we all know.
I might offer a million with safety. If it ever could have been done the
noble intellectual aristocracy of novel-readers would have been reduced
to a condition of penury and distress centuries ago.
For, who can put fetters upon even the smallest second of eternity? Who
can repeat a joy or duplicate a sweet sorrow? Who has ever had more than
one first sweetheart, or more than one first kiss under the honeysuckle?
Or has ever seen his name in print for the first time, ever again? Is it
any wonder that all these inexplicable longings, these hopeless hopes,
were summed up in the heart-cry of Faust--
"Stay, yet awhile, O moment of beauty."
* * * * *
Yet, I maintain, Dr. Faustus was a weak creature. He begged to be given
another and wholly different chance to linger with beauty. How much
nobler the magnificent courage of the veteran novel-reader, who in the
old age of his service, asks only that he may be permitted to do again
all that he has done, blindly, humbly, loyally, as before.
Don't I know? Have I not been there? It is no child's play, the life of
a man who--paraphrasing the language of Spartacus, the much neglected
hero of the ages--has met upon the printed page every shape of perilous
adventure and dangerous character that the broad empire of fiction could
furnish, and never yet lowered his arm. Believe me it is no carpet duty
to have served on the British privateers in Guiana, under Commodore
Kingsley, alongside of Salvation Yeo; to have been a loyal member of
Thuggee and cast the scarf for Bowanee; to have watched the tortures of
Beatrice Cenci (pronounced as written in honest English, and I spit upon
the weaklings of the service who imagine that any freak of woman called
Bee-ah-treech-y Chon-chy could have endured the agonies related of that
sainted lady)--to have watched those tortures, I say, without breaking
down; to have fought under the walls of Acre with Richard Coeur de Lion;
to have crawled, amid rats and noxious vapors, with Jean Valjean through
the sewers of Paris; to have dragged weary miles through the snow with
Uncas, Chief of the Mohicans; to have lived among wild beasts with Morok
the lion tamer; to have charged with the impis of Umslopogaas; to have
sailed before the mast with Vanderdecken, spent fourteen gloomy years
in the next cell to Edmund Dantes, ferreted out the murders in the Rue
Morgue, advised Monsieur Le Cocq and given years of life's prime in
tedious professional assistance to that anointed idiot and pestiferous
scoundrel, Tittlebat Titmouse! Equally, of course, it has not been all
horror and despair. Life averages up fairly, as any novel-reader
will admit, and there has been much of delight--even luxury and
idleness--between the carnage hours of battle. Is it not so? Ask that
boyish-hearted old scamp whom you have seen scuttling away from the
circulating library with M. St. Pierre's memoirs of young Paul and his
beloved Virginia under his arm; or stepping briskly out of the book
store hugging to his left side a carefully wrapped biography of Lady
Diana Vernon, Mlle. de la Valliere, or Madame Margaret Woffington; or
in fact any of a thousand charming ladies whom it is certain he had met
before. Ladies too, who, born whensoever, are not one day older since
he last saw them. Nearly a hundred years of Parisian residence have not
served to induce the Princess Haydee of Yanina to forego her picturesque
Greek gowns and coiffures, or to alter the somewhat embarrassing status
of her relations with her striking but gloomy protector, the Count of
Monte Cristo.
The old memories are crowded with pleasures. Those delicious mornings in
the allee of the park, where you were permitted to see Cosette with her
old grandfather, M. Fauchelevent; those hours of sweet pain when it was
impossible to determine whether it was Rebecca or Rowena who seemed to
give most light to the day; the flirtations with Blanche Amory, and the
notes placed in the hollow tree; the idyllic devotion of Little Emily,
dating from the morning when you saw her dress fluttering on the beam as
she ran along it, lightly, above the flowing tide--(devotion that is yet
tender, for, God forgive you Steerforth as I do, you could not smirch
that pure heart;) the melancholy, yet sweet sorrow, with which you saw
the loved and lost Little Eva borne to her grave over which the
mocking-bird now sings his liquid requiem. Has it not been sweet good
fortune to love Maggie Tulliver, Margot of Savoy, Dora Spenlow
(undeclared because she was an honest wife--even though of a most
conceited and commonplace jackass, totally undeserving of her); Agnes
Wicklow (a passion quickly cured when she took Dora's pitiful leavings),
and poor ill-fated Marie Antoinette? You can name dozens if you have
been brought up in good literary society.
* * * * *
These love affairs may be owned freely, as being perfectly honorable,
even if hopeless. And, of course, there have been gallantries--mere
affaires du jour--such as every man occasionally engages in. Sometimes
they seemed serious, but only for a moment. There was Beatrix Esmond,
for whom I could certainly have challenged His Grace of Hamilton, had
not Lord Mohun done the work for me. Wandering down the street in London
one night, in a moment of weak admiration for her unrivalled nerve
and aplomb, I was hesitating--whether to call on Mrs. Rawdon Crawley,
knowing that her thick-headed husband was in hoc for debt--when the door
of her house crashed open and that old scoundrel, Lord Steyne, came
wildly down the steps, his livid face blood-streaked, his topcoat on
his arm and a dreadful look in his eye. The world knows the rest as I
learned it half an hour later at the greengrocer's, where the Crawleys
owed an inexcusably large bill. Then the Duchess de Langeais--but all
this is really private.
After all, a man never truly loves but once. And somewhere in Scotland
there is a mound above the gentle, tender and heroic Helen Mar, where
lies buried the first love of my soul. That mound, O lovely and loyal
Helen, was watered by the first blinding and unselfish tears that
ever sprang from my eyes. You were my first love; others may come and
inevitably they go, but you are still here, under the pencil pocket of
my waistcoat.
Who can write in such a state? It is only fair to take a rest and brace
up. [Blank Page]
II
NOVEL-READERS
AS DISTINGUISHED FROM WOMEN AND NIBBLERS AND AMATEURS
There is, of course, but one sort of novel-reader who is of any
importance He is the man who began under the age of fourteen and
is still sticking to it--at whatever age he may be--and full of
a terrifying anxiety lest he may be called away in the midst of
preliminary announcements of some pet author's "next forthcoming." For
my own part I cannot conceive dying with resignation knowing that the
publishers were binding up at the time anything of Henryk Sienckiewicz's
or Thomas Hardy's. So it is important that a man begin early, because he
will have to quit all too soon.
There are no women novel-readers. There are women who read novels, of
course; but it is a far cry from reading novels to being a novel-reader.
It is not in the nature of a woman. The crown of woman's character is
her devotion, which incarnate delicacy and tenderness exalt into perfect
beauty of sacrifice. Those qualities could no more live amid the
clashings of indiscriminate human passions than a butterfly wing could
go between the mill rollers untorn. Women utterly refuse to go on with a
book if the subject goes against their settled opinions. They despise a
novel--howsoever fine and stirring it may be--if there is any taint of
unhappiness to the favorite at the close. But the most flagrant of all
their incapacities in respect to fiction is the inability to appreciate
the admirable achievements of heroes, unless the achievements are solely
in behalf of women. And even in that event they complacently consider
them to be a matter of course, and attach no particular importance to
the perils or the hardships undergone. "Why shouldn't he?" they argue,
with triumphant trust in ideals; "surely he loved her!"
There are many women who nibble at novels as they nibble at
luncheon--there are also some hearty eaters; but 98 per cent of them
detest Thackeray and refuse resolutely to open a second book of Robert
Louis Stevenson. They scent an enemy of the sex in Thackeray, who never
seems to be in earnest, and whose indignant sarcasm and melancholy
truthfulness they shrink from. "It's only a story, anyhow," they argue
again; "he might, at least write a pleasant one, instead of bringing in
all sorts of disagreeable people--some of them positively disreputable."
As for Stevenson, whom men read with the thrill of boyhood rising new
in their veins, I believe in my soul women would tear leaves out of his
novels to tie over the tops of preserve jars, and never dream of the
sacrilege.
Now I hold Thackeray and Stevenson to be the absolute test of capacity
for earnest novel-reading. Neither cares a snap of his fingers for
anybody's prejudices, but goes the way of stern truth by the light of
genius that shines within him.
If you could ever pin a woman down to tell you what she thought, instead
of telling you what she thinks it is proper to tell you, or what she
thinks will please you, you would find she has a religious conviction
that Dot Perrybingle in "The Cricket of the Hearth," and Ouida's Lord
Chandos were actually a materializable an and a reasonable gentleman,
either of whom might be met with anywhere in their proper circles, I
would be willing to stand trial for perjury on the statement that I've
known admirable women--far above the average, really showing signs of
moral discrimination--who have sniveled pitifully over Nancy Sykes and
sniffed scornfully at Mrs. Tess Durbeyfield Clare. It is due to their
constitution and social heredity. Women do not strive and yearn and
stalk abroad for the glorious pot of intellectual gold at the end of the
rainbow; they pick and choose and, having chosen, sit down straightway
and become content. And a state of contentment is an abomination in the
sight of man. Contentment is to be sought for by great masculine minds
only with the purpose of being sure never quite to find it.
* * * * *
For all practical purposes, therefore--except perhaps as object lessons
of "the incorrect method" in reading novels--women, as novel-readers,
must be considered as not existing. And, of course, no offense is
intended. But if there be any weak-kneed readers who prefer the
gilt-wash of pretty politeness to the solid gold of truth, let them
understand that I am not to be frightened away from plain facts by any
charge of bad manners.
On the contrary, now that this disagreeable interruption has been forced
upon me--certainly not through any seeking of mine--it may be better to
speak out and settle the matter. Men who have the happiness of being in
the married state know that nothing is to be gained by failing to settle
instantly with women who contradict and oppose them. Who was that mellow
philosopher in one of Trollope's tiresomely clever novels who said: "My
word for it, John, a husband ought not to take a cane to his wife
too soon. He should fairly wait till they are half-way home from the
church--but not longer, not longer." Of course every man with a spark
of intelligence and gallantry wishes that women COULD rise to real
novel-reading Think what courtship would be! Every true man wishes to
heaven there was nothing more to be said against women than that they
are not novel-readers. But can mere forgetting remove the canker? Do not
all of us know that the abstract good of the very existence of woman is
itself open to grave doubt--with no immediate hope of clearing up? Woman
has certainly been thrust upon us. Is there any scrap of record to show
that Adam asked for her? He was doing very well, was happy, prosperous
and healthy. There was no certainty that her creation was one of that
unquestionably wonderful series that occupied the six great days.
We cannot conceal that her creation caused a great pain in Adam's
side--undoubtedly the left side, in the region of the heart. She
has been described by young and dauntless poets as "God's best
afterthought;" but, now, really--and I advance the suggestion with
no intention to be brutal but solely as a conscientious duty to the
ascertainment of truth--why is it, that--. But let me try to present the
matter in the most unobjectionable manner possible.
In reading over that marvelous account of creation I find frequent
explicit declaration that God pronounced everything good after he had
created it--except heaven and woman. I have maintained sometimes to
stern, elderly ladies that this might have been an error of omission by
early copyists, perpetuated and so become fixed in our translations. To
other ladies, of other age and condition, to whom such propositions
of scholarship might appear to be dull pedantry, I have ventured the
gentlemanlike explanation that, as woman was the only living thing
created that was good beyond doubt, perhaps God had paid her the special
compliment of leaving the approval unspoken, as being in a sense
supererogatory. At best, either of these dispositions of the matter is,
of course, far-fetched, maybe even frivolous. The fact still remains by
the record. And it is beyond doubt awkward and embarrassing, because
ill-natured men can refer to it in moments of hatefulness--moments
unfortunately too frequent.
Is it possible that this last creation was a mistake of Infinite Charity
and Eternal Truth? That Charity forbore to acknowledge that it was a
mistake and that Truth, in the very nature of its eternal essence, could
not say it was good? It is so grave a matter that one wonders Helvetius
did not betray it, as he did that other secret about which the
philosophers had agreed to keep mum, so that Herr Schopenhauer could
write about it as he did about that other. Herr Schopenhauer certainly
had the courage to speak with philosophical asperity of the gentle
sex. It may be because he was never married. And then his mother wrote
novels! I have been surprised that he was not accused of prejudice.
But if all these everyday obstacles were absent there would yet remain
insurmountable reasons why women can never be novel-readers in the sense
that men are. Your wife, for instance, or the impenetrable mystery of
womanhood that you contemplate making your wife some day--can you,
honestly, now, as a self-respecting husband of either de facto or in
futuro, quite agree to the spectacle of that adored lady sitting over
across the hearth from you in the snug room, evening after evening, with
her feet--however small and well-shaped--cocked up on the other end of
the mantel and one of your own big colorado maduros between her teeth!
We men, and particularly novel-readers, are liberal even generous, in
our views; but it is not in human nature to stand that!
Now, if a woman can not put her feet up and smoke, how in the name
of heaven, can she seriously read novels? Certainly not sitting bolt
upright, in order to prevent the back of her new gown from rubbing the
chair; certainly not reclining upon a couch or in a hammock. A boy, yet
too young to smoke may properly lie on his stomach on the floor and read
novels, but the mature veteran will fight for his end of the mantel as
for his wife and children. It is physiological necessity, inasmuch as
the blood that would naturally go to the lower extremities, is thus
measurably lessened in quantity and goes instead to the head, where a
state of gentle congestion ensues, exciting the brain cells, setting
free the imagination to roam hand in hand with intelligence under the
spell of the wizard. There may be novel-readers who do not smoke at the
game, but surely they cannot be quite earnest or honest--you had better
put in writing all business agreements with this sort.
* * * * *
No boy can ever hope to become a really great or celebrated novel-reader
who does not begin his apprenticeship under the age of fourteen, and, as
I said before, stick to it as long as he lives. He must learn to scorn
those frivolous, vacillating and purposeless ones who, after beginning
properly, turn aside and whiling away their time on mere history, or
science, or philosophy. In a sense these departments of literature are
useful enough. They enable you often to perceive the most cunning and
profoundly interesting touches in fiction. Then I have no doubt that,
merely as mental exercise, they do some good in keeping the mind in
training for the serious work of novel-reading. I have always been
grateful to Carlyle's "French Revolution," if for nothing more than that
its criss-cross, confusing and impressive dullness enabled me to find
more pleasure in "A Tale of Two Cities" than was to be extracted from
any merit or interest in that unreal novel.
This much however, may be said of history, that it is looking up in
these days as a result of studying the spirit of the novel. It was
not many years ago that the ponderous gentlemen who write criticisms
(chiefly because it has been forgotten how to stop that ancient waste
of paper and ink) could find nothing more biting to say of Macaulay's
"England" than that it was "a splendid work of imagination," of Froude's
"Caesar" that it was "magnificent political fiction," and of Taine's
"France" that "it was so fine it should have been history instead of
fiction." And ever since then the world has read only these three
writers upon these three epochs--and many other men have been writing
history upon the same model. No good novel-reader need be ashamed to
read them, in fact. They are so like the real thing we find in the
greatest novels, instead of being the usual pompous official lies of
old-time history, that there are flesh, blood and warmth in them.
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