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Vague Vagaries

LL my life has vagueness hovered about me like one of those invisible companions of little children, to whom they talk, with whom they play, from whom they receive intermittent but ample direction and consolation. I cannot recall any crisis but this very Vagueness has offered something to blunt or blur, to enhance, mitigate or pacify my special need. It is evident that I can speak of Vagueness but vaguely, else it would in the exploitation become its opposite. If I can, however, dimly shadow forth its evanescent face, impart something of its shaping power; if I can separate its adventitious weakness from its essential potency; if I can show it as a stage in our development and a crown upon our endeavor, with instances of lives it has fashioned-manipulating these into a sort of whole to prove that the best part of truth is that which evades our thinking, the best part of thought that which eludes our speech, and the best part of life that which escapes our classification-I may help to dissipate the traditional prejudice against this discredited quality.

I despair as I read my supposititious listing: if, if-but of course I cannot express the Vagueness that is next my heart, nor can I be quite at ease until I try. Even with Hardy's dictum in mind, that only those who half know a thing write about it; for those who know a thing thoroughly do not take the trouble-I still try.

That some of my bias is physical I must allow. "Why do artists always draw a moon like that?" I once asked petulantly, pointing to a painted crescent. "How would you draw it?" questioned my mother. Whereupon I drew a proper moon with two horns on either side, and a little crescent tidily tucked into the arms of its parent. I was forthwith led off to the oculist, and my heavens stripped of half their glory. "No wonder you find four-leaf clovers!" exclaimed my same comrade, now sophisticated, after frantic but futile search in the grass to rival my vaunted pickings; "I could too if I saw double!" So if my Vagueness is a magic, in the exercise of which I

have only to pull off my spectacles, hers was a magic of the mind, the donning at will of wizard glasses which could rectify most of the prosaic literalism and the too-sharp-byfar focussing of a conventional world.

The principle, however, is the same. Just as misty morning assumes the similitude of dusky twilight, and each is more exquisite in my hemmed-in garden, when my shadow is the long trail leading to rising or setting sun, than is noonday's brilliance, when I wantonly tread down the black, amorphous shape myself creates. And just as misty morning progresses to dusky twilight, I trust that my own physical vagueness, instanced by astigmatic vision of waxing moon, will grow into the deliberately sublimated vagueness of my mother, founding the astronomers, but oh! delighting me."

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The evolution of Vagueness seems to me something like this: The unconsciousness of it in Infancy; passing to adoption of it in Childhood; after which Youth's dawning recognition of it, growing dislike and distrust of it, with the effort, fostered by the schools, to overcome it. Manhood brings so-called victory. The mind is intensely keen, discriminating, far-seeing; so farseeing, so discriminating, so keen, that inklings come of a haunting vagueness, followed by faint praise of it, shy tests of it, tentative practice of it. This bourgeons into the luminous vagueness of Old Age, when there is no more search, no more question-then Vagueness. Thus like the winds and clouds it circles our little world, and for its perfect consummation it must be nowhere stayed or spent.

At birth, what a long way the ancestral vagueness has to go, "seeking among forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul." Then, like Jeanne d'Arc, or Pelle the Conqueror, or any least one of us, comes a vague feeling of being chosen. "Even as a child it made Pelle look with courage in the face of a hard world. Light radiated from him, insignificant and ordinary as he was. God had given him the spark, the old man said, and he looked upon the boy as a little miracle of heaven." In

Shades of the prison-house! The child must pass from the vagueness he loves to the rigid rule of the educator. The wise teacher will avoid haste in putting exact ideas into his undeveloped brain, knowing exactness will be repugnant. This is why the influence of Arnold upon the majority of his pupils was "very good though very vague." From myth and Homer the youth is led to mathematics and logic and the exact sciences. The rainbow is reduced to the prismatic colors; analytic fingers dissect the old magic of flower and cloud and stream; the vein is traced, not by beautyloving eye on wrist and temple, but by the scalpel on the cadaver. Thomas must feel the nail-marks; Euclid must measure the sides of his triangle; Watt must press the cover down on the teakettle. "Therefore," becomes the habitual conjunction. But hark! "Nevertheless" creeps in, with some apprehension of its meaning. Henry James got it earlier than most persons, "the intensity of meaning and vagueness that thrills us but once, the prime hour of first intuitions!" Even in his college days he had come to regard vagueness as a saving virtue; though "to be properly and perfectly vague one has to be vague about something," he concedes. Kipling, perceiving that his passion for exact definition failed to produce depth and shimmer and bloom, faced about, evolved a new obscurity, a mist not of dusk but of dawn, and the unsubstantial dream-stuff of Rewards and Fairies was minted into shape. nobly wrote Dixon Scott, the young critic killed at Dardanelles. "For half of life," he comments, "is moonlit, and the image that would copy it exactly must be vague." This is the stage in the evolution of the theme in which one would linger, to contemplate and to experience. But turn, my wheel! We find that what escapes us on the steady swing of it, glows as the pace quickens. "In rapid flashes, with the hurrying of the rhythm of time, we discern

So

Is there not cheer in this for Old Age-the relaxation of energy, the dimming of our light, the softening of the too-lucid focus? Watt still painted at ninety-five, typified by his blindfolded hope, listening intently to the music of the world. Yeats promises "Though you have passed the best of life, shall trace Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion Magical shapes."

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St. Paul's Paradox

EOPLE who believe what they cannot prove are not necessarily sinners against truth and justice. We constantly see the power of things which are not bring to naught the things which are. We see wide-spread human needs awakening to continuous if often vague social movements-"the soft, indefinite jellyfish retains its shape, and grows in wind and storm, because its particles are bound by an organic force." Ralph Cram comments on the vague heroes buried at Glastonbury: "St. Dunstan, the Venerable Bede, King Arthur and Guinevere, Merlin and Elaine. Why not? Actualities or emanations, they are facts. Even science, according to Herbert Spencer, discovers new veilings in every evolutionary advance, but these veilings are revealings." Probably every man, living at a certain intellectual level, has in mind an obscure inkling of the proximate discovery which is to change our views of nature; while the least thinker recognizes some subject about which his thought revolves, a subject whose very vagueness lends plasticity and hence usefulness to daily life. Perhaps I speak timidly of some theme over which I have long speculated. My friends do not understand. They catch me up in sharp disagree

ment. I cannot argue. I reach my conclusion somehow and then lose the thread of my own procedure and cannot quickly recover it. I am embarrassed and change the subject. Yet my mind has somehow made a spring beyond anything I knew before. Later, my friends recur to the subject questioningly. Their former surety has progressed to doubt. This is the law of life; even clarity must change or perish, adapt itself or die.

So I am less and less daunted by others' clear-sightedness and sure-footedness, their lucid statements, their concise terminology; and I trust more and more to reaching my own dim goal, even blindfolded, with uncertain steps, through unmarked paths. The air, I feel sure, will clear as I go, and my step become firmer as I advance. I am not seeking Vagueness, per se-I have enough of it already; but I repeat that it enters, as a slave, not a leader, into my philosophy of life. Mindful of the fact that the things which have ever most fascinated and influenced me were not accomplishments, but half-formed purposes, vague aspirations, unsuccessful attempts; conversation and reading about deep things which I could not understand; feelings not easily defended on the grounds of definite help given or wrongs done I hold, in George Eliot's estimable phrase, to "the inalienable right of private haziness," and I concur with a later novelist, Mr. de Morgan, when he gaily advocates: "Do not try to say what you mean, because you can't, you are not clever enough!"

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The Unpublished

'HE cruel business of sending rejection slips to hopeful authors gives very little time or place for the exercise of "the humanities." Indeed, the reader often enough wishes for an opportunity to express some sentiment besides stereotyped disapproval or lack of interest, for he is generally wholly devoid of harsh feelings, and not in the least bored by the floods of unavailable manuscripts that must go back whence they came. Contrary to public opinion, it is no fearful task to read and pass upon manuscripts. Instead, it is one of the most romantic of pastimes. One's fingers clutch strands from the far ends of the earth, and stow away into one place each day such a collection of

the great and the lowly as would put an ordinary city street to shame. Here East meets West and all nations gather, striving in friendly fashion for that seemingly unattainable thing, editorial favor. And to the magazine reader, who merely picks the sheep from the goats, one great interest must always be the personality of the contributor.

How many strange people one meets, and how very well one learns to know them! Particularly is this true of the Unpublished, for they have not yet learned to hide all things under the cloak of art, or to serve up startling reality with the grace and inevitability of fiction. Their work is replete with life in the rough; they deal but rarely with pure fancy, and even then sometimes the alchemy fails-somewhere the art wears thin and the gilt of romance rubs off and reveals the reality beneath. One may probe with the analyst's full joy, and discover with surprising accuracy of what stuff contributors are made, and what experiences their lives have held. One may work in vast fields, for the trusting contributor pours out his all to the editor—his age and ambition, his heart's secrets and his financial status, his family skeleton—and lets them all gather to await the editor's momentary decision of their right to fame.

Personally I should be willing never to meet, editorially speaking, with the Published Great. Their ways are covered with an architectural grandeur; their remoteness does not tempt one to intrude upon it in the hope of possible discovery. But the Unpublished are a never-failing joy.

Some of them introduce themselves personally to you. The débutante from the Middle West, whose father is on the staff of the local paper, sends you a five-column clipping containing a lovely portrait of herself, and a note saying "A few words to tell you who I am." And thereafter day by day you are flooded with verse about the poor factory worker, and the miner whose young wife has died, and the earthquakeorphaned children. And back they must all go to her with nothing more than a printed slip for comment, when you would so like to add approval of her interest in the downtrodden poor, and more than that, a statement that you liked the picture and thought the débutante's gown in every way equal to those of the New York shop-win

dows. And in the same mail you have received another portrait, of a man who would surely advertise himself in a want column as an "aggressive live-wire." Boldness is written deep in his face, but very little candor. And oh, horror! He writes of his experiences in an insane asylum, and of playfully throwing jelly in the faces of the inmates. "Pure fact," he calls it, and urges that it be published to show how a man may be wronged-shut up in an asylum with no one to believe that he is not insane. The "story" runs a little thin at the end of the thirtieth page, but still bears the stamp of truth in a few places. You long to send it to an alienist of your acquaintance, instead of back to its author, whom you now picture running unguarded about the streets, throwing things.

Always the mails are flooded with verse. The lyric outcry of humanity, read only by the editorial profession, contains much material for the student of race development and of psychology, for here nothing is suppressed. All moods, all joys, sorrows, and passions, have poetic license. By example from the realists of the present day, nothing is too sordid or too vulgar, and by tradition from the infinite past, nothing is too beautiful or too holy to go unspoken. What does it matter, since only the editor reads them and he guards the secrets with his professional honor? What if contributors knew that it is not alone professional honor that prevents him from sharing his discoveries into the ways of the soul, but mostly his very great confusion at having heaped upon him the secrets of so many souls! After years of experience he has learned not to attempt a vicarious part in their emotions, for his job is that of picking out literature, not revelling in life. doubt that lesson takes very long to learn, and only the great accomplish it, and even they themselves are never so happy as when they come upon a "human document" that is at the same time literature, for this is rare indeed. But the reader for the magazine does not try to learn this lesson, lest it take away the chiefest of his joys.

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How one looks for letters from the bride who has tacked her married name at the end of her maiden name in bold proud letters, and scratched out the "Miss" that

preceded it that last time her efforts fell into an editor's hands! She has, as you know, run the gamut of all the unmarried emotions, and you wonder what new possibilities will be brought to the surface by her richer life.

Here again among the very regular contributors is one who mentions the price he will demand if his manuscripts are accepted. How heavy a price, and possible to how very few publications! One regards this as arrogance unspeakable, especially when the information comes typed upon the most heavily engraved and embossed paper. Far preferable is the work of the gentle old lady-by her handwriting-who tells about her garden, each flower in a separate poem, "The Lily" written upon white paper, "Forget-Me-Not" upon blue, "Old-Fashioned Rose," upon pale pink, and "The Violets" upon that lovely lavender affected by old ladies, and, wonder of wonders, she offers you the whole dainty collection "Free, no compensation desired"! Almost as entrancing is the offering of a man from the gallant South, whose collection of "Songs of the Heart," written in red ink, contains an ode to each member of his family, entitled variously “Adored Father," "Darling Sister Jess," "Beloved Wife," and "Most Precious Baby," and there is even an "Esteemed Mother-inLaw!" Oh, perfect self-revelation, worthy of more than a mere reader's delight!

One grows to love the familiar names of the Unpublished, and to smile kindly and not scornfully at their urgent request that their writing, be kept "strictly anonymous." The tasteful modesty of the unknown ones is refreshing amidst the hosts who yearn for fame.

What becomes of the returned writings of the Unpublished no one will ever know. Are quiet tears dropped upon them, or are they flung in scattering sheets about the room, wildly, to match the author's rage, or burned with bitter smiles in a cynic's fire? At least be it known that they have filled up with their diverting variety the craving after "human interest" in one reader, at least, who with all humbleness of spirit begs their pardon for editorial rudeness, and in entire sincerity wishes them well!

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'N his art, Abbott H. Thayer is one of our foremost American painters. His pictures have enduring qualities, and this has for many years been understood and recognized wherever art is known. He had the supreme ability to see and realize essential character-the

Mr. William James, in the "Stevenson Memorial," and in the picture entitled "My Children" in the Carnegie Institute collection, the same figure appears, representing a type, although not primarily a portrait in any one of these. With unerring precision in each case, Thayer has portrayed the character of the girl, which he has understood in a profound and masterly way. The three paintings are revelations of his power in portraiture. It is not simply that we recognize the model. It is that we recognize unmistakably the character of the girl.

tion is not restricted to any age or nation. They live in the art of every period and people. They are universal.

Abbott Thayer's portraits are profound expressions of character, wherein he seems to have fathomed the innermost meaning of personality as expressed by external form. As showing his grasp upon essential, dominating character a comparison of three of his important paintings will be convincing. In the "Sketch for an Angel," owned by

In the group entitled "My Children," the portrait of his son Gerald has been painted with. such insight and knowledge that even in this child's head we see the man of later years.

To this, the power to realize character, Thayer added another important qualification-a sensitive response to beauty and nobility in life, whether in man or nature. Many of his groups and figures are especially fine in their expression of grace, and they always possess a rare distinction. He had a feeling for the beauty of symmetry as expressed in form, which is very evident in his compositions.

One of the most beautiful of his subject