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Page 4
But beneath these preoccupations another influence was working its
inward way. My paramount interest had always been literary, though
regarded as a gentle diversion, not degraded to a bread-and-butter
concern. Ever since I had fallen under the superlative spell of
R.L.S., in whom the cunning enchantment of the written word first
became manifest, I had understood that books did not grow painlessly
for our amusement, but were the issue of dexterous and intentional
skill. I had thus made a stride from Conan Doyle, Cutcliffe Hyne,
Anthony Hope, and other great loves of my earliest teens; those
authors' delicious mysteries and picaresques I took for granted, not
troubling over their method; but in Stevenson, even to a schoolboy
the conscious artifice and nicety of phrase were puzzingly apparent.
A taste for literature, however, is a very different thing from a
determination to undertake the art in person as a means of
livelihood. It takes brisk stimulus and powerful internal fevers to
reduce a healthy youth to such a contemplation. All this is a long
story, and I telescope it rigorously, thus setting the whole matter,
perhaps, in a false proportion. But the central and operative factor
is now at hand.
* * * * *
There was a certain classmate of mine (from Chicago) whose main
devotion was to scientific and engineering studies. But since his
plan embraced only two years at college before "going to work," he
was (in the fashion traditionally ascribed to Chicago) speeding up
the cultural knick-knacks of his education. So, in our freshman
year, he was attending a course on "English Poets of the Nineteenth
Century," which was, in the regular schedule of things, reserved for
sophomores (supposedly riper for matters of feeling). Now I was
living in a remote dormitory on the outskirts of the wide campus
(that other Eden, demi-paradise, that happy breed of men, that
little world!) some distance from the lecture halls and busy heart
of college doings. It was the custom of those quartered in this
colonial and sequestered outpost to make the room of some central
classmate a base for the day, where books might be left between
lectures, and so on. With the Chicagoan, whom we will call "J----,"
I had struck up a mild friendship; mostly charitable on his part, I
think, as he was from the beginning one of the most popular and
influential men in the class, whereas I was one of the rabble. So it
was, at any rate; and often in the evening, returning from library
or dining hall on the way to my distant Boeotia, I would drop in at
his room, in a lofty corner of old Barclay Hall, to pick up
note-books or anything else I might have left there.
What a pleasant place is a college dormitory at night! The rooms
with their green-hooded lights and boyish similarity of decoration,
the amiable buzz and stir of a game of cards under festoons of
tobacco smoke, the wiry tinkle of a mandolin distantly heard, sudden
clatter subsiding again into a general humming quiet, the happy
sense of solitude in multitude, these are the partial ingredients of
that feeling no alumnus ever forgets. In his pensive citadel, my
friend J---- would be sitting, with his pipe (one of those new
"class pipes" with inlaid silver numerals, which appear among every
college generation toward Christmas time of freshman year). In his
lap would be the large green volume ("British Poets of the
Nineteenth Century," edited by Professor Curtis Hidden Page) which
was the textbook of that sophomore course. He was reading Keats. And
his eyes were those of one who has seen a new planet swim into his
ken. I don't know how many evenings we spent there together.
Probably only a few. I don't recall just how we communed, or
imparted to one another our juvenile speculations. But I plainly
remember how he would sit beside his desk-lamp and chuckle over the
Ode to a Nightingale. He was a quizzical and quickly humorous
creature, and Keats's beauties seemed to fill him not with
melancholy or anguish, but with a delighted prostration of laughter.
The "wormy circumstance" of the Pot of Basil, the Indian Maid
nursing her luxurious sorrow, the congealing Beads-man and the
palsied beldame Angela--these and a thousand quaintnesses of phrase
moved him to a gush of glorious mirth. It was not that he did not
appreciate the poet, but the unearthly strangeness of it all, the
delicate contradiction of laws and behaviours known to freshmen,
tickled his keen wits and emotions until they brimmed into puzzled
laughter. "Away! Away!" he would cry--
For I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards--
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