Charles Macomb Flandrau

“ Abstractly considered, travel is at best an uncomfortable activity more often than not: strange beds, strange food, a constant, hideous packing and unpacking of trunks too small to contain conveniently one’s few possessions; long, dreary intervals in railway stations, nightmare scrambles at custom-houses, steamers that bury their noses in the sea and kick their heels in the air, sleeping cars always either too hot or too cold. Such is travel in the abstract. Its pleasant qualities, like the pleasant qualities of almost every other pleasure in life, must be supplied largely by{83} ourselves. ”

“ You can, in a word, endure the naked truth about persons who are not of your own nationality and whose language is not very familiar to you, but you hate to have the truth told about your neighbors and acquaintances and friends. You hate to have a writer of English tackle either the fundamental questions of existence, or any of the ugly, gross, squalid, frightful, real aspects that can be found without any trouble whatever in every well-regulated family. ”

“ Wells himself is aware of what is really the lesson of his novel, but it is that sixty rarely has sympathy with and genuine understanding of twenty, and twenty in its heart of hearts looks upon sixty, not as perhaps experienced and wise, but as rather absurd. Concessions! All life is an endless succession of them. If we didn’t at every moment make them, everybody in the world would have to live in absolute solitude, and even then he would have to concede to the forces of nature, the sun and the rain, the cold and the dark, hunger, weariness and sleep. ”

“ One stays in the house and, some time during the day, eats a variety of rather unusual and not necessarily agreeable things one would never think of ordering at a restaurant or a club. Until one has freed oneself from the thralldom of holidays (I have) , the semi-historical, semi-culinary torpidity of Thanksgiving Day usually upsets one’s routine, one’s digestion, one’s entire scheme of life. It is as if the Fourth of July had eloped with Christmas and the result of the union had been a kind of illegitimate Sunday. ”

“ I yearned instead for an exquisite bedroom and salon overhanging a sapphire and diamond sea, a young man—whose{134} very presence created a deeper silence—to wake me in the morning, to draw a bath, to lay out my clothes, to bring me my breakfast on china that had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. I wanted to arise late and mingle with perfectly dressed, good-looking, agreeable people, who seemed to be enjoying themselves and who, if they ever did have annoying, serious or sad moments, never let one know about it. ”

“ My experience with writers may not be conclusive, but it seems to have dawned on me that, the more important a writer is, the more stable and justified his place is in the world of letters, the less eager he is to chatter about his profession. It is the person who has more or less accidentally had one story accepted by Scribner’s, Harpers’ or the Century, or the contributor to some third-rate sectional magazine, who insists upon talking of his “work,” who is forever hinting of the conspiracy among editors and publishers to reject anything unsigned by a well-known name. ”

“ It is a rather hot day for Newport, but in this vast and lovely room, at a long window opening on a cliff covered with mauve heather,{132} and with the sea beyond, I don’t in the least mind. I don’t think I should mind anything very much. I don’t even mind that just outside a man is pushing a lawn mower back and forth on the faultless turf, although the sound of his performance makes me feel as if all my teeth were loose. ”

“ Sometimes the idea of one’s entire country becomes even as a long occupied chair in a room, and it is then that, circumstances being propitious, people pack up and flit to lands where everything is different. Having voluntarily sought complete change, it always strikes me as ungrateful and childish to quarrel with it when they get it. If almost everything in a foreign land were not different, travel would begin and end with locomotion, and locomotion is the least of travel. ”

“ I wanted to go to large, gay luncheons at half-past two, and larger, gayer dinners at half-past eight or nine, with golf and rides and drives, and other people and tea in between. I wanted to see lots of young girls who looked like hot-house flowers and who would decide to be charming to me because they knew that I knew it would be out of the question to try to marry them, and I wanted to talk to incredibly youthful looking old women with marvelously arranged, dyed hair, high diamond collars to conceal the wattles, and ropes of pearls, with which to run through nervous, jeweled fingers. ”

“ I have had a fat, coarse-skinned, rich, middle-aged woman half humorously assure me in speaking of one of her footmen, whose mere presence in the room made her entire family appear to be even more common than they actually were. The aristocratic tendency must have been omitted from me, for I have never been able to detect on my part the slightest desire to apologize for either intelligence or beauty wherever I wonderfully discovered it. If it is there, it is there, and instantly recognizable. But in the case of servants, it, for some reason, does not seem to be quite “the thing” to admit it. ”

“ From servants I have learned many curious and amazing things about people I thought I knew tolerably well and really didn’t because I had never been their servant. And I am not in the least ashamed of having learned these things by chatting pleasantly with servants; I am glad of it, for it has added greatly to my understanding of people and life. Nothing is more interesting than the contemplation of our little world from as many different angles as possible. The servant’s angle is one of the most acute. ”

“ When I asked him why not, he said in all sincerity that when he was in London he had never been in the kind of mood that made it a pleasure to look at such things, and he hated to make a duty of what often was so great a pleasure. The pleasure of travel, in a word, depends entirely upon the point of view. Like all the other pleasures of life it depends, to employ the trite, true phrase, upon what we ourselves bring to it. ”

“ While an American family is taking an exhausted nap or hanging about a hotel wondering what to do, these English people will be tramping five miles to see the sunset and get up an appetite for dinner. There is something admirably complete about them. They enjoy the churches and galleries and appreciate them, but they are also sincerely interested in the life of the people and in nature. The incidents of travel they take calmly as they come, and when they complain it is only because their rights have been infringed upon. ”

“ Once inside the White Maria the busy baby fingers began straightway to coördinate and keep pace with the germinating mentality by transforming the dusky interior into a veritable black hole of Calcutta. I slapped faces, pulled hair, kicked shins, threw lunch-baskets on the floor and stamped upon their contents, while the other children, goaded on to madness and piercing shrieks, ran amuck and did the same. Mr. White never interfered with this perambulating inferno both because he was of an incorrigible cheerfulness—the result of a severe sunstroke—and because he couldn’t see it. ”

“ Servants, I repeat, are a luxury. They do something for us that we could do ourselves, but don’t wish to. We deny ourselves other luxuries when we can’t afford them; why not deny ourselves servants if we can’t conveniently pay the wages they are entitled to? It is an odd fact that we don’t. Instead, we pay the wages and then complain and lament and get together and discuss “the servant problem.”
A cook, who had lived for several years with a family of my acquaintance, abruptly left them because another household offered her a dollar a month more. ”

“ A huge, bare-footed sailor came into the room, managed in some inscrutable fashion to take off his cap with a glass of beer for me in one hand and a cup of coffee for the Fourth in the other, placed the things on the table and tiptoed out. Somewhere far below us, young men and girls were waltzing frantically in the heat, women were dripping over games of bridge as if their souls depended on the outcome, men in the smoking room were getting drunk and calling one another names. ”

“ No writer is ever anything but pleased to learn that some one has found something, anything, of interest or value in one of his efforts. One may write primarily for money, to make a living, but no matter to what trashy and flashy depths a writer may descend, there is always in his books something of himself. ”

“ It was interesting for the first few days to stretch out on a chair in the sun and, with complete detachment, examine one’s fellow passengers as they passed by. One always hears that “a ship is such a good place in which to study human nature.” Of course it is. Every place is if one has the eyes and{90} ears with which to see and hear it. But I do not believe a ship is particularly so any more. The day for that has passed. People at the present time travel too much to desire to become deeply intimate on short acquaintance. They are too reserved, too experienced. ”

“ The country in general believes, I am sure, that a dinner party here is merely a euphonious term for a debauch—but, of course, you know as well as I do that a Newport dinner resembles precisely a similar festivity everywhere else in the world where there is great wealth and the strange state of mind known as “fashion.” Here there is sometimes—often, perhaps,—rather too much pomp and circumstance, more servants and American beauties and jewels than the particular occasion justifies. ”

“ During the past month a great many other persons apparently have been doing precisely the same thing. For whatever may be one’s verdict on the novels of Mr. Wells, and the verdicts are absorbingly different, it cannot be said that these volumes do not incite one to think. The ordinary American and English novel does not. It may be, and often is, skilful and diverting; it holds the attention and “passes the time,” but on finishing it one immediately begins to think of something else. It almost never seems to be the cause of the slightest kind of mental result. ”

“ Before I was twelve I had sat in a whitewashed room with a drowned boy, discussing with his family what they could most advantageously sell or pawn in order to pay for the expense of a funeral. And, oh! the wakes. We had wakes on Elm street; real ones; the kind that nowadays take place only{145} in Irish fiction. And I used to go to them because they were the wakes of persons I had known, and, in a childish way, cared for. After twenty-four years I can still recall the final expression of certain pallid, waxen faces, and white, crossed, emaciated hands. ”

“ The rocking-chairs, the tidies, the dusty green things, the pictures, the colored glass are there to “soften the blow,” to extend a kind of mute sympathy, to make you feel that your relations with the place are not entirely sordid and commercial. On a table there is literature, but lest it should strike in one’s affliction a false and jarring note, it is invariably confined to last year’s reports, bound in dark-gray paper, of the trustees of local cemeteries. To one’s intelligence it is all very insulting. ”

“ One would experience a certain delicacy in asking even a tailor about the various garments he was cutting and sewing, but comparatively few persons have scruples against putting a writer through the third degree. To me this has always been remarkable, because I realize that in almost every lawsuit, however trivial, and in almost every case of illness, there is more emotion, more hope and fear, more ingenuity, more drama, more “human interest,” than in all the novels and stories put together. ”

“ Every child in our high schools makes a futile stab at French or German. How few make of them a precious possession! As one grows older there is almost no pleasure greater than the ability to read with ease a book in a foreign language; to realize that, while the medium is different, the humanity underlying it is the same. An understanding of foreign languages, more than anything else, helps on the universal brotherhood of man.
Fourthly, I never allow my children to go to the theater because Sissy Jones is allowed to go. ”

“ The part they play in life includes being verbally kicked for so much a year. It is because of the greater prevalence in the East of English butlers and footmen, I am sometimes inclined to believe, that one more often hears the “correct” tone in speaking to a servant in New York and Boston, than one does in the cities of the West.
But there are other ways of making servants “know their place” of which we in the West are by no means guiltless. One woman of my acquaintance invariably refuses to engage a maid who possesses that all but indispensable appurtenance known as a “gentleman friend.” ”

“ On the Fourth of July, for instance, I would try to feel noisily inclined and patriotic, although my patriotism is not of a blatant variety and I had begun to dread noise almost more than I dreaded any other ill to which the human flesh is heir. On Christmas I endeavored, in the most painstaking fashion, to scare up a good-will-to-everybody sensation that I didn’t sincerely possess. On Thanksgiving Day I tried to observe the convention, not of giving thanks, for that has never become a convention, but of pretending{208} that I desired more than usual to eat, which I never did and never do. ”

“ To refrain from speaking to a writer of his books because you think it in better taste not to, because “he must be so tired of having people talk to him about that book,” is to display a not particularly keen or sympathetic understanding of human nature. ”