Ponkapog Papers | Page 4

ready-made and second-hand clothing. The contents of the dingy shops seem to have revolted, and rushed pell-mell out of doors, and taken possession of the sidewalk. One could fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this point, and that those ghastly rows of complete suits strung up on either side of the doorways were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders. But as you approach these limp figures, each dangling and gyrating on its cord in a most suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the lapel of a coat here and there, a strip of paper announcing the very low price at which you may become the happy possessor. That dis- sipates the illusion.
POLONIUS, in the play, gets killed--and not any too soon. If it only were practicable to kill him in real life! A story--to be called The Passing of Polonius--in which a king issues a decree condemning to death every long-winded, didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of rank, and is himself instantly arrested and de- capitated. The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
WHENEVER I take up Emerson's poems I find myself turning automatically to his Bacchus. Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in mediocre verse, he rises for a moment to heights not reached by any other of our poets; but Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its tex- ture can bear comparison with the world's best in this kind. In imaginative quality and austere richness of diction what other verse of our period approaches it? The day Emerson wrote Bacchus he had in him, as Michael Drayton said of Marlowe, "those brave translunary things that the first poets had."
IMAGINE all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest portrait of himself in an autobiography, however sedulously he may have set to work about it. In spite of his candid purpose he omits necessary touches and adds superfluous ones. At times he cannot help draping his thought, and the least shred of drapery becomes a disguise. It is only the diarist who accom- plishes the feat of self-portraiture, and he, with- out any such end in view, does it unconsciously. A man cannot keep a daily record of his com- ings and goings and the little items that make up the sum of his life, and not inadvertently betray himself at every turn. He lays bare his heart with a candor not possible to the self- consciousness that inevitably colors premeditated revelation. While Pepys was filling those small octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he never once suspected that he was adding a pho- tographic portrait of himself to the world's gal- lery of immortals. We are more intimately acquainted with Mr. Samuel Pepys, the inner man--his little meannesses and his large gener- osities--then we are with half the persons we call our dear friends.
THE young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever any- body praises her she breaks into colors.
IN the process of dusting my study, the other morning, the maid replaced an engraving of Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the man- tel-shelf, and his majesty has remained in that undignified posture ever since. I have no dis- position to come to his aid. My abhorrence of the wretch is as hearty as if he had not been dead and--otherwise provided for these last three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England was nearly as merciless, but she was sincere and uncompromising in her extirpation of heretics.
Philip II., whose one recorded hearty laugh was occasioned by the news of the St. Bartholomew massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop it for the time being, when it seemed politic to do so. Queen Mary was a maniac; but the suc- cessor of Torquemada was the incarnation of cruelty pure and simple, and I have a mind to let my counterfeit presentment of him stand on its head for the rest of its natural life. I cor- dially dislike several persons, but I hate no- body, living or dead, excepting Philip II. of Spain. He appears to give me as much trouble as Charles I. gave the amiable Mr. Dick.
AMONG the delightful men and women whom you are certain to meet at an English country house there is generally one guest who is sup- posed to be preternaturally clever and amusing --"so very droll, don't you know." He recites things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and mimics public characters. He is a type of a