Story / essay notes

Hawthorne’s tale (among the Twice-Told Tales) is American nineteenth-century short fiction, not a British Victorian novel. One sitting, one room, one test. Dr Heidegger, elderly, invites four aged friends: Mr Medbourne, ruined in speculation; Colonel Killigrew, worn by pleasure; Mr Gascoigne, a ruined politician; and Widow Wycherly, once a beauty, now a scandal. The study holds dust, cobwebs, a skeleton in the closet, a bust of Hippocrates, a black folio of magic. On the table a cut-glass vase of water.

He shows a withered rose, fifty-five years old, his dead fiancée’s. He drops it in the vase; it blooms. The water, he says, is from the Fountain of Youth in Florida. The four laugh, then drink. Colour returns; wrinkles go; they are young again and immediately vain. The Widow’s mirror, the men’s rivalry, the same flirtation and quarrel they had in youth — all return in minutes. They dance, lunge, knock the table; the vase smashes; the precious water is a puddle on the floor. The rose withers. They wither. Dr Heidegger has not drunk.

Short-story method: limited cast, one device, a close that turns the knife. It is not an essay. It is not Wilde’s novel, though both use a magical object that tells the truth about a face. Stay in this one sitting; do not drag in other Hawthorne novels.

The doctor’s lesson is the last turn. He has learned enough from the evening not to drink. The four have learned nothing they will keep. As soon as they are old again they plan a pilgrimage to Florida to drink from the Fountain itself. A second youth would not teach them; it would only repeat the folly. That is why the tale is a short story of revelation, not a sermon pasted on. The rose is the emblem: bloom by art, then the same withering.

Keep neighbours apart. Wilde’s portrait hides vice while the face stays young; Hawthorne’s friends show vice as soon as they are young, in public, in one room. If a question asks you to illustrate “short story” from this paper, this is the exhibit: one experiment, one smashed vase, one refusal to learn.

Stevenson’s essay (1876; Virginibus Puerisque, 1881) is a personal essay in the line of Hazlitt, whom he quotes. A walking tour is not mainly a better way to see landscape: the railway sees landscape vividly enough. The walker goes for “certain jolly humours” — morning hope, evening peace. Pleasure must lead on to pleasure. The overwalker who stupefies himself with miles comes to the inn with frost on his wits and misses the happiness. To be properly enjoyed, the tour should be gone upon alone. Company turns it into a picnic. Freedom is of the essence: your own pace, your own stops, thoughts taking colour from what you see. Hazlitt: walking and talking at once is no wit; in the country one wishes to vegetate like the country.

The day has a curve: exhilaration of the start; then open-air drunkenness, a cheerful dream of muscle and road; bivouac at a milestone, pipe, no clock — “Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever.” Night after dinner is the best hour: the pipe, the book that sounds as if you had written it, talk at the inn door, or “happy thinking” by the fire when weather imprisons you. Modern haste, clocks, projects, forget that the point is to live. Next morning the parish of the infinite changes. Hold three claims: alone; not the overwalker; the evening’s repletion. It is not a short story. It is not Huxley’s classification of snobs. If you name Hazlitt’s On Going a Journey as Stevenson’s acknowledged master, you have the genre right.

Huxley’s essay opens with a hard sentence: all men are snobs about something. He then sorts the fashions. Disease-snobbery: the adolescent who thinks it romantic to fade like Keats, and the richer sort who collect fashionable maladies and spas. Family-snobbery is in decline. Culture-snobbery still strong, wrestling with a snobbery of ignorance. Booze-snobbery, born of American Prohibition, makes drunkenness socially creditable. Modernity-snobbery is the age’s economic engine: machines overproduce, so advertising teaches us to throw away and buy again — “We are all modernity-snobs now.” Art-snobbery splits: platonic (an “interest” in art) and unplatonic (buying art as culture-symbol and wealth-symbol). Old Masters are safer than living painters; a few modernity-art-snobs, plus eccentrics who like art for itself, keep artists alive.

The humanistic “point” of snobbery is that it stimulates activity: a society with plenty of snobberies is like a dog with fleas — not comatose. If activity is good, snobberies are good; a Buddhist would condemn them all. Huxley votes a middle: approve those snobberies that provoke better activities (the intellectual will even stomach culture-snobs because they make philistines pay a tribute to mind); detest the rest. Each hierarchy culminates in its own Pope. Keep the essay as witty classification plus this moral of the middle. It is not Wilde’s Preface (art for art); it is sociology of prestige. Do not confuse it with Belloc’s praise of not-knowing.

Belloc opens with a joke of dates: Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly; four hundred years later he will write in praise of Ignorance. The target is not illiteracy. It is the modern pride of knowing a little of everything, and the specialist who knows more and more about less and less, then speaks as if that sliver were the world. Print and fashionable theory can be a tyranny: people repeat what they have not tested. There is a health in saying “I do not know,” in keeping wonder, common sense, and the knowledge of ordinary things — a craft, a road, a parish — against the man stuffed with newspaper. Some ignorance is even a protection: not every vice and not every pretension needs to be studied before a conscience can judge.

It is a paradox essay, not a hymn to remaining untaught. Belloc does not tell you to skip the set poems. He tells you not to confuse information with wisdom, and not to let an expert’s tone bully a conscience. Beside Huxley: Huxley maps snobberies, including a snobbery of culture and a snobbery of ignorance; Belloc defends a humble not-knowing that is the opposite of that low-brow pose. Beside Stevenson: both distrust modern haste; Stevenson’s walker empties the mind by stride, Belloc by refusing false knowledge. In an answer: Erasmus hook; specialist vs whole; “I do not know”; not an attack on literacy.

Chesterton’s essay (All Is Grist) is a defence of maturity against the cult of youth. The young have energy and innocence, but they have little past with which to compare a new thing: they cannot taste “new” until they have an “old.” They also have little patience for a proverb they have not yet found true. The person who is no longer very young has the pleasure of recognition: this has happened before; the proverb fits; the joke is on the latest fashion. Proverbs become usable because experience has paid for them. Happiness, here, is not a defeat called old age; it is being better equipped — able to take a predicament and find its old name.

Youth can be in conflict with itself for lack of that equipment. Age is not automatically wisdom (a fool can grow old), but the essay’s claim is that perspective, humour, and the acceptance of tested sayings are pleasures the very young cannot yet have. Beside Huxley’s modernity-snob, Chesterton refuses to treat newness as a duty. Beside Stevenson’s “happy thinking,” this is another essay against haste — not on a road, but in a life. Beside Belloc, both use paradox to defend something unfashionable (ignorance; not being young). It is not a short story and not a dirge. If the question is this essay, name youth’s lack of comparison, the proverb as earned wisdom, and pleasure as perspective, not as decline.