March 11, 1909
At times certain tones in music, certain sounds heard at night and whistling winds, particularly at sea have put me in a disturbed but reflective mood, when all else seemed stilled, and I looked into the depths of being with unusual clarity, and felt with an emotion as though my heart would fail the surge and mystery of the universal life: yet tossing as I seemed in a frail shallop far out on treacherous, darkling, unsheltered seas, I remained undismayed. I had a poise in this elemental feeling, a sense of security -I knew I carried with me an isle of safety in my very soul -something that nothing could daunt, that no hazards of fortune or misadventures amongst men or perils of nature could render nugatory. My breath might stop or quicken, my heart beat intensely or quit, the corporeal envelope disappear, but my soul was self-centered and serene, stablished as on a rock, unconquered and indestructible.
March 16, 1909
My most congenial companion is my own mind or soul, with which I am on familiar terms, and can commune intimately as with an alter ego, or alterum rue (L. altera).
I should like to marry a comprehensive mind as well as an attractive body, but can not find that particular combination that fills my intent. In earlier days love may be collish, illusive or confused, it may strike fire aright and fulfil, or dissipate itself, but later it should have some raison d'etre*, some congeniality of soul and ethical consideration or sanctions.
*
March 18, 1909
Club night, Princeton Club, Manhattan
March 22, 1909
Sunday morning I attended the services at St. Mark's with Marie and Blanche. Again I felt as by discovery the wonderfully rich deposit of truth found here, accumulated, whipped, worn into beautiful shapes and forms through the ages -a noble growth and structure. With all its defects and shortcomings, the man who would lay rude hands on the Church -I care not what cold intellect or ruffling force he has -is no artist or philosopher or well-wisher of his kind, but peradventure a barbarian.
March 23, 1909
Annual Dinner and Re-union of the Old Boys of Mount Pleasant Academy, at the Hotel Manhattan.
March 25, 1909
This evening I attended a meeting of the local Historical Society in the Public Library building. Mr. John C. Payne went over some maps and records pertaining to the Hudson County waterfront. He detailed facts and statistics, giving here and there a more vitalizing point, but the treatment for the most part was dry and limited, when it might readily have been made enlarging and progressive. It showed industry and research, but in this it was by no means thorough. I might take exception to his negative view about farming out the ripa for revenue, to the proceedings and very existences of the Riparian Commission, yet again these have their defences. Mr. Payne is secretary of the commission and commended its acts, perhaps naturally enough; yet it is decidedly questionable whether a commission that has conveyed away from the people to monopolizing corporations some of the choicest, most valuable shore property in this country or abroad, for a meager or inadequate consideration, and has permitted the City on its Eastern front to be hedged in as by a veritable Chinese wall -it is a question, I say, whether such a commission is entitled to much credit or praise.
March 29, 1909
A special meeting of the Hudson County Bar Association, at the Chancery Chambers.
April 1, 1909
After a busy morning, I felt the call of spring and this afternoon strolled through Westside Park, resting by the lake and pool to see the children play and the boys at baseball on the wide playing grounds. The air was cool with a liquid softness and slightly hazed, not so much by nature as by the smoke of manufacture that blew across the park. The prevailing dun of the sward was faintly mottled and yielding to the beginnings of the oncoming green. From one of the Italian-like pergolas or shelter houses that abut the parkway I got a goodly view. The dwelling houses nestled snugly on either hand: a fair church tower looked up, the dark lines of the still leafless trees fretted the sky; there was little animation from foot or wheel, but the graying atmosphere was shot through with old gold and in the distance the sparkling waters of the Hackensack added spirit to the scene.
April 5, 1909
Yesterday -Palm Sunday -I went to St. Mark's, the morning service. Dr. Roper preached an excellent sermon about Christ the conqueror of pain: it was vital and sympathetic. I came away with palms in my hand.
Mrs. Flavel McGee dined with us. Later M., B. and I supped at the McGees' house, Fairmont Avenue and Hudson Boulevard and confabulated a while with this branch of the Flavian gens.
April 8, 1909
Engaged a man to work on the farm and sent him out there. I rambled around Manhattan the rest of the afternoon and dined there. Part of the evening I indulged in a Music Hall Melange, and part along the brilliantly lighted streets, in the folds of the protecting buildings and various night, seeing the unfamiliar in the familiar, and noting with attractive interest the movement, the surge, the personal idiom and denotement of those sensuous units or figures, made up in the inimitable fashion of men and women, and caressed by the circumambient fingers of the sentient air. The show inside was arousing, brightening, but the one outside, incomparably superior.
April 10, 1909
Algernon Charles Swinburne, the last of the greater Victorian poets, died this morning in England. I was always charmed with his flute-like voice, his swift spirit and the magic splendor of his words. He was perhaps unsurpassed as a lyric or metrist, and I treasure some of his jewels; yet in a larger sense, he diffused and flattened, is too adjectival, too slightly substantive. He sang of the flashing or darkening sea but sounded not the spiritual deeps. You remark the rare manipulation, the dexterity of the word-jugglers, brilliant, but not deeply or naturally melodic, and the impression is faint, apt to fade, the thought fails to provoke, stimulate, the feeling is engaged but not aroused as by a Miltonic sonnet it is aroused. He wrote frames and with some force, but lacked the concentration, point, informing mood and culminating power of great tragedy.
April 12, 1909
Easter was blessed with a bright day. The weather was unusually fine with golden light and cool, crisp air. Marie, Helen and I attended the main morning service at St. Mark's and made our Easter offerings. Otherwise, with the exception of a short walk in the afternoon, I remained at home and read.
April 13, 1909
Sent a photograph of my father and his autograph to the Free Public Library, with a note to President Stowe, at whose request they were sent.
The Rev. Frederic E. Mortimer, Rector of St. Mark's, called in the evening and we had a pleasant chattery. He graciously sent a note of thanks yesterday for my Easter offering. He is wise in this world as well as the other, and that is just to both and becoming.
April 14, 1909
Concert at Grand View Auditorium, for the benefit of Christ Hospital.
Rain all day, pouring for the most part.
April 15, 1909
Meeting of the University Club at the Club Rooms, Hasbrouck Institute.
The morning was flecked, recovering from yesterday's storm. Mid-afternoon it brightened spring-like with a clean atmosphere. I rode about Central Park on horseback, and enjoyed the baby spring as seen in tender grass, and bud-tipped trees, and in the feel of the air. What an oasis amid the pity-less streets! After dinner I went to the theatre and later attended a variegated ball.
April 16, 1909
Marie and I sat out a concert tonight. It was not inspiriting: the minor key prevailed. The music put me in a reflective but somber mood. It lacked luster. There are those, usually the young and tyros in art, who think that a depressive seriousness is correspondingly deep. The subdued and melancholy have a sweetness of their own, yet they are secluded eddies of life. The great currents express themselves in strong music and forms: they command and uplift, they compensate, fulfil supremely and make whole.
April 20, 1909
The Shubert Glee Club concert, in the Auditorium of the High School.
Dinner to Mayor McClellan at the Waldorf-Astoria, given under the auspices of the Princeton Club. -The night was wet, rainy, but I put over river to the big hostelry, where after a brief reception we dined in the large ball-room, which was artistically decorated with the national and university colors, and suggested the spaciousness, hight, and broad relief, of some royal banqueting hall. I was pleased to meet the Mayor, who has managed municipal affairs under trying difficulties with marked success. He is short, stockily built, with a direct, manly bearing and countenance. Back in the seventies I met his father, Gen. McClellan, who was then running for Governor of New-Jersey. The General was affectionately called by the veterans, his companions in arms, ?the little idol that we love?. President Woodrow Wilson made a fine address, brilliant at times, in tribute to the Mayor and on university topics. The Mayor spoke in a straight-forward manner, in fitting terms, about his administration and Princeton. His utterance, well informed, came out of experience with the added weight or prestiges of office. I sat at a round table with some dear old fellows of '77.
April 23, 1909
America should become richer in memoirs. Besides their own peculiar interest, they give depth, relief to the personal, the social perspective and enliven the dry annals of history. We do not find ourselves sufficiently surrounded by sentient and speaking figures of the past, and wish for the enrichment of our society by their spiritual presence and voices. The barest record may have its force and suggestion, but the most accurate statement is only a segment of the truth, a skeleton of a historical presentment. Intimate pictures, richly or slightly made, if moved by insight and vision, have a friendly, revealing power that helps more nearly and subtly to complete the body, air and fashion of the times moment considered or in view, and give a wholeness and traditional solidity to life.
April 26, 1909
My acquaintance with Newyork might be regarded as familiar; we have been on more than speaking terms; along with some frowns, we have been at times really friendly and intimate, nor has this familiarity bred contempt, thought I keep my critical sense alive to form and betterments. Newyork is too great and diversified for that, it is built on too many factors, too many lives and spirits have gone into its make-up and uplift. Not only the larger unit or municipal personality, but each separate being has added its peculiar human note or dropped some encircling human trace in the bed and current of the city's structure and life. It has arisen out of much that is unaccountable when all the faces are recounted and histories rendered. I find it perennially interesting and absorbing. Its very noise is sea-like as befits its fluviatile setting. Every casual jaunt into Manhattan and its supporting environs yield surprising rescues from the shadows of the past or puts things seen into unforeseen attitudes, and at different points or angles of incidence and reflections. Infinite is the variety of types, yet even the same face or scene wears a changed light and aspect at each recurrence, whether actual or through medial refraction and altered vision. One constantly meets with such evocations, such strange revealments! To the warm imagination this is true to some extent everywhere, but where more intensely than where multitudes of human beings of mingled and contrasted cosmopolitan diversity have settled, mixed massed, built and swarmed for long generations? Here history thickens, deepens, society becomes richer, more complex and such huge centers of popular pressure electrically attract and stimulate, and about them hover, despite economic reasons, a local spirit, some indefinable glamour and divine mystery.
April 29, 1909
This morning I awoke to a snow shower -the whitened streets and tops of things presented a wintry scene. Ah, the poor spring child is cold today! The child spring is weeping in sleet and rain all thinly clad in its sea-green cape.
April 30, 1909
At the High School on the hill-top, I listened this evening to a discursive talk on ?How Music Began?, by Prof. John D. Prince, of Columbia University. He illustrated his remarks with snatches from folk-songs, of varying degrees of merit, and concluded with a composition of his own, set to the words of Kipling's ?Mandalay?, which he sang and played with marked spirit and abandon. Prof. Prince is a New-Jersey legislator -he was speaker of the last session, a teacher of languages, and manifestly practices with credit the agreeable art of music.
May 3, 1909
Miss Stewart, who has been visiting us for several days, left for home this afternoon. She is a sister, the only surviving sister of the late Judge Stewart of Trenton.
Hired a farm-hand at a West street office to work on the farm; he goes out to-morrow morning.
May 4, 1909
At a benefit concert tonight at Elks' Hall, Marie and I enjoyed some musical moments, especially the virtuoso playing of a young violinist -((Kotlarsky)).
May 6, 1909
Meeting of the local Princeton Alumni Association, at Hasbrouck Hall.
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One's ink-pot may not always follow his think-pot, so many things are coming and going between, yet there is a charm in intermediary thoughts, and yet a special fascination in re-envisaging recollected things, seen through the haze of distance in time or space, or musing expressively on moods and memories. Here is a fly upon my window pane -the season's first: it gives a droning buzz or sound, like unto the season's last -an autumn's afternoon. It spint the circuit of contrasts and unites in a general symbol or a complexity. A creature with its uses and purposeful, a fine denizen of the natural world, looked upon more engagingly by eye than microscope, or a baleful little scavenger, good and bad, or what you will. It matters not -it matters. A trifling somewhat, but, oh, how important a trifle, perplexed or clear, is -is everything! Its interesting self apart, this dozing bug has turned my mood, my mind in several channels, and the current flows, not momently or intermittently, but continues crescendo or diminuendo to the end. Ah, the comedy of the fly, the pinnatile tragedy of the insect! It may carry you far out and on, inscrutably faring, only to defeat you of your apparent due or make the barren waste-place bloom or gold and give you fortune in desired kinds. Is it not all in the fashioning of a man, the law of being, the nemesis of fitness, the soul's protasis, to ultimate good, whether here or hereafter? Yes, it is, all that, all that and something more.
May 10, 1909
Memories of Constantinople were revived today by the official investiture of Sultan Mehmed V. with the Turkish sovereignty. He succeeds the wily Abdul Hamid who was recently deposed by the Young Turks. The latter are seeking to secure some degree of constitutional government and social emancipation. They are evidently in earnest, and in league with the time-spirit are bringing about a transformation that is epochal and far reaching. And they seem to be doing this in a preconsidered masterful way, with not more than the necessary spectacle and ado, and with less sacrifice than is usual in such a revolution. Indeed, it would appear that the army were simply executing an act of evolution, and naturally the few who stood resisting in its path were brushed aside or out of existence by this subtle but invincible power. And this fluid force finds in Mahmond Chefket Pasha a fit instrument of its progressive purposes.
May 13, 1909
Late in the afternoon I went over the river for something, and dined simply at one of those ?shining halls?, as Howells calls them. Later I went slumming.
I should like to make an illuminating remark or two about my dark trip through the Ghetto and Chinatown. These black swarms of humans, scarcely relieved against the night, have a stubborn interest, but weigh down my thoughts. They cast somber shadows, but less sinistre than those in other quarters of the city. In a lumpish, sordid way they manage to tread it out and serve. Incidentally some animal spirit awakens and leads out of it, and it has its own bargain and sale sufficiency. But alas! So little light!
The slippered, stealthy pigtails, blinking in their dingy, circuitous alleys, entries and underground passages, gave a more exotic sense. The joss-house had some interesting souvenirs, in particular some carved scenes in the life of Confucius; the restaurants looked bright and clean, the theatre bare of stage but prettily costumed, took on an endless mimetic, yet ludicrous jangle; here and around they were all to be seen -the merchant, the doctor, the porter, laundrymen -brown, slant-eyed, bloused, hand-pocketed, furtive-slippered -, opium and its den or joint, known to the initiate, the devious dance-hall, a sorry mission, gambling holes, ginger, confections, chop-suey, chinaware, punk, lanterns, fire-crackers, toys, red -yes red seemed to be the color of redemption in this swart scheme. It was all so far from the Flowery Kingdom, you know, and yet I saw my old friend the mandarin with his familiar Chinese characters on a tea-caddy, and lo! he kindly conducted me there again as in my long-ago childhood.
May 15, 1909
This afternoon Blanche and I witnessed from the McGees' house a Marathon race on the Hudson Boulevard. In the evening I amused myself at an entertainment in Manhattan.
May 17, 1909
Sunday M., B., and I attended services at St. Mark's. Mr. Mortimer preached. We came home with Mrs. Bryan and Mrs. McGill. I might descant on the beauty of going to church, but almost any one who goes must perceive its virtues and fulfillments.
I rested at home the remainder of the day, or scribbled a few notes and read.
May 18, 1909
George Meredith, the English novelist, died early this morning. The other day there died a poet with comparatively little substance or spiritual depth but of matchless, mellifluous or metrical song. With Meredith the conditions seemed to be measurably reversed: a keen wit, essentially poetic, a human analyst of rare insight, with more, however, of brittle intellect than elasticity and pervasive, humorous, comprehending soul, his sententious fragments of expression, instinct with epigram weighted, abrupt, had a strained if not affected look or gave forth a jangled music. Yet the content was originally visioned and conceived, singularly but not completely. The reading of him and Browning is a good exercise in mental gymnastics. It will stiffen your fibre if it does not please your sense of form. Still it was their several mode of getting out what was in them and should be gratefully accepted. The union of the essential and expressive marks the greatest writers. It can not be said that certain authors were less subtle and deep, whose style, nevertheless, carried their images and message with unimpeded claritude.
May 20, 1909
It is unusually cool; the sky is overcast with a slaty spread which lightens at times and lets through some tempered or subdued sunshine.
The Circus has come to town, and great is the joy of the youngster large or small.
May 21, 1909
Is the book type-written and manufactured or hand-made and heart-felt?
I like different styles, various modes of expression, provided they are good of their several kinds; nor would it seem that a composite of all were best -that might be indifferent, neither one thing nor another, confused and unindicated, a pale polished surface. What seems to be best is a rich, flexible, glancing style, informed with temper and imagination and wrought with a high simplicity.
May 24, 1909
Sometimes I wonder if the stage is not less effective than it used to be. It certainly has not the charm, the roseate hues, the indefinable beckonings that held one's morning eyes. And actually I think it is less strong and salient, if in some degree more reserved and artistic than formerly. I speak of the better sorts. In general it makes but a trifling appeal to the man of fifty. Perhaps he has seen enough, read and experienced enough to account for that. Of the higher drama, I like to read my Sophocles, and Shakespeare better than to see them enacted. Yet the theatre has its sufficient moments that compensate and count. It remains an amusing picture-book of life.
May 28, 1909
Mrs. Muirheid (Clara Pearsall) and her daughter Julia lunched with us.
May 29, 1909
The city is putting on color for Memorial day.
I dined in Newyork, and after a street stroll went to Daly's and saw ?The Climax?, a nationally acted and moving phase of artistic Bohemia, such as it is in a subdued apartment-house retreat. Music is the art this time and a lost and recovered voice the pathos and triumph of the theme with its love accompaniment. In some respects an unusually good little play, depending on itself more than on accessories. And still only a minor current. Of some intimate merit, it was as a public exhibition somewhat dull.
May 31, 1909
We had at Sunday supper Mrs. McGee (Julia Randolph). She was charmingly gowned and made an attractive picture as she toyed with her tea-cup and languidly talked.
Today is fine, and the city is bright with bunting and animated. The gayer features prevail over the grave in commemoration of the day. The parade of military and civic organizations was unusually large -about 25000 in line -and made a stirring pageant. Some of the veterans marched and others were borne in carriages. Amid a degree of dull looking-on, these crumbling remnants of war and time were regarded with lively feelings of gratitude and given becoming attention and applause. What is needed is some signal and adequate expression of the day's significance, some Lincolnian or Periclesian tribute!
