THE IMMORALITY OF SHOP-WIN

DOWS

At the heart of morality lies content. That is a statement either optimistic or cynical, as you choose to look at it; but it is a statement of fact. Even the reformer seeks to allay his discontent, which does not arise from the morality in him, but from the immorality in other people. Anybody who has lived with a reformer knows this. Therefore are modern shop-windows- by steel construction made to occupy the maximum amount of space, to assault by breadth and brilliance the most callous eye-one of the most immoral forces in modern city life.

This is especially true of the shop windows on Fifth Avenue, New York. For these windows, even at night illuminated like silent drawing-rooms vacant of people, expose to the view of the most humble passer on the curb as well as to the pampered rich racing by in motors, the spoils of all the world. Here are paintings by the old masters and the new; rare furniture and marbles from Italian palaces; screens from Japan; jewels and rugs from the Orient; silk stockings, curios, china, bronzes, hats, furs; and again more curios, cabinets, statues, paintings; things rare and beautiful and exotic from every quarter of the globe, 'from silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.' And they are not collections, they are not the treasures of some proud house although they might have been once: they are for sale; they may be bought by anybody-who has the price.

But who has the price? That stout woman riding by in her limousine,

with a Pomeranian on her lap instead of a baby? That fifteen-dollar-a-week chorus-girl in a cab, half buried under a two-thousand-dollar chinchilla coat? That elderly man who hobbles goutily out of his club and walks a few short blocks to his house on Murray Hill, 'for exercise'? Assuredly, somebody has the price, for the shops are ever open, the allurement of their windows never less. But not you, who gaze hungryeyed at these beautiful objects, and then go to a Sixth Avenue department store and wonder if you can afford that Persian rug made in Harlem, marked down from $50 to $48.87; or that colonial mahogany bookcase glistening with brand new varnish. Envy gnaws at your heart. And yet you had supposed that yours was a comfortable sort of income-maybe four thousand dollars a year. Your father, on that income, back in a New England suburb, was counted quite a man in the community, and you put on airs. He selected the new minister, and you set the style in socks: But now you are humiliated, embittered. . You rave against predatory wealth. Thus shopwindows do make Socialists of us all.

Nor are you able to accept the shopwindows educationally, recalling that when you went to Europe you saw nothing that had not already stared at you through plate-glass on Fifth Avenuefor sale. Who wants to view one of the chairs that a Medici sat in, only to recall that months before he saw its mate in a shop-window at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-first Street; or to contemplate a pious yellow heathen bowed down before the image of Buddha, while the tinkly temple bells

are tinkling, only to have rise in his mind the memory of a much larger and more venerable Buddha which used to smile out inscrutably at the crossing of Twenty-ninth Street, below a much sweeter string of tinkly temple bells? We've a bigger, better Buddha in a cleaner (!), greener (!!) land,

Many miles from Mandalay.

There is no romance in an antique, be it god or chair or China plate, when it is exposed for sale in a shop-window. And there is no romance in it amid its native surroundings when you realize that any day it may be carried off and so exposed. Thus do shop-windows destroy romance.

But in the humbler windows off the Avenue there is an equal, if grosser, element of immorality. For these are the windows where price-tags are displayed. The tag has always two prices, the higher marked through with red ink, the lower, for this very reason, calling with a siren voice. The price crossed off is always just beyond your means, the other just within it. 'Ah,' you think, swallowing the deception with only too great willingness, what a bargain! It may never come again!' And you enter the fatal door.

Perhaps you struggle first. 'Don't buy it,' says the inhibition of prudence. "You have more neckties now than you can wear.'

'But it's so cheap,' says impulse, with the usual sophistry.

And you, poor victim that you are, tugged on and back by warring factions in your brain,-poor refutation of the silly old theological superstitions that there is such a thing as free will,vacillate on the sidewalk till the battle is over, till your mythical free will is down in the dust. Thus do shop-windows overthrow theology.

Then you enter that shop, and ask for the tie. Or perhaps it is something else, and they haven't your size. You ought

to feel glad, relieved. Do you? You do not! You are angry. You feel as if you had lost just so much money, when in reality you have saved it. Thus do shop-windows destroy logic.

This has been a particularly perilous season for the man with a passion for shirts. By some diabolical agreement, all the haberdashers at one and the same time filled their windows with luscious lavenders and faint green stripes and soft silk shirts with comfortable French cuffs, and marking out $2.00 or $3.00, as the case might be, wrote $1.50 or $2.50 below. The song of the shirt was loud in the land, its haunting melody not to be resisted. Is there any lure for a woman in all the fluffy mystery of a January 'white sale' comparable to the seduction for a man of a lavender shirt marked down from $2.00 to $1.50? I doubt it. Heaven help the women if there is! So the unused stock in trunk or bureau drawer accumulates, and the weekly reward for patient toil at an office dribbles away, and the savings bank is no richer for your deposit - and the shop-windows flare as shamelessly as ever. There is only one satisfaction. The man who sells shirts always has a passion for jewelry. And that keeps him poor, too!

ULTIMATE CONVICTIONS

Most of us if questioned as to our ultimate convictions would unhesitatingly give such answers as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the unvaryingness of natural law, the relativity of knowledge, the inaccessibility of the supernatural, democracy. A few cautious or frivolous folk would want to sleep on it. The small number of really serious people who answered quite honestly would avow such ultimate convictions as that sausage and Germans are nasty, that red-headed women are bad-tempered,

that well-dressed people are mostly fools, that servants are dishonest, that whoever wears a ready-made tie is not a gentleman, that doctors are ignoramuses, that eating smoked herring is vulgar. But these are prejudices. Not at all; by any fair test they better deserve the name of ultimate convictions than the ambitious articles of faith with which we began. And the test is simply this: on which set of convictions do men act? Plainly on the second. Your believer in immortality will cheerfully imperil his soul through a long lifetime, your fanatic of the relativity of knowledge will be completely irate in discussion with a dogmatist, your advocate of the unknowable, if entrusted with power, would conscientiously proclaim, "The Unknowable or the sword.'

In short, these ambitious categories are not, properly speaking, convictions at all, but mere simulacra thereof. They are emblems, not principles. We would willingly die for them, just as the predatory politician will honestly yearn to die for his country's flag; but Heaven keep us from the folly of living by our ultimate convictions! Such is the unspoken prayer of most sensible people who reserve their creeds for Sunday or election-day use. A rather plain-spoken person, Geoffrey Chaucer, once wrote, For Plato saieth, whoso can him rede, The word mote be accordant to the dede. We should then be following two eminent truth-tellers should we degrade most metaphysical, theological, and political formulas from their false estate of convictions to that of intermittently recurrent prejudices. To complete the demonstration, we need only show that the real ultimate convictions are invariably acted on.

You

may make a Christian Scientist out of a Jesuit, but hardly a sausage-eater out of a sausage-hater. Nor shall you win to friendly association with Germans one whose axiom it is that they

are nasty. Many persons call in a physician as an expected social form, and habitually disregard his advice. In fact, a true medicophobe will gladly pay a fee for the pleasure of flouting his doctor. At every point we shall find that the test of action will prove what we commonly call prejudices to be our genuine and most intimate convictions.

In great as in small affairs this truth holds. We know a business man who after careful scrutiny of an enterprise was on the point of a large investment. Hearing casually that the promoter's cheeks were adorned with side-whiskers, the capitalist brushed the project aside. He knew that no luck could come of association with a man who wore 'weepers.' Indeed, experience had taught him that such persons were not merely inauspicious, but positively untrustworthy. At the risk of anticlimax the present writer must avow that, saving the case of very ancient clergymen, he has absolutely no confidence in the taste or morals of any person wearing congress gaiters. Of course such a conviction, being based on a sound analogy between elasticity in principles and in footgear, is not to be confused with the more irrational sort of ultimate convictions. But at bottom the reason hardly comes in. We simply feel and act in a certain way, and that is all there is of it. We dig our last ditches where we please, and not where any moral Vauban dictates. The chaste Lucretia, it will be recalled, because of the outrage of Tarquin, killed herself. This certainly looks like the working of a transcendental ultimate conviction. Yet we should not forget that it is quite possible that the chaste Lucretia would equally have killed herself if her husband had persistently required her to eat mutton, if indeed, in proper resentment of such persecution, she had not killed him.

Shortsighted people will feel that

this reversal, by which, according word with deed, our prejudices become our convictions, somehow degrades human nature. To which the answer is, first, that the truth is no respecter of persons; and next, the counter-query, Does it degrade? On the contrary it exalts. By an instinctive altruism we dig our last ditches where they will endanger few but ourselves. If the If the theological and political creeds which we profess really guided our conduct, New York soon would be a new Constantinople, with massacre hanging on the presence or absence of a grammatical prefix. To build your ultimate convictions too high is socially dangerous. The man who stands on his notion of the substance or essence of divinity will appeal to the fagots if he may; the man who would perish before eating snails or frogs' legs is content with a subjective superiority. In fact, while dissent is only an offense to our philosophical and churchly prejudices, it is actually a salve to our ultimate convictions. We pride ourselves in those who vulgarly breakfast on smoked herring; they are our background, the conspicuous evidence of our own gentle tastes. It might seem that some Providence had deliberately set our more rigid principles in the field of the wholly inconsequential, in order that men might differ without hating. Lest, influenced by reason, we should act too unreasonably, a great gulf has wisely been established between the proud heights of reason and the pleasant table-land of our ultimate convictions.

OF WALKING

WITH SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SITTING ON FENCES

WALKING is fundamentally a matter of boots. Nay, friend, I do not mean top-boots, but boots in the sense of the English, who, being most perfectly

enfranchised for walking, have thence the right to name the gear in which they travel. But I do not here discourse of fine details. So the boot fit, the sole be adequate, and the heel not loftily inclined, choose your own wear, and you shall know content. There be that favor rubber heels, and here again each man is his own arbiter; yet this, at least, is not to be forgotten or lightly overpassed: there is a tang in the sharp crunch of a hard heel on fair road-metal that greets not him who goes delicately on rubber. Let temperament decide.

Most men walk merely to arrive. To such the right flavor of walking is not known; though chance may reveal to them the unsuspected good, and so kindle a longing for the proper bliss of the walker. The true pedestrian knows that the means is itself an end. Not for him 'so many miles and then begins the actual business,' but 'so many miles of utterly fulfilled content'; and if at the road's end he find some pleasant hostelry, with fire and food and all manner of cheer, this is but the fair setting of the stone, not the gem's perfect self. Not that the walker scorns good entertainment, or fair weather, or congenial fellowship. His feet are on the earth; he is no detached dreamer; and all these things may be accounted part and parcel of his pleasure without disloyalty to the pedestrian creed.

Walking is not merely moving two legs rhythmically over certain intervals of ground. It is the primal and the only way to know the world, the deliberate entering into an inheritance, whose parts are wind and weather, sky and prospect, men and animals, and all vital enjoyment. The bicycle has some advantages in point of speed, but it is a foe to observation. All carriages, whether propelled by horse or motor, destroy all feeling of achievement. The

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very word 'mile' is a walker's word, mille passus a thousand doublepaces. So the Roman legions measured their conquering advances; so the legion of pedestrians estimates its conquests of the day. 'So many thousand buffets have mine own two feet given the resisting soil 'twixt sun and sun; so many thousand times have the good muscles of calf and thigh lent their elastic force.' What has the dusty reader of figures on a dial to match with that? Another element, of grave importance and unquestioned worth, is the privilege, nay, the imperative necessity, of sitting on a fence from time to time. Literature hints at this. Lewis Carroll's aged, aged man a-sitting on a gate' had, by the sunset of his days, at least, acquired this wisdom. Poor Keats owned to a hankering to 'sit upon an Alp as on a throne' — although the German school of critics, keenly sensing the discomfort which inevitably disqualifies a mountain pinnacle for the scene of prolonged sessile repose, suggests metathesis, and would amend the reading to 'sit upon an Alp as on a thorn'; adducing as collateral argument Keats's well-known admiration for the nightingale, and that bird's familiar practice of artificially stimulating the centres of voice-production by causing its breast to impinge upon a thorn or similar sharp object. Leaving this delicate problem to the competent consideration of the wise, we may safely conclude that our first thesis is correct, and that to sit on a fence beside a road is of itself a satisfaction and an inspiration. For, be it posited again, the walker walks not to arrive, but to be in the world, to contemplate the same, and to take sufficient leisure for the formation of his judgments. To do this, he must sit. Sitting on a grassy bank is not, indeed, barred, although to the unwary it brings perils of ants, rheumatism, and (in some re

gions) snakes. It is, indeed, provocative of idleness; it leads one to forget that the interlude is not the song; and he who sprawls may ultimately sleep. But the fence and cursed be he who first conceived the hellish scheme of substituting barbed wire for honest rails! the fence invites no such relaxing pose. The feet on their supporting rail are still in contact with reality, and it needs but a spring to be on the way again; while the seat, none too soft, gives perpetual reminder that the stay must be transitory, and that wits are not to slumber. To rest, and as he rests descry, discern, and fill the mental eye through the gateway of the physical that is his portion who sits upon the fence. I will not mention the gain that comes from elevation, or even hint at the scenes which to have missed were to have suffered loss, revealed to him who climbs even to this humble post of vantage.

Only to those who will drink is the water good; one does not describe beverages to the thirsty: they would rather taste. So to the uneasy loiterer at home, to him who has found in gasoline only vanity and a striving after wind, to all who hunger for they know not what diversion, I offer no guidebooks of the journey, seek to convey no colors of the walker's paradise; enough to point the entrance of the way, and give the password: 'Forward, march!'

THE VANISHING VILLAGE

WANDERING along an oily roadthere was no walk-in an attractive New York suburb, the other day, pursued by chugging motor-cycles and madly hopping this way and that at the honk of speeding automobiles, an appalling thought struck me: is the village, still so dear to New England, becoming extinct? Will succeeding generations know only as ancient history