The Magical Chance

THE MAGICAL CHANCE

“What are you going to say to the college girls?” my pretty niece asked, as we motored down the valley. She was being graduated this spring, and the snowy dogwoods and the purple Judas-trees against the tender hillsides were not so fresh, nor half so full of bloom, as she. But they were gayer far than she.

“Don’t tell them, uncle, how wonderful they are! How the world waits for them! Don’t say it, uncle! I have heard that sort of talk for these four years, and here I am with nobody waiting for me; not fitted for anything; nothing to do; and as wonderful—as thirty cents!”

Poor thing!

A few days before, I had seen an interview with the President of Yale, in which the young

[4]

 writer said he had read in a book that all the great devices had been invented; all the new lands explored; all the great deeds done—all the adventure and romance forever gone from life, and that only bread and butter remain with the odds against a young man’s getting much of the butter.

Poor thing!

Have I been living fifty years—in America? or fifty cycles in Cathay? I cannot still be young at fifty! nor can I be so old either as modern two-and-twenty! Youth is a dry tree, these days; a sad state—particularly youth bent with the burden of an A.B. degree. Out of my fifty-odd years of existence I have taught college youth for three-and-twenty, and never in all that time have they looked like plain bread and butter to me. If they are not adventure and romance, not better stories, sweeter songs, mightier deeds than any yet recorded, then I am no judge of story matter and the stuff of epic song.

But my pretty niece declares that she also knows a shoat when she sees one; and she knows it is just pork. As for the college man of the

[5]

 interview: he was not speaking by the book; out, rather, of the depths of his heart.

It is an evil thing to be born young into an old world!

For the world seems very old. Its face is covered with doubt, its heart is only ashes of burned-out fires. The River of Life which John saw has dwindled into Spoon River; and his Book of Life is now a novel, piddling and prurient. But John also saw the Scarlet Woman—and that was long ago! The world was ever much the same; ever in need of an Apocalypse; and never more in need than now. My pretty niece, and the young man of the interview, are the world, and the college world at that, the more’s the pity. They are its skepticism, its materialism, its conventionalism, its fear and failure. They seem afraid to bid on life, for fear it might be knocked off to them at something above par! They do not dare. They won’t take a chance. They would, of course, if there were chances; they would dare, if only one giant were still left stalking through the land. The giants are gone!

The orator was celebrating the hundredth anniversary

[6]

 of Richard Henry Dana, the author of “Two Years Before the Mast”:

Life offered him a magical human chance and he took it. There was something in him for which the decorous and conventional life of Boston allowed no place in its scheme. “Two Years Before the Mast” belongs to the Literature of Escape.

Life offered him a magical chance—as if he were a special case! So he was. So is every boy. Who was this boy? and what were the circumstances under which Life offered him this magical chance? He was a Bostonian to begin with, and that is bad enough; he was a Harvard undergraduate also, which still further complicates the situation; and, besides, he was a Dana! Here was a complex which should have staggered Life. Who could escape from all of this? Leave that to Life. Up she comes boldly, just as if she expected the boy to take her offer. And he did take it. He fell ill with some affliction of the eyes; and, going down to the Boston wharfs, shipped as a common sailor before the mast in the little brig Pilgrim for a two years’ trip around the Horn. And out of that escape from Boston and Harvard and the Danas, he brought back one of

[7]

 the three greatest sea stories in literature—a book that all of Boston and Harvard and the Danas combined could never have written except for this escape.

The question is: Does Life come along to-day, as then, and offer us, as it offered Dana, such a magical chance? Is there any escape for us?

We are not all Danas, and so we are certainly not worse off than he was; but our circumstances are distinctly different, and rather disquieting. This chance was given Dana far back in 1834, nearly one hundred years ago, when escape was possible, and when Dana was a boy. It was a young world a hundred years ago, and full of adventure. One could escape then because there was some place to escape into; but to round the Horn to-day is to land, not on wild Point Loma, but at San Diego, with the single exception of Monte Carlo, the most decorous and conventional city on the planet.

Perhaps my niece and the college boy of the interview are right.

About the time that Dana was escaping from Boston, a young man by the name of Henry David Thoreau tried to escape from Concord,

[8]

 of the same State. He had no deep-sea wharf, no brig like the Pilgrim, but, as one must seize such things as are at hand in an escape, Thoreau took a rowboat and the near-by river and started off. He rowed and rowed for a week, and came to Concord, New Hampshire. Here he took to his diary and wrote that there were no frontiers this way any longer. “This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us. We cannot have the pleasure of erecting the last house; that was long ago set up in the suburbs of Astoria City, and our boundaries have literally been run to the South Sea.”

Born in 1817, more than a hundred years ago, and still born fatally late! How late, then, was I born? and you, my son? and you, my pretty niece?

“The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose,

but you and I have missed the early glory that hath passed forever from the morning earth,” she makes reply.

But I would say to her: It was ten years later,

[9]

 ten whole years after Thoreau’s tame adventure on the Merrimac, that gold was discovered in California. Here was a magical chance as late as the year ’Forty-Nine, and Life offered it to a young man of Providence and Brooklyn by the name of Bret Harte. He took it. There was something in him for which the decorous and conventional round of these cities allowed no place in their scheme. He went into the gold-fields and brought out “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” another piece of the Literature of Escape. Then my students answer: “Yes, but there are no more outcasts in Poker Flat, and whom are we to write about?”

Alas, ’tis true, they’re in their graves, that gentle race of gamblers. With the wind-flower and the violet they perished long ago, as literary material. Eighteen-Forty-Nine will be having its hundredth anniversary soon. But, some fifty years later, gold was struck again—this time on the Yukon. Here was another magical chance. And there was a young fellow walking the streets of Boston along with me, literally begging bread with me from editorial door to editorial door, by the name of Jack London.

[10]

 Life came up to us and offered us this magical chance, and Jack took it, bringing out of the Yukon a story called “Building a Fire” which is surely a part of the immortal Literature of Escape.

“Well, what would he write about now?” they ask. “What has happened since?”

“Peary has found the North Pole,” I reply.

“Yes, and Amundsen, or somebody, has found the South Pole!” they cry. “And what’s the use of living in a world of only two poles, and some one finding both of them before we come along!”

There is something in that. It is a bad sort of world that has only two poles. It should be stuck full of poles, one for each of us. But there are only two, and a flag flies from each of them; as a flag flies over every terrestrial spot in between them: over Mount McKinley now; over the River of Doubt now, so that we are stopped from singing, as once we sang,—

“There’s one more river,

There’s one more river to cross.”

There is no more river to cross. Theodore Roosevelt crossed it. There is nothing to cross;

[11]

 no place to go where, on the surface of things, men have not been there before us. Yes, yes, there is Mount Everest. No one has yet stood on that peak; but there is an expedition climbing it, camping to-day at about twenty-five thousand feet up, with only two or three thousand feet more to go. And here we are in Hingham!

It looks bad. My young niece is possibly right, after all. East, west, north, south, where is a frontier? Where shall I go from here and find an escape?

Not overland any longer, for even Thoreau could find no frontier this way; and not by sea now, for here comes John Masefield, poet and sailor, saying the frontier has disappeared from off the sea; that the clipper ship, the ship of dreams, has foundered and gone down; that you can haunt the wharves these piping times of steam,