Colville smiled at the Emersonian touch, but he said gravely, “I can never quite reconcile myself to the thought of dying out of my own country.”
“Why not? It is very unimportant where one dies. A moment after your breath is gone you are in exile forever—or at home forever.”
Colville sat musing upon this phase of Americanism, as he had upon many others. At last he broke the silence they had both let fall, far away from the topic they had touched.
“Well,” he asked, “how did you enjoy the veglione?”
“Oh, I’m too old to go to such places for pleasure,” said the minister simply. “But it was very interesting, and certainly very striking: especially when I went back, toward daylight, after seeing Mrs. Bowen home.”
“Did you go back?” demanded Colville, in some amaze.
“Oh yes. I felt that my experience was incomplete without some knowledge of how the Carnival ended at such a place.”
“Oh! And do you still feel that Savonarola was mistaken?”
“There seemed to be rather more boisterousness toward the close, and, if I might judge, the excitement grew a little unwholesome. But I really don’t feel myself very well qualified to decide. My own life has been passed in circumstances so widely different that I am at a certain disadvantage.”
“Yes,” said Colville, with a smile; “I daresay the Carnival at Haddam East Village was quite another thing.”
The old man smiled responsively. “I suppose that some of my former parishioners might have been scandalised at my presence at a Carnival ball, had they known the fact merely in the abstract; but in my letters home I shall try to set it before them in an instructive light. I should say that the worst thing about such a scene of revelry would be that it took us too much out of our inner quiet. But I suppose the same remark might apply to almost any form of social entertainment.”
“Yes.”
“But human nature is so constituted that some means of expansion must be provided, or a violent explosion takes place. The only question is what means are most innocent. I have been looking about,” added the old man quietly, “at the theatres lately.”
“Have you?” asked Colville, opening his eyes, in suppressed surprise.
“Yes; with a view to determining the degree of harmless amusement that may be derived from them. It’s rather a difficult question. I should be inclined to say, however, that I don’t think the ballet can ever be instrumental for good.”
Colville could not deny himself the pleasure of saying, “Well, not the highest, I suppose.”
“No,” said Mr. Waters, in apparent unconsciousness of the irony. “But I think the Church has made a mistake in condemning the theatre in toto. It appears to me that it might always have countenanced a certain order of comedy, in which the motive and plot are unobjectionable. Though I don’t deny that there are moods when all laughter seems low and unworthy and incompatible with the most advanced state of being. And I confess,” he went on, with a dreamy thoughtfulness, “that I have very great misgivings in regard to tragedy. The glare that it throws upon the play of the passions—jealousy in its anguish, revenge glutting itself, envy eating its heart, hopeless love—their nakedness is terrible. The terror may be salutary; it may be very mischievous. I am afraid that I have left some of my inquiries till it is too late. I seem to have no longer the materials of judgment left in me. If I were still a young man like you—”
“Am I still a young man?” interrupted Colville sadly.
“You are young enough to respond to the appeals that sometimes find me silent. If I were of your age I should certainly investigate some of these interesting problems.”
“Ah, but if you become personally interested in the problems, it’s as bad as if you hadn’t the materials of judgment left; you’re prejudiced. Besides, I doubt my youthfulness very much.”
“You are fifty, I presume?” suggested Mr. Waters, in a leading way.
“Not very near—only too near,” laughed Colville. “I’m forty-one.”
“You are younger than I supposed. But I remember now that at your age I had the same feeling which you intimate. It seemed to me then that I had really passed the bound which separates us from the further possibility of youth. But I’ve lived long enough since to know that I was mistaken. At forty, one has still a great part of youth before him—perhaps the richest and sweetest part. By that time the turmoil of ideas and sensations is over; we see clearly and feel consciously. We are in a sort of quiet in which we peacefully enjoy. We have enlarged our perspective sufficiently to perceive things in their true proportion and relation; we are no longer tormented with the lurking fear of death, which darkens and embitters our earlier years; we have got into the habit of life; we have often been ailing and we have not died. Then we have time enough behind us to supply us with the materials of reverie and reminiscence; the terrible solitude of inexperience is broken; we have learned to smile at many things besides the fear of death. We ought also to have learned pity and patience. Yes,” the old man concluded, in cheerful self-corroboration, “it is a beautiful age.”
“But it doesn’t look so beautiful as it is,” Colville protested. “People in that rosy prime don’t produce the effect of garlanded striplings upon the world at large. The women laugh at us; they think we are fat old fellows; they don’t recognise the slender and elegant youth that resides in our unwieldy bulk.”
“You take my meaning a little awry. Besides, I doubt if even the ground you assume is tenable. If a woman has lived long enough to be truly young herself, she won’t find a man at forty either decrepit or grotesque. He can even make himself youthful to a girl of thought and imagination.”
“Yes,” Colville assented, with a
