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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40232 ***
+
+POST-IMPRESSIONS
+
+
+
+
+POST-IMPRESSIONS
+
+An Irresponsible Chronicle
+
+
+BY
+SIMEON STRUNSKY
+
+Author of "The Patient Observer," "Through
+the Outlooking Glass," etc.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+NEW YORK
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+1914
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1913,
+BY THE EVENING POST COMPANY,
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1914,
+BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+
+The papers in the present volume were published during 1913 in the
+Saturday Magazine of the _New York Evening Post_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE
+       I ALMA MATER BROADWAY                                           1
+      II THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE                                        8
+     III SUMMER READING                                               17
+      IV NOCTURNE                                                     26
+       V HAROLD'S SOUL, I                                             35
+      VI EDUCATIONAL                                                  44
+     VII MORGAN                                                       53
+    VIII THE MODERN INQUISITION                                       63
+      IX THORNS IN THE CUSHION                                        72
+       X LOW-GRADE CITIZENS                                           80
+      XI ROMANCE                                                      89
+     XII WANDERLUST                                                   99
+    XIII UNREVISED SCHEDULES                                         108
+     XIV SOMEWHAT CONFUSED                                           117
+      XV HAROLD'S SOUL, II                                           126
+     XVI RHETORIC 21                                                 134
+    XVII REAL PEOPLE                                                 141
+   XVIII DIFFERENT                                                   150
+     XIX ACADEMIC FREEDOM                                            157
+      XX THE HEAVENLY MAID                                           166
+     XXI SHEATH-GOWNS                                                176
+    XXII WITH THE EDITOR'S REGRETS                                   185
+   XXIII A MAD WORLD                                                 194
+    XXIV PH.D.                                                       202
+     XXV TWO AND TWO                                                 211
+    XXVI BRICK AND MORTAR                                            220
+   XXVII INCOHERENT                                                  228
+  XXVIII REALISM                                                     236
+    XXIX ART                                                         239
+     XXX THE PACE OF LIFE                                            242
+    XXXI MARCUS AURELIUS, 1914                                       244
+   XXXII BY THE TURN OF A HAND                                       247
+  XXXIII THE QUARRY SLAVE                                            250
+   XXXIV MONOTONY OF THE POLES                                       253
+
+
+
+
+POST-IMPRESSIONS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+ALMA MATER BROADWAY
+
+
+He came in without having himself announced, nodded cheerfully, and
+dropped into a chair across the desk from where I sat.
+
+"I am not interfering with your work, am I?" he said.
+
+"To tell the truth," I replied, "this is the busiest day in the week for
+me."
+
+"Fine," he said. "That means your mind is working at its best, brain
+cells exploding in great shape, and you can follow my argument without
+the slightest difficulty. What I have to say is of the highest
+importance. It concerns the present condition of the stage."
+
+"In that case," I said, "you want to see Mr. Smith. He is the editor
+responsible for our dramatic page."
+
+"I want to speak to the irresponsible editor," he said. "I asked and
+they showed me in here. I think I had better begin at the beginning."
+
+I sighed and looked out of the window. But that made no difference. He,
+too, looked out of the window and spoke as follows:
+
+"Last night," he said, "I attended the first performance of A. B.
+Johnson's powerful four-act drama entitled 'H2O.' It was a remorseless
+exposure of the phenomena attending the condensation of steam. In the
+old days before the theatre became perfectly free the general public
+knew nothing of the consequences that ensue when you bring water to a
+temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. The public didn't know and didn't
+care. Those who did know kept the secret to themselves. I am not
+exaggerating when I say that there was a conspiracy of silence on the
+subject. A play like 'H2O' would have been impossible. The public would
+not have tolerated such thoroughgoing realism as Johnson employs in his
+first act, for instance. With absolute fidelity to things as they are he
+puts before us a miniature reciprocating engine, several turbine
+engines, and the latest British and German models in boilers,
+piston-rods, and valve-gears. When the curtain rose on the most masterly
+presentation of a machine shop ever brought before the public, the house
+rocked with applause. But this was nothing compared to the delirious
+outburst that marked the climax of the second act, when the hero, with
+his arm about the woman he loves, proudly declares that saturated steam
+under a pressure of 200 pounds shows 843.8 units of latent heat and a
+volume of 2.294 cubic feet to the pound. The curtain was raised eleven
+times, but the audience would not be content until the author appeared
+before the footlights escorted by a master plumber and the president of
+the steamfitters' union.
+
+"The third act was laid in the reception room of a Tenderloin resort--"
+
+"I don't quite see," I said.
+
+"That followed inevitably from the development of the plot," he replied.
+"The heroine, you must understand, had been abducted by the president
+of a rival steamfitters' union and had been sold into a life of shame.
+She is saved in the nick of time by an explosion of the boiler due to
+superheated steam. In the old days such a scene would have been
+impossible and the author's lesson about the effects of condensation and
+vaporization would have been lost to the world."
+
+"And the play will be a success?" I said.
+
+"It's a knockout," he replied. "No play of real life with a punch like
+that has been produced since C. D. Brewster put on his three-act
+tragi-comedy, 'Ad Valorem.' As the title implies, the play sets out to
+demonstrate the difference between the Payne-Aldrich tariff law and the
+Underwood law, item by item. I have rarely seen an audience so deeply
+stirred as all of us were during the long and pathetic scene toward the
+end of the first act in which the author deals with the chemical and
+mineral oil schedule. Are you aware that under the Underwood law the
+duty on formaldehyde is reduced from twenty-five per cent. to one cent a
+pound?"
+
+"I hardly ever go to the theatre nowadays," I said.
+
+He looked at me reproachfully.
+
+"Some day you will find yourself, quite unexpectedly, facing a crisis in
+which your ignorance of the duty on formaldehyde will cost you dear, and
+then you will have cause to regret your indifference toward the progress
+of the modern drama. However, the third act of 'Ad Valorem' is laid in
+the reception room of a Tenderloin resort."
+
+"What?" I said.
+
+"It was bound to be," he replied. "Freed from all Puritanical
+restrictions, the playwright of the present day follows wherever his
+plot leads him in accordance with the truth of life. In 'Ad Valorem,'
+for instance, the fabulously rich importer of oils and chemicals who is
+the villain of the piece has succeeded in smuggling an enormously
+valuable consignment of formaldehyde out of the Government warehouse.
+What is more natural than that he should conceal the smuggled goods in
+the Tenderloin? The case is a perfectly simple one. Forbid a playwright
+to show the interior of a Tenderloin dive and the public will never know
+the truth about the Underwood bill. You see, there is nothing about the
+tariff in the newspapers. There is nothing in the magazines. College
+professors never mention the subject. Campaign speakers ignore it. There
+is a conspiracy of silence. Only the theatre offers us enlightenment on
+the subject. Under such conditions would you keep the playwright from
+telling us what he knows?"
+
+"Putting it that way--" I said.
+
+"I knew you would agree with me," he went on. "Take, for instance, E. F.
+Birmingham's realistic drama, 'The Shortest Way,' in which the author
+has demonstrated with implacable truthfulness and irresistible logic
+that in any triangle the sum of two sides is greater than the third. In
+a joint letter to the freshman classes of Columbia University and New
+York University, the author and the producer of 'The Shortest Way' have
+pointed out that nowhere have the principles of plane geometry been so
+clearly formulated as in the second act of the play. The gunman has just
+shot down his victim on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street.
+He flees northward on Broadway to Forty-third Street and then doubles
+backward on Seventh Avenue. The hero, who is a professor of mathematics,
+recalling his Euclid, runs westward on Forty-second Street, and the
+curtain descends. At the beginning of the next act we find that the
+gunman has taken refuge in the reception room of a Tender--"
+
+"I know," I replied. "He was driven there by the irresistible logic of
+the dramatist's idea."
+
+"Exactly," he said. And so left me.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE
+
+
+From the chapter entitled "My Milkman," in Cooper's volume of
+"Contemporary Portraits," hitherto unpublished, through no fault of his
+own, but because one publisher declined to handle anything but
+typewritten copy, and another suggested that if cut down by half the
+book might be accepted by the editor of some religious publication, and
+still another editor thought that if several chapters were expanded and
+a love story inserted, the thing might do, otherwise there was no market
+for essays, especially such as failed to take a cheerful view of life,
+whereupon Cooper insisted that his book was exceptionally cheerful,
+inasmuch as it showed that life could be tolerable in spite of being so
+queer, to which the editor replied that serializing a book of humour was
+quite out of the question. "Then how about Pickwick?" said Cooper--but
+let us get back to the chapter on the milkman. I quote:
+
+Would sleep never come! I shifted the pillow to the foot of the bed and
+back; threw off the covers; pulled them over my head; discarded them;
+repeated the multiplication table; counted footsteps in the street
+beneath my window; lit a cigarette; tried to go to sleep sitting up and
+embracing my knees the way they bury the dead in Yucatan. No use. I
+would doze off, and immediately that unfortunate column of figures would
+appear, demanding to be added up, and I unable to determine whether sums
+written in Roman numerals could be added up at all. That is the
+disadvantage of taking conversation seriously, after ten in the evening,
+or at any time. I had been discussing the immigration problem till
+nearly midnight, and now I was busy adding up the annual influx from
+Austria-Hungary during the last twelve years expressed in Roman
+numerals. Some people are different. Their opinions don't hurt them. I
+have heard people say the most biting things about the need of
+abolishing religion and the family, and five minutes later ask for a
+caviare sandwich. Whereas I take the total immigration from
+Austria-Hungary for the last twelve years to bed with me and cannot fall
+asleep.
+
+I heard the rattle of wheels under my window. It was nearing daybreak. I
+looked at my watch and it was close to five. I got up, washed in cold
+water, dressed, and went outside. As I walked downstairs I heard the
+clatter of bottles in the hallway below and some one whistling
+cheerfully. It was the milkman. His wagon was at the curb, and as I
+passed down the front steps and stopped to breathe in the sharp, clean,
+mystic air of dawn, the milkman's horse raised his head, gazed at me for
+a moment with a curious, friendly scepticism, and sank back into
+thoughtful contemplation of a spot eighteen inches immediately in front
+of his fore-legs.
+
+(Here one editor had written in the margin: "Amateurish beginning;
+should have led off with a crisp phrase or two addressed to the milkman
+and then proceeded to a psychological analysis of the milkman's horse.")
+
+I said to the milkman:
+
+"This life of yours must be wonderfully conducive to seeing things from
+a new angle. A world of chill and pure half-shadows; the happiest time
+of the twenty-four hours; the roisterers gone to bed and the
+factory-workers not stirring for a good hour. I should imagine that men
+in your line would all be philosophers."
+
+"It does get a bit lonely," he said. "But I always carry an evening
+paper with me and read a few lines from house to house. Do you think
+they'll let Thaw off?"
+
+"What do _you_ think about it?" I said. "I haven't been following up the
+case."
+
+"I have read every bit of the story," he said. "He isn't any more crazy
+than you or me. He's been punished enough; what's the use of persecuting
+a man like that?"
+
+If Thaw were as sound in mind as my friend the milkman, there would be
+no doubt that he deserved his freedom. My new acquaintance was so well
+set up, so clear-eyed, with that ruddy glow which comes from shaving and
+washing in cold water before dawn, with the quiet air of peace and
+strength which comes from working in the silent hours. I thought what an
+upright, independent life a milkman's must be, so free from the petty
+chaffering and meanness that make up the ordinary tradesman's routine.
+He has no competition to contend with. He is no one's servant. He
+deposits his wares at your doorstep and you take them or leave them as
+you please. He can work in the dark because he does not need the light
+to study your face and overreach you. With no one to watch him, with no
+one to criticise him, with leisure and silence in which to work out his
+problems--I envied him.
+
+(Here another editor had written: "Tedious; chance for an excellent bit
+of characterisation in dialogue entirely missed.")
+
+"You're an early riser," he said.
+
+"Can't fall asleep," I said. "This air will do me good."
+
+"A brisk walk," he suggested.
+
+"I'm too tired," I said.
+
+He turned on the wagon step. "Jump in," he said; and when I was seated
+beside him he clucked to the horse, who raised his drooping head and
+started off diagonally across the street, apparently confident that he
+would find another cobblestone to contemplate, eighteen inches in front
+of his fore-legs.
+
+"A good many more people find it hard to sleep nowadays than ever
+before," he said. "You can tell by the windows that are lit up. Though
+very often it's diphtheria or something of the sort. You hear the little
+things whimper, and sometimes a man will run down the street and pull
+the night-bell at the drug-store."
+
+"Then you don't read all the time while you are driving?"
+
+"Oh, you notice those things and keep on reading. It isn't very noisy
+about this time of the day." He laughed.
+
+"I should think you'd be tired," I said.
+
+He said they did not work them too hard in his line. The hours were
+reasonable. At one time there was an attempt on the part of the dairy
+companies to make the hours longer; but the milkmen have some union of
+their own, and there was a strike which ended in the companies agreeing
+to pay for over-time from 7 to 9 A.M. Their association was more of a
+social and benefit society than a trade union. Once a month in summer
+they had an outing with lunch and some kind of a cabaret show and
+dancing. They were a contented lot. The work was not too exacting. He
+could read the evening paper when it got light enough, or sometimes he
+could just sit still and think.
+
+Think what?
+
+Again I envied him. What extraordinary facilities this man had for
+thinking straight, for seeing things clearly in this crisp morning air,
+and around him silence and everything as fresh, as frank, as fragrant as
+when the world was still young.
+
+He blushed and hesitated, but finally confessed that for more than a
+year he had been carrying about in his head a scenario for a
+moving-picture play. His story was naturally interrupted at frequent
+intervals as he went about the distribution of his milk bottles. But
+stripped of repetitions and ambiguities the plot he had evolved in the
+course of more than a year's driving through the silent streets was
+about as follows:
+
+The infant daughter of an extremely wealthy Mexican mine-owner is stolen
+by the gipsies. When she grows up she is chosen by the gipsy king for
+his bride. Before the wedding takes place the gipsies plan to rob the
+house of a Mexican millionaire who is no other than the girl's father.
+She volunteers to gain entrance into the house by posing as a celebrated
+Spanish dancer. At night she opens the door to her confederates. Leaving
+the girl to keep watch over their prisoner, the gipsies go about
+ransacking the house. The unhappy man groans and cries out, "Ah, if only
+I could see my little Juanita before I die." Father and daughter
+recognise each other, she releases him from big bonds, and arming
+themselves with Browning revolvers they shoot down the gipsy marauders
+as they enter the room in single file. Juanita marries the young
+overseer whom the childless old man has designated as his heir.
+
+(Here one editor wrote: "An ordinary plot; nothing in it to show that it
+was written by a milkman instead of a clergyman or a structural iron
+worker.")
+
+I think the criticism is a fair one.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SUMMER READING
+
+
+Our vacation plans last year were of the simplest. Personally, I said to
+Emmeline, there was just one thing I longed for--to get away to some
+quiet place where I could lie on my back under the trees and look up at
+the clouds. To this Emmeline replied that in this posture (1) I always
+smoke too much; (2) I catch cold and begin to sneeze; (3) I don't look
+at the clouds at all, but tire my eyes by studying the baseball page in
+the full glare of the sun. The newspaper habit is one which I regularly
+forswear every summer on leaving town. I hold to my resolution to this
+extent that I refrain from going down to the post office in the morning
+to buy a paper. But toward eleven o'clock the strain becomes unendurable
+and I borrow a copy of yesterday's paper after peering wistfully over
+other people's shoulders. Emmeline thinks this habit all the more
+inexcusable because, working for a newspaper myself, I ought to know
+there is never anything in them. She can't imagine what drives me on. I
+told her, perhaps it is the unconscious hope that some day I shall find
+in the paper something worth while.
+
+Actually, one soon discovers that the simple act of lying on one's back
+on the grass and looking up at the clouds involves an extraordinary
+amount of preparation. I am inclined to think that there must be
+correspondence courses which teach in ten lessons how to lie on one's
+back properly and look up. There must be text-books on how to tell the
+cumuli from the cirrus. There must be useful hints on how to relax and
+lose yourself in the immensity of the blue void.
+
+The personal equipment one needs to gaze at the clouds, if you believe
+the department stores, is tremendous. English flannels; French
+shirtings; native khaki; silks; home-spuns; belts with a monogram
+buckle; flowered cravats in colours to blend with the foliage; safety
+razors; extra blades for the razors; strops to sharpen the blades;
+unguents to keep the strops flexible; nickeled cases to keep the
+unguents in; and metal polish for the nickeled cases. Arduous labour is
+involved in going to Maple View Farm from the comparatively simple
+civilisation of New York. I am not certain whether in the best circles
+one can properly lie on one's back and look at the clouds without a
+humidor and a thermos bottle.
+
+Emmeline said I must be sure and not forget my fishing-pole, as that
+trout in the brook behind the barn would probably be expecting me.
+
+It seems absurd for a full-grown man to speak of hating a trout. But why
+deny it? When I think of the utterly debased creature in the pool behind
+the barn, the accumulated results of ten thousand years of civilisation
+drop from me, and my heart is surcharged with venom. It all came about
+so gradually. My landlord asked me one morning whether I shouldn't like
+to try my luck with his rod. I said I should. I took his rod and hooked
+the blackberry bush on the other side of the stream. I did better on my
+next try. As my hook sank below the surface, a thrill ran along the
+line, the slender bamboo stem arched forward, and I waited with my heart
+in my mouth for an enormous trout to emerge and engage me in a
+life-and-death struggle. But through three long weeks he refused to
+emerge. Emmeline said it was the bottom of the soap-box whose upper edge
+is visible above the surface. But that cannot be. No inanimate object
+could elicit in any one the rage and the sense of frustrated
+desire--perhaps I had better say no more. All my better instincts
+corrode with the thought of that fish. It would have been compensation,
+at least, if I had ever caught any other fish in that brook. It might
+have been a near relation, a favourite son perhaps, and I should have
+had my revenge--but there I go again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What Emmeline wanted was a chance to catch up in her reading. It had
+been a hard winter and spring, with the doctor too frequently in the
+house and books quite out of the question. There were a half-dozen
+novels Emmeline had in mind, not to mention Mr. Bryce's book on South
+America, John Masefield, and Strindberg, whom she cordially detests. I
+do too. I warned her against drawing up too ambitious a list, but she
+was determined to make a summer of it. She said she felt illiterate and
+terribly old. All I could do was to mention a few bookshops where she
+could get the best choice with the least expenditure of energy.
+Nevertheless she came back from her first day's shopping with a
+headache.
+
+Éponge is a rough, Turkish-towel fabric, selling in many widths, and
+eminently desirable for out-of-door wear because of its peculiar
+adaptability to the slim styles which prevent walking. Éponge has this
+fatal defect, however, that when it is advertised in ready-made gowns at
+an astounding reduction from $39.50, all the desirable models sell out
+some time before ten o'clock in the morning. Hence Emmeline's headache.
+She took very little supper and expressed the belief that our vacation
+would be a complete failure. The mountains are always hot and dusty and
+the crowd is a very mixed one.
+
+After a while Emmeline had a cup of tea and felt better. We went over
+our list of books for the summer and she wondered whether it wouldn't
+pay to get a seamstress into the house and avoid the exhausting trips
+downtown. On second thoughts she decided not to. Next morning she was
+quite well and asked me to remind her not to forget Robert Herrick's new
+novel. She said she might drop in at the office for lunch if she got
+through early at the stores, and we might look at books together.
+
+Charmeuse is a shimmering, silk-like material which lends itself
+admirably to summer wear, because it stains easily. But in its effect on
+the shopper's nerves, charmeuse is even worse than éponge. In fact, as a
+preparation for a summer's reading, I don't know what is more
+exhausting than charmeuse, unless it be crêpe de Chine. Emmeline did not
+drop in for lunch that day, and when I came home at night, I found her
+more depressed than ever. There was nothing to be had downtown. Prices
+were impossible and anything else wasn't fit to be touched. It might be
+just as well to stay in town for the summer as go away and take the
+chance of getting typhoid. The situation was somewhat relieved by the
+arrival at this juncture of several parcels, some long and narrow, and
+others short and square. One particularly heavy box felt as if it might
+contain a set of Strindberg, but turned out to be a really handsome coat
+in blue chinchilla which Emmeline explained would be just the thing for
+cool nights in the country. She had bought it in despair at obtaining
+the kind of crêpe de Chine she wanted. The crêpe de Chine came in a
+smaller box.
+
+At breakfast the next day we were tremendously cheerful. I told Emmeline
+of the handsome raincoat I had bought in preparation for lying on my
+back on the grass and looking up at the clouds. From that we passed to
+the new Brieux play. But when Emmeline intimated that she was going
+downtown soon after breakfast, I grew anxious.
+
+"Do you think," I said, "that it will really make any difference to Mr.
+Galsworthy whether you read him in a voile or in a white cotton ratine?"
+
+"If that is the way you feel about it," said Emmeline, "I can telephone
+and have them take all these things back. I hate them anyhow."
+
+"What I mean is," I said, "that you don't want to wear yourself out
+completely before we leave the city. We have a month's reading ahead of
+us. Let us begin it in peace of mind."
+
+"With nothing to wear?" she said.
+
+Tulle is a partly transparent material, which in the hands of a skilful
+milliner becomes an invaluable aid to a thorough comprehension of the
+plays of M. Brieux, especially when studied amid the complexities of
+life on Maple View Farm. As usual, it is the department stores which
+have been first to discover this fundamental connection in life. They
+have everything necessary for the thorough enjoyment of Mr. Bryce's book
+on South America--blouses, toques, parasols, and tennis shoes. Special
+bargains in linen crash and batiste are offered on the same day with a
+cut-rate edition of "Damaged Goods." Reading Brieux in the country is
+almost as complicated a diversion as lying on one's back and looking up
+at the clouds.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+NOCTURNE
+
+
+Once every three months, with fair regularity, she was brought into the
+Night Court, found guilty, and fined. She came in between eleven o'clock
+and midnight, when the traffic of the court is as its heaviest, and it
+would be an hour, perhaps, before she was called to the bar. When her
+turn came she would rise from her seat at one end of the prisoners'
+bench and confront the magistrate.
+
+Her eyes did not reach to the level of the magistrate's desk. A
+policeman in citizens' clothes would mount the witness stand, take oath
+with a seriousness of mien which was surprising, in view of the
+frequency with which he was called upon to repeat the formula, and
+testify in an illiterate drone to a definite infraction of the law of
+the State, committed in his presence and with his encouragement. While
+he spoke the magistrate would look at the ceiling. When she was called
+upon to answer she defended herself with an obvious lie or two, while
+the magistrate looked over her head. He would then condemn her to pay
+the sum of ten dollars to the State and let her go.
+
+She came to look forward to her visits at the Night Court.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Night Court is no longer a centre of general interest. During the
+first few months after it was established, two or three years ago, it
+was one of the great sights of a great city. For the newspapers it was a
+rich source of human-interest stories. It replaced Chinatown in its
+appeal to visitors from out of town. It stirred even the languid pulses
+of the native inhabitant with its offerings of something new in the way
+of "life." The sociologists, sincere and amateur, crowded the benches
+and took notes.
+
+To-day the novelty is worn off. The newspapers long ago abandoned the
+Night Court, clergymen go to it rarely for their texts, and the tango
+has taken its place. But the sociologists and the casual visitor have
+not disappeared. Serious people, anxious for an immediate vision of the
+pity of life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. No session of
+the court is without its little group of social investigators, among
+whom the women are in the majority. Many of them are young women,
+exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely gowned, and very well taken care of.
+
+As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting her turn before
+the magistrate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance over the railing
+that separated her from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic
+young women in the audience. She observed with extraordinary admiration
+and delight those charming faces softened in pity, the graceful bearing,
+the admirably constructed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of dress,
+which she compared with the best that the windows in Sixth Avenue could
+show. She was amazed to find such gowns actually being worn instead of
+remaining as an unattainable ideal on smiling lay figures in the shop
+windows.
+
+Occupants of the prisoners' bench are not supposed to stare at the
+spectators. She had to steal a glance now and then. Her visits to the
+Night Court had become so much a matter of routine that she would
+venture a peep over the railing while the case immediately preceding her
+own was being tried. Once or twice she was surprised by the clerk who
+called her name. She stood up mechanically and faced the magistrate as
+Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted the witness stand.
+
+She had no grudge against Officer Smith. She did not visualise him
+either as a person or as a part of a system. He was merely an incident
+of her trade. She had neither the training nor the imagination to look
+behind Officer Smith and see a communal policy which has not the power
+to suppress, nor the courage to acknowledge, nor the skill to regulate,
+and so contents itself with sending out full-fed policemen in civilian
+clothes to work up the evidence that defends society against her kind
+through the imposition of a ten-dollar fine.
+
+To some of the women on the visitors' benches the cruelty of the process
+came home: this business of setting a two-hundred-pound policeman in
+citizens' clothes, backed up by magistrates, clerks, court criers,
+interpreters, and court attendants, to worrying a ten-dollar fine out of
+a half-grown woman under an enormous imitation ostrich plume. The
+professional sociologists were chiefly interested in the money cost of
+this process to the taxpayer, and they took notes on the proportion of
+first offenders. Yet the Night Court is a remarkable advance in
+civilisation. Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner would pay
+a commission to the professional purveyor of bail.
+
+Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or new to the business, she would
+be given a chance against Officer Smith. She would be called to the
+witness chair and under oath be allowed to elaborate on the obvious
+lies which constituted her usual defence. This would give her the
+opportunity, between the magistrate's questions, of sweeping the
+court-room with a full, hungry look for as much as half a minute at a
+time. She saw the women in the audience only, and their clothes. The
+pity in their eyes did not move her, because she was not in the least
+interested in what they thought, but in how they looked and what they
+wore. They were part of a world which she would read about--she read
+very little--in the society columns of the Sunday newspaper. They were
+the women around whom headlines were written and whose pictures were
+printed frequently on the first page.
+
+She could study them with comparative leisure in the Night Court.
+Outside in the course of her daily routine she might catch an occasional
+glimpse of these same women, through the windows of a passing taxi, or
+in the matinée crowds, or going in and out of the fashionable shops. But
+her work took her seldom into the region of taxicabs and fashionable
+shops. The nature of her occupation kept her to furtive corners and the
+dark side of streets. Nor was she at such times in the mood for just
+appreciation of the beautiful things in life. More than any other walk
+of life, hers was of an exacting nature, calling for intense powers of
+concentration both as regards the public and the police. It was
+different in the Night Court. Here, having nothing to fear and nothing
+out of the usual to hope for, she might give herself up to the æsthetic
+contemplation of a beautiful world of which, at any other time, she
+could catch mere fugitive aspects.
+
+Sometimes I wonder why people think that life is only what they see and
+hear, and not what they read of. Take the Night Court. The visitor
+really sees nothing and hears nothing that he has not read a thousand
+times in his newspaper and had it described in greater detail and with
+better-trained powers of observation than he can bring to bear in
+person. What new phase of life is revealed by seeing in the body, say, a
+dozen practitioners of a trade of whom we know there are several tens of
+thousands in New York? They have been described by the human-interest
+reporters, analysed by the statisticians, defended by the social
+revolutionaries, and explained away by the optimists. For that matter,
+to the faithful reader of the newspapers, daily and Sunday, what can
+there be new in this world from the Pyramids by moonlight to the habits
+of the night prowler? Can the upper classes really acquire for
+themselves, through slumming parties and visits to the Night Court,
+anything like the knowledge that books and newspapers can furnish them?
+Can the lower classes ever hope to obtain that complete view of the
+Fifth Avenue set which the Sunday columns offer them? And yet there the
+case stands: only by seeing and hearing for ourselves, however
+imperfectly, do we get the sense of reality.
+
+That is why our criminal courts are probably our most influential
+schools of democracy. More than our settlement houses, more than our
+subsidised dancing-schools for shop-girls, they encourage the
+get-together process through which one-half the world learns how the
+other half lives. On either side of the railing of the prisoners' cage
+is an audience and a stage.
+
+That is why she would look forward to her regular visits at the Night
+Court. She saw life there.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+HAROLD'S SOUL, I
+
+
+I agree with the publishers of Miss Amarylis Pater's book, "The New
+Motherhood," that the subject is one which cannot possibly be ignored. I
+have not only read the book, but I have discussed it with Mrs. Hogan,
+and with my eldest son Harold, who will be seven next June. As a result
+I am confronted with certain remarkable differences of opinion.
+
+Twenty years ago, as I plainly recall, the Sacred Function of Motherhood
+was not a topic of popular interest. There were a great many mothers
+then, of course, and there were unquestionably many more children than
+there are to-day. People, as a rule, spoke of their mothers with
+fondness, and sometimes even with reverence. The habit had been forming
+for several thousand years, in the course of which poets and painters
+never grew tired of describing mothers who were engaged in such highly
+useful occupations as bending over cradles, watching by sick-beds,
+baking, mending, teaching, laughing in play-rooms, weeping at the Cross,
+manipulating with equal dexterity the precious vials of love and
+sacrifice and the carpet slipper of justice. But though people had thus
+got into the way of accepting their mothers as an essential part in the
+scheme of things, they rarely thought it necessary to write to the
+editor about the Sacred Function of Motherhood. I mean in the
+impersonal, scientific sense in which Amarylis Pater uses the phrase.
+
+Life in general was a pitifully unorganised, rule-of-thumb affair in
+those days. People fell in love because every one was doing it and
+without any expressed intention to advance the purposes of Evolution.
+They did not marry because they were anxious to render social service;
+but waited only till they had saved up enough to furnish a home. They
+bore children without regard to the future of the race. When the child
+came it was not a sociological event. The family did not consider the
+occurrence sacred, as Miss Vivian Holborn insists on calling it in her
+frequent communications to the press. The family contented itself with
+wishing the mother well and hoping the baby would not look too much like
+its father.
+
+Here I thought it would be well to confirm my own impressions by the
+testimony of a competent witness. So I turned and called through the
+open door into the dining-room.
+
+"Mrs. Hogan," I said, "what do you think of the Sacred Function of
+Motherhood?"
+
+"What do I think of what?" said Mrs. Hogan.
+
+"Of the Sacred Function of Motherhood," I repeated, rather timidly.
+
+She looked at me with a distrustful eye, her broom suspended in midair.
+
+Mrs. Hogan comes in once a week to help out. Distrust is her chronic
+attitude toward me. She has all of the busy woman's aversion for a man
+about the house while domestic operations are under way. But besides,
+she cannot quite understand why a full-grown and able-bodied man should
+be lolling at his desk, pen in hand, when he ought to be downtown
+working for his family. She is aware, of course, that all the members of
+my family are well-nourished, decently dressed, and apparently quite
+happy. But that only renders the source of my income all the more
+dubious. When any one asks Mrs. Hogan how many children she has, she
+stares for some time at the ceiling before replying. From which I gather
+that there must be several.
+
+"I refer to the business of being a mother, Mrs. Hogan. Have you never
+felt what a sacred thing that is?"
+
+"An' what would there be sacred about the same?" she asked, seeing that
+I was quite serious. "Bearin' a child every other year, an' nursin'
+them, an' bringin' them through sickness, an' stayin' up nights to sew
+an' wash an' darn, an' drivin' them out to school, an' goin' out by the
+day's wurrk, where's the time for anythin' sacred to come into the life
+of a woman?"
+
+"Just the same it does," I said. "Motherhood, Mrs. Hogan, is so holy a
+thing nowadays that a great many women are afraid to touch it,
+preferring to write in the magazines about it. Are you aware that when
+you married Mr. Hogan you were performing an act of social service?"
+
+"I was not that," said Mrs. Hogan, "I was doin' a service to Jim,
+besides plazin' myself. 'Twas himself needed some one to take care of
+him."
+
+"But that would mean," I said, "that you were false to your own highest
+self. If you had read Miss Pater's book you would know that any marriage
+entered into without the sense of social service merely means that a
+woman is selling herself to a man for life for the mere price of
+maintenance."
+
+"When I married Jim," said Mrs. Hogan, "he was after being out of a job
+for six months."
+
+She went back to her work more than ever puzzled why my wife and the
+children should look so well taken care of.
+
+In those days--I mean about the time Mrs. Hogan was married to Jim, and
+I was at college constructing my world of ideas out of the now forgotten
+books which Mr. Gaynor was always quoting--I recall distinctly that the
+sacred things were also the secret things. What burned hot in the heart
+was allowed to rest deep in the heart. Partly this was because of a
+common habit of reticence which we have so fortunately outgrown. But
+another reason must have been that life then, as I have said, was
+imperfectly organised. To-day we have applied the principle of the
+division of labour so that we no longer expect the same person to do the
+work of the world and to feel its sacred significance. Thus, to-day
+there are women who are mothers and other women who proclaim the sacred
+function of motherhood. To-day there are women who bring up their
+children, and other women who, at the slightest provocation, thrill to
+the clear, immortal soul that looks out of the innocent eyes of
+childhood.
+
+At this moment the clear, immortal soul of my boy, Harold, finds
+utterance in a succession of blood-curdling howls. He is playing Indians
+again. The wailing accompaniment in high falsetto emanates from the
+immortal soul of the baby. Those two immortalities are at it again.
+
+I call out, "Harold!"
+
+There is a silence.
+
+"Harold!"
+
+With extreme deliberation he appears in the doorway. I recognise him
+largely by intuition, so utterly smeared up is he from crawling in
+single file the entire length of the hall on his stomach. Beneath that
+thick deposit of rich alluvial soil I assume that my son exists. I ask
+him what he has been doing with the baby.
+
+He had been doing nothing at all. He had merely tied her by one leg to a
+chair and pretended to scalp her with a pair of ninepins. He had
+performed a war dance around her and every time his ritual progress
+brought him face to face with the baby he made believe to brain her, but
+he only meant to see how near he could come without actually touching
+her, and he would strike the chair instead. He didn't know why the baby
+shrieked.
+
+"Harold," I said, "do you feel the sacred innocence of childhood
+brooding in you?"
+
+He was alarmed, but bravely attempted a smile.
+
+"Ah, father!" he said.
+
+I looked at him severely.
+
+"Do you know what I ought to do to you in the name of the New
+Parenthood?"
+
+"Ah, father!" and his lip trembled.
+
+"You are a disgrace to the eternal spark in you," I said.
+
+He lowered his head and began to cry. It required an effort to be stern,
+but I persisted.
+
+"Harold," I said, "you will go into your room and stand in the corner
+for ten minutes. Close the door behind you. I will tell you when time is
+up."
+
+He dragged himself away heartbroken and I found it was useless trying to
+write any more. I had made two people utterly miserable. I threw down my
+pen and rose to take a book from the shelf, but stopped in the act. Out
+of Harold's room came music. I stole to the door and looked in. He had
+not disobeyed orders. He had merely dressed himself in one of the
+nurse's aprons and the baby's cap, and standing erect in his corner, he
+sang "Dixie," with all the fervour of his fresh young voice.
+
+About his appearance there was nothing sacred.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+EDUCATIONAL
+
+
+Half-minute lessons for up-to-the-minute thinkers:
+
+
+I. WORD STUDY
+
+CHILD, _noun_; a student of sex hygiene; a member of boy scout
+organisations and girls' camp-fire organisations for the practice of the
+kind of self-control that parents fail to exercise; a member of school
+republics for the study of politics while father reads the sporting
+page; a ward of the State; a student of the phenomena of alcoholism; a
+handicap carefully avoided by specialists in child-study; one-third of a
+French family; the holder of an inalienable title to happiness which the
+Government must supply; in general, a human being under thirteen years
+of age who must be taught everything so that he will be surprised at
+nothing when he is thirty years of age. The ignorant and innocent
+offspring of a human couple, obs. Synonyms: man-child; girl-child;
+love-child.
+
+MOTHERHOOD, _noun_; a profession once highly esteemed, but rejected by
+modern spirits as too frequently automatic.
+
+MOTHER, _noun_; a female progenitor; a term often employed by the older
+poets in connection with the ideas of love, sacrifice, and holiness, but
+now delicately described by writers of the _Harper's Weekly_ temperament
+as being synonymous with cow.
+
+EUGENICS, _noun_; a condition of intense excitement over the future of
+the human race among those who are doing nothing to perpetuate it.
+
+LITERATURE, _noun_; see SEX; WHITE SLAVE.
+
+DRAMA, _noun_; see SEX; WHITE SLAVE.
+
+PUNCH, _noun_; see DRAMA; LITERATURE; MAGAZINE ADVERTISING.
+
+ADENOIDS, _noun_; something that is cut out of children.
+
+SOCIAL-MINDEDNESS, _noun_; something that is injected into children.
+
+
+II. GEOGRAPHY
+
+ARGENTINA; where the tango comes from.
+
+RUSSIA; where Anna Pavlova and ritual murder trials come from.
+
+PERSIA; where the harem skirt comes from, and other fashions eagerly
+embraced by a generation which insists that woman shall no longer be
+man's chattel and plaything.
+
+AMERICA; where the profits of all-night restaurants in Montmartre come
+from.
+
+ASSYRIA, BABYLONIA, EGYPT, PERU, YUCATAN, PATAGONIA; where the
+decorations for Broadway lobster-palaces come from.
+
+EQUATOR; the earth's waistline, unfashionably located in the same place
+year after year.
+
+TENDERLOIN; where the world's wisdom comes from.
+
+CAMBRIDGE, NEW HAVEN, PRINCETON, MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS; the sites of once
+celebrated educational institutions whose functions have now been taken
+over by theatre managers on Broadway.
+
+UNDERWORLD; the world now uppermost.
+
+MOUNTAIN; a rugged elevation of the earth's surface which comes to every
+self-constituted little prophet when he snaps his fingers.
+
+SEA; where we are all at.
+
+MEXICO CITY; residence of Huerta, the most eminent living disciple of
+Nietzsche.
+
+BULGARIA; a nation which scornfully rejected peace and reaped honour,
+widows, and orphans; where the Servians were the other day.
+
+SERVIA; where the Bulgarians may be next week.
+
+CHAUTAUQUA; any place outside the offices of the State Department.
+
+
+III. ARITHMETIC
+
+1. A ship carrying 800 passengers and crew is in collision off the banks
+of Newfoundland, and 700 are saved. Describe the method by which the
+_Evening Journal_ computes 400 souls lost.
+
+2. The salary of a police lieutenant is about $2,500 a year. At what
+rate of interest must this sum be invested to produce a million dollars'
+worth of real estate in ten years?
+
+3. 2+2=4. Show this to be true otherwise than by writing a four-act play
+with its principal scene laid in a house of ill fame.
+
+4. The loss to the nation from disease has been estimated at
+$200,000,000 a year. Show the profit that would accrue to the nation
+from abolishing every form of disease after deducting the cost of
+maintaining the dependent widows and orphans of 50,000 doctors who have
+starved to death.
+
+5. In a certain gubernatorial campaign several disinterested gentlemen
+contributed $10,000 each to the campaign fund; yet the total of campaign
+contributions was a little over $5,000. Explain this.
+
+6. If you were called upon to build a bridge to the moon, which would
+you rather use, the total number of postage stamps on rejected magazine
+contributions laid end to end, or the total number of automobiles
+shipped from Detroit placed end to end?
+
+7. In a recent article on mortality statistics in the _World_, the
+writer omitted to divide his average death rate by 2. Was his argument,
+because of that, two times as convincing or only half as convincing?
+
+8. Describe the modifications in the laws of arithmetic introduced by
+Mr. Thomas W. Lawson.
+
+
+IV. HISTORY
+
+The supporters of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt have frequently remarked that
+if Abraham Lincoln were alive to-day, he would be with them. Uncle Joe
+Cannon has expressed the conviction that Abraham Lincoln if he were
+alive to-day would be on his side. Is there anything in history to
+indicate that Abraham Lincoln, great man though he was, could be in two
+places at the same time?
+
+Mention three Republican administrations in which the rainfall was twice
+as heavy as in any Democratic administration since 1837, and show what
+this indicates for the prosperity of the country under Mr. Woodrow
+Wilson.
+
+Julius Cæsar is said to have been in the habit of dictating to three
+secretaries simultaneously. How does this compare with the literary
+productivity of Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Jack London?
+
+At the last meeting of the Tammany aldermanic convention of the Fifth
+Assembly District a speaker declared it to be the most momentous event
+in the history of the world. Compare the Fifth Assembly District
+convention with (a) the battle of Marathon; (b) the meeting of the
+States-General at Versailles in 1789; (c) the signing of the
+Emancipation Proclamation.
+
+
+V. LOGIC
+
+Prove that the department store is the principal cause of prostitution
+by showing that the department store is fifty-six years old and the
+social evil is forty thousand years old.
+
+The mortality rate in municipal foundling asylums is 99-1/2 per cent.
+Develop this into an argument for the maintenance of all children by the
+State.
+
+Compare the arguments advanced in at least four (4) New York newspapers
+to show that the Giants would win with the reasons given in the same
+newspapers why the Athletics won.
+
+Compare Richard Pearson Hobson's last speech on the Japanese peril with
+Demosthenes's Oration on the Crown.
+
+
+VI. SCIENCE
+
+The classification of the sciences has always presented peculiar
+difficulties, but a partial list would include the following:
+
+  Tonsorial Science,                 Sunday Supplement Science,
+  Science of Bricklaying             Domestic Science,
+  Science of Cosmic Love             Bohemian Science,
+  Science of Advertising             Science of Sir Oliver Lodge,
+  Scranton, Pa., Science             Science of Packy McFarland,
+  Science of Puts and Calls          Science of Sexology,
+  Anti-vivisectionist Science,       Science.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+MORGAN
+
+
+We were speaking of the man whose career was written in terms of huge
+corporations and incomparable art collections.
+
+"What a life it was!" said Cooper. "From his office-desk he controlled
+the destinies of one hundred million people. His leisure hours were
+spent amidst the garnered beauty of five thousand years. Isn't it almost
+an intolerable thought that the same man should have been master of the
+Stock Exchange and owner of that marvellous museum in white marble on
+Thirty-sixth Street?"
+
+"Cooper," I said, "you sound like the I. W. W."
+
+"I am that," he retorted. "I express the Inexhaustible Wonder of the
+World in the face of this thing we call America. A nation devoted to the
+principle that all men are born equal has produced the perfect type of
+financial absolutism. A people given up to material aims has cornered
+the art treasures of the ages. Need I say more?"
+
+"You needn't," I said. "You have already touched the high-water mark in
+lyricism."
+
+But Harding waved me aside.
+
+"I have also been thinking of that marble palace on Thirty-sixth
+Street," he said. "I can't help picturing the scene there on that
+critical night in the fall of 1907 when Wall Street was rocking to its
+foundations, and a haggard group of millionaires were seeking a way to
+stave off ruin. I imagine the glorious Old Masters looking down from
+their frames on that unhappy assembly of New Masters--the masters of our
+wealth, our credit, our entire industrial civilisation. I imagine
+Lorenzo the Magnificent leaning out from the canvas and calling the
+attention of his neighbour, Grolier, to that white-faced company of
+great American collectors. The perspiring gentleman at the head of the
+table had one of the choicest collections of trust companies in
+existence. The man at his elbow was the owner of an unrivalled
+collection of copper mines and smelters. Facing him was an amateur who
+had gone in for insurance companies. Others there had collected
+railroads, or national banks, or holding companies. No wonder old
+Lorenzo was moved at the prospect of so many matchless accumulations,
+representing the devoted labour of years, going under the hammer. Around
+the walls the wonderful First Editions stood at attention and some one
+was saying, 'Naturally, on the security of your first mortgage bonds--'"
+
+"Putting poetry aside," I said somewhat impatiently, "what I should like
+to know is whether this garnered beauty of five thousand years, as
+Cooper calls it, really has any meaning to its owners. I understand that
+most of our great collections are bought in wholesale lots, Shakespeare
+folios by the yard, Chinese porcelains by the roomful. Does a man
+really take joy in his art treasures in such circumstances?"
+
+"Of course he does," said Cooper. "If we buy masterpieces in the bulk,
+that again is the American of it. I am certain that this man's
+extraordinary business success is to be explained by the mental stimulus
+he derived from his books and his pictures. His business competitors
+really had no chance. Their idea of recreation was yachts or cards or
+roof-gardens. But he found rest in the presence of the loveliest dreams
+of dead painters and poets. Can't you see how a man's imagination in
+such surroundings would naturally expand and embrace the world? No
+wonder he thought in billions of dollars. Why, I myself, if I could
+spend half an hour before a Raphael whose radiant beauty brings the
+tears to your eyes, could go out and float a $100,000,000 corporation."
+
+"Having first dried your tears, of course," I suggested.
+
+"Well, yes," he said.
+
+Harding had been showing signs of impatience, a common trait with him
+when other people are speaking.
+
+"When a rich man dies," he said, "the first thing people ask is what
+will the stock market do. They were putting that question last week.
+Your Wall Street broker is a sensitive being. Nothing can happen at the
+other end of the world but he must rush out and sell or buy something.
+Returning, he says to the junior partner, 'I see there has been a big
+battle at Scutari. Where's Scutari and what are they fighting about?'
+'Search me,' says the junior partner, 'but I think you did right in
+buying.' 'I sold,' says the broker. 'Who won the battle?' says the
+junior partner. 'I don't recall,' says the broker. But he is convinced
+that no big battle should be allowed to pass without being reflected in
+Wall Street.
+
+"But that is not what I wanted to say. Suppose the market does go up two
+points or loses two points. What is the effect on the Stock Exchange
+compared with the crisis that ensues in the art world when a rich
+American dies? There's where things begin to look panicky. The
+quotations on Rembrandts and Van Dycks are cut in two. There is
+consternation in London auction rooms and Venetian palaces. In some
+half-ruined little Italian town the parish council has almost made up
+its mind to ship to New York the thirteenth-century altar piece which is
+the glory of the cathedral. The news comes that Croesus is dead and
+the parish authorities see their dreams of new schools and a new chapel
+and a modern water supply vanish. That is the crisis worth considering."
+
+"Not to speak," I said, "of that little shop on Fourth Avenue where they
+paint Botticellis."
+
+"I admit that Harding has made a very interesting suggestion, though
+probably without any deliberate intention on his part," said Cooper.
+"This steady drain by Wall Street upon Europe's art treasures is a
+civilising process which scarcely receives the attention it deserves,
+except when some Paris editor loses his temper and calls us barbarians
+and despoilers. I am not sure who is the barbarian, the American trust
+magnate who thinks a million francs is not too much for one of Raphael's
+Madonnas, or the scion of Europe's ancient nobility who thinks that no
+Madonna is worth keeping if you can get a million francs for it.
+According to the European idea, the proper place for a masterpiece is a
+corner of the lounging-room where the weary guest, after a hard day with
+the hounds, may be tempted to stare at the canvas for a moment and say,
+'Nice little daub, what?' Their masterpieces are made to be seldom seen
+and never heard of.
+
+"Now see what we do with the same picture over here. Before it is
+brought into the country all the papers have cable despatches about it,
+and they have impressed its value on the public mind by multiplying the
+real price by five. Then we advertise it by raising the question whether
+it is genuine or a fake. Then we put it into a museum and countless
+thousands besiege the doorkeeper and ask which is the way to the
+million-dollar picture. Then the Sunday papers print a reproduction in
+colours suitable for framing, but it isn't framed very often because the
+baby destroys it while papa is busy with the comic supplement. Then the
+New York correspondents of the Chicago papers write columns about the
+picture. Then it is taken up by women's clubs, the reading circles, and
+the Chautauqua. Before the process is completed that picture has entered
+into the daily thought and speech of the American people."
+
+Harding interrupted.
+
+"The members of the European nobility have seldom been interested in
+art. They have been too busy wearing military uniforms or pursuing the
+elusive fox all over the landscape."
+
+"But that is just the point I was making," said Cooper indignantly.
+
+"Yes, but not so clearly as I have formulated it," said Harding. "The
+fact is that art has always flourished under the patronage of the
+merchant class. The Athenians were a trading people. Lorenzo the
+Magnificent came from a family of pawn-brokers. Rembrandt sold his
+pictures to the sturdy, and quite homely, tea and coffee merchants of
+Holland. It is preposterous to suppose that because a man is lucky in
+the stock market he is incapable of appreciating the very best things in
+art. He is not incapable; only he keeps his interests separate. From ten
+o'clock to three our patron of the arts is busy downtown attending to
+the unfortunate financiers whom he has caught on the wrong side of the
+market. If Cooper here were a Cubist painter, and you gave him the run
+of a great art collector's front office on settlement day, he could
+produce any number of pictures entitled Nude Speculator Descending a
+Wall Street Staircase."
+
+"The European aristocracy doesn't always despise us," I said.
+"Occasionally an American will be decorated by the Grand Duke of
+Sonderklasse-Ganzgut with the cross of the Bald Eagle of the Third
+Class, the person thus honoured being worth nine hundred million
+dollars and the area of the Prince's dominions being eighty-nine square
+miles."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE MODERN INQUISITION
+
+
+QUESTIONNAIRE: _A favourite indoor amusement in uplift circles._
+
+His eyes were bloodshot and he stared forward into vacancy.
+
+"We were married," he said, "shortly after I was graduated from law
+school. For just five years we were happy. We were in love. I was making
+good in my profession. Helen took delight in her household duties and
+her baby. Then one day--the exact date is still engraved in letters of
+fire on my memory--I received a letter. It was from the Society for the
+Propagation of Ethical Statistics. It said that a study was being made
+of the churchgoing habits of college graduates, and there was a printed
+list of questions which I was requested to answer. I cannot recall the
+entire list, but these were some of the items:
+
+"Do you go to church willingly or to please your wife?
+
+"Do you stay all through the sermon?
+
+"What is the average amount you deposit in the contribution plate (a) in
+summer; (b) in winter?
+
+"Is your choice of a particular church determined by (a) creed; (b) the
+quality of the preaching; (c) ventilation?
+
+"Are you ever overtaken by sleep during the sermon, and if so, at what
+point in the sermon do you most readily yield to the influence? (Note:
+In answering this question a state of recurrent drowsiness is to be
+considered as sleep.)
+
+"Do you go to sleep most easily under (a) an Episcopalian; (b)
+Presbyterian; (c) Methodist; (d) Rabbi; (e) Ethical Culturist? (Note:
+Strike out all but one of the above names.)
+
+"Is your awakening attended by a sensation of remorse or merely one of
+profound astonishment?
+
+"What do you consider to be the ideal length for a sermon, leaving
+climatic conditions out of account?
+
+"I tossed the letter across the breakfast table to Helen and intimated
+that I couldn't spare the time for an answer. But Helen insisted it was
+my duty as a college graduate. If the science of sociology couldn't look
+to us men of culture for its data, whom could it go to? So I telephoned
+down to the office that I would be late and sat down to draft my reply.
+It was much more difficult than I imagined. I was amazed to find how
+little I knew of my own habits and processes of thoughts. It took the
+greater part of the morning, and when I finally did get down to the
+office I learned that my most important client, an aged gentleman of
+uncertain temper, had gone off in a rage saying he would never come
+back. He kept his word.
+
+"That letter was the beginning. I had no leisure to worry over this loss
+of a very considerable part of my income, because the next morning's
+mail brought a letter from the Association for the Encouragement of the
+City Beautiful. It contained a very long questionnaire which I was
+requested to fill out and forward by return mail. I was asked to state
+whether the character of the telegraph poles in our neighbourhood was
+such as to reflect credit on the civic spirit of the community, in
+respect to material (a) wood, (b) ornamental iron; and secondly, as to
+paint, (a) yellow, (b) red, (c) green, (d) no paint at all. I was also
+to say whether conditions in our neighbours' back yards were conducive
+to the propagation of the typhoid-bearing or common house-fly and to
+give my estimate of the number of flies so propagated in the course of a
+week, in hundreds of thousands. Finally, was the presence of the
+house-fly in our community due to the negligence of individual citizens,
+or was it the direct result of inefficient municipal government? And if
+the latter, was our municipal administration Republican or Democratic,
+and what were the popular majorities for mayor since the
+Spanish-American war?
+
+"With Helen's assistance I managed to send off my reply within two
+days. But when I came down to my place of business I found that I had
+missed an important long-distance call from Chicago which the office-boy
+had promised to transmit to me, but failed to do so because he did not
+understand it in the first place."
+
+He sighed and stared at the floor. His emaciated fingers beat a rapid
+tattoo on my desk. He droned on in dull, impersonal tones, as if this
+story of the wreck of a man's happiness had no special concern for him.
+
+"Well," he said, "you can foresee the end for yourself. Within less than
+two months my law business disappeared, because I simply could not
+devote the necessary time to it. I resorted to desperate measures. I
+wrote to our alumni secretary, asking him to remove my name from the
+college catalogue; but it was too late. My name was by this time the
+common property of all the sociological laboratories and research
+stations in the country. At home, want began to stare us in the face.
+Worry over my financial condition, added to the long hours of labour
+involved in filling out questionnaires, undermined my health. I grew
+morose, ill-tempered, curt in my behaviour to Helen and the child. We
+still loved each other, but the glow and tenderness of our former
+relations had disappeared.
+
+"Fortunately Helen did not feel my neglect as she might. For by this
+time she, too, was getting letters from sociological experiment
+stations. Helen was graduated from a New England college. Her letters,
+at first, dealt with problems of domestic economy. She had to write out
+model dietaries, statements of weekly expenses, the relative merits of
+white and coloured help. Later she was led into the field of child
+psychology. Our little Laura was hardly able to go out into the open
+air, because her mother had to keep her under observation during so many
+hours of the day. The child grew pale and nervous. Helen grew thin. In
+her case, poor girl, it was actual lack of food. There was no money in
+the house. One night as we sat down at table there was just a glass of
+milk and a slice of bread and butter at Laura's plate; for us there was
+nothing. At first I failed to understand. Then I looked at Helen and she
+was trying to smile through her tears."
+
+He sobbed and I turned and stared out of the window.
+
+"That night," he said, "I went out and pawned my watch; my
+great-grandfather had worn it. People rally quickly under trouble, and
+the next morning we were fairly cheerful. I set to work on a list of
+questions from the Bureau of Comparative Eugenics. Helen was busy with a
+questionnaire on Reaction Time in Children Under Six, from the
+Psychological Department at Harvard. I was resigned. I looked up and saw
+Laura playing with her alphabet blocks. I thought: Well, our lives may
+be spoiled, but there is the child. Life had cast no shadow on the
+current of her young days. At that moment the hall-boy brought in a
+letter. It was addressed to Miss Laura Smith--our baby. It was from the
+Wisconsin Laboratory of Juvenile Æsthetics. It contained a list of
+questions for the child to answer. How many hours a day did she play?
+Did she prefer to play in the house or on the street? Did she look into
+shop windows when she was out walking or at moving-picture posters? Was
+she afraid of dogs? I was crushed. There was a mist before my eyes. I
+fell forward on the table and wept."
+
+His lip trembled, but the manhood was not gone from him. He faced me
+with a show of firmness.
+
+"Mind you," he said, "I am not complaining. The individual must suffer
+if the world is to move forward. We have suffered, but in a good cause."
+
+I agreed. I recalled the tabulated results of a particularly elaborate
+questionnaire printed in the morning's news. Questions had been sent to
+a thousand college graduates. Of that number it appeared that 480 lived
+in the country, 230 preferred the drama to fiction, 198 were
+vegetarians, and 576 voted for Mr. Wilson at the last Presidential
+election. Those who voted the Democratic ticket were less proficient in
+spelling than those who voted for Colonel Roosevelt. Could anything be
+more useful?
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THORNS IN THE CUSHION
+
+
+I have a confession to make and I have my desk to clean out. One is as
+hard to go at as the other. If people would only refrain from putting my
+books and papers in order whenever I am away, I could always find things
+where I leave them and the embarrassment I am about to relate would have
+been spared me. After all, there is efficiency and efficiency. If the
+book I need at any moment is always buried beneath a pile of foreign
+newspapers, it is only interfering with my work to haul it out during my
+absence and put it on the desk right in front of me, where I cannot see
+it.
+
+It was at Harding's place that I met Dr. Gunther. Harding had insisted
+that we two ought to know each other. After I had spent half an hour in
+the Doctor's company I agreed that had been worth my while; the rest is
+for him to say. Gunther is a physician of high standing, but his hobby
+is astronomy, and it was quite evident that he is as big an expert in
+that field as in his own profession. We spent a delightful evening. As
+he rose to say good-night, Gunther turned to me and smiled in a timid
+fashion that was altogether charming.
+
+"I must confess," he said with a sort of foreign dignity of speech,
+"that my desire to make your acquaintance was not altogether
+disinterested. I have here," pulling a large envelope out of his pocket,
+"a few remarks which I have thrown together at odd moments, and which it
+occurred to me might be of interest to your readers. It is on a subject
+which I can honestly profess to know something about. Perhaps you might
+pass it on to your editor after you have glanced through it and decided
+that it had a chance. In case it is found unavailable for your purposes,
+you must be under no compunction about sending it back. You see, I have
+put the manuscript into a stamped and addressed envelope. I know how
+busy you journalists are."
+
+I told him I would be delighted to do what I could. I brought the
+manuscript to the office next morning, laid it on my desk, and forgot
+about it. It was a Saturday. After I left the office, the janitor's
+assistant, being new to the place, came in and cleaned up my room. When
+I looked for the paper on Monday, I could not find it. At first I was
+not alarmed, because I reasoned that in the course of two or three weeks
+it would turn up.
+
+But this was evidently Dr. Gunther's first experience as a contributor
+to the press. He was impatient. Within a week I had a letter from him,
+dated Boston, where, as he explained, he had been called on a matter of
+private business which would keep him for some time. Without at all
+wishing to seem importunate, he asked whether my editor had arrived at
+any decision with regard to his manuscript. It was a vexing situation. I
+shrank from writing and confessing how clumsy I had been; and besides
+the paper was likely to be found at any moment. I saw that I must fight
+for time.
+
+What I am about to say will confirm many good people in their opinion of
+the unscrupulous nature of the newspaper profession; but the truth must
+be told. I determined to write to Dr. Gunther as if I had read his
+article. The terrible difficulty was that I did not know what it was
+about. I was fairly sure it had to do with one of two things, medicine
+or astronomy. He had said, when he gave me the manuscript, that it was a
+subject on which he could claim special knowledge. But which of the two
+was it? For some time I hesitated, and then I wrote the following
+letter:
+
+"Dear Dr. Gunther: Before giving your valuable paper a second and more
+thorough reading, I must bring up a question which suggests itself even
+after the most cursory examination. It is this: Will your article go
+well with illustrations, and if so where are they to be had? You know
+that ours is a picture supplement, appealing to a general audience, and
+there is every chance for inserting illustrations into an article of
+scientific nature abounding in such close-knit argument as you present.
+Of course there is not the least reason for haste in the matter. A reply
+from you within the next four weeks will be in time."
+
+Next morning I found a telegram from Boston on my desk. It said:
+"Naturally no objection to pictures. Suggest you reproduce some of the
+illustrations from Langley's masterly work on the subject. Gunther."
+
+My ruse had succeeded. I was prepared now to keep up a fairly active
+correspondence until the missing paper was found. I knew of Samuel
+Pierpont Langley, one of the greatest of American astronomers and a
+pioneer of aviation. I turned to the encyclopædia to see which one of
+Langley's books was likely to be the one Gunther had in mind. There,
+before me, was a biographical sketch of John Newport Langley, an English
+physiologist, who had published, among other things, a treatise "On the
+Liver," and another "On the Salivary Glands." I recalled that at
+Harding's house Gunther, after an elaborate discussion of the present
+state of meteorology, had drifted into a spirited tirade against the
+evils of ill-cooked and undigested food. It might very well be this
+paper "On the Salivary Glands" that Gunther had in mind.
+
+I delayed writing as long as I could while the office was being
+ransacked for the missing article. It was a hopeless search. The
+manuscript had evidently been swept away into the all-devouring waste
+basket, another victim to mistaken ideals of efficiency. A few days
+later came a long and friendly letter from Gunther. Without wishing to
+flatter me, he said that he was quite as much interested in my opinion
+of his article as in getting it published. He hoped to hear from me at
+my very earliest convenience.
+
+I waited nearly a week, and yielding to fate wrote as follows:
+
+"Dear Dr. Gunther: The article is altogether admirable. It seems to me
+that there are just two subjects which never lose their appeal to the
+average man. One is the food by which he lives. The other is the
+universe in which he lives. They represent the opposite poles in his
+nature, one being no less important than the other. Let the primitive
+man but satisfy the cravings of his stomach, and his awed gaze will turn
+to the illimitable glory of the stars. I think of Pasteur's epoch-making
+researches into the processes of food-fermentation and then I think of
+Galileo. If you ask me which is the greater man, I will say frankly I do
+not know. Your article will duly appear in our magazine, though not for
+some time. In the meanwhile, it may be that additions or changes will
+suggest themselves to you. Very likely you have a carbon copy of your
+manuscript at home. Make such alterations as you see fit and send the
+new manuscript to us as soon as you are satisfied with it."
+
+The foregoing letter was addressed to Dr. Gunther in Boston. Two days
+later he wrote from his home address in New York. He said: "I cannot
+speak adequately of the consideration you have given to my poor literary
+effort. Your letter offering me an opportunity to revise the manuscript
+reached me just before I left for New York. At home I found the original
+article awaiting me, in my own envelope. Evidently it had occurred to
+you that I might not have a copy of the article at hand--which is indeed
+the case--and so you hastened to send me the original."
+
+Of course the envelope containing the good Doctor's manuscript had not
+fallen into the hands of the janitor at all. It had caught the quick eye
+of our conscientious mail-boy, who saw his duty and promptly did it. It
+only remains for me to persuade the managing editor to print the article
+when it comes back. After what I have gone through, this should not be
+difficult. Our readers, therefore, may look forward to a masterly
+article on a subject of great interest. Whether it is an astronomical
+article or a pure food article the reader will learn for himself.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+LOW-GRADE CITIZENS
+
+
+Cooper was in a confidential mood.
+
+"Isn't it true," he said, "that once so often every one of us feels
+impelled to go out and assassinate a college professor?"
+
+"Why shouldn't one?" said Harding. "No one would miss a professor
+except, possibly, his wife and the children."
+
+"That's just it, his children," said Cooper. "That's what makes a man
+hesitate. The particular college professor I have in mind recently
+published an article on Social Decadence in the _North American Review_.
+He deplored the tendency among our well-to-do classes toward small
+families. At the same time he deplored the mistaken zeal of our
+low-income classes in trying to more than make up for the negligence of
+their betters. He said, 'The American population may, therefore, be
+increasing most rapidly from that group least fitted by heredity or by
+income to develop social worth in their offspring. Such a process of
+"reversed selection" must mean, for the nation, a constant decrease in
+the social worth of each succeeding generation.' He brought forward a
+good many figures, but I have been so angry that I am quite unable to
+recall what they are."
+
+"In that case," Harding said, "you should lose no time in seeking out
+the man and slaying him before his side of the case comes back to you."
+
+"People," said Cooper, with that happy gift of his for dropping a
+subject to suit his own convenience, "have fallen into the habit of
+saying that the art of letter-writing is extinct. They say we don't
+write the way Madame de Sévigné did or Charles Lamb. This is not true.
+
+"For instance, on April 26, 1913, Charles Crawl, a low-income American
+residing in the soft-coal districts of western Pennsylvania, wrote a
+letter which I have not been able to get out of my mind. With that
+unhappy predilection for getting into tight places which is one of the
+characteristics of our improvident, low-income classes, Charles Crawl
+happened to be in one of the lower workings of the Cincinnati mine when
+an explosion of gas--unavoidable, as in all mine disasters--killed
+nearly a hundred operatives. Charles Crawl escaped injury, but after
+creeping through the dark for two days he felt his strength going from
+him, and so, with a piece of chalk, on his smudgy overalls, he wrote the
+following letter:
+
+"'Good-bye, my children, God bless you.'
+
+"He had two children, which for a man of low social worth was doing
+quite well. But on the other hand he was improvident enough to leave his
+children without a mother. When I was at college, my instructor in
+rhetoric was always saying that my failure to write well was due to the
+fact that I had nothing to say; and he used to quote passages from
+Isaiah to show how the thing should be done. I think my rhetoric teacher
+would have approved of Charles Crawl's epistolary style. I think Isaiah
+would have."
+
+"But we can't all of us work in the mines," I said.
+
+"Therefore it is not to you that America is looking for the development
+of an epistolary art," said Cooper; "an art in which we are bound to
+take first place long before our coal deposits are exhausted. Charles
+Crawl had his predecessors. In November, 1909, Samuel Howard was
+thoughtless enough to let himself be killed, with several hundred
+others, in the St. Paul's mine at Cherry, Illinois. He, too, left a
+letter behind him. He wrote:
+
+      "If I am dead, give my diamond ring to Mamie Robinson. The ring is
+      at the post-office. I had it sent there. The only thing I regret
+      is my brother that could help mother out after I am dead and gone.
+      I tried my best to get out and could not.
+
+"You see, being a low-income man, of small social worth and pitifully
+inefficient, even when he did his best to get out, he could not. But
+perhaps the subject tires you?"
+
+"You might as well go on," said Harding. "If you finish with this
+subject you will have some other grievance."
+
+"I have only two more examples of the vulgar epistolary style to cite,"
+said Cooper. "Strictly speaking one of them is not a letter. But it is
+to the point. On the night of April 14, 1912, an Irishman named Dillon
+of low social value, in fact a stoker, happened to be swimming in the
+North Atlantic. The _Titanic_ had just sunk from beneath his feet. But
+perhaps I had better quote the testimony before the Mersey Commission,
+which, being an official communication, is necessarily unanswerable, as
+the late Sir W. S. Gilbert pointed out:
+
+      "Then he [Dillon] swam away from the noise and came across Johnny
+      Bannon on a grating--
+
+"From the fact that Johnny Bannon had managed to possess himself of a
+grating we are justified in concluding that he was a man of somewhat
+higher social worth than the witness, Dillon. However,
+
+      "--came across Johnny Bannon on a grating. He said, "Cheero,
+      Johnny," and Bannon answered, "I am all right, Paddy." There was
+      not room on the grating for two, and Dillon, saying, "Well, so
+      long, Johnny," swam off--
+
+In thus leaving Johnny Bannon in undisputed possession of the grating
+you see that Dillon once more wrote himself down as a low-grade man
+unfit for competitive survival. However,
+
+      --"Well, so long, Johnny," swam off in the direction of a star
+      where Johnny Bannon had seen a flashlight.
+
+And as it turned out, it was, indeed, a flashlight, and Dillon was
+pulled out of the water to go on stoking and accelerating the process of
+national decadence.
+
+"My last letter," continued Cooper, "was written in October, 1912, in
+the Tombs. The author was one Frank Cirofici, known to the patrons of
+educational moving-picture shows all over the country as Dago Frank. It
+was addressed to one Big Jack Zelig, a distinguished ornament of our
+Great White Way, cut down before his time by a bullet from behind.
+Cirofici wrote:
+
+      "I know the night I heard Jip and Lefty were arrested I cried like
+      a little baby.--Dear pal, I have more faith in you than in any
+      living being in this country. I tell you the truth right from my
+      heart. I don't know you long, Jack, and I think if it wasn't for
+      you, I don't know what would happen to me. Being I am a Dago, of
+      course, you don't know what I know."
+
+"Please," said Harding, "please don't knock a hole into your own
+argument by asking us to shed tears over the undefiled wells of purity
+that lie deep in the soul of the Bowery gunman. You won't contend that
+Dago Frank, when he leaves us, will be a loss to the nation."
+
+"It would be an act of delusion on my part," said Cooper, "to expect you
+to see what I am driving at without going to the trouble of spelling it
+out for you, Harding, even if you do belong to the classes of superior
+social worth. What I want to express is the justifiable wrath which
+possesses me at this silly habit of taking a pile of figures and adding
+them up and dividing by three and deducing therefrom scarlet visions of
+Decadence and the fall of Rome and Trafalgar, and all that rot. What if
+empires, and republics, and incomes, and the size of families do rise
+and fall? Does the soul of man decay? Do the primitive loyalties decay?
+As long as we have men like Charles Crawl and Samuel Howard, do you
+think I care whether or not Harvard graduates neglect to reproduce their
+kind? The soul of man, as embodied in Dillon with his 'So long, Johnny,'
+is as sound to-day as it was ten thousand years ago, before the human
+race entered on its decline by putting on clothes. And Cirofici, pouring
+his soul out to his 'pal,' crying like a child over those poor lambs,
+Lefty Lewis and Gyp the Blood--"
+
+"If that's what you mean," said Harding with suspicious humility, "I
+quite agree with you. You know, I have often--"
+
+"Once you agree with me," said Cooper, "I don't see why it is necessary
+for you to continue."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+ROMANCE
+
+
+At 5:15 in the afternoon of an exceptionally sultry day in August, John
+P. Wesley, forty-seven years old, in business at No. 634 East
+Twenty-sixth Street as a jobber in tools and hardware, was descending
+the stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway at Twenty-eighth
+Street, when it occurred to him suddenly how odd it was that he should
+be going home. His grip tightened on the hand rail and he stopped short
+in his tracks, his eyes fixed on the ground in pained perplexity. The
+crowd behind him, thrown back upon itself by this abrupt action, halted
+only for a moment and flowed on. Cheerful office-boys looked back at him
+and asked what was the answer. Stout citizens elbowed him aside without
+apology. But Wesley did not mind. He was asking himself why it was that
+the end of the day's work should invariably find him descending the
+stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway. Was there any reason for
+doing that, other than habit? He wondered why it would not be just as
+reasonable to cross the avenue and take an uptown train instead.
+
+Wesley had been taking the downtown train at Twenty-eighth Street at
+5:15 in the afternoon ever since there was a Subway. At Brooklyn Bridge
+he changed to an express and went to the end of the line. At the end of
+the line there was a boat which took him across the harbour. At the end
+of the boat ride there was a trolley car which wound its way up the hill
+and through streets lined with yellow-bricked, easy-payment, two-family
+houses, out into the open country, where it dropped him at a cross road.
+At the end of a ten minutes' walk there was a new house of stucco and
+timber, standing away from the road, its angular lines revealing mingled
+aspirations toward the Californian bungalow and the English Tudor. In
+the house lived a tall, slender, grey-haired woman who was Wesley's
+wife, and two young girls who were his daughters. They always came to
+the door when his footsteps grated on the garden path, and kissed him
+welcome. After dinner he went out and watered the lawn, which, after his
+wife and the girls, he loved most. He plied the hose deliberately, his
+eye alert for bald patches. Of late the lawn had not been coming on
+well, because of a scorching sun and the lack of rain. A quiet chat with
+his wife on matters of domestic economy ushered in the end of a busy
+day. At the end of the day there was another day just like it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, motionless in the crowd, Wesley was asking whether right to the
+end of life this succession of days would continue. Why always the
+south-bound train? He was aware that there were good reasons why. One
+was the tall grey-haired woman and the two young girls at home who were
+in the habit of waiting for the sound of his footsteps on the garden
+path. They were his life. But apparently, too, there must be life along
+the uptown route of the Interborough. He wanted to run amuck, to board a
+north-bound train without any destination in mind, and to keep on as far
+as his heart desired, to the very end perhaps, to Van Cortlandt Park,
+where they played polo, or the Bronx, where there was a botanical museum
+and a zoo. Even if he went only as far as Grand Central Station, it
+would be an act of magnificent daring.
+
+Wesley climbed to the street, crossed Fourth Avenue, descended to the
+uptown platform, and entered a train without stopping to see whether it
+was Broadway or Lenox Avenue. Already he was thinking of the three women
+at home in a remote, objective mood. They would be waiting for him, no
+doubt, and he was sorry, but what else could he do? He was not his own
+master. Under the circumstances it was a comfort to know that all three
+of them were women of poise, not given to making the worst of things,
+and with enough work on their hands to keep them from worrying
+overmuch.
+
+Having broken the great habit of his life by taking an uptown train at
+5:15, Wesley found it quite natural that his minor habits should fall
+from him automatically. He did not relax into his seat and lose himself
+in the evening paper after his usual fashion. He did not look at his
+paper at all, but at the people about him. He had never seen such men
+and women before, so fresh-tinted, so outstanding, so electric. He
+seemed to have opened his eyes on a mass of vivid colours and sharp
+contours. It was the same sensation he experienced when he used to break
+his gold-rimmed spectacles, and after he had groped for a day in the
+mists of myopia, a new, bright world would leap out at him through the
+new lenses.
+
+Wesley did not make friends easily. In a crowd he was peculiarly shy.
+Now he grew garrulous. At first his innate timidity rose up and choked
+him, but he fought it down. He turned to his neighbour on the right, a
+thick-set, clean-shaven youth who was painfully studying the comic
+pictures in his evening newspaper, and remarked, in a style utterly
+strange to him:
+
+"Looks very much like the Giants had the rag cinched?"
+
+The thick-set young man, whom Wesley imagined to be a butcher's
+assistant or something of the sort, looked up from his paper and said,
+"It certainly does seem as if the New York team had established its
+title to the championship."
+
+Wesley cleared his throat again.
+
+"When it comes to slugging the ball you've got to hand it to them," he
+said.
+
+"Assuredly," said the young man, folding up his paper with the evident
+design of continuing the conversation.
+
+Wesley was pleased and frightened. He had tasted another new sensation.
+He had broken through the frosty reserve of twenty years and had spoken
+to a stranger after the free and easy manner of men who make friends in
+Pullman cars and at lunch counters. And the stranger, instead of
+repulsing him, had admitted him, at the very first attempt, into the
+fraternity of ordinary people. It was pleasant to be one of the great
+democracy of the crowd, something which Wesley had never had time to be.
+But on the other hand, he found the strain of conversation telling upon
+him. He did not know how to go on.
+
+The stranger went out, but Wesley did not care. He was lost in a
+delicious reverie, conscious only of being carried forward on
+free-beating wings into a wonderful, unknown land. The grinding of
+wheels and brakes as the train halted at a station and pulled out again
+made a languorous, soothing music. The train clattered out of the tunnel
+into the open air, and Wesley was but dimly aware of the change from
+dark to twilight. The way now ran through a region of vague apartment
+houses. There were trees, stretches of green field waiting for the
+builder, and here or there a colonial manor house with sheltered
+windows, resigned to its fate. Then came cottages with gardens. And in
+one of these Wesley, shocked into acute consciousness, saw a man with a
+rubber hose watering a lawn. Wesley leaped to his feet.
+
+The train was at a standstill when he awoke to the extraordinary fact
+that he was twelve miles away from South Ferry, and going in the wrong
+direction. The imperative need of getting home as soon as he could
+overwhelmed him. He dashed for the door, but it slid shut in his face
+and the train pulled out. His fellow passengers grinned. One of the most
+amusing things in the world is a tardy passenger who tries to fling
+himself through a car door and flattens his nose against the glass. It
+is hard to say why the thing is amusing, but it is. Wesley did not know
+that he was being laughed at. He merely knew that he must go home. He
+got out at the next station, and when he was seated in a corner of the
+south-bound train, he sighed with unutterable relief. He was once more
+in a normal world where trains ran to South Ferry instead of away from
+it. He dropped off at his road crossing, just two hours late, and found
+his wife waiting.
+
+They walked on side by side without speaking, but once or twice she
+turned and caught him staring at her with a peculiar mixture of wonder
+and unaccustomed tenderness.
+
+Finally he broke out.
+
+"It's good to see you again!"
+
+She laughed and was happy. His voice stirred in her memories of long
+ago.
+
+"It's good to have you back, dear," she said.
+
+"But you really look remarkably well," he insisted.
+
+"I rested this afternoon."
+
+"That's what you should do every day," he said. "Look at that old maple
+tree! It hasn't changed a bit!"
+
+"No," she said, and began to wonder.
+
+"And the girls are well?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"I can hardly wait till I see them," he said; and then, to save
+himself, "I guess I am getting old, Alice."
+
+"You are younger to-night than you have been for a long time," she said.
+
+Jennie and her sister were waiting for them on the porch. They wondered
+why father's kiss fell so warmly on their cheeks. He kissed them twice,
+which was very unusual; but being discreet young women they asked no
+questions. After dinner Wesley went out to look at the lawn.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+WANDERLUST
+
+
+April sunlight on the river and the liners putting out to sea. Paris!
+Florence! the Alps! the Mediterranean! I turned away and let my thoughts
+run back to the time when Emmeline and I were in the habit of making,
+once a year, the trip to Prospect Park South.
+
+The Subway has brought this delightful region within the radius of
+ordinary tourist travel, though I am told that the element of adventure
+has not been completely eliminated, owing to the necessity of
+transferring at Atlantic Avenue, where it is still the custom of the
+traffic policemen to direct passengers to the wrong car. At the time of
+which I am speaking, Prospect Park South lay off the beaten track, but
+the difficulties of the venture were atoned for by the delight of
+finding one's self, at the journey's end, in a world of new impressions,
+a world untouched by the rush and clamour of our own days, and steeped
+in the colour and poetry which Cook's, cotton goods, and the
+cinematograph have been wiping out in Europe and the Near East.
+
+There were no Baedekers then for travellers to Prospect Park South.
+To-day I presume guide-books and maps may be purchased at the Manhattan
+end of the Brooklyn Bridge if people still go by that route. We did
+without guide-books or guides, because the inhabitants of Prospect Park
+South were a kindly folk and as a rule would wait for visitors at the
+trolley stops, with an umbrella. When this did not happen, we asked our
+way from passers-by. These were always strangers who had lost their way.
+The inhabitants were either peacefully at home or waiting at the trolley
+stops. For that matter an inhabitant, when encountered by rare chance,
+was not really of assistance. A resident always referred to streets and
+avenues by the names they bore when he first moved in; and inasmuch as
+the streets in Prospect Park South are renamed every year and the
+street numbers altered at the same time, the settlers, who would find
+their own homes by intuition, were worse than useless as guides. On the
+other hand, to meet a stranger who was lost was always a help. It was a
+peculiarity of strangers who were lost in Prospect Park South that they
+would always be passing the street you were looking for, while you in
+turn had just turned in from the street they were looking for, so that
+an exchange of information was always mutually profitable.
+
+The following hints for travellers to Prospect Park South are based upon
+our experiences of some years ago. Those who go by the Interborough tube
+will probably find that changed conditions have rendered many of these
+rules obsolete. But for those who go by way of Brooklyn Bridge they may
+still be of some value. First then as to dress. As a rule one should
+dress for Prospect Park South very much as for a short run to Europe.
+That is to say, woollens are always preferable, especially in the rainy
+season (which in Prospect Park South is coextensive with the visiting
+season), owing to the long waits between cars. It is true, as I have
+said, that the inhabitants of Prospect Park South are accustomed to wait
+at the trolley stations with an umbrella, and no household is without a
+full assortment of old mackintoshes and rubbers to lend to improvident
+visitors who believed the weather reports in the paper. But house
+parties in Prospect Park South are frequently large and there may not be
+enough old raincoats to go around. A light overcoat, an umbrella,
+rubbers or a pair of stout shoes, and a pocket electric light for
+reading names on the street lamps at night, will be found sufficient for
+the ordinary traveller.
+
+The choice of route is important. Those who, like us, live in upper
+Manhattan may lay their plans (excluding the Subway) either for the
+Ninth Avenue L or the Sixth Avenue L. As far south as Fifty-third Street
+the two lines coincide. Below Fifty-third Street the question of route
+should be determined by one's personal preferences in the matter of
+scenery; though not entirely. Veteran travellers assure me that there is
+also a difference in comfort. The curves are sharper on Sixth Avenue,
+but there are more flat wheels on the Ninth Avenue line. According as
+the tourist is susceptible to lateral or vertical disturbances he will
+make his choice. The front and rear cars are to be recommended above all
+others because a seat may always be obtained. I recognise, however, that
+if the traveller has long been a resident of New York he will force his
+way into the middle cars. Then, hanging from a strap, he may curse the
+company and be in turn cursed by the quick-tempered gentleman upon whose
+feet he is standing.
+
+A phrase-book is not necessary. The English language is used on both the
+Sixth and Ninth Avenue lines, and being equally incomprehensible, cannot
+be looked up in a dictionary. Only legal currency of the United States
+is accepted at the ticket-offices, but change is frequently given in
+Canadian dimes. It is convenient, but not essential, to supply one's
+self with reading matter at the beginning of the trip. Newspapers are
+always to be had for the picking on the floor of the cars. The question
+of fresh air, a topic of constant unpleasant controversy between
+American travellers and Europeans on the Continent, need not concern the
+traveller here. The matter is regulated by the company management which
+keeps the windows closed in summer and open in winter. Passengers of an
+independent turn of mind will be wary of opening windows on their own
+account. The sudden entrance of air following upon the heavy
+perspiration induced by the effort has been known to lead to pneumonia.
+
+With these few general considerations in mind, we may proceed to give a
+rapid sketch of the route the tourist traverses. As we have said, down
+to Fifty-third Street the passenger on the Sixth Avenue and on the Ninth
+Avenue will pass through the same landscape. As the train makes the
+magnificent curve through One Hundred and Tenth Street he will have
+before him on the right the towering mass of the Cathedral of St. John,
+which a kindly neighbour will tell him is Columbia University, and on
+the left the lovely, wooded heights of Central Park, their base skirted
+by a low line of garages and French dyeing establishments. At
+Ninety-eighth Street, on the right, is a water tower of red brick, which
+probably has the distinction of being the tallest water tower on
+Ninety-eighth Street. At Seventy-seventh Street to the left is the
+Museum of Natural History, which the same kindly informant to whom we
+have referred will describe as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On every
+cross street to the right one may catch a glimpse of the beautiful
+Riverside Drive with the smoke from the New York Central's freight
+engines rising above the trees.
+
+At Fifty-third Street the Sixth Avenue trains diverge to the left for a
+short distance and then, turning south once more, carry the traveller
+through a region heavily overgrown with skeleton advertising signs of
+woman's apparel and table waters. If the Ninth Avenue route is selected
+the vista is one of tenement houses and factories. At Thirty-third
+Street is the new Pennsylvania Station, the cost of which the same
+kindly neighbour will exaggerate by several hundred millions of dollars.
+
+Ten blocks further down are the buildings of the General Theological
+Seminary, so beautiful in line and colour that no resident of New York
+ever alludes to them. A few minutes further down the train rounds a
+curve and the traveller, if he goes in the early morning, as every
+visitor to Prospect Park South must, catches a glimpse of the fairy land
+of steeples and battlements of lower New York, a Camelot wreathed with
+wisps of steam. For the lover of scenery the Ninth Avenue is to be
+unhesitatingly recommended, whereas the Sixth Avenue route will give
+pleasure to the citizen who takes pride in the development of our
+garment industries.
+
+I have no space to describe the interesting views to be had while
+crossing Brooklyn Bridge. I can only mention the harbour with the
+sunlight upon it, a spectacle of loveliness for which New York will be
+forgiven much. Straight under the span of the bridge is the pier from
+which Colonel Roosevelt set sail for South America. On the left, close
+to the edge of the river, is the beetling mass of sugar refineries
+famous the world over as the scene of an epoch-making experiment in
+modifying the law of gravitation, when the sugar company succeeded in
+weighing in three thousand pounds of sugar to the ton and paying duty on
+the smaller amount to the United States Government.
+
+Of the trip through Brooklyn to Prospect Park South I will not attempt
+to give any description. For that matter I will not pretend that on any
+of our journeys I have carried away a definite idea of Brooklyn. For
+that a lifetime is necessary.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+UNREVISED SCHEDULES
+
+
+Life's ironies beset us whichever way we turn. The very day that Woodrow
+Wilson signed the tariff bill, I discovered that Emmeline is a
+Protectionist.
+
+Thrice in the course of the evening I alluded, with pretended calm, to
+the signing of the bill, without awakening the least response in
+Emmeline. The tariff apparently had no meaning to her. Thereupon I
+reproached her openly.
+
+"It is characteristic of your sex," I said, "not to betray the slightest
+interest in a matter that comes so intimately home to you. Here is a
+bill which is bound to affect the problem of high prices. Every woman
+who carries a market basket, every woman who shops, every woman who has
+the management of a household on her hands, is directly concerned in the
+question of lower tariff duties. Yet I dare say you haven't read two
+lines on the subject in your newspaper."
+
+"What have we been paying duties on?" she said.
+
+"On everything," I replied with spirit. "Anchors, for instance. We have
+been paying one cent a pound on them. That means twenty dollars a ton.
+You know what the average anchor weighs, so you can figure out for
+yourself what we have been paying out all these years for this commodity
+alone. We have been paying 85 per cent. on bunion plasters, 10 per cent.
+on animals' claws, and 85 per cent. on teazels."
+
+"But we hardly ever use any of these things," she said.
+
+"I was simply illustrating the iniquitous extremes to which our tariff
+advocates were prepared to go," I said. "It may seem natural to put a
+duty on beef, and shoes, and cotton goods. But the tariff barons were
+not content. Insatiable greed demanded that a tax be put on teazels."
+
+"What is a teazel?" she said.
+
+"I am not sure that I know," I replied. "But that just illustrates one
+of the favourite methods of the tariff plunderers. It consisted in
+slapping a stiff duty on articles people did not know the meaning of and
+so would pay without protest. I say teazels, but, of course, I mean
+meat, and sugar, and cotton, and woollen goods, all of which things will
+soon be within the reach of all. I should imagine that women would be
+grateful for what has been done to make the living problem so much
+easier."
+
+"Under the new tariff bill," she said, "will there still be only
+twenty-four hours to the day?"
+
+"The new tariff doesn't repeal the laws of astronomy," I replied.
+
+"That is what I was thinking when you spoke of the living problem being
+made easier for us," she said. "Putting twelve more hours into the day
+would be a help. Did the old tariff have a big duty on hanging up
+pictures?"
+
+"I don't know what you are driving at," I said, but in my heart I
+thought I knew.
+
+"I mean," she said, "around moving time. I have always thought there
+must be a very heavy tax on every picture that a man hangs up; or
+rugs--"
+
+I decided that frivolity was the best way out of a situation that had
+suddenly become menacing. "Usually we don't hang up rugs," I said.
+
+"That may be an oversight on our part," she replied. "Perhaps, if we
+hung up rugs and put pictures on the floor it might appeal to your
+passion for romance. You might even find it exhilarating."
+
+The idea seemed to fascinate her.
+
+"There are a great many things," she went on, "that I should like to see
+on the free list. Seats in the Subway, for instance. I stood up all the
+way from Twenty-third Street this afternoon, but I suppose the duty on a
+man's giving up his seat to a woman is prohibitive. Then there's Mrs.
+Flanagan who comes in by the day. She has a baby who is teething and
+cries all night. I wish there was a lower duty on babies' teeth, so that
+they came easier; and on sleep for mothers who have to go out by the
+day. I also wish there was a lower duty on the whisky that her husband
+consumes. She could possibly afford to stay at home more than she does."
+
+"He'd only drink himself to death," I said.
+
+But she was not paying attention. "There might be a lower duty on
+efficient domestic help. It would be a relief."
+
+"Foreign household help are not under the tariff law at all," I said.
+"They come in free."
+
+"That's what the girl said yesterday when she decided to quit, an hour
+before dinner. And from the way she spoke to me I imagine that her
+language also came in free. The more I think of it the fewer advantages
+I can see for us women under your new tariff bill." And then the bitter
+truth came out. "I think that on the whole I am in favour of a high
+tariff on most things."
+
+"You are in favour of Protection," I stammered, hardly believing my
+senses.
+
+"I am in favour of protecting domestic industry," said Emmeline, and I
+saw that she had been reading the newspapers more carefully than I
+imagined.
+
+The protective system which Emmeline outlined to me that evening would
+have made Senator Penrose sob for joy. One of the first things she
+demanded was a heavy duty on tobacco. She said she would be satisfied
+with a flat rate of 100 per cent. on the nasty article, with a super tax
+of 100 per cent. on all half-smoked cigars left lying around the house,
+and another 100 per cent. on cigar ashes and half-burnt matches.
+Alcoholic spirits should be totally excluded. She wanted a pretty heavy
+duty on raincoats left lying on chairs when they should be hung up on
+the proper hook. She was also in favour of a prohibitive tax on all
+arguments tending to prove that woman's natural sphere is the home.
+Lodge dues, club dues, and the practice of reading newspapers at the
+breakfast table should be heavily taxed. There were a great many other
+schedules she proposed, carrying a minimum duty of seventy-five per
+cent. I cannot pretend to remember all, but my impression is that plays
+dealing with the social evil and eugenics were among them.
+
+By this time it will be apparent that Emmeline's views on tariff
+legislation were somewhat confused. She evidently made no distinction
+between import duties, internal revenue taxes, and the police power of
+the State. Before continuing our discussion I therefore insisted that we
+restrict debate to the specific question of import duties and the cost
+of living. The simple fact was that we had now changed from a
+high-tariff nation to a low-tariff nation. How would this affect
+ourselves and our neighbours?
+
+Thereupon I was subjected to a severe examination as to tariffs and
+prices in other countries. My answers were, in a general fashion,
+correct, though possibly I may have confused the British tariff system
+with that of Germany.
+
+"From your statements, so far as I can make head or tail out of them,"
+said Emmeline, "I gather that in protection countries the cost of food
+and clothing and rent is always just a little ahead of wages and
+salaries."
+
+"You have followed me perfectly," I said.
+
+"Whereas in low-tariff countries people's wages and salaries are always
+just a little behind the cost of food, clothing, and shelter.
+
+"That is due to quite a different set of causes," I said.
+
+"I imagined," she said, "that the causes must be other than those you
+mentioned. But the fact remains that the choice which confronts most of
+us is between having a little less than we need, or needing a little
+more than we have. If that is so, it seems to me rather a waste of time
+to spend--did you say seventy-five years?--in revising the tariff. I
+prefer my own kind of tariff."
+
+"And the cost of living?" I said.
+
+"My kind of tariff gets much nearer to solving that problem," she said.
+
+"But then, why Mrs. Pankhurst?" I said. "If the making of laws has
+nothing to do with the comfort of life, why do you want to vote?"
+
+"Because we want to assert our equality by sharing your illusions.
+Besides, we can use the vote to bring about a state of things when
+voting won't be necessary."
+
+On further thought, Emmeline is not a Protectionist; she is an
+Anarchist.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+SOMEWHAT CONFUSED
+
+
+He said:
+
+"Last night my wife took me to a lecture on Eugenics and the Future. The
+night before, we went to a lecture on the Social Implications of the
+Tango. I enjoyed them both immensely. Of course, after a long day in the
+office, I am rather tired in the evening. If I dozed off on either
+occasion it must have been just for a moment. I followed the arguments
+perfectly."
+
+"Are you converted?" I said.
+
+He pushed his derby further back on his head.
+
+"Quite. I am not a mule. I know a good argument when I see one. Now,
+isn't it true, as the speaker contended last night, that the human
+animal, taking him by and large, is not a beautiful object? When he
+isn't bow-legged, he is knock-kneed. There are too many men prematurely
+bald. There are too many women prematurely wrinkled--and fat. We are
+nothing but a shambling, stoop-shouldered race, in a permanent state of
+ill-health. In summer we get sun-struck. In winter we get colds in the
+head. Look at the ancient Greeks. Is there any reason why we cannot
+produce a race as healthy, as beautiful, as graceful in the free play of
+muscle and limb? An erect, supple, free-stepping race, breathing deeply
+of life, looking the world full in the face, daring everything, afraid
+of nothing. Our bodies are divine, as much so as our souls. To go on
+being a race of physical degenerates, a snuffling, wheezing, perspiring
+race that is always running to the doctor, is mortal sin; especially
+when the remedy is close at hand."
+
+"You mean eugenics?" I said.
+
+"No," he said, "I refer to the tango. The speaker last night--or was it
+the night before?--was absolutely convincing on the point. I am sure you
+will agree."
+
+To make sure that I would agree he interrupted me just as I opened my
+mouth to frame an objection. He continued rapidly:
+
+"Take this matter of old age. There's no reason why people should let
+themselves grow old, is there now? And a properly constituted race would
+see to it that old age was postponed indefinitely. After all, when a man
+says he is eighty years old or ninety years old, it is only a figure of
+speech. Look at Napoleon winning the battle of Leipzig when he was
+seventy-eight years old."
+
+"I never heard that before," I said. "I thought Napoleon lost the battle
+of Leipzig, and when he died--"
+
+"It may have been Hannibal," he said. "At that point I may possibly have
+dozed off. But the principle of the thing is the same. Only a race of
+weaklings will succumb to the ravages of time without making a fight for
+it. There is really nothing beautiful in old age. You sit out the long
+winter nights by the fire. Your eyes are too weak for the fine print in
+the evening paper, and when you ask your son to tell you about the new
+Currency Law he grows cross and scolds the baby. When you stop to buy a
+ticket in the Subway, people grow impatient and murmur something about
+an old ladies' home. It's all as plain as daylight. There is no reason
+why people, as soon as they get to be sixty, should reconcile themselves
+to the idea of debility, warm gruel, and chest protectors, when they
+might go on being young, alert, graceful, full of the joy of life, if
+they would only recognise the way of going about it."
+
+"You mean the tango?" I said.
+
+"No," he said. "I was alluding to eugenics."
+
+He spoke with assurance, but from the corner of his eye he threw me a
+wistful, fugitive glance, as if to make sure from my bearing that this
+was really what he meant. I did not contradict him. I was thinking of
+his wife. For the first time in my experience my sympathies were with
+the tired business man. It is good for the tired business man that his
+wife shall be alive to the things that count; but two nights in
+succession is rather hard. His wife, I knew, was alive to every phase of
+our intense modern existence, and in rapid succession. She did not
+precisely burn with that hard, gemlike flame which Mr. Pater
+recommended. Sometimes I thought she burned with a sixty-four-candle
+power carbon glow. It was a bit trying on the eyes.
+
+"Or take the question of sex," he said. "What is there in sex emotion to
+be ashamed of? It is the most primordial of feelings. It comes before
+the law of gravitation, as the speaker showed last night."
+
+"Does it though?" I said.
+
+"Well," he said, "perhaps it was the night before last. Around this
+universal urge, of which we ought to be proud, as the most powerful
+force in Evolution (the speaker last night was sure there could be no
+doubt on the subject), we have built up an elaborate structure of
+reticence and hypocrisy. All art, all literature, is of significance
+only as it emphasises sex. If the Bible has impressed itself on the
+imagination of humanity for two thousand years, it is because it
+contains the most beautiful love songs in all literature. It is the
+force which drives the sun in its course, as the Italian poet has said.
+It has been the inspiration of all great deeds. If we searched deeply
+enough, we should find that sex was the inspiration behind the discovery
+of America, the invention of printing, and the building of the Roman
+aqueducts. Only the most benighted ignorance will permit our prudish
+sentiments on the subject to stand in the way of a movement which is
+sweeping the world like wildfire."
+
+"Referring to eugenics?" I said.
+
+"No," he said, "I mean the tango."
+
+He looked out of the window and pondered.
+
+"Yes," he said, "that was night before last. What the speaker dwelt upon
+last night was the subject of democracy. At present we know nothing of
+true democracy, of true equality. Society is divided into classes with
+separate codes of morals and standards of conduct. There are rich and
+poor; workers and idlers; meat eaters and vegetarians; the old and the
+young; the literate, the illiterate, and the advocates of simplified
+spelling. It isn't a world at all; it is chaos. In the end it all
+resolves itself into this: humanity is divided into the strong and the
+weak. The surest way to do away with inequality is to produce a race in
+which every member is strong."
+
+"You mean--" I said.
+
+"Pardon me," he said. "I haven't finished. Let me sum up the speaker's
+concluding sentence as I recall it. As we look around us to-day there is
+unmistakably one force which works for the elimination of that
+inequality which is the source of all our troubles; a force which wipes
+out all distinction of class, of age, and of education, and produces a
+world in which everybody is engaged in doing the same thing as everybody
+else."
+
+"Oh, I see," I said. "You are now speaking of the tango."
+
+"Not at all," he said, "I am referring to eugenics. But perhaps you do
+not agree with me?"
+
+I hesitated. He was watching me eagerly, pushing his derby back until it
+stood upright on its tail like a trained seal.
+
+"I have done my best to agree with you," I said, "but you have made it
+rather difficult for me. Nevertheless I do agree with you. What I am
+thinking of now is something which the speaker last night omitted to
+mention--or was it the night before last? And it is this. Under the
+conditions which you describe, how beautifully complex the art of
+thinking will become. At present we can hardly be said to think at all.
+We are cowards. We crawl along from one truth to another. We timidly
+look back to our premises before jumping at the conclusion. We are
+horrified by inconsistencies. We are enslaved by facts--facts of nature,
+facts of human nature, facts of experience. How different it will all be
+when we can sidestep facts, when we can dip over inconsistencies, when
+we can hug boldly an apparent contradiction and make it our own; when
+thinking, in short, will not be a timid regulated process, but a
+succession of dips, twists, gallops, slides, bends, hurdles, sprints,
+and pole vaults."
+
+"You are thinking of the tango?" he said.
+
+"No," I replied. "I had eugenics in mind."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+HAROLD'S SOUL, II
+
+
+You, mothers and fathers [said this particular advertising folder which
+I found in my morning's mail], do you know what goes on in the soul of
+your child?
+
+I, for one, know very little of what goes on inside of Harold. My
+information on the subject would hardly furnish material for a single
+university extension lecture on child psychology. It is an imperfect,
+unsystematised knowledge based on accidental glimpses into Harold's
+soul, odd flashes of self-revelation, and occasional questions the boy
+will put to me. I don't know whether Harold is more reticent than the
+average boy in the second elementary grade, but in his case it does no
+good to cross-examine. He grows confused, suspicious, and afraid. He
+resents the intrusion of my rough fingers into his sensitive world of
+ideas. So I do not insist on detailed accounts of how the boy passes
+his time in class or at play; for what are time and space and
+grammatical sequence to the child? I am content to wait, and now and
+then I make discoveries.
+
+Harold and I were discussing one day the rather important question,
+raised by himself, from what height a man must fall down in order to be
+killed. It began, I think, with umbrellas and how they behave in a high
+wind. From that we passed on to parachutes and balloons and the loftier
+mountain tops. We dwelt for some time upon the difficulties and dangers
+of mountaineering.
+
+"Once there was a man," said Harold, "who used to drive six mules up a
+mountain."
+
+"Six mules," I said. "How do you know?"
+
+"A bishop told me," he said.
+
+The sense of utter helplessness before the closed temple of Harold's
+private life oppressed me. Let alone his soul, I found that I did not
+even know how the boy was spending his time and who his associates
+were. Fortunately, in this case it was a bishop; but it might have been
+some one much worse.
+
+And why had Harold never spoken of his friend the bishop until our talk
+of parachutes and mountain climbing brought forth his perfectly
+matter-of-fact statement? Was it indifference on Harold's part? Was it
+studied reticence? I thought with a pang of self-accusation how I would
+have behaved, after meeting a bishop; how I would have turned the
+conversation at the dinner-table to the declining influence of the
+Church; how I would have found a way of comparing the Woolworth Building
+with ecclesiastical architecture; how I might have steered a course from
+golf to bridge and from bridge to chess; always ending with a careless
+allusion to what the bishop said when we met.
+
+There was, as it turned out, a simple explanation for Harold's
+statement. A notable conclave of bishops and laymen had been in session
+for some days in our neighbourhood, and one of the visiting dignitaries
+had addressed the school children at the opening exercises one morning.
+I say the explanation is simple, though it is largely my own hypothesis
+based on Harold's words as I have given them above; but I believe my
+supposition to be true. With regard to the six mules up a steep mountain
+I am not so sure; but probably it was a missionary bishop who
+entertained the children with an account of his experiences in Montana
+or British Columbia. What else the bishop told them Harold could not
+say. He admitted, regretfully, that the bishop used long words.
+
+But I am not at all certain that other bits of information from that
+ecclesiastical speech have not lodged in Harold's memory, to be brought
+forward on some utterly unexpected but quite appropriate occasion. In
+the meanwhile I can only think that it must be a very fine sort of
+bishop, indeed, who could find time for an audience of school children
+and was not afraid to use long words in their presence. As I can
+testify, the encounter thus brought about did Harold good; and I am
+inclined to think that it did the bishop good.
+
+We finally decided that no man could fall from a height over one hundred
+and fifty feet and reasonably expect to live.
+
+You, mothers and fathers [this advertising folder petulantly insists],
+can you appease the wonder that looks out of the eyes of your child?
+
+From Harold's eyes, I am inclined to think, no wondering soul looks out.
+The world to him is quite as it should be. Everything fits into its
+place. Harold does not think it strange that a bishop should address him
+any more than he would think it strange to have the Kaiser walk into the
+class-room and begin to do sums on the blackboard. Why should there be
+anything to puzzle him? He has learned no rules of life and is,
+therefore, in no position to be astonished by the exceptions of life. If
+only you are unaware that two things cannot be in the same place at the
+same time, or that the whole is greater than any of its parts, the world
+becomes a very easy thing to explain. To Harold everything that is, is.
+Everything that appears to be, is. Everything that he would like to be,
+is; and nothing contradicts anything.
+
+It is true that Harold asks questions. But I believe he asks questions
+not because he wonders, but because he suspects that he is being
+deprived of something that should be his. It is that partly and partly
+it is the desire to make conversation. He insists on having his privacy
+respected, but often he appears to be seized with an utter sense of
+loneliness. All children experience this recurrent necessity of clinging
+to some one, and they do so by putting questions the answers to which
+frequently do not interest them or else are already known to them. To
+postpone the bed-time hour a child will try to make conversation as
+desperately as any fashionable hostess with an uncle from the country in
+her drawing-room. Children rarely deceive themselves, but they are
+expert at the game of hoodwinking and concealment. I think we find it
+difficult to understand how passionately they desire to be let alone
+whenever they do not need us.
+
+And how desperately bent we are upon not letting them alone! The number
+of ways in which I am constantly being urged to make myself a nuisance
+to Harold is extraordinary. I am assailed by advertising folders, uplift
+articles in the magazines, Sunday specials, Chautauqua lectures,
+pedagogical reviews, and the voice of conscience in my own breast, to
+inflict myself upon the boy, to win his confidence, make him my comrade,
+guide his thoughts, shape his moral development, keep a diary of his
+pregnant utterances, and in every other way that may occur to a fertile
+mind bent on mischief, peer into him, pry into him, spy on him, spring
+little psychological traps under him--a disgusting process of infant
+vivisection which has no other excuse than our own vacant curiosity.
+Provided Harold digests his food, sleeps well, does his lessons, and
+abstains from unclean speech, it is no business of mine what Harold is
+doing with his soul. I am thankful for what he consents to reveal at
+odd moments. I guess at what I can guess and am content to wait.
+
+And waiting, I have my reward--occasionally. Not until several weeks
+after I had discovered that Harold had the entrée into ecclesiastical
+circles did the subject come up again. The boy paused between two
+spoonfuls of cereal and asked me whether a bishop would not find it
+easier to go up a mountain in an aeroplane. I foolishly asked him what
+he was driving at and he grew shy. I am afraid he now thinks bishops are
+not proper.
+
+But who shall say that the connection between high altitudes and the
+episcopal dignity is not really an important one? Harold is apparently
+occupied with the question and I shall take care not to disturb him.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+RHETORIC 21
+
+Every time I happen to turn to the Gettysburg Address I am saddened to
+find that, after many years of practice, my own literary style is still
+strikingly inferior to that of Lincoln at his best. The fact was first
+brought home to me during my sophomore year.
+
+(Incidentally I would remark that the opportunities for consulting the
+Gettysburg Address occur frequently in a newspaper office. Every little
+while, in the lull between editions, a difference of opinion will arise
+as to what Lincoln said at Gettysburg. Some maintain that he said, "a
+government of the people, for the people, by the people"; some declare
+he said, "a government by the people, of the people, for the people";
+some assert that he said, "a government by the people, for the people,
+of the people." Obviously the only way out is to make a pool and look
+up Nicolay and Hay. When we are not betting on Lincoln's famous phrase,
+we differ as to whether the first words in Cæsar are "Gallia omnis est
+divisa," or "Omnis Gallia est divisa," or "Omnis Gallia divisa est." We
+all remember the "partes tres.")
+
+In my sophomore year we used to write daily themes. We were then at the
+beginning of the revolt from the stilted essay to the realistic form of
+undergraduate style. Instead of writing about what we had read in De
+Quincey or Matthew Arnold, we were asked to write about what we had seen
+on the Elevated or on the campus. I presume this literary method has
+triumphed in all the colleges, just as I know that the new school of
+college oratory has quite displaced the old. Instead of arguing whether
+Greece had done more for civilisation than Rome, sophomores now debate
+the question, "Resolved, that the issue of 4-1/2 per cent. convertible
+State bonds is unjustified by prevailing conditions in the European
+money market." So with our daily themes. We did not write about
+patriotism or Shakespeare's use of contrast. We wrote about football,
+about the management of the lunch-room, about the need of more call-boys
+in the library.
+
+The underlying idea was sensible enough. But it was disheartening to
+have a daily theme come back drenched in red ink to show where one's
+prose rhythm had broken down or the relative pronouns had run too thick.
+Our instructors were good men. They did not content themselves with
+pointing out our sins against style; they would show us how much more
+skilfully the English language could be used. When I wrote: "That the
+new improvements that have been made in the new gymnasium that has just
+been inaugurated are all that are necessary," my instructor would pick
+up the Gettysburg Address and read out aloud: "But in a larger sense, we
+cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground."
+Sometimes he would pick up the Bible and read out aloud:
+
+      For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have
+      slept: then had I been at rest,
+
+      With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate
+      places for themselves.
+
+Sometimes he would read from Keats's "Grecian Urn," or ask me, by
+implication, why I could not frame a concrete image like "Look'd at each
+other with a wild surmise, Silent upon a peak in Darien."
+
+Even then I laboured under a sense of injustice. I could not help
+thinking that the comparison would have been more fair if I had had a
+chance to speak at Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln had had to write about
+the new gymnasium. I thought how the red ink would have splashed if I
+had ended a sentence with a comma like Job, or had said "kings and
+counsellors which." Are there still sophomores whom they drill in
+writing about the prospects of the hockey team and to whom they read
+"The Fall of the House of Usher," as an example of what can be done with
+the English language? And do some of them do what some of us, in
+desperation, used to do? We cheated. We worked ourselves up into
+ecstasies of false emotion over the hockey team or pretended to see
+things in Central Park which we never saw. I always think of Central
+Park with bitterness. We were to write a description of what we saw as
+we stood on the Belvedere looking north. I wrote a faithful catalogue of
+what I saw, and the instructor picked up "Les Misérables" and read me
+the story of the last charge over the sunken road at Waterloo. I should
+have done what one of the other men did. He never went to Central Park.
+He stayed at home and, looking straight north from the Belvedere, he saw
+the sun setting in the west, and Mr. Carnegie's new mansion to the east,
+and the towers of St. Patrick directly behind him. He saw it all so
+vividly, so harmoniously, that they marked him A. I got C+. Is it any
+wonder that I cannot even now read the Gettysburg Address without a
+twinge of resentment?
+
+And yet we were fortunate in one way. In those days they read the
+Gettysburg Address to us as a model, and in spite of our resentment our
+sophomore hearts caught the glory and the awe of it. But in those days
+the art of text-book writing had not attained its present perfection,
+and the Gettysburg Address had not yet been edited as a classic with
+twenty pages of introduction and I don't know how many foot-notes. Am I
+wrong in supposing that somewhere in the high schools or the colleges
+this is what the young soul finds in the Gettysburg Address?:
+
+      Fourscore and seven years[1] ago our fathers[2] brought forth on
+      this continent[3] a new nation,[4] conceived in liberty, and
+      dedicated to the proposition[5] that all men are created equal.[6]
+      Now we are engaged in a great civil war,[7] testing whether that
+      nation,[8] or any nation so conceived and so dedicated,[9] can
+      long endure. We are met on a great battlefield[10] of that war.
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] I.e., eighty-seven years ago. The Gettysburg Address was delivered
+Nov. 19, 1863. Lincoln is here referring to the Declaration of
+Independence.
+
+[2] Figuratively speaking. To take "fathers" in a literal sense would,
+of course, involve a physiological absurdity.
+
+[3] The western continent, embracing North and South America.
+
+[4] "A new nation." This is tautological, since a nation just brought
+forth would necessarily be new.
+
+[5] "Proposition," in the sense in which Euclid employs the term and not
+as one might say now, "a cloak and suit proposition."
+
+[6] See the Declaration of Independence in Albert Bushnell Hart's
+"American History Told by Contemporaries" (4 vols., Boston, 1898-1901).
+
+[7] The war between the States, 1861-65.
+
+[8] I.e., the United States.
+
+[9] See Elliot's Debates in the several State Conventions on the
+adoption of the Federal Constitution, etc. (5 vols., Washington,
+1840-45).
+
+[10] Gettysburg; a borough and the county seat of Adams Co.,
+Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border, 85 miles southwest of
+Harrisburg. Pop. in 1910, 4,030.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+REAL PEOPLE
+
+
+Among the most remarkable people I have never met is the family that had
+just moved out of the apartment we were going to rent. My knowledge of
+those strangers is based entirely on odd bits of information casually
+furnished by the renting-agent in the course of a single interview. Yet
+they are more actual and alive to me than many people with whom I have
+lived in intimate communion for years. Is it our fate ever to meet? I
+look forward to the event and dread it. I look forward with eagerness to
+a new sensation, and I fear lest the reality fall short of the vivid
+image I have built up with the help of the renting-agent.
+
+In the matter of picking out an apartment, it is an invariable rule that
+I shall inspect the place and decide whether I like it. This I do after
+Emmeline has paid down a month's rent and selected the wall-paper. On
+questions of such nature, Emmeline is the Balkan States and I am the
+European Concert. She creates a _status quo_ and I ratify. In the
+present instance, however, I was really given a free hand. Emmeline
+admitted she was suffering from headache when she told the renting-agent
+that she rather liked the place. Later she recognised that the rooms
+were altogether too small. What had swayed her judgment was that the
+bedrooms had the sun in the morning and we should thus be saving on our
+doctor's bills. In this respect expensive apartments are like
+high-powered motor cars and a long summer vacation on the St. Lawrence.
+They may be all easily paid for by cutting in two the doctor's annual
+bills amounting to ninety-odd dollars. However, I understood that this
+time Emmeline would be glad to be overruled.
+
+The European Concert had its first shock when it was confronted with the
+size of the nursery bedroom. The renting-agent called my attention to
+the wall-paper. It had a very pretty border, showing scenes from
+"Mother Goose"; this at once revealed the purpose for which the room was
+intended. But I pointed out to him that if we put a chest of drawers
+against the wall and a little armchair in the corner, the crib would
+come hard against the steam pipe and would project halfway across the
+window.
+
+"Oh," he said, looking up in surprise. "There's a crib?"
+
+"Naturally," I said, "we should want this nursery for the baby."
+
+This did not seem to strike him as altogether unreasonable, but he was
+puzzled nevertheless.
+
+"You see," he explained, "the people who were here before you had a
+music-box."
+
+When a renting-agent discerns signs of disappointment in a prospective
+tenant he immediately calls his attention to the shower. The agent's
+face as he ushered me into the bath-room and pointed to the shower was
+irradiated by a smile of ecstatic beatitude. He reminded me of Mme.
+Nazimova when she waits for the Master Builder to tumble from the
+church tower.
+
+"Does the shower work?" I asked.
+
+"Why, of course it does," he said.
+
+"That is very interesting," I said. "Most of them either drip or else
+the hot water comes down all at once. I don't suppose you have to keep
+away to one side and thrust your finger forward timidly before you
+venture under the shower?"
+
+"Not at all," he said. "This has splendid pressure. Just turn it on for
+yourself."
+
+I did as I was told, and after he had finished drying himself with his
+handkerchief he asked me whether this wasn't one of the best showers I
+had ever come across. I agreed, and he then told me that the very latest
+ideas in modern bath-room construction had been utilised by the
+architect. As for the people who had just moved out, they were so
+delighted with the shower that they spent the greater part of the day in
+the tub, often doing their reading there.
+
+On our way towards the library and living-room he called my attention
+to the air in the hall. He said that if there was any breeze stirring
+anywhere we were sure to get it in that particular apartment. This
+puzzled me, because he had told Emmeline the same thing about another
+apartment which she had inspected and which faces south and west, while
+this one faces north and east. Suppose now a good northeast breeze-- But
+we were now in the main bedroom and he was asking me to take notice of a
+small iron safe let into the wall at the height of one's head.
+
+"This," he said, "is extremely useful for jewels and old silver. You
+don't find it in every apartment house, I assure you."
+
+"That _is_ convenient," I said, and looked out of the window, "and of
+course one could keep other valuables in there, too, like bonds and
+mortgages and such things."
+
+"A great many people do," he said.
+
+We passed another bedroom which was so small that even the agent looked
+apologetic. He said it was the maid's room, but that the people who had
+just moved out had a woman come in by the day and used the chamber as a
+store-room. He supposed we should prefer to have our maid sleep in the
+house.
+
+"We do," I said, "but then we might get a short maid. The Finns, for
+example, are a notoriously chunky race and attain their full height at
+an early age. Let us look at the library."
+
+I did not like the room at all. It faced north and looked out upon the
+rear of a tall building only thirty feet away. I asked him if the light
+was always as bleak as it was to-day.
+
+"You get all the light you want in here," he said. "Lots of people, you
+know, object to the sun. It's hard on the eyes. The people who had this
+apartment always kept the window shades down. It made the room so cosy."
+
+I shook my head. The dimensions of the room were quite disappointing. It
+was not only small, but there was little wall space, because the
+architect had provided no less than three doorways which were supposed
+to be covered with portières. I presume that architects find open
+doorways much easier to plan than any other part of a room.
+
+He was surprised at my objections. There was plenty of space, he
+thought. As libraries go it was one of the largest he had seen. Here you
+put an armchair, and here you put a small, compact writing-desk, and you
+had plenty of floor space in the middle for a small table.
+
+"And the bookcases?" I asked.
+
+He looked downcast.
+
+"You have bookcases?" he said.
+
+"We have six."
+
+He was about to say something, but I anticipated him.
+
+"I know, of course," I said, "that the people who lived here before used
+to keep their books in the kitchen, but I hardly see how we could manage
+that. It's too much trouble, and besides I am somewhat absent-minded. It
+would be absurd if I should walk into the kitchen for a copy of 'Man and
+Superman,' and come back with half a grapefruit on a plate. And,
+furthermore, I like a library where a man can get up occasionally from
+his writing-table and pace up and down while he is clarifying his ideas.
+You couldn't do that here."
+
+"There is a nice, long hall," he said. "You might pace up and down
+that." But he saw I was unconvinced, and he did not go to much pains in
+exhibiting the dining-room, merely remarking that it did look rather
+small, but the people who last lived in the apartment were accustomed to
+go out for their meals.
+
+You will see now why I am so intensely interested in the tenants whose
+successors we were on the point of being. With life growing more flat
+and monotonous about us, how refreshing to come across a family which
+keeps a music-box in the nursery, does its reading in the bath-tub, and
+never eats in the dining-room. Is it studied originality on their part
+or are they born rebels? And how far does their eccentricity go? Does
+the head of the house, when setting out for his office in the morning,
+walk upstairs? Do they walk downstairs when they wish to go to bed?
+
+I am still to meet these highly original citizens of New York, but their
+numbers must be increasing. Every year I hear of more and more former
+tenants who prefer dark rooms and libraries without shelf space. I have
+never asked the renting-agent why, being so contented with their
+surroundings, his tenants should have moved out. But probably it is
+because they have found an apartment where the rooms are still smaller
+and the windows have no sun at all.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+DIFFERENT
+
+
+Constantly I am being invited, through the mails or the advertising
+columns, to buy something because it is different. Such appeals are
+wasted upon me. In the realm of ideas, I am as radical as the best of
+them, in many ways. But when it comes to shopping I am afraid of change.
+
+The advertising writer is the most unoriginal creature imaginable. He is
+more imitative than a theatre manager on Broadway. He is more imitative
+than the revolutionaries of art, the Impressionist who imitates the
+Romanticist, the Post-Impressionist who imitates the Impressionist, the
+Cubist who imitates the Post-Impressionist, the Futurist who imitates
+the Cubist, and the Parisian dressmaker who imitates the Futurist. When
+a happy word or phrase or symbol is let loose in the advertising world,
+it is caught up, and repeated, and chanted, and echoed, until the sound
+and sight of it become a torture. How long ago is it since every
+merchantable product of man's ingenuity from automobiles to xylophones
+was being dedicated to "his majesty the American citizen"? How long is
+it since every item in the magazine pages was something ending in ly,
+"supremely" good, or "potently" attractive, or "permanently" satisfying,
+or in any other conceivable phrase, adverbially so? To-day the
+mail-order lists are crammed with commodities that are different. Oh,
+jaded American appetite that refuses to accept a two-for-a-quarter Troy
+collar unless it is different!
+
+Now the truth that must be apparent to any man who will only think for a
+moment--and by all accounts your advertising writer is always engaged in
+a hellish fury of cerebration--is that there are a great many
+commodities whose value depends on the very fact that they shall not be
+different, but the same. If I were engaged in the business of publicity,
+I cannot imagine myself writing, "Try our eggs--they are different." I
+should also hesitate to write, "Sample our lifeboats, they are
+different; try them and you will use no other." If I were working for
+the gas company I should never think of saying, "Come in and look at our
+gas metres, they are different." It requires little effort to draw up a
+list of marketable goods, services, and utilities for which it would be
+no recommendation at all to say that they are different. Thus:
+
+  Railway time tables.
+  Photographs.
+  Grocers' scales.
+  Complexions.
+  Affidavits, and especially statements made in swearing off personal
+      property tax assessments.
+  Clocks.
+  Individual shoes of a pair.
+  The multiplication table.
+  The Yosemite Valley.
+
+In every instance it would manifestly be absurd to try to prove that the
+object in question is anything but what we have always known it to be
+or expected it to be.
+
+On the other hand, there is a great class of commodities which one would
+never think of taking seriously unless we were assured that they are
+different from what we have always found them to be. If some ingenious
+inventor could really put on the market a Tammany Hall that was
+different, or a hair tonic that was different, or something different in
+the way of
+
+  Hat plumes (guaranteed not to tickle).
+  Musical comedy.
+  Rag-time.
+  Domestic help.
+  Book-reviews.
+  Winter temperature at Palm Beach (as compared with temperature in New
+      York city).
+  Remarks on the weather.
+  Mr. Carnegie's speeches.
+  Remarks on Maude Adams.
+  Epigrams about women.
+  Epigrams about love.
+  Epigrams about money.
+  Epigrams.
+  Food prices.
+  Florence Barclay.
+  Golf drivers (guaranteed not to slice).
+  Brassies (guaranteed not to top).
+  Mid-irons (guaranteed not to cut).
+  Advertising.
+
+And countless other things which every one can imagine being different
+in a better-organised world than ours.
+
+But does your advertising expert recognise the distinction between
+things which must under no consideration be different and things which
+must be made different if they are to find acceptance? Not in the least.
+In season and out he sounds his poor little catch-word, and frightens
+away as many customers as he attracts. Under such circumstances one can
+only wonder why advertising should continue to be the best-paid branch
+of American literature. Of what use are the Science of Advertising, the
+Psychology of Advertising, the Dynamics of Advertising, the Ethics of
+Advertising, the Phonetics of Advertising, the Strategy and Tactics and
+Small-Fire Manuals of Advertising--on all of which subjects I have
+perused countless volumes--if all this theoretical study will not teach
+a man that it is appropriate to say: "Try our latest Hall Caine, it is
+different," and quite out of place to say, "Try our quart measures, they
+are different"?
+
+Between the things that must never be different and the things that
+ought never to be the same, there is a vast class of commodities which
+may be the same or may be different according to choice. Linen collars,
+musical machines, newspapers, ignition systems, interior decoration--it
+is evident that some people may like them the same and some people may
+like them different. My own inclinations, as I have intimated, are
+toward the same, but my sympathies are with those who want things
+different. The argument advanced by the advertiser in behalf of his
+latest three-button, long-hipped, university sack with rolling collar,
+that it is different and that it radiates my individuality, leaves me
+cold. I am not moved by the plea that the rolling-collar effect is so
+different that a quarter-million suits of that model have already been
+sold west of the Alleghanies. I remain indifferent on being told that
+the three-button effect would radiate my individuality even as it is
+radiating the individuality of ten thousand citizens of Spokane. When it
+is a choice between wearing unindividual clothes of my own or being
+different with a hundred thousand others, I suppose I must be classed as
+a reactionary and a fossil.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+ACADEMIC FREEDOM
+
+
+The approaching end of another college year gives peculiar timeliness to
+the following account of a recent meeting of the Supercollegiate
+Committee on Entrance Examinations. For the details of the story I am
+indebted to the able and conscientious correspondent of the
+Disassociated Press at Nottingham. The discerning reader will have no
+difficulty in identifying the persons mentioned. Professor Münsterberg
+is, of course, Professor Münsterberg. Professor Lounsbury is Professor
+Lounsbury. Professor Hart is Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Dr. Woods
+Hutchinson is Dr. Woods Hutchinson.
+
+Professor Münsterberg: The meeting will please come to order. We are now
+in the first week of October. This fact, which the average citizen has
+probably accepted without question, has been amply confirmed in an
+elaborate series of laboratory tests carried on by means of white and
+yellow cards and rapidly revolving disks. Thus we are prepared to
+discuss once more the highly interesting question, why the vast majority
+of freshmen cannot spell. Neither can they write their native tongue in
+accordance with the rules of grammar.
+
+Professor Lounsbury: Aw, gee! Why should they? Look at Chaucer, Milton,
+and Browning. The fiercest bunch of little spellers you ever saw. And
+their grammar is simply rotten. They didn't care a red cent for the
+grammarians. When they saw a word or a phrase they liked they went to
+it. If the grammarians didn't agree with them it was up to the
+grammarians. Chaucer should worry.
+
+Dr. Hutchinson: Quite right.
+
+Professor Lounsbury: The question is this: Are freshmen made for the
+English language or is language made for freshmen? Language is like a
+human being; change does it good. Stick to your Lindley Murray and it's
+a cinch your little old English tongue will be a dead one in fifty
+years.
+
+Dr. Hutchinson: I agree with Professor Lounsbury, speaking from the
+standpoint of physiology. Constant use of a plural verb with a plural
+subject plays the deuce with the larynx. You know what the larynx is,
+gentlemen. It's the rubber disk in the human Victrola. Drop the pin on
+the rubber disk and the record will grind out the same formula, again
+and again. Keep it up long enough and the record wears out. That's the
+larynx under the operation of grammatical rules. It gets the habit, and
+the first law of health is to avoid all habits. What you want to do is
+to shake up the larynx by feeding it with new forms of expression. When
+a man says "I done it," it imparts a healthy jolt to the delicate
+muscles of the throat, limbers up his aorta and his diaphragm, and
+reconciles him with his digestion. This is the opinion of eminent
+physiologists, like Drinckheimer of Leipzig.
+
+Professor Lounsbury: Whom did you say the man is?
+
+Dr. Hutchinson: Drinckheimer, professor at Leipzig. He doesn't write for
+the magazines.
+
+Professor Lounsbury: Then you agree with me that when a man has
+something to say he will say it?
+
+Professor Münsterberg: We have an excellent illustration on this point
+in a history paper submitted in the last entrance examinations. In reply
+to the question, "Name the first two Presidents of the United States,"
+one candidate wrote, "The first pressident was Gorge Washington; his
+predeceassor was Alexander Hamilton." Observe the extraordinary
+psychological correlation between thought and expression in such a
+reply.
+
+Professor Hart: I don't think the young man was guilty of an injustice
+with regard to Alexander Hamilton. You will recall that Hamilton was one
+of the principal founders of the system of privilege which has produced,
+in our own day, Lorimerism and the purchase of Southern delegates. If
+it had not been for Hamilton and his crowd we should not now be
+compelled to wage a campaign for social justice and I should not be
+under the necessity of writing Bull Moose history for _Collier's_.
+
+Dr. Hutchinson: But getting back to the real point of our inquiry,
+whether the failure to spell and write correctly is a sign of mental
+feebleness--
+
+Professor Münsterberg: On that point I believe I can speak with
+authority. Psychological tests in the laboratory show that the average
+freshman is as quick-witted to-day as his predecessor of fifty or a
+hundred years ago. We examined three hundred first-year men from eleven
+colleges and universities. Each man was required to peep into a dark
+box, shaped like a camera, through an eye-hole sixteen millimetres in
+diameter. By pressing a button, light was flashed upon a slip of paper
+inside the box, on which was printed, in letters nine millimetres high,
+the following question: "What is your favourite breakfast food?" The
+candidate was required to signify his answer by tapping with his finger
+on the table, one tap for Farinetta, two taps for Dried Husks, three
+taps for Atlas Crumbs, and so forth. The average time for three hundred
+answers was six and seven-tenths seconds. Thereupon the candidates were
+asked to think over the question at their leisure and to hand in a
+written answer sworn to before a notary public. On comparing the written
+answers with the laboratory results, it appeared that only thirty-seven
+out of the three hundred had tapped the wrong answer. Need I say more?
+
+Professor Lounsbury: May I ask how the written answers showed up from
+the point of view of spelling and grammar?
+
+Professor Münsterberg: They were impressively defective.
+
+Professor Lounsbury: I'm tickled to death. When you cut out bad spelling
+and grammar, you queer the evolution of the English language. There's
+nothing to it.
+
+Professor Münsterberg: But take the case of the freshman squad whom we
+kept in a hermetically sealed room for twenty-four hours at a
+temperature of eighty-nine degrees--
+
+Professor Lounsbury: May I ask what their language was when they were
+released at the end of twenty-four hours?
+
+Professor Münsterberg: Truth compels me to say it was something awful.
+
+Professor Lounsbury: But how about the grammar?
+
+Professor Münsterberg: There was no grammar to speak of. They used
+mostly interjections.
+
+Dr. Hutchinson: Finest thing in the world, interjections. Good for the
+lungs and the heart. Rapid process of inhalation and expulsion keeps the
+bellows in prime order. That's all a man is, gentlemen, a bellows on a
+pair of stilts driven by a hydraulic pump. If the bellows holds out
+under sudden strain, that's all you want. That's why I like to hear
+people swear. It's good for the wind. Next time you walk down a step too
+many in the dark or lose your hat under a motor truck, don't hold
+yourself back. It's the way nature is safeguarding you against asthma.
+
+Professor Münsterberg: Then it is the consensus of opinion here that the
+psychological and cultural status of our college freshmen is everything
+it ought to be?
+
+Professor Hart: I'd rather take the opinion of a roomful of freshmen on
+any subject than the opinion of the United States Supreme Court. They
+don't know anything about American history, but it's the kind of history
+that isn't worth knowing. I prefer them to know things as they ought to
+have been rather than as they were before the Progressive party was
+born. Whatever is worth preserving from the past, including the
+Decalogue, will be found in the Bull Moose platform. We don't want
+examination papers. We want social justice.
+
+Professor Lounsbury: Between you and I, the English language won't get
+what's coming to it until all entrance examinations have been chucked
+into the discard.
+
+Dr. Hutchinson: Spelling is demonstrably bad for the muscles of the
+chest and the abdomen.
+
+Professor Lounsbury: You've said it.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+THE HEAVENLY MAID
+
+
+As the familiar sound fell upon our ears, we walked to the window, drew
+aside the curtains, and shamelessly stared into the windows of the
+apartment across the court. That usually quiet home had been in evident
+agitation all that afternoon. There was the noise of hurrying feet.
+Excited voices broke out now and then. Twice a woman scolded and we
+distinctly heard a child cry. Now the mystery was explained.
+
+"The new Orpheola has come," said Emmeline. "I wonder how late they will
+keep it up the first night."
+
+In the apartment across the way the family was gathered in a reverent
+circle about the new talking-machine, and we heard the opening strains
+of the "Song to the Evening Star."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Have you ever thought," I said to Emmeline, "how infinitely superior
+the music of Wagner is to that of any other composer, in its immunity
+against influenza? The German Empire, you know, has a moist climate, and
+the magician of Bayreuth recognised that he must write primarily for a
+nation that is extremely subject to cold in the head. It was different
+with the Italian composers. Bronchial troubles are virtually unknown in
+Italy. When Verdi wrote, he failed to make allowance for a sudden attack
+of the grippe. That is why when Caruso catches cold they must change the
+bill at the Metropolitan. But if a Wagnerian tenor loses his voice, the
+papers say the next morning, 'Herr Donner sang Tristan last night with
+extraordinary intelligence.' Sometimes Herr Donner sings with
+extraordinary intelligence; sometimes he sings with marvellous
+histrionic power; sometimes he sings with an earnest vigour amounting to
+frenzy. Wagner, who foresaw everything, foresaw the disastrous effect of
+steam-heated rooms on the delicate organs of the throat. So he developed
+a music form in which the use of the throat is not always essential."
+
+"I know," said Emmeline, "that you'd much rather listen to the la-la,
+la-la-la-la-la-lah from Traviata."
+
+"I'd much rather listen to Traviata," I said, losing my temper, "than
+strive painfully to be electrified by the 'Ho-yo-to-ho' of eight
+Valkyrie maidens averaging one hundred and seventy-five pounds and
+leaping from crag to crag at a speed of two miles an hour."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When a man first acquires an Orpheola, he loses interest in his
+business. He leaves for home early and bolts his dinner. The first night
+he sits down before the machine from 6:30 to 11, and with a rapt
+expression on his face he runs off every record in his collection twice.
+No one but himself is permitted to return the precious rubber disk to
+its envelope. Later in the week the eldest child, as a reward of good
+behaviour, may be allowed to adjust the record on the revolving base
+and to pull the starting lever, while mother watches anxiously from the
+dining-room. At intervals grandma puts her head in at the door to make
+sure that the proper needle has been inserted. The modern musical
+cabinet does not eliminate the personal factor. People can put all of
+their individuality into the music by choosing between a fine needle and
+one with a blunt point. Persons of temperament are particular about the
+speed at which the disk revolves. When a man is in high spirits he picks
+out a sharp needle and winds the spring up tight. Pessimists do just the
+opposite. It is imperative to keep the fine, steel points out of the
+baby's reach because irreparable harm might thereby be done to the
+record.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Of course," said Emmeline, "I can see why you should be so greatly
+attracted by the Italian ting-a-ling stuff. It's the result of your
+journalistic training. It's the most superficial business there is.
+Everything in a newspaper must be perfectly obvious at the first
+glance, and there's nothing like a jingle to fetch the crowd. After a
+while a man gets to be like the people he writes for."
+
+I had been called to the telephone and Emmeline had made use of the
+interval to build up her little argument. It was unfair, but I
+generously refrained from saying so. Besides, I, too, had not been idle
+while I waited for Central to restore the connection.
+
+"I am not denying," I said, "that Wagner gets his effects, if you give
+him time enough. But how does he do it? By wearing you out and knocking
+you down and running away with you. That was the way, you will recall,
+the old Teutonic gods and heroes used to make love. When a Germanic
+warrior was attacked with the fatal passion, he would seize the
+well-beloved by the hair, throw her over his shoulder and ride away with
+her. It was different with Puccini's countrymen. In their hands a
+mandolin on a moonlit night under a balcony melted away all opposition.
+After half an hour of solid Wagnerian brasswork you surrender; but only
+the way Adrianople surrendered.
+
+"That, too, was the case with the early Teutonic ladies. Their masters
+did not always woo with a club. Now and then they interjected little
+bits of kindness which were appreciated because they were so rare. That
+is Wagner again. Every little while he throws you a kind word, a snatch
+of golden melody that Verdi himself might have written, and, as a matter
+of fact, did write all the time. With the master of Bayreuth these
+little rifts in the clouds are doubly welcome. They shine out like a
+good deed on a dark night."
+
+"How any one can listen to the last act of Tristan without feeling all
+the sorrow of the universe, I cannot understand," said Emmeline. "Do you
+mean to say that the Liebestod does not really carry you out of
+yourself?"
+
+"It does not," I said. "But when Gadski in Aïda turns to the wicked
+Amneris and sings 'Tu sei felice,' something in me begins to give way."
+
+"It is probably your intellect," said Emmeline.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One popular error with regard to talking-machines is that they have
+solved the hitherto irreconcilable conflict between music on the one
+hand and bridge and conversation on the other. At first sight it may
+seem that the religious silence which one must maintain while some one
+is singing--it may be the hostess herself--is no longer compulsory. You
+cannot hurt the feelings of a mahogany cabinet three feet high. If the
+worst happens, you can wind up the machine and start all over again. But
+actually the situation is very much what it was before. I myself, on one
+occasion when Tetrazzini was singing from Lucia, ventured to lean over
+to my neighbour and whisper a word or two. Whereupon there came across
+the face of my host, brooding fondly over the machine, a look of pain
+such as I never want to bring to any face again. As it happened, it was
+the man's favourite record. On the other hand, people who play cards
+tell me that as between a living tenor and Caruso on the machine there
+is not much to choose. Both are a hindrance to the correct leading of
+trumps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Besides," I said, "any number of Wagnerians will tell you that the
+music dramas in their unabridged form are much too long. You will recall
+that Wagner himself said that many of his scores would benefit by
+generous cutting. A great many eminent conductors have made a specialty
+of cutting things out of Tristan. This serves a double purpose. It
+permits the development of a class of post-graduate Wagnerians who can
+take the whole opera without flinching, and it enables people to catch
+the 11:45 for Montclair. Somewhere I have come across a story of two
+great conductors who had charge of rival orchestras in one of the
+principal cities of Europe. One man, when he conducted the Ring, was in
+the habit of cutting out the first half of every act. The other man
+played the first half, but omitted the second half of every act. For
+many years there was a bitter controversy as to which of the two
+conductors best brought out the real meaning of the composer."
+
+"I don't think it is a very good story," said Emmeline, walking to the
+window and closing it; for our neighbour's machine had switched without
+warning from the Ride of the Valkyrs to Alexander's Band. "It's a poor
+story and I am inclined to think you made it up yourself."
+
+"As for that," I said, "that is just what Wagner did with his music."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When you overhear a man in the subway say to his neighbour, "Mine are
+all twelve-inch, reversible, and go equally well on low or high speed,"
+you will know that the new Orpheola came home last week. Next week the
+children will be allowed to handle the records without special
+injunctions regarding the proper needle. The week after that, the baby
+will be allowed to approach quite near and hear Mother Goose come out of
+the mahogany toy. Within a month the master of the house will be looking
+for his hat in the cabinet. The intolerable air of superiority and
+aloofness with which he has been greeting you will disappear.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+SHEATH-GOWNS
+
+
+From Emmeline I learned that I had been doing the fashion designers an
+injustice. I had always imagined that styles were the creation of
+Parisian dressmakers who worked with only two ends in view--novelty and
+discomfort. But Emmeline assured me that styles are a faithful record of
+the march of civilisation. When the Manchurian War was under way,
+everything in the shops was Russian. When Herr Strauss produced
+"Salome," half the world went in for the slim and viperous costume. The
+revolution in Persia worked a revolution in blouse decoration. Later
+everything was Bulgarian.
+
+"In that case," I said, "those poor fellows at Adrianople have not died
+in vain. Under a rain of shot and shell I can hear the Bulgarian
+officers rallying their men: 'Forward, my children! The eyes of Fifth
+Avenue are upon you! Fix bayonets! For King, for country, and for
+Paquin!' The Turks, being a backward millinery nation, naturally had no
+chance."
+
+"What you say is extremely amusing, of course," remarked Emmeline. "But
+I seem to remember an old suit of yours. It was about the time of the
+Boer War. The coat was cut like an hour glass and there was cotton
+wadding in the shoulders so that you had to enter a room sideways. The
+trousers were Zouave. Yes, it must have been about the time of the Boer
+War or the war with Spain."
+
+"That was just when the feminist movement was beginning to shape our
+ideals," I retorted.
+
+Not only do the styles symbolise the process of historic evolution--I
+distinctly recall toilets on Fifth Avenue which must have commemorated
+the Messina earthquake and the report of the New York Tenement House
+Commission--but styles actually follow an evolution of their own. They
+do not change abruptly, but melt into each other. Thus the costume
+which Emmeline described as Bulgarian could not have been altogether
+that. The coat was military enough, with its baggy shoulders and a bold
+backward sweep of the long skirts. But this coat was worn over a gown
+that was unmistakably hobble, revealing the persistence of the Salome
+influence. To call this outfit Bulgarian is to raise the supposition
+that the Bulgarians hopped to victory at Kirk-Kilisseh.
+
+I pointed this out to Emmeline, and at the same time took occasion to
+protest against the extravagant lengths to which the languorous styles
+were being carried. It was bad enough, I said, to see elderly matrons
+arrayed like Oriental dancing girls. But what was worse was to see young
+girls, mere children, in scant and provocative attire. I thought the law
+might very well take up the question of a minimum dress for women under
+the age of eighteen.
+
+"Of course it's disgusting," said Emmeline, "but it's their right."
+
+"I know that youth has many rights," I said, "but I didn't know that
+the right to make one's self a public nuisance and offence is among
+them."
+
+"What I mean," said Emmeline, "is that we have outgrown the days when
+young ladies fainted and wives fetched their husbands' slippers. We have
+broken the shackles of mid-Victorian propriety and are working out a new
+conception of free womanhood. Our ideas of modesty are changing. You
+might as well make up your mind to be shocked quite frequently before
+the process is completed."
+
+"Oh, I see," said I. "Enslaved within the iron circle of the home,
+crushed by the tyranny of convention, of custom, of man-made laws, woman
+lifts up her head and declares she will be free by inserting herself
+into a skirt thirteen inches in diameter. Where's the sense of it?"
+
+"It's all very simple," said Emmeline. "It means that we are having an
+awful time trying to escape from the degradation into which you have
+forced us. We struggle forward, and then the habits of the harem
+civilisation which you have imposed on us assert themselves. Do you
+think we women love to dress? Every time we try on a pretty gown we know
+that we are riveting on the chains of our own servitude."
+
+"But why make the chains so tight?" I said.
+
+She now turned to face me.
+
+"The reason for the sheath-gown is quite plain," said Emmeline. "Men
+have always shown such a decided preference for actresses and dancing
+girls that we others have taken to imitating actresses and dancing girls
+in self-defence."
+
+"But that isn't so at all," I said. "Look at your trained nurses in
+their simple white caps and aprons. They are bewitching. It is
+universally conceded that the most dangerous thing in the world is for
+an unmarried man to be operated on for appendicitis. That was the way,
+you'll recall, Adam obtained his wife--after a surgical operation. The
+case of the hospital nurse alone disposes of your entire argument about
+our predilection for dancing girls."
+
+"That I do not admit," said Emmeline. "It is true that a man finds
+himself longing for what is simple and wholesome whenever there is
+something the matter with him."
+
+"When I spoke of the immodesty of present-day fashions," I said,
+adroitly turning the subject, "I am afraid I gave you the wrong
+impression. It isn't the viciousness of the thing that I object to, it's
+the stupid, sheeplike spirit of imitation behind it. If the passion for
+tight gowns indicated a kind of spiritual development, I shouldn't mind
+it even if it was development in the wrong direction. There might be an
+erring soul in the hobble, but still a soul. If the young girl of good
+family who strives to look like a lady of the chorus did so out of sheer
+perversity, there would be some comfort. One must think and feel to be
+perverse. What appals me is the dreadful, unquestioning innocence with
+which the thing is done. If we males are indeed responsible for what you
+are, then we have a real burden on our souls. We have done more than
+degrade you; we have made automata out of you. The little girl behind
+the soda counter who paints her face and hangs jet spangles from her
+ears will just as readily comply with fashion by putting on a military
+cape and boots, or a pony coat, or calico and a sunbonnet, or an
+admiral's uniform, or a _yashmak_."
+
+"A what?" said Emmeline, frowning slightly.
+
+"A _yashmak_," I replied, meeting her gaze steadily. "I use the word
+with confidence because I have just looked it up in the dictionary. At
+first I confused it with _sanjak_, which, on examination, turns out to
+be a district in the Balkan Peninsula bounded on the east by Servia and
+on the north by Bosnia-Herzegovina. A _yashmak_ is the long veil worn by
+Moslem women to conceal the face and the outlines of the upper part of
+the body."
+
+"You seem to have prepared pretty thoroughly for this discussion," said
+Emmeline.
+
+"I have always considered it prudent before entering into debate with a
+woman to have a few facts on my side," I said.
+
+"As if that made any difference," she replied scornfully.
+
+"As to the sheeplike way in which women follow the fashions of the
+moment," continued Emmeline, "it simply isn't true." I could see she was
+terribly in earnest now. "There are tens of thousands of women who dress
+to please themselves; independent, courageous, self-reliant women who
+face life seriously and rationally. We are going in more and more for
+loose and comfortable things to wear."
+
+"Not the typical woman of to-day, I assure you."
+
+"Of course not the typical woman," said Emmeline. "Any Exhibition of
+common-sense by a woman at once makes her a freak. You prefer the other
+kind for your ideal of the eternal womanly. Take her and welcome. I
+suppose it is necessary for a man to have something worthless to work
+for."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+WITH THE EDITOR'S REGRETS
+
+
+Talk of post-office-reform brings to my mind a conversation I had with
+Williams, who is a poet. It was about the time, some two years ago, when
+a Postmaster-General of the United States proposed the abolition of the
+second-class mail privilege for magazines.
+
+I knew that Williams hates magazine editors with all the ardour of an
+unsuccessful poet's soul. Consequently, when he sat down and lighted one
+of my cigarettes and said that the magazines in their quarrel with the
+post office had overlooked the strongest argument on their side, I
+suspected irony. It is Williams's boast that he has one of the largest
+collections of rejected manuscripts in existence, the greater part being
+in an absolutely new and unread condition. Placed end to end, Williams
+once estimated, his unpublished verses would reach from Battery Park to
+the Hispanic Museum, at Broadway and One Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Street.
+Every poem in his collection has been declined at least once by every
+editor in the United States, and many of the longer poems have been
+declined two or three times by the same editor, and for totally opposite
+reasons.
+
+It is not mere brute persistence on Williams's part that is responsible
+for this unparalleled literary accumulation. As a matter of fact he is
+easily discouraged, although, of course, like all poets he has his
+moments of exaltation. The trouble, he complains, is that with every
+printed rejection slip there comes a word of sincere encouragement from
+the editor. The editors are constantly telling Williams that his verse
+is among the very best that is now being produced, but that a sense of
+duty to their readers prevents them from printing it. They regret to
+find his poems unavailable, and earnestly advise him to keep on writing.
+
+"You will recall," said Williams, "the principal point made by the
+periodical publishers. Conceding that their publications, as
+second-class mail matter, are carried at a loss, they argue that the
+post office is more than compensated by the volume of first-class mail
+sent out in response to magazine advertisements. The argument is sound,
+as I can testify from personal experience. Not long ago I came across a
+five-line 'ad' in agate which said, 'Are you earning less than you
+should? Write us.' Well, the question seemed to fit my case and I wrote.
+That was two cents to the credit of the post office. The post office
+sold another stamp when I received a reply asking me to send fifty cents
+in postage for instructions on how to double my income in three months.
+I was somewhat disappointed. With my income merely doubled I should
+still find it difficult to pay my landlady, but it was better than
+nothing. So I sent the fifty cents in stamps. You will recall the
+half-dollar."
+
+"Oh, don't mention it," I said.
+
+"Well, after a day or two I received in a penny envelope a paper-bound
+copy of 'How to Succeed,' being a baccalaureate address delivered by the
+Rev. Josiah K. Pebbles, who showed that honesty, thrift, and
+perseverance were the secrets underlying the career of Hannibal, Joan of
+Arc, John D. Rockefeller, and Theodore Roosevelt. So you see, by the
+time the secret had been conveyed to me the post office had sold stamps
+to the amount of fifty-five cents. Now assume that there are in the
+United States between forty and fifty thousand poets and other literary
+workers who would like to double their income, and it is plain that the
+United States Government made a very handsome profit on that five-line
+'ad.'"
+
+"But that is not what I started out to show," said Williams. "What the
+magazines have omitted to point out is that by rejecting every
+contribution at least once, the editors are doing more for Uncle Sam's
+first-class mail business than through their advertising pages. And the
+difference is this: While there must be a limit to the number of people
+who will answer an advertisement, there need be no limit to the number
+of times a manuscript is sent back. I can't see why the publishers and
+the Postmaster-General should be flying at each other's throat, when
+there's such a simple solution at hand. It is evident that there is no
+postal deficit, however large, which cannot be wiped out by a sharp
+increase in the average number of rejections per manuscript. Editors
+will only have to augment by, say, fifty per cent. the number of reasons
+why a contribution of exceptional merit is unavailable. My 'Echoes from
+Parnassus' was sent back thirty-seven times before it found a publisher.
+It would have been a simple matter to send the poem back a dozen times
+more either absolutely or with a word of hearty encouragement."
+
+By this time I had made up my mind that it was indeed irony, and I was
+sorry. I don't mind when Williams gets quite angry and lashes out; but I
+hate to have a poet laugh at himself.
+
+"Not that I can help feeling sorry for the editor chaps," he went on.
+"You couldn't help feeling sorry, could you, for a man who has been
+trained to recognise the very best in literature, and to send it back on
+the spot? And the more he likes it the quicker he sends it back.
+Frequently I have been on the point of writing to the man and telling
+him that if it is really such a wrench to return my poem to please not
+consider my feelings in the matter, but to go ahead and print it. What
+saves the editor, I imagine, is that after a while he does learn how to
+detect some real fault in a contribution which just enables him to send
+it back without altogether succumbing to grief. Of the fourteen men who
+rejected my 'Echoes from Parnassus,' one wrote that I reminded him of
+Milton, but that I lacked solemnity; another wrote that I reminded him
+of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, but that I was a little too serious; another
+wrote that my verses had the Swinburnian rush, but were somewhat too
+fanciful. The editor who accepted the poem wrote that he couldn't quite
+catch the drift of it, but that he would take a chance on the stuff."
+
+Here Williams got up and strode about the room and vowed that no
+combination of editors could prevent him from continuing to write
+poetry. "And I never refuse to meet them half way," he said rather
+inconsequentially. "I went into Smith's office yesterday with a bit of
+light verse and had him turn it down because it had the 'highbrow
+touch.' 'My boy,' he said, 'we must give the people what they want. For
+instance, I was going up to my apartment last night and the negro boy
+who runs the elevator was quite rude to me; he had been drinking. Now
+why couldn't you write a series of snappy verses on the troubles of the
+flat-dweller? This line you're on now won't go at all with my readers;
+they are not a very intelligent class, you know.' And that's another
+thing I can't understand: Why should every editor be anxious to prove
+that his subscribers are a bigger set of donkeys than any other editor
+in town can claim?"
+
+"I was fool enough," Williams proceeded, "to reject Smith's suggestion.
+I should have accepted it. My poet's mission won't feed me. If President
+Eliot insists it is my mission to write stuff no editor will touch, he
+doesn't know what he is talking about."
+
+"I don't think it was President Eliot," I said.
+
+"Wasn't it? Say Plato or Carlyle, then. You can't go on for ever
+slapping us on the back and letting us starve. You have got to back up
+your highly laudatory statements by purchasing our wares or we shut up
+shop. We don't ask for champagne and truffles, but we do want a decent
+measure of substantial appreciation, all of us people with a mission,
+poets, artists, prophets, women. Now women, here comes Plato or Carlyle
+and says it is a woman's mission to have at least eight children."
+
+"President Eliot said that," I interposed.
+
+"Oh it _was_ President Eliot? Eight children, says he, is her mission.
+But let me tell you if you take her children and pitch them into the
+waste basket, if you use them only to fill up your factories, and slums,
+and reformatories, woman will be chucking that sacred mission of hers
+through the window before President Eliot can say Jack Robinson. She is
+doing it now and serve them right. Mission! Rot!"
+
+He seized a handful of my cigarettes and went out without saying
+good-morning.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+A MAD WORLD
+
+
+_From an old-fashioned country doctor to an eminent alienist in New York
+city:_
+
+My dear Sir:
+
+I cannot claim the honour of your acquaintance. My name is quite unknown
+to you. For some thirty years I have been established in this little
+town, ministering to a district which extends five miles in every
+direction from my house-door. My practice, varying little from year to
+year consists largely in prescribing liniments, quinine, camphorated
+oil, and bicarbonate of soda; and regularly I am summoned, of course,
+into the presence of the august mysteries of birth and death.
+
+The life, though grateful, is laborious. The opportunities for keeping
+in touch with the march of events in the great world outside are
+limited. It has nevertheless been one of the few delights of my
+restricted leisure to follow your career through the medium of the
+public press. My own course, as I have shown, lies far from the highly
+specialised and fascinating field of mental pathology to which you have
+devoted yourself. But from the distance I have admired the expert skill
+and the consummate authority which have made you the central figure in
+an unbroken succession of brilliant criminal trials. I have admired and
+kept silent. If I have departed from my custom in the present instance,
+it is only because I feel that your brilliant services in the recent
+Fletcher embezzlement case ought not, in justice to yourself and to our
+common profession, to be passed over in silence.
+
+Let me recall the principal circumstances of the Fletcher case. The man
+Fletcher was indicted for appropriating the funds of the trust company
+of which he was the head. His lawyer pleaded insanity and called upon
+you to give an account of several examinations you had made of the
+prisoner's mental condition. You testified that on one occasion you
+asked the defendant how much two plus two is, and he replied four,
+thereby revealing the extraordinary cunning with which the insane assume
+the mask of sanity. You then asked him to enumerate the days of the week
+in their proper order. This the prisoner did without the least
+hesitation, thereby supplying a remarkable instance of the unnatural
+lucidity and precision of thought which, in the case of those suffering
+from progressive insanity, immediately precede a complete mental
+eclipse.
+
+On the other hand you found that the defendant was unable to recall the
+name of the clergyman who had married him to his first wife at San
+Jacinto, Texas, twenty-seven years ago; an unaccountable failure of
+memory, which could not be passed over as an accident and must be
+accepted as a symptom of the gravest nature. You cited the prisoner's
+lavish expenditure on motor-cars and pearl necklaces as evidence of his
+inability to recognise the value of money; and this in turn clearly
+indicated a congenital incapacity to recognise values of any kind,
+whether physical or moral. This contention you drove home by citing the
+very terms of the indictment, in which it was charged that the prisoner
+had failed to distinguish between what was his and what was not
+his--another infallible sign of approaching mental deliquescence.
+
+You did not stop with the man Fletcher. You searched his family history
+and found (1) a great-uncle of the defendant who used to maintain that
+Mrs. E. D. N. Southworth was a greater genius than George Eliot; (2) a
+second cousin who dissipated a large fortune by reckless investments in
+wild-cat mining shares; and (3) a nephew who was accustomed to begin his
+dinner with the salad and finish with the soup.
+
+At the trial, counsel for defence asked you a hypothetical question. It
+contained between nine and ten thousand words arranged in two hundred
+and fifty principal clauses, and nearly a thousand subordinate
+adjective and adverbial clauses, with no less than eighty-three
+parentheses and seven asterisks referring to as many elaborate
+foot-notes. It would have taken a professional grammarian from three to
+six days to grasp the proper sequence of the clauses. Yet it is on
+record that within three seconds after the lawyer had finished his
+question, and while he was still wiping the sweat from his forehead, you
+answered "Yes." This is all the more curious because I gather from
+statements in the press that while the question was being propounded to
+you, you were apparently engaged in jesting with your fellow-experts or
+nodding cheerfully to friends in different parts of the court-room.
+Needless to say Fletcher was acquitted.
+
+I have mentioned your fellow-experts. That recalls to my mind another
+admirable phase of your services in behalf of the medical art. Your
+activity in the criminal courts has freed our profession from the
+ancient reproach that doctors can never agree. As a matter of fact,
+whether you have been retained by the prosecution or the defence, I
+cannot think of a single instance in which you have failed to agree with
+every one of the half-dozen other experts on the same side. More than
+that, I firmly believe that if by some unexpected intervention you were
+suddenly transferred from the employ of the defence to that of the
+prosecution, or _vice versa_, your opinion would still be in complete
+harmony with that of every one of your new colleagues. In offering your
+services impartially to the District Attorney or to counsel for the
+defence you have lived up to that lofty impartiality of service which is
+the glory of our art. The physician knows neither friend nor foe,
+neither saint nor sinner. From the rich store of your expert knowledge
+you can draw that with which to satisfy all men.
+
+I find it hard to frame a single formula which shall describe the sum
+total of your achievements in the field of medicine. Perhaps one might
+say that you have discovered the unitary principle underlying the laws
+of health and disease, for which men have searched since the beginning
+of time. Behind all physical ills they have looked for Evil. Behind
+diseases they have looked for Disease. That unitary principle you have
+found in what goes by the general name of Insanity. The cynical opinion
+of mankind long ago laid it down that all crimes may be resolved into
+the single crime of allowing one's self to be found out. If a poor man
+is caught, it is stupidity or negligence. But obviously, when a wealthy
+criminal is apprehended, the only possible explanation is that he is
+insane.
+
+The youthful degenerate who resorts to murder; the financier who steals
+the savings of the poor; the lobbyist who buys a Senator-ship and sells
+a State; the Pittsburg millionaire who seeks to rise above the laws of
+bigamy, may all be explained, and acquitted, in terms of mental
+aberration. The only parallel in history that I can think of, is the
+elder Mr. Weller's belief in the efficacy of an alibi as a defence in
+trials for murder and for breach of promise of marriage.
+
+I congratulate you, sir. You have discovered a principle which, like
+charity, covers a multitude of sins. Like charity, too, your discovery
+begins at home. For, as I have shown, there is no home in this broad
+land wherein the expert will fail to discover the necessary great-aunt
+or third cousin endowed with the precise degree of paranoia, paresis, or
+infantile dementia required to secure an acquittal, or, at least, a
+disagreement of the jury.
+
+  Sincerely yours,
+  AN ADMIRER.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+Ph.D.
+
+
+The time has come when a serious attempt must be made to determine
+Gilbert and Sullivan's permanent place in the world of creative art. A
+brief review of the musical-comedy output during the last theatrical
+season will convince any one that we are sufficiently far removed from
+"Pinafore" and "The Mikado" to insure a true perspective.
+
+Happily, the material for a systematic examination of the subject is
+accessible. It is true that we are still without a definitive text of
+the Gilbert librettos. For this we must wait until Professor Rücksack,
+of the University of Kissingen, has published the results of his
+monumental labours. So far, we have from his learned pen only the text
+for the first half of the second act of "The Mikado." This is in
+accordance with the best traditions of German scholarship, which demand
+that the second half of anything shall be published before the first
+half. In the meanwhile, there are several editions of Gilbert available
+which, though somewhat imperfect, ought to present no difficulties to
+the scholar. For example, in my own favourite edition of "The Mikado"
+(Chattanooga, 1913), the text reads:
+
+  And he whistled an air, did he,
+      As the sabre true
+      Cut cleanly through
+  His servical vertebrae!
+
+where "servical" is evidently a misprint for "cervical." So, too, the
+trained eye will at once discern that in the following passage from the
+Peers' chorus in "Iolanthe":
+
+  'Twould fill with joy
+    And madness stark
+  The hoi polloi
+    (A Greek rebark),
+
+the sense is greatly improved by reading "remark" for "rebark," unless
+we argue that the chorus had a slight cold in the head, an assumption
+which nothing in the text would justify us in bringing forward, and
+which, indeed, would be contradicted by the highly emphasised summer
+style in which the chorus is apparelled. Thus forewarned, then, we are
+ready to enter upon a detailed examination of the intensely animated men
+and women in whom Sir William S. Gilbert has embodied his _ultima
+ratio_, his _dernier cri_, and his _Weltanschaung_.
+
+In Ko-Ko, the author has given us a Man, with none of the
+sentimentalities of August Strindberg, with nothing of the limited,
+vegetarian outlook upon life of Bernard Shaw, with nothing of the
+over-refinement of Mrs. Wharton. Ko-Ko is atingle with all the passion
+and faults of humanity. He is both matter and spirit. He comes close to
+us in his rare flashes of insight and in his moments of poignant
+imbecility. The human being is not lost in the Lord High Executioner. He
+is alive straight through to his entrails and liver, as Jack London
+might say. He is infinite, even as life is infinite. He is, by turns,
+affable, as with Pitti-Sing; cynically disdainful, as with Pooh-Bah;
+paternal, as with Nanki-Poo.
+
+In the presence of Yum-Yum he is that most appealing figure, a strong
+man in love torn between desire and duty. The firmness with which he
+rejects the suggestion that he decapitate himself, arguing that in the
+nature of things such an operation was bound to be injurious to his
+professional reputation, reveals a character of almost Roman austerity.
+There is something of the Roman, too--or shall we say something of the
+German?--in the thoroughness with which he would enter on his career. He
+would prepare himself for his functions as Lord High Executioner by
+beginning on a guinea pig and working his way through the animal kingdom
+till he came to a second trombone. This is the old standard of
+conscientiousness of which our modern world knows so little.
+
+And yet a very modern man withal, this Ko-Ko. I cannot help thinking
+that Mr. Chesterton would have loved him, and would have had no
+difficulty in proving that his name should be pronounced not Ko-Ko, but
+the second syllable before the first. He is modern in his extraordinary
+adaptability to time and circumstance. Starting life as a tailor, he
+adapts himself to the august functions of Lord High Executioner. He
+adapts himself to Yum-Yum. He adapts himself to Katisha. No sooner is he
+released from prison to become Lord High Executioner than he has ready
+his convenient little list of people who never would be missed. Of his
+powers of persuasion we need not speak at great length. His wooing of
+Katisha is a triumph of romantic eloquence. It carries everything before
+it, as in that superb climax when Katisha inquires whether it is all
+true about the unfortunate little tom-tit on a tree by the river, and
+Ko-Ko replies: "I knew the bird intimately." He is modern through and
+through, our Ko-Ko. He is at one with Henri Bergson in asserting that
+existence is not stationary but in constant flux, and that the universe
+takes on meaning only from our moods:
+
+  The flowers that bloom in the spring,
+      Tra la,
+  Have nothing to do with the case.
+
+Far less subtle a character is the Lord High Chancellor in "Iolanthe,"
+although, within the well-defined liminations of his type, he is as real
+as Ko-Ko. Like Ko-Ko he has risen from humble beginnings. But whereas
+our Japanese hero attains fortune by trusting himself boldly and
+joyfully to life, letting the currents carry him whither they will, like
+Byron, like Peer Gynt, and like Captain Hobson, the Lord High
+Chancellor's rise is the result of painful concentration and steadfast
+plodding. Ko-Ko is at various times the statesman, the poet, the lover,
+the man of the world (as when he is tripped up by the Mikado's
+umbrella-carrier). The Lord High Chancellor is always the lawyer. In
+response to Strephon's impassioned cry that all Nature joins with him in
+pleading his love, that dry legal soul can only remark that an
+affidavit from a thunderstorm or a few words on oath from a heavy shower
+would meet with all the attention they deserve.
+
+Plainly, we have here a man who has won his way to the highest place in
+his profession by humdrum methods; the same methods which Sir Joseph
+Porter, K.C.B., employed when, by writing in a hand of remarkable
+roundness and fluency, he became the ruler of the Queen's navee; the
+same methods brought into play by Major-General Stanley, of the British
+army and Penzance, when he qualified himself for his high position by
+memorising a great many cheerful facts about the square of the
+hypothenuse.
+
+There is matter enough for an entire volume on Gilbert's self-made
+men--Ko-Ko, the Lord High Chancellor, Major-General Stanley, and the
+lawyer in "Trial by Jury," who laid the foundation of his fortunes by
+marrying a rich attorney's elderly ugly daughter. I throw out the
+suggestion in the hope that it will be some day taken up as the subject
+of a Ph.D. thesis in the University of Alaska. That is only one hint of
+the unworked treasures of research that await the student in these
+librettos. How valuable would be a really comprehensive monograph on the
+royal attendants in Gilbert, including a comparison of the Mikado's
+umbrella-carrier with the Lord High Chancellor's train-bearer!
+
+As for Gilbert and Sullivan's women, I find that even if I were not so
+near to the end of my chapter, I could not enter upon a discussion of
+the subject. The field is too vast. I must content myself with merely
+pointing out that Gilbert's ideas on women were painfully Victorian. It
+is true that the eternal chase of the male by the female was no secret
+to him. In Katisha's pursuit of Nanki-Poo we have a striking
+anticipation of Anne's pursuit of John Tanner in "Man and Superman." But
+on the whole, Gilbert describes his women of the upper classes as
+simpering and sentimental--Josephine, Yum-Yum, Mabel, Iolanthe--and his
+women of the working classes as ignorant and incapable. What an
+extraordinary example of ineptitude is afforded by Little Buttercup,
+who, in her capacity as baby-farmer, so disastrously mixes up Ralph
+Rackstraw with Captain Corcoran. Or by Nurse Ruth of Penzance, who fails
+to carry out orders and, instead of apprenticing her young charge to a
+pilot, apprentices him to a pirate. Miss Ida Tarbell could not have
+framed a severer indictment of inefficiency in the home.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+TWO AND TWO
+
+
+Harding said that if he were ever called upon to deliver the
+commencement oration at his alma mater, he knew what he would do.
+
+"Of course you know what you would do," I said. "So do I. So does every
+one. You would rise to your feet and tell the graduating class that
+after four years of sheltered communion with the noblest thought of the
+ages they were about to plunge into the maelstrom of life. If you didn't
+say maelstrom you would say turmoil or arena. You will tell them that
+never did the world stand in such crying need of devoted and unselfish
+service. You will say that we are living in an age of change, and the
+waves of unrest are beating about the standards of the old faith. You
+will follow this up with several other mixed metaphors expressive of the
+general truth that it is for the Class of '14 to say whether this world
+shall be made a better place to live in or shall be allowed to go to the
+demnition bow wows. You will conclude with a fervent appeal to the
+members of the graduating class never to cease cherishing the flame of
+the ideal. You will then sit down and the President will confer the
+degree of LL.D. on one of the high officials of the Powder Trust."
+
+But Harding was so much in earnest that he forgot to receive my remarks
+with the bitter sneer which is the portion of any one unfortunate enough
+to disagree with him.
+
+"The commencement address I expect to deliver," he said, "will precisely
+avoid every peculiarity you have mentioned. It is the fatal mistake of
+every commencement orator that he attempts to deal with principles. He
+knows that by the middle of June the senior class has forgotten most of
+the things in the curriculum. His error consists in supposing that this
+is as it should be; that Euclid and the rules of logic were made to be
+forgotten, and that the only thing the college man must carry out into
+the world is an Attitude to Life and a Purpose. Which is all rot. There
+is no necessity for preaching ideals to a graduating class. The ideals
+that a man ought to cling to in life are the same that a decent young
+man will have lived up to in college. The dangers and temptations he
+will confront are very much like those he has had to fight on the
+campus. The undergraduate of to-day is not a babe or a baa-lamb."
+
+He paused and seemed to be weighing the significance of what he had
+said. Apparently he was pleased. He nodded a vigorous approval of his
+own views on the subject, and proceeded:
+
+"It is not the temptations of the world the college man must be on the
+lookout against, but its stupidities, its irrelevancies, its general
+besotted ignorance. He is less in peril of the flesh and the devil than
+of the screaming, unintelligent newspaper headline, whether it leads off
+an interview with a vaudeville star or with a histrionic college
+professor. What he needs to be reminded of is not principles, but a few
+elementary facts. My own commencement address would consist of nothing
+more or less than a brief review of the four years' work in
+class--algebra, geometry, history, physics, chemistry, psychology,
+everything."
+
+"How extraordinarily simple!" I said. "The wonder is no one has ever
+thought of this before."
+
+"I admit," he said, "that it may be rather difficult to compress all
+that matter in fifteen hundred words, but it can be done. It can be done
+in less than that. My peroration, for instance, would go somewhat as
+follows--that is, if you care to listen?"
+
+"It will do no harm to listen," I said.
+
+"I would end in some such way: 'Members of the graduating class, as you
+leave the shades of alma mater for the career of life, the one thing
+above all others that you must carry with you is a clear and ready
+knowledge of the multiplication table. Wherever your destiny may lead
+you, to the Halls of Congress, to the Stock Exchange, to the counting
+room, the hospital ward, or the editorial desk, let not your mind wander
+from the following fundamental truths. Two times two is four. A straight
+line is the shortest distance between two points. Rome fell in the year
+476, but it was founded in the year 753 B. C., and so took exactly 1,229
+years to fall. The northern frontier of Spain coincides with the
+southern frontier of France. The Ten Commandments were formulated at
+least 2,500 years ago. Japan is sixty times as far away from San
+Francisco as it is from the mainland of Asia. Virginius killed his
+daughter rather than let her live in shame. The subject of illicit love
+was treated with conspicuous ability by Euripides. The legal rate of
+interest in most of the States of the Union is six per cent. The
+instinct for self-preservation is one of the elementary laws of
+evolution. Hamlet is a work of genius. Victor Hugo is the author of "Les
+Misérables." I thank you.'"
+
+"Thus equipped, any young man ought to become President in time," I
+said.
+
+"Thus equipped," retorted Harding, "any young man ought to make his way
+through life as a rational being, and not as a sheep. And that is the
+main purpose of a college education, or of any process of education. No
+amount of moral enthusiasm will safeguard a man against the statement
+that the panic of 1893 was caused by the Democratic tariff bill; but the
+knowledge that the tariff bill was passed in 1894 may be of use. It
+saves a rational being from talking like a fool. Idealism will not keep
+a man from investing in get-rich-quick corporation stock; but knowledge
+of the fact that the common sense and experience of mankind have agreed
+upon six per cent. as a fair return on capital will keep him from going
+after 520 per cent. Mind you, it is not the fact that he will lose his
+money which concerns me. It is the fact that there should be a mentality
+capable of believing in 520 per cent. The dignity of the human mind is
+at stake. Or take this matter of the boundary line between France and
+Spain."
+
+"If you are sure it is related to the subject in hand," I said.
+
+"It is, intimately," he replied. "I am, as you know, exceedingly fond of
+books of travel. I read them as eagerly as I do all the cheap fiction
+that deal with brave adventures in foreign lands. Now a very common
+trait in books of both kinds is the author's fondness for pointing out
+the differences between the people of the southern part of a particular
+country and the people living in the northern part. You are familiar
+with the distinction. The inhabitants of the south are hot-headed,
+amorous, given to mandolin playing, and lacking in political genius. The
+people of the north are phlegmatic, practical, averse to love-making,
+unimaginative, readers of the Bible, and tenacious of their rights. I
+don't recall who first called attention to the fact. Perhaps it was
+Macaulay. Perhaps it was Herodotus. The idea is sound enough.
+
+"But observe what the writers have made out of this simple truth. It
+has escaped them that anything is north or south only by comparison with
+something else. In the minds of our parrot authors the south has simply
+become associated with one set of stock phrases and the north with
+another. Here is where my Franco-Spanish frontier comes in. We learn
+that the people of southern Spain are gay and fickle whereas the people
+of northern Spain are sturdy and sober-minded. But cross over into
+France and the people of southern France are once more gay and fickle,
+in spite of the fact that they live further north than the sober-minded
+inhabitants of northern Spain; and the people of northern France are
+calm and self-reliant. Moving still further toward the Pole, into
+Belgium, we find that the Belgians of the south are a frivolous lot, but
+the Belgians of the north are eminently desirable citizens. From what I
+have said you will no longer be surprised to hear that the inhabitants
+of southern Sweden are a harum-scarum populace, whereas in the north of
+Sweden every one attends to his own business. As a result of my long
+course in travel literature I am convinced that the southern Eskimos are
+not to be mentioned in the same breath, for hardihood and manly
+self-control, with the sturdy inhabitants of northern Congo. People go
+on writing this terrific nonsense and people go on reading it. A brief
+review in geography would put a stop to the nefarious practice. Have I
+made myself clear?"
+
+"The question is whether people are interested in the countries you have
+mentioned," I said.
+
+Even then Harding was patient with me.
+
+"That is what I would try to do in my commencement oration--arm those
+young minds against the catch-words and imbecilities of the great world.
+Altruism, the passion for service, the passion for progress, are all
+very well in their way. But first of all comes the duty of every man to
+defend the integrity of his own mind and the multiplication table."
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+BRICK AND MORTAR
+
+
+It is a pleasure to put before my readers the first completely
+unauthorised interview with Professor Henri Bergson on the spiritual
+significance of American architecture. We were speaking of Mr. Guy
+Lowell's original design for New York's new County Court house.
+
+M. Bergson smiled pragmatically.
+
+"A round court house, you say? Suggestive of the Colosseum, with a touch
+of the Tower of Babel, and the merest _soupçon_ of Barnum and Bailey?
+Come then, why not? To me it is eminently just that your architecture
+should typify the different racial strains that have entered into the
+making of the American people. When one observes in the façade of your
+magnificent public buildings the characteristic marks of the Chinese,
+the Red Indian, the Turco-Tartar, the Provençal, the Lombard
+Renaissance, the Eskimo, and the Late Patagonian, one catches for the
+first time the full meaning of your so complex civilisation."
+
+The distinguished philosopher turned in his seat, struck a match on a
+marble bust of Immanuel Kant just behind him, and lit his cigar. He
+gazed thoughtfully out of the window. Before him stretched the
+enchanting panorama of Paris so familiar to American eyes--Notre Dame,
+the Gare de St. Lazare, the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower, the
+cypresses of Père Lachaise, the tomb of Napoleon, and the offices of the
+American Express Company.
+
+"Yes," he said, "one envies the advantages of your multi-millionaires.
+The kings and princes of former times, when they built themselves a
+home, had to be content with a single school of architecture. Your rich
+men on Fifth Avenue may have two styles, three, four--what say I?--a
+dozen! And on their country estates, where there is a garage, a
+conservatory, stables, kennels, the opportunities are unlimited."
+
+"But we have pretty well exhausted all the known styles," I said. "What
+about the future?"
+
+"Have no fear," he replied. "The archæologists are continually digging
+up new monuments of primitive architecture. By the time you need a new
+City Hall excavations will be very far advanced in Peru and Ceylon.
+
+"The one secret of great architecture," M. Bergson went on, "is that it
+shall contain a soul, that it shall be the expression of an idea. A
+splendid courage accompanied by a high degree of disorder is what I
+regard as the American Idea. Hence the perfect propriety of a
+fifty-story Venetian tower overlooking a Byzantine temple devoted to the
+Presbyterian form of worship. Too many of my countrymen are tempted to
+scoff at your skyscrapers. But I maintain that a skyscraper perfectly
+expresses the spirit of a people which has created Pittsburg, the Panama
+Canal, and Mr. Hammerstein's chain of opera houses. Take your loftiest
+structures in New York and think what they stand for."
+
+I thought in accordance with instructions, and recognised that the three
+tallest structures in New York symbolised, respectively, the triumph of
+the five and ten cent store, the sewing machine, and industrial
+insurance at ten cents a week.
+
+"In your skyscrapers," he went on, "there speaks out the soul of
+American idealism."
+
+I recalled what a drug the skyscrapers are on the real estate market,
+how they yield an average of two per cent. on the cost, and I decided
+that our tall buildings are indeed the expression of uncompromising
+idealism. As an investment there was little to be said for them.
+
+"I repeat," said M. Bergson, "your skyscrapers stand for an idea, but
+they also express beauty. Not only do they reveal the restless energy of
+a people which waits five minutes to take the elevator from the tenth
+floor to the twelfth, but they also embody the most modern conception of
+fine taste. I think of them as displaying the perfection of the
+hobble-skirt in architecture--tall, slim, expensive, and never failing
+to catch the eye."
+
+We were interrupted by a trim-looking maid who brought in a telegram. My
+host tore open the envelope, glanced at the message, and handed it to me
+with a smile. It was from a Chicago vaudeville manager who offered M.
+Bergson five thousand dollars a week for a series of twenty-minute talks
+on the influence of Creative Evolution on the Cubist movement to be
+illustrated with motion pictures. I handed the telegram to M. Bergson,
+who dropped it into the waste basket.
+
+"People," he said, "have fallen into the habit of asserting that beauty
+in architecture is not to be separated from utility. To be beautiful a
+building must at once reveal the use to which it is devoted. But this
+need not mean that a certain architectural type must be devoted to a
+certain purpose. The essential thing is uniformity. The same form should
+be devoted to the same purpose. Then there would be no trouble in
+learning the peculiar architectural language of a city. When I was in
+New York I experienced no difficulty whatsoever. When I saw a Corinthian
+temple I knew it was a church. When I saw a Roman basilica I knew it was
+a bank. When I saw a Renaissance palace I knew it was a public bath
+house. When I saw an Assyrian palace I knew there was a cabaret tea
+inside. When I saw a barracks I knew it was a college laboratory. When I
+saw a fortress I knew it was an aquarium. The soul of the city spoke out
+very clearly to me."
+
+He thought for a moment.
+
+"But yes," he said. "When I think of New York and its architecture I am
+more than ever convinced that there is no such a thing as
+predestination, that your American architect is emphatically a free
+agent."
+
+"This seems so very true," I murmured.
+
+"Recently," he went on, "when I was the guest of your most hospitable
+countrymen there was a sharp controversy regarding the appropriateness
+of the architect's design for a memorial to be erected to your immortal
+Lincoln in the national capital. There were critics who professed to be
+shocked by the incongruity of placing a statue of Lincoln, the
+frontiersman, the circuit-rider of your raw Middle West, the teller of
+most amusing anecdotes, amusing, but--somewhat Gothic, shall I
+say?--putting a statue of this typical American inside a temple of pure
+Grecian design. Such critics, in my opinion, were in error. They made
+the same mistake of concentrating on the specific use, instead of
+searching after the broad meaning. Lincoln was an American. His monument
+should be American in spirit. And I contend that it is the American
+spirit to put a statesman in frock coat and trousers inside a Greek
+temple. For that matter, what structural form is there which one might
+call typical of your country, outside of your skyscrapers?"
+
+"There is the log cabin," I said, "but that would hardly bear
+reproduction in marble. And there is the baseball stadium, but somehow
+that sounds rather inappropriate."
+
+"So I should earnestly advise you," continued M. Bergson, "not to waste
+time in studying what your architectural types ought to be, but to build
+as the fancy seizes you. In the course of time the right fancy may seize
+you. If anything, avoid striving for perfection. Continue to mix your
+styles. It is not essential to cling to the original plans once you have
+started. Change your plans as you go along. Avoid the spick and span. If
+your foundations begin to sag a little before the roof is completed, so
+much the better. If the right wing of your building is out of line with
+the left wing, let it go at that. If your interior staircases blind the
+windows, if your halls run into a _cul-de-sac_, instead of leading
+somewhere, let them."
+
+"But that is precisely the way we build our State Capitols," I said.
+
+"Then you are to be congratulated on having solved the problem of a
+national style," said M. Bergson.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+INCOHERENT
+
+
+A topsy-turvy chapter of no particular meaning and of little
+consequence; whether pointing to some divine, far-off event, the reader
+must determine for himself.
+
+He came into the office and fixed me with his glittering eye across the
+desk. Under ordinary circumstances I should have found his manner of
+speech rather odd. But it was the last week of the Cubist Exhibition on
+Lexington Avenue, and a certain lack of coherence seemed natural. He
+said:
+
+"Is there a soul in things we choose to describe as inanimate? Of course
+there is. Can we assign moral attributes to what people usually regard
+as dead nature? Of course we can. Why don't we do something then? Take
+the abandoned farm. Doesn't the term at once call up a picture of
+shocking moral degradation? We are surrounded by abandoned farms, and
+do nothing to reclaim them morally. But I have hope. That is the fine
+thing about the spirit of the present day. It abhors sentimentality. It
+is honest. It recognises that before we can do away with evil we must
+acknowledge that it exists. Look at the wild olive! Look at the vicious
+circle! Look at Bad Nauheim!"
+
+"Are you sure it's me you wished to see?" I asked. "Because there's a
+man in the office whose name sounds very much the same and the boys are
+apt to confuse us. He is in the third room to your right."
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said. "The main thing is that the present uplift
+does not go half far enough. Just consider the semi-detached family
+house. Can anything be more depressing? There are happy families; of
+them we need not speak. There are unhappy families; but there at least
+you find the dignity of tragedy, of fierce hatreds, of clamour, of hot
+blood running riot in the exultation of excess--Swinburne, you know,
+Dolores, Faustina, Matisse, and all that. But a semi-detached family, a
+home of chilly rancours and hidden sneers, too indifferent for love, too
+cowardly for hate, a stagnant pool of misery--can you blame me?"
+
+"I do not," I said. "Far be it from me to censure the natural antipathy
+for real estate agents which surges up--"
+
+"Thank you," he said. "That is all I wish to know." He rose, but turned
+back at the door. "Of course," he said, "there is the other side of the
+picture. Not all nature is degenerate. There are upright pianos. There
+are well-balanced sentences. There are reinforced-concrete engineers. I
+thank you for your courtesy." And he went out.
+
+I had no scruples in directing my visitor to the third floor from mine
+on the right, because that room is occupied by the anti-suffragist
+member of the staff. Between editions he reads the foreign exchanges
+with a fixed sneer and polishes up his little anti-feminist aphorisms.
+These he recites to me with a venomous hatred which Charlotte Perkins
+Gilman would have no trouble in tracing back to the polygamous cave
+man. He came in now and sat down in the chair just vacated by my
+somewhat eccentric visitor.
+
+"Mrs. Pankhurst," he said, "is completely justified in asserting that
+the leaders may perish, but the good fight will go on. There are plenty
+of frenzied Englishwomen to carry the torch. The practice of arson, you
+will observe, comes natural to woman as the historic guardian of the
+domestic fire. We have great difficulty in preventing our cook from
+pouring kerosene into the kitchen range. Instinct, you see."
+
+"But look at the other side of the question," I said.
+
+"That doesn't concern me in the least," he replied. "Of course you will
+say there is the hunger strike. But what does that prove? Simply that
+another ancient custom of the submerged classes has become an amusement
+of the well-to-do. We are all copying the underworld nowadays. We have
+borrowed their delightfully straightforward mode of speech. We have
+learned their dances. We are imitating their manners. Now we are
+acquiring their capacity for going without food. Not that I think the
+hunger-strike is altogether a futile invention. Practised on a large
+scale it will undeniably exercise a beneficent influence on the status
+of woman. Modern fashions in women's garments have already reduced the
+expenditure on dress material to an insignificant minimum. When the
+wives of the middle and upper classes have learned to be as abstemious
+with food as they are with clothes, it is plain that the economic
+independence of women will be close at hand."
+
+"You are assuming that the sheath-gown is less expensive than the
+crinoline," I managed to interject.
+
+"I consider your remarks utterly irrelevant to my argument," he said.
+"Mind you, I don't deny that forcible feeding is a disgusting business
+as it is carried on at present. But that is because it is being
+misdirected. If the British Government were to apply forcible feeding in
+Whitechapel and among the human wreckage that litters the Thames
+Embankment, I am confident that the problem of social unrest would be
+speedily disposed of."
+
+He, too, turned back at the door.
+
+"Mark my word," he said, "it won't be long before the manhood of England
+asserts itself, and then look out for trouble! You know, even the earth
+turns when you step upon it."
+
+But sometimes you find yourself wondering whether it is really (1) the
+solid earth we tread to-day, or whether it is (2) on clouds we step, or
+whether (3) we walk the earth with our heads in the clouds, or whether
+(4) we are standing on our heads on earth with our feet in the clouds.
+It isn't an age of transition, because that means progress in one
+direction. It isn't revolution, because revolution is an extremely
+clear-cut process with heads falling and the sewers running red with
+blood; whereas the swollen channels to-day run heavy with talk chiefly.
+It isn't a transmutation of values, because we have no single accepted
+standard of exchange. It isn't a shifting of viewpoints, because it is
+much more than that.
+
+It is a shifting of the optical laws, of the entire body of physical
+laws. Pictures are painted to be heard, music is written to be seen,
+passion is depicted in odours, dancing aims to make the bystander lick
+his chops. Mathematics has become an impressionist art, and love, birth,
+and death are treated arithmetically. Grown men and women clamour for
+the widest individual freedom, and children, if you will listen to the
+Princeton professor, should render compulsory service to the State. We
+are in full revolt; in revolt toward State Socialism, toward Nietzsche,
+toward Christian idealism, toward the paganism of the Latin Quarter and
+Montmartre, toward university settlements, toward the cabaret. Are we in
+a fog? Are we in the clouds striving toward the light? Well, I haven't
+the least doubt that the mist will roll away and leave us in man's
+natural position, his feet planted solidly on earth, his face lifted to
+the sun. But for the moment it's puzzling.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+REALISM
+
+(AFTER A-N-LD B-N-ETT)
+
+
+In the dining-room of her little apartment, from the windows of which
+one might catch a glimpse of the Place de la Révolution on a clear day,
+Madame Lafarge was laying the table for supper. She had folded the
+table-cloth in two. With outstretched arms she held the four ends of the
+beautifully laundered piece of napery between the thumb and
+middle-finger of either hand. Suddenly she released two of the corners
+of the white cloth, transferring her grip with practised deftness to the
+two other corners, and whipped the flapping sheet across the table with
+a confident gesture that emphasised the vigour of her ample bosom. The
+further end of the cloth wrinkled. Perfect mistress of herself, Madame
+Lafarge walked around the table and patted the offending creases into
+an unblemished surface. She was extremely proud of her finger-nails,
+upon which she spent fifteen minutes twice a day.
+
+From the china-closet at one end of the room, Madame Lafarge brought
+forth two plates, which she placed on the table at either end of a
+perfect diameter. This diameter she bisected with four salt and pepper
+casters of cut-glass topped with silver elaborately chased in the
+bourgeois style. While arranging the spoons she happened to look at the
+clock and noticed that it was a quarter past five. M. Lafarge would be
+leaving his shop behind the Palais Royal in half an hour. He would stop
+at the tobacconist's for his semi-weekly bag of fine-cut Maryland and
+would probably call at the cobbler's for Madame's second best shoes
+which she was having resoled for the third time; they would last out the
+winter. That would bring her husband home within an hour. In another
+half hour it would be time to put the cutlets on the fire. As she walked
+into the kitchen she wondered whether there was quite enough flour in
+the sauce. A heavy sauce made M. Lafarge toss about in bed.
+
+Outside, on the Place, they were guillotining Marie Antoinette....
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+ART
+
+(WHEN EMMY DESTINN SANG IN THE LION CAGE)
+
+
+First Lion: I'm nervous. Aren't you?
+
+Second Lion: Not in the least.
+
+First Lion: Then why do you keep your tail between your legs?
+
+Second Lion: I always do that when I'm thinking.
+
+First Lion: What I want to know is, what do they want to go and put her
+in the cage for? The place is crowded as it is and there isn't enough
+raw beef to go around.
+
+Second Lion: Maybe she is a new kind of beef.
+
+First Lion: I wouldn't touch it for the world-- Now what are you doing?
+Are you afraid?
+
+Second Lion: Who's afraid?
+
+First Lion: What made you back into me like that and growl when she
+waved her upper limbs and stepped forward?
+
+Second Lion: Purely reflex action. Do you think she's hungry?
+
+First Lion: For heaven's sake, don't say that. What makes you think so?
+
+Second Lion: She has her mouth wide open and she emits prolonged howls.
+I wish she wouldn't move forward so abruptly.
+
+First Lion: And I wish you wouldn't back into me like that without
+warning.
+
+Second Lion: Perhaps she howls because she's afraid.
+
+First Lion: Whom would she be afraid of?
+
+Second Lion: The man outside who is turning the handle of the
+picture-machine.
+
+First Lion: He has a red face.
+
+Second Lion: He must be juicy. I could fetch him in two leaps if I were
+feeling just right.
+
+First Lion: There you go again. You'll be backing me against the bars
+before you know it.
+
+Second Lion: Can't one stretch when one feels bored?
+
+First Lion: The red-faced man must be the new keeper.
+
+Second Lion: Probably, and she is howling for something to eat. I wonder
+how long this will last.
+
+First Lion: I wonder. This is worse than the circus with nothing between
+you and a crowd. What is it now?
+
+Second Lion: She's come nearer again and she is stretching out her upper
+limbs in our direction. Suppose she's hungry and the red-faced man
+refuses to let her have anything.
+
+First Lion: For heaven's sake, don't speak like that.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+THE PACE OF LIFE
+
+(AS RECORDED BY THE FILM DRAMA AND TIMED BY A DOLLAR WATCH)
+
+
+From love at first sight to end of successful courtship, 2-1/2 minutes.
+
+Breakfast, 45 seconds.
+
+Ascent of the Jungfrau, 5 minutes.
+
+A riot, 1 minute, 45 seconds.
+
+A wedding, 1-1/2 minutes.
+
+A conflagration, 55 seconds.
+
+A night of restless tossing on a bed of pain, 35 seconds.
+
+From discovery of wife's faithlessness to attempt at suicide, 50
+seconds.
+
+Reconciliation between life-long enemies, 1 minute.
+
+Trust monopolist converted to endow a hospital and reorganise business
+on a profit-sharing basis, 1-1/2 minutes.
+
+A piano recital, 30 seconds.
+
+A battle in Mexico, 1-1/2 minutes.
+
+A major abdominal operation, 19 seconds.
+
+Establishing identity of long-lost heir, 6 seconds.
+
+Buy your hats at O'Grady's--they're different, 2 minutes.
+
+Getting Central on the telephone, instantaneous.
+
+Central gives the right connection, 2 seconds. (Incidentally it may be
+remarked that the film drama can never hope to reproduce the most
+powerful comic device of the legitimate stage. This consists in saying
+to Central, "Yes, I want two-four-six-thr-r-re-e," the most notable
+advance in dramatic art since the invention of the inflated bladder.)
+
+Restoration of lost memory and discovery of hiding-place of lost
+documents, 10 seconds.
+
+Orator sways hostile audience, 15 seconds.
+
+Detailed plan for robbing Metropolitan Museum formulated by six
+conspirators, 15 seconds.
+
+Twenty years pass, 2 seconds.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+MARCUS AURELIUS, 1914
+
+
+Let me exaggerate! For in exaggeration there is life and the punch that
+makes for progress. Whereas no man can manifestly qualify as a live wire
+who sees things as they are.
+
+Let me exaggerate the number of millions of bacteria to the cubic
+centimetre in our morning milk; and the hosts of virulent bacilli that
+make their encampment on the unlaundered dollar-bill; and the
+anti-social micro-organisms that beset the common drinking-cup.
+
+Let me exaggerate the virtue of assiduously and courageously swatting
+the common house-fly.
+
+Let me exaggerate the grey and monotonous life of the poor, forgetting
+the children who dance to the sound of the hurdy-gurdy; and the mothers
+who smile over their babies in tenement cradles, and the lovers in the
+parks, and the May parties, and the millions who patronise the
+moving-picture theatres, and the millions in Coney Island.
+
+Let me exaggerate the grinding, crushing, withering speed of modern
+industry, forgetting the hundreds of thousands who throng the baseball
+parks and the additional millions who study the score boards on Park
+Row.
+
+Let me exaggerate the number of children who go breakfastless to school,
+since nothing less than 25,000 gets into the newspaper headlines; and
+the wickedness of regularly ordained clergymen who marry people without
+asking for a physician's certificate; and the peril of helping an old
+lady up the Subway steps lest she turn out to be a recruiter of white
+slaves.
+
+Let me exaggerate the blessings of an age when babies shall be born
+without adenoids and tonsils, and shall develop just as automatically
+into clear-eyed little Boy Scouts and Camp-fire Girls.
+
+Let me exaggerate! Teach me that outlook upon life which the highbrow
+pragmatists describe as the will to believe, and the low-brow describes
+as pipe dreams! Save me from those twin devils, the Sense of Humour and
+the Sense of Proportion; for in common sense is stagnation and death,
+but progress lies in exaggeration!
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+BY THE TURN OF A HAND
+
+
+In seven different ways has the world been on the point of being
+regenerated since the Spanish-American War. For the completeness with
+which the world has been reconstructed consult the current files of the
+newspapers.
+
+The world was to be made over by the bicycle. The strap-hanger was to
+abandon his strap and ride joyfully down the Broadway cable-slot,
+snapping his fingers at traction magnates and imbibing ozone. The
+factory-hand was to abandon his city flat and live in the open country,
+going to and from his work through the green lanes at fifteen miles an
+hour, with his lunch on the handle bars. The old were to grow young
+again and the young were to dream close to the heart of Nature. The
+doctors were to perish of starvation. But where is the bicycle to-day?
+
+The world was to be made over by jiu-jitsu. Elderly gentlemen were to
+regain the waistline of their youth by ten minutes' attention every
+morning to the secrets of the Samurai. Slim young women, when attacked
+by heavy ruffians, were to seize their assailants by the wrist and hurl
+them over the right shoulder. The police were to discard their revolvers
+and their night sticks, and suppress rioters by mere muscular
+contraction. The doctors, as before, were to grow extinct through the
+rapid process of starvation. But where is jiu-jitsu to-day?
+
+The world was to be regenerated by denatured alcohol. Congress had
+merely to remove the internal revenue tax and a new motive power would
+be let loose, far transcending the total available horsepower of our
+coal mines. Denatured alcohol was to drive the farmer's machines, propel
+our war automobiles, run our factories, and reduce the cost of living to
+a ridiculous minimum. But where is denatured alcohol to-day?
+
+The world was to be redeemed by the bungalow. The landlord was to
+disappear and in his place would come a race of free-men bowing the head
+to no man and raising their own vegetables. Kitchen drudgery was to be
+eliminated by the simple device of abolishing the kitchen and calling it
+a kitchenette. With no more stairs to climb, rheumatism would pass into
+history. So would the doctors. The bungalow is still with us, and alas,
+so are the doctors.
+
+The world was to be regenerated by sour milk; by the simple life; by
+sleeping in the open air. But where now are Prof. Metchnikoff and Pastor
+Wagner? And the pictures of rose-embowered sleeping porches in the
+garden magazines have been supplanted by pictures of colonial farmhouses
+transformed into charming interiors by two coats of white-wash and a
+thin-paper edition of the classics.
+
+Does this show that we must give up all hope of seeing a new world
+around us before 1915? By no means. We still have Eugenics.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+THE QUARRY SLAVE
+
+
+The tired business man leaves his home in the country just in time to
+catch the next train. By ten o'clock, at the latest, he is in his
+office, having ridden up to the thirteenth floor in an express elevator
+and so gained a distinct advantage over his London competitors who are
+in the habit of walking up to their offices on the third floor. He finds
+his mail opened and sorted on his desk. He glances over the most
+important letters, puts aside those requiring immediate attention, and
+has his shoes shined. At eleven o'clock he calls up on the telephone
+and, in the course of fifteen minutes' conversation, transacts a great
+deal of business which has to be confirmed by letter. His father would
+merely have written the letter.
+
+Ignoring the primary rule of health which forbids the mingling of work
+and recreation, he makes a business appointment for lunch, and between
+one o'clock and half-past three he puts through a deal on which his
+father would have spent at least half an hour during his busiest hours.
+Returning to his office he dictates several letters which he dictated
+the day before and into which a number of vital errors have been
+introduced in the course of transcription. This necessitates repeated
+reference to a card catalogue, an operation which takes some time
+because the young man in charge has been brought up on the phonetic
+system and experiences some difficulty in determining the proper place
+of the letter G in the alphabet. From 3:30 to 4:30 the business man is
+interviewed by an agent who demonstrates the merits of a new
+labour-saving letter file. Donning his overcoat hastily he runs to make
+an express which takes eight minutes to reach Grand Central Station,
+whereas the local trains sometimes take as much as eleven minutes.
+
+Later, exhausted by his efforts of the day, he just manages to purchase
+two seats on the aisle from a speculator, and staggers to his chair at
+8:30 as the curtain rises on the first act of "The Girl and the
+Eskimo."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+MONOTONY OF THE POLES
+
+(AT A FIVE O'CLOCK TEA)
+
+
+The Lady: It's so good of you to come. It must be wonderful to have been
+at the Pole. Do you know, when the news first reached us, I was so
+excited I insisted on calling up all my friends on the telephone and
+asking them if they had heard. It must have been a wonderful trip. Won't
+you sit down and tell us all about it?
+
+The Explorer: Thank you. We left our winter camp in latitude 83 degrees
+7 minutes on October 24, with five men, four sledges, and thirty-two
+dogs. The long wait was spent in laying in stocks of seal-meat for the
+dogs, constructing sledges, breaking the dogs to harness, making
+meteorological observations, bathing, sleeping, and attending to the
+dogs. In the cold of the Polar night, work moves on rather slowly, but
+I always enjoyed the restful half-hour I devoted to winding up my watch.
+On August 24 we caught the first sign of spring.
+
+The Lady: Of course.
+
+The Explorer: But it was not till October 24 that the sun rose and the
+Polar day began.
+
+The Lady: How very interesting!
+
+The Explorer: We had been getting impatient. We were afraid the dogs
+would grow too fat. We were glad when the edge of the sun's disk showed
+above the horizon.
+
+The Lady: It must have been like the first day of creation; it must have
+been like the radiant illumination of a great love.
+
+The Explorer: It was indeed. We immediately harnessed the dogs and set
+out. The sledges had been loaded several days before. The dogs were in
+excellent physical condition. The ice was smooth. The temperature was
+minus 28 degrees Centigrade. What this is when expressed in terms of
+Fahrenheit, madam, you will of course readily ascertain for yourself by
+multiplying by 9, dividing by 5, and subtracting 32.
+
+The Lady: It is all too wonderful!
+
+The Explorer: On our first day's march we covered forty-three
+kilometres, the kilometre being equal, as you are aware, to .62121 of a
+mile. Part of the way we rode upon the sledges. Then the ice grew rough,
+and we took to our skis. We camped in 83 degrees 29 minutes, and built
+an igloo, which you will recall is a hut made of ice-blocks and snow.
+First we fed the dogs. The daily ration for the dogs was one and a half
+kilogrammes of seal-meat, the kilogramme, I need not tell you, being
+equal to 2.2046 pounds. Then we turned in.
+
+The Lady: Your first night in the unknown!
+
+The Explorer: As you say, madam. The next day we camped in 83 degrees 53
+minutes, fed the dogs as usual, and built an igloo. The day after, we
+camped in 84 degrees 29 minutes and built another igloo, after feeding
+the dogs. Nothing happened for the next ten days. The dogs were in good
+condition. The sledges held well. We made an average daily march of 36
+kilometres. But on the eleventh day, at the conclusion of a fairly good
+march, one of the dogs in sledge number 2--we called him
+Skraal--attacked and bit a dog we called Ragnar. We parted them with
+great difficulty. The two days that followed were uneventful, but on the
+third day Ragnar attacked and bit Skraal. We had to club them apart. On
+the fifteenth day out Ragnar and Skraal attacked and bit a third dog
+named Skalder, but he eventually recovered. That was in latitude 85
+degrees 87 minutes, at an altitude of 3,700 feet, and the temperature
+was minus 27 degrees Centigrade. It occurred just after we had finished
+building an igloo and were preparing to feed the dogs.
+
+The Lady: And always you were drawing nearer the goal!
+
+The Explorer: Naturally, madam. All this time we were busy laying down
+depots of food for the dogs and the men. Because once we reached the
+goal we must, of course, get back as fast as we could. We built a depot
+at every degree of latitude, or, roughly speaking, every 100 kilometres.
+Our depot in latitude 87 degrees 25 minutes was situated amidst very
+picturesque surroundings.
+
+The Lady: In that wonderful landscape!
+
+The Explorer: Yes, the spot had some very extraordinary ice-formations.
+Setting out from that point we marched 37 kilometres over rough ice, fed
+the dogs, and built an igloo. The next day we marched 70 kilometres over
+smooth ice, and, having attended to the dogs, built another igloo. The
+next day we marched 50 kilometres over ice that was partly rough and
+partly smooth, and had a good night's rest, after putting up an igloo
+and caring for the dogs. The next day the ice was very soft, and the
+dogs hung back and complained. However, we managed to cover 27
+kilometres that day, reaching 88 degrees 14 minutes. There we camped
+and--
+
+The Lady: And built another igloo!
+
+The Explorer: No, madam, a food depot. It was on the following day that
+I first had reason to feel anxious for my men. Skaarmund, my chief
+assistant, froze his ears. That was in latitude 88 degrees 36 minutes,
+and the temperature was minus 40 degrees Centigrade. After being
+vigorously rubbed for several minutes, he was all right again. Almost
+immediately Knudsen complained of headache and we had to give him some
+phenacetine. Half an hour later Lanstrup fell down a crevice in the ice.
+
+The Lady: Horrors!
+
+The Explorer: Fortunately the crevice was only two feet deep, and after
+we had applied peroxide and vaseline, Lanstrup was as well as ever.
+Owing to the high altitude we all experienced some difficulty in
+breathing. It was very much like being stalled on a crowded train in
+your Subway. It was our ambition to reach the Pole on the fifth day
+after, because that was our national holiday. But we found the going too
+rough. However, we celebrated the day by giving an extra
+half-kilogramme of seal-meat to the dogs and a whole cup of coffee to
+the men. Skaarmund had some cigarettes hidden about his person and we
+smoked and took an extra hour's rest. Two days later, we were at the
+Pole.
+
+The Lady: Where no man's foot had trod before! Alone amidst that
+infinite stretch of virgin snow!
+
+The Explorer: Quite so, madam. Immediately after taking observations and
+noting the temperature and the velocity of the wind, we built an igloo
+and picketed the dogs. We remained there for three days, taking
+additional observations, repairing the sledges, and resting up the dogs.
+On the third day after we raised the flag over the Pole, we set out on
+our return journey.
+
+The Lady: What thoughts must have been yours! You were coming back with
+the prize of the centuries, to find the world at your feet.
+
+The Explorer: Exactly, madam. Not one of the dogs had failed us. Having
+said farewell to the flag waving proudly at the apex of the globe, we
+marched fifty-two kilometres. At the end of the march we built an igloo
+and fed the dogs. At the end of the next day's march we killed two dogs:
+we gave one to the other dogs, and the other we ate ourselves. It tasted
+not unlike fresh veal. The following morning we had hardly commenced our
+march when Malstrom cut his foot on a sharp piece of ice which
+penetrated his boot. We washed his foot out with witch hazel and made
+him ride for a mile or two on a sledge. The pain thereupon disappeared.
+At exactly 89 degrees we built an igloo and slept for ten hours in one
+stretch. Rising, we killed a dog for breakfast, took our observations,
+and set out. Malstrom's foot gave him no trouble. That day we camped at
+88 degrees 23 minutes, built another igloo, and killed another dog. Our
+appetites were very active. On the way to the Pole we had allowed
+ourselves two and one-half kilos of food per day. Now we were consuming
+over four kilos a day.
+
+The Lady: Fancy eating four kilometres a day.
+
+The Explorer: No, madam, kilogrammes. But at the same time we were
+travelling at a much faster pace; one day our record was ninety.
+
+The Lady: That was a great deal, wasn't it, ninety kilogrammes a day?
+
+The Explorer: No, madam, kilometres. And in this manner we arrived
+safely at our winter camp. Five days later we were on board our ship, on
+the way to civilisation.
+
+The Lady: How happy you must have been!
+
+The Explorer: We were. But perhaps madam may be interested in some of
+the photographs illustrating incidents of our journey to the Pole?
+
+The Lady: How can you ask!
+
+The Explorer: This picture, you will see, shows our permanent camp,
+situated in the midst of a snow plain stretching to the horizon in every
+direction. This is a picture of the South Pole, similarly situated, you
+will observe, in the midst of a snow plain stretching as far as the eye
+can see. This is the sledge upon which I travelled to the Pole. The next
+picture shows the same sledge viewed from the rear and a little to one
+side, and this is still the same sledge as seen at a distance of 200
+feet to the left and from a slight elevation. The next picture shows the
+sledge with its load, and the one after that shows the load itself
+resting close to the walls of an igloo which is just going up. In this
+picture you see the igloo completed and with the dogs lying in front.
+The next picture shows the same group of dogs with two of the leaders
+missing. The next two pictures show the sledge as it was before the
+accident and after. The remaining pictures deal with similar subjects.
+
+The Lady: This has been so delightful! Do you know, your English
+pronunciation is wonderful for a foreigner!
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Post-Impressions, by Simeon Strunsky
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40232 ***