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. Thereare 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 interruptedme 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 thenew 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 thethings 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 hasimpressed 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 andstandards 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."
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 insiston 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 spendinghis 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 hadaddressed 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 Haroldgood; 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 avery 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 doingwith 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.
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." Obviouslythe 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 4½ per cent. convertible State bonds is unjustified by prevailing conditions in the European money market." So with ourdaily 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.
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 someof 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.
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.
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 rentand selected the wall-paper. On questions of such nature, Emmeline is the Balkan States and I am the European Concert. She creates astatus quoand 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 avery 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 waitsfor 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-roomhe 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."
"Thatisconvenient," 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 womancome 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 tobe 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 grapefruiton 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 hisoffice 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.
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, andrepeated, 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 inquestion 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, theEthics 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 andthat 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.
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 withoutquestion, 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 itgood. 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 thepurchase 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 forCollier'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 favouritebreakfast 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 caseof 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 motortruck, 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.
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 inwhich 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 revolvingbase 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 atthe 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 solidWagnerian 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 andsings '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 toany 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 ofevery 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.
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 areupon 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. Thusthe 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," Isaid, "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 yourentire 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, thenwe 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 ayashmak."
"A what?" said Emmeline, frowning slightly.
"Ayashmak," 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 withsanjak, 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. Ayashmakis 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 prettythoroughly 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 ofthe eternal womanly. Take her and welcome. I suppose it is necessary for a man to have something worthless to work for."