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 unpublishedverses 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, "theprincipal 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 ina 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 ofpeople 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 forthe 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 acceptedthe 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 provethat 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 itwasPresident 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.
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 outsideare 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 examinationsyou 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 inabilityto 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 neveragree. 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, orvice 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 discoveredthe 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 efficacyof 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.
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 thebest 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 trueCut cleanly throughHis 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 joyAnd madness starkThe 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 hisultima ratio, hisdernier cri, and hisWeltanschaung.
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, byturns, 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 thatthe 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 anaffidavit 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 ofAlaska. 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.
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 tosay 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 thecollege 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 theHalls 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 matterof 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 madeout 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 Swedenevery 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."
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 merestsoupçonof 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 structuresin 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. Ithink 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 fora 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 acul-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.
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 byabandoned 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 tracingback 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. Weare 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 andamong 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 nosingle 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.
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 andpatted 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 kitchenshe 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....
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 melike 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.
From love at first sight to end of successful courtship, 2½ minutes.
Breakfast, 45 seconds.
Ascent of the Jungfrau, 5 minutes.
A riot, 1 minute, 45 seconds.
A wedding, 1½ 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, 1½ minutes.
A piano recital, 30 seconds.
A battle in Mexico, 1½ 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.
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 babiesin 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 outlookupon 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!
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 thebungalow. 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.