but the strain on his moral nature is terrific. I go through my morning
exercise with hatred for all the world and contempt for myself. Why, for
instance, should every system of gymnastics require that a man place
himself in the most ridiculous and unnatural postures? A stout,
middle-aged man who struggles to touch the floor with the palms of his
hands is not a beautiful sight. Equally preposterous is the practice of
standing on one leg and stretching the other toward the nape of one's
neck. In the confines of a city bedroom such evolutions are not only
ungraceful but frequently dangerous. Harrington tells me that every
morning when he lunges forward he scrapes the tips of his fingers
against the edge of the bed and the tears come into his eyes. When he
throws his arms back he hits the gas jet. Harrington's young son, who
insists on being present during the ordeal, believes that the entire
performance is intended for his amusement, and laughs immoderately. I
cannot blame him. Morning exercise is incompatible with the maintenance
of parental dignity. Were I a child again I could neither love nor
respect a father who placed two chairs at a considerable distance from
each other and mounted them horizontally like the human bridge in a
melodrama.
I admit, of course, that home exercises have the merit of being cheap.
No special apparatus is required. The ordinary household furniture and
such heirlooms as are readily available will usually suffice. An onyx
clock will do instead of chest weights. Any two volumes of the
Encyclopædia Britannica will take the place of dumb-bells or Indian
clubs. Many a time I have stood still and held a bronze lamp in my
outstretched right hand for a minute and then held it in my left hand
for half a minute. I know of one man who skipped the rope one hundred
times every morning. Within four months he had lost three and a half
pounds, and driven the family in the flat below into nervous
prostration. I have even been told that there are systems of exercise
which show how physical perfection may be attained by scientifically
manipulating, for fifteen minutes every day, a couple of fountain pens
and a paper cutter. But I cannot reconcile myself to such methods
because of the confusion they introduce into the world of common things.
A table is no longer something to write upon or to eat upon, but
something to lie down upon while one flings out his arms and legs fifty
times in four contrary directions. A broom-stick is an instrument for
strengthening the shoulder muscles. When I see a transom, I find myself
estimating the number of times I could chin it.
The intimate connection between the hygienic life and the temptation to
tell lies is a delicate subject to touch upon; but the facts may as well
be brought out now as later. People of otherwise irreproachable conduct
will lose all sense of truthfulness when they speak of physical culture
and fresh air. They will exaggerate the number of inches they keep their
bedroom windows raised in midwinter; they will quote ridiculous
estimates of the doctors' bills they have saved; they will represent
themselves as being in the most incredibly perfect health. I know one
sober, intelligent business-man who not only habitually understates, by
ten degrees, the temperature of his morning tub, but gives an
altogether distorted impression of the alacrity with which he leaps into
his bath every morning, and the reluctance with which he leaves it. This
same man asserts that he can now walk from the Chambers Street ferry to
his office in Wall Street in astonishing time. And not only that, but
since he took to walking as much as he could, he has cut down his daily
number of cigars to one-fourth (which is untrue). And not only that, but
since he has gone in for exercise and fresh air and has given up
smoking, his income has increased by at least 50 per cent., owing to his
improved health and clearer mental vision. But that again, as I happen
to know, is untrue.
But there is another, much more subtle form of prevarication. Smith
meets you in the street and remarks upon your flabby appearance. He
argues that you ought to weigh twenty-five pounds less than you do, and
that a long daily walk will do the trick. "Look at me," he says, "I walk
ten miles every day and there isn't an ounce of superfluous flesh on
me." And so saying, he slaps his chest and offers to let you feel how
hard the muscles are about his diaphragm. Of course, there is no
superfluous flesh on Smith. And if he abstained entirely from physical
exertion and guzzled heavy German beer all day and dined on turtle soup
and roast goose every day, and ate unlimited quantities of pastry, he
would still be what he describes as free from superfluous flesh. _I_
call it scraggy. Smith is one of the men set apart by nature to
perpetuate the Don Quixote type of beauty, just as I am doomed with the
lapse of time to approximate the Falstaffian type. Smith's five sisters
and brothers are thin. His father was slight and neurasthenic. His
mother was spare and angular. Little wonder the Smith family is fond of
walking. Friction and air-resistance in their case are practically
nonexistent.
I do not, of course, mean to deny the ancient tradition that a sound
body makes a sound mind. But I would only point out that we are just
beginning to wake to the truth of the converse proposition, that a sane,
equable, easy-going mind keeps the body well. Hence there are really two
kinds of exercise, and two kinds of hygiene, a physical kind and a
spiritual kind. Which one a man will choose should be left entirely to
himself. It is only a question of approaching the same goal from two
different directions. Smith is welcome to make himself a better man by
exercising his legs three hours a day. But I prefer to sit in an
armchair and exercise my soul. Smith comes in refreshed from a
half-day's sojourn in the open air, and I come away refreshed from a
roomful of old friends talking three at a time amidst clouds of tobacco
smoke.
The trouble with so many of the physical-culture devotees is that they
tire out the soul in trying to serve it. I am inclined to believe that
the beneficent effects of the regular quarter-hour's exercise before
breakfast, is more than offset by the mental wear and tear involved in
getting out of bed fifteen minutes earlier than one otherwise would.
Some one has calculated that the amount of moral resolution expended in
New York City every winter day in getting up to take one's cold bath
would be enough to decide a dozen municipal elections in favour of the
decent candidate, or to send fifty grafting legislators to jail for an
average term of three and a half years. The same specialist has worked
out the formula that the average married man's usefulness about the
house varies inversely with his fondness for violent exercise. Smith's
dumb-bell practice, for instance, leaves him no time for hanging up the
pictures. After his long Sunday's walk he is invariably too tired to
answer his wife's questions concerning the influence of the tariff on
high prices.
By this time it will be plain that I am no passionate admirer of the
gospel of salvation by hygiene. So many things that the world holds
precious have been developed under the most unhygienic conditions.
Revolutions for the liberation of mankind have been plotted in
unsanitary cellars and dungeons. Religions have taken root and prospered
in catacombs. Great poems have been written in stuffy garrets. Great
orations have been spoken before sweating crowds in the foul air of
overheated legislative chambers. Lovers are said to be fond of dark
corners and out-of-the-way places. It is not by accident that children,
said to be the most beautiful thing in the world, are so inordinately
fond of dirt. Every great truth on its first appearance has been
declared a menace to morals and society; in other words, unhygienic. And
yet one would imagine that truth, from its habit of going naked, would
appeal strongly to the ardent fresh-air practitioner.
VIII
SOME NEWSPAPER TRAITS
At Cooper's house last winter I met Professor Grundschnitt of Berlin,
who has been making a study of American newspaper methods in behalf of
the German government. For some time after the professor's arrival in
this country, he told me, he found himself completely at sea. American
newspapers, it appeared to him, were written in two languages. One was
the English language as he had studied it in the writings of Oliver
Goldsmith, John Ruskin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In America it seemed to
be used chiefly by auctioneers, art critics, and immigrants. The other
was a dialect, evidently English in origin, but sufficiently removed
from the parent stock to be quite unintelligible. The professor spent
many painful hours over such sentences as "Jeffries annexes the Brunette
Beauty's Angora," and "Sugar Barons hand Uncle Sam a lemon." This
dialect, he found, was extensively employed by truck-drivers,
playwrights, and college students.
It did not take the professor very long, however, to overcome this
initial difficulty. His education proceeded rapidly. One of the first
things he learned, so he told me, is that some American newspapers are
printed in black ink and some in red. As a rule, the former tell more of
the truth, but the latter sell many more copies. On Sunday, which in
America is observed much more rigorously than in Europe, the red ink
predominates. The professor suggested that this might be a survival of
primitive times when the British ancestors of the present-day Americans
tattooed themselves in honour of their gods. It is universally accepted
that the American business man reads so many papers because he has
neither the time nor the energy to read books. But this would seem to be
contradicted on Sundays, when every American business man reads two or
three times the equivalent of the entire works of William Shakespeare.
Herr Grundschnitt was inclined to believe that carrying home the Sunday
paper is the most popular form of physical exercise among our people.
A very curious circumstance about the press in all the great American
cities, the professor thought, is that every newspaper has a larger
circulation than any other three newspapers combined. According to the
arithmetical system in use among all civilised peoples, that would be
manifestly impossible. But the professor imagines that the methods of
calculation by which such results are obtained are the same as those
employed by politicians in estimating their majorities on the eve of
election day, by millionaires in paying their personal taxes, and by
operatic sopranos in figuring out their age. The influence of a
newspaper depends, of course, upon its circulation. Such influence is
exercised directly in the form of news and editorial comment, and
indirectly in the form of wrapping paper.
Still another curious trait about all American newspapers, this learned
German found, is that they tell a story backward. This arises from the
desire to put the most important thing first; and in this country it is
the rule that the thing which happens last is the most important. As an
illustration Herr Grundschnitt read the following brief account clipped
from one of the principal newspapers in New York city:
"Arthur Wellesley Jones died in the municipal hospital last night as the
result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident. The end was
peaceful. Mr. Jones was driving his own machine down Fifth Avenue when
he ran into a laundry-wagon at Twenty-first Street. He had left his home
in New Rochelle an hour before. Mr. Jones was an enthusiastic motorist.
In 1905 he won the Smithson cup for heavy cars. In 1903 he was second in
the Westchester hill-climbing contest. In 1899 he helped to organise the
first road race in New York State. He was in Congress from 1894 to 1898,
and was elected to the Legislature in 1889, the same year that his
eldest son was born. Two years before that event he married a daughter
of Henry K. Smith of Philadelphia. He was graduated from Yale, having
prepared for that institution at Andover, where he played right tackle
on the football team. As a child he showed a decided taste for
mechanics. He was born in 1861."
The daily press in America, the professor went on to say, takes
extraordinary interest in visitors from abroad. He referred, as an
instance in point, to the recent arrival in New York of a nephew of the
Dalai Lama of Tibet. As the ship was being warped into the dock, a young
man with a notebook asked the distinguished visitor if it was true that
his Holiness, the Dalai Lama, had been found guilty of converting the
temple treasures at Lhassa to his own use. Upon receiving a reply in the
negative, the young man asked what progress the suffrage movement had
made in Tibet. He was told that inasmuch as every woman in Tibet must
take care of several husbands instead of one, as among the more
civilised nations, women there were not interested in the question of
votes. Thereupon the young man asked whether Tibet offered a promising
market for automobiles. He was pleased to learn that Tibet, with its
extremely sparse population and its very precipitous cliffs, was an
ideal place for the automobilist.
These, however, were superficial characteristics. What the professor was
anxious to learn was just how the newspapers influence the national life
to the remarkable extent they undoubtedly do. He knew, of course, that
the Americans are a free people, and that they select their own
lawmakers and magistrates. He soon discovered that when the people
desire to choose some one to rule over them, they name two, three, or
more men for the same office. The newspapers then proceed to accuse
these men of the vilest crimes, and the one who comes out least
besmirched is declared to be elected. After he has been put into office
the people no longer pay attention to him, leaving it to the newspapers
to see that he conducts himself properly. When a high official is caught
stealing the people rejoice, because it shows that the newspapers are
doing their duty.
In the sphere of social relations, Herr Grundschnitt learned, the
newspapers are mainly concerned with safeguarding the purity and
integrity of the home. Most of them do this by printing full accounts of
all murder and divorce trials. The professor told me that he could
recall nothing in literature that quite equals the white heat of
indignation with which the editor of the _Star_ once spoke of "the
festering national sore revealed in the proceedings of the Dives divorce
suit, the nauseous details of which the reader will find in all their
hideous completeness on the first three pages of the present issue,
together with all the photographs ruled out of evidence on the grounds
of decency." The press also serves the cause of public morals by holding
up to scorn the vices and extravagances of the vulgar rich, whose
ill-used millions, as they hasten to point out elsewhere, are nothing
more than what any American may look forward to, provided he has courage
and energy.
The same ingenious method of promoting virtue by holding up vice to
obloquy is pursued in every other field, the learned German told me. The
newspapers do not print the names of men who support their wives, but
they print the names of men who do not, or who support more than one.
They do not publish the photographs of honest bank clerks, but of
dishonest ones, and of these only when they have stolen a very large
sum. They pay no attention to a clergyman as long as he advocates the
brotherhood of man, but they have large headlines about the minister who
believes in the moderate use of the Scotch highball. They overlook a
college professor's epoch-making researches in American history, and
take him up when he comes out in favour of an exclusive diet of raw
spinach. From the newspaper point of view, a college professor counts
less than a professional gambler; a gambler counts less than an actress;
a good actress counts less than a bad one; a bad actress counts less
than a prize-fighter; a prize-fighter counts less than a chimpanzee that
has been taught to smoke cigarettes; and an educated chimpanzee counts
less than a millionaire who suffers from paranoia. By continuously
pondering on the horrors of crime and vice as depicted in the
newspapers, the American people are roused to such a hatred of evil that
some editors receive a salary of $100,000 a year.
Oddly enough, the American people freely criticise their newspapers. One
of the commonest charges is that their editors write with great haste
and little accurate information. But, Herr Grundschnitt argued, it is
unfair to insist that newspapers shall be both forceful and accurate.
It is true that the editors who supply the American people with their
opinions think fast and write fast, but it is absurd to maintain that as
a class they are unreasonably set in their own beliefs. Editors, as a
matter of fact, change their opinions every little while. In such cases
they usually have no difficulty in proving that, while their present
views are right, their previous views were also right. This makes for
consistency. Nor is there any reason for maintaining, as is often done,
that editors are restive under criticism. The professor declared that
there are very few newspapers in the United States that will refuse to
print a letter from any one who believes that the paper in question is
the only one in town with courage and honesty enough to tell the truth
and that it is the best newspaper in the country at the price.
As for the old-fashioned critics who maintain that not even the best
newspaper tells more than half the truth, my informant pointed out that
every town and village in the United States has at least two daily
publications. The conscientious reader who buys both is thus saved from
error.
When I rose to say good-night the professor accompanied me to the door,
and would not let me go till he had pronounced a final eulogy on the
press in general, and the American newspaper in particular. He
expatiated on its omnipresence. The printed sheet is with a man when he
wakes in the morning, and when he falls asleep at night, and when he is
at the breakfast table with his wife. The newspaper breaks up families
and reunites other families, though it usually misspells their names. It
chastises the rascal, and worries the honest man. It can make a
reputation in a day, and destroy a reputation in ten minutes, sending
its owner into the grave or upon the vaudeville stage. It teaches
Presidents how to rule, women how to win husbands, the Church how to
save souls, and middle-aged gentlemen how to reduce weight by exercising
ten minutes every day. It knows nearly everything and guesses at the
rest. It will say almost anything and publish the rest at advertising
rates. Without it, democratic government would be difficult and
travelling in the Subway quite impossible. The newspaper is the only
institution since the world began that succeeds in being all things to
all men for the moderate sum of one cent a day. The only universal
things that come cheaper, the professor told me, are birth and death.
IX
A FLEDGLING
A sophomore's soul is not the simple thing that most people imagine. I
am thinking now of my nephew Philip and of our last meeting. This time,
he was more than usually welcome. I was lonely. The family had just left
town for the summer and the house was fearfully empty. I sat there,
smoking a cigarette amid the first traces of domestic uncleanliness,
when I heard him on the stairs. The dear boy had not changed. Dropping
his heavy suitcase anyways, he seized my hand within his own huge paw
and squeezed it till the tears came to my eyes. His voice was a young
roar. He threw his hat upon the table, thereby scattering a large number
of papers about the room, and then sat down upon my own hat, which was
lying on the armchair, on top of several July magazines. I had put my
hat down on the chair instead of hanging it up, as I should have done,
because the family was away and I was alone in the house.
Might he smoke? He was busy with his bull-dog pipe and my tobacco jar
before I could say yes. He explained that he was sorry, but he found he
could neither read, write, nor think nowadays without his pipe. He
admitted that he was the slave of a noxious habit, but it was too late,
and he might as well get all the solace he could out of a pretty bad
situation. But, as I look at Philip, I cannot help feeling that his fine
colour and the sparkle in his blue eyes and his full count of nineteen
years make the situation far less desperate than he portrays it. Philip
is not a handsome lad, but he will be a year from now. At present he is
mostly hands and feet, and his face shows a marked nasal development.
Before Philip has completed his junior year, the rest of his features
will have reasserted themselves, and the harmony of lineament which was
his when he was an infant, as his mother never tires of regretfully
recalling, will be restored. Until that time Philip must be content to
carry the suggestion of an attractive and eager young bird of prey.
Philip lights pipe after pipe as he dilates on his experiences since
last I saw him. The moralising instinct is very weak in me. I cannot
find it in my heart to censure Philip's constant mouthing of the pipe.
I, too, smoke, and I am not foolish enough to risk my standing with
Philip by preaching where I do not practise. Besides, I observe that the
boy does not inhale, that his pipe goes out frequently, and that his
consumption of matches is much greater than his consumption of tobacco.
So I say nothing in reproof of his pipe.
But it is different with his language. Philip, I observe regretfully, is
profane. I am not mealy-mouthed myself. There are moments of high
emotional tension when silence is the worst form of blasphemy. But
Philip is profane without discrimination. His supply of unobjectionable
adjectives would be insufficient to meet the needs of the ordinary
kindergarten conversation. He uses the same swift epithet to describe
certain brands of tobacco, the weather on commencement day, the food at
his eating-house, his professors of French and of mathematics, the
spirit of the incoming freshman class, and the outlook for "snap"
courses during the coming year.
It is not my moral but my æsthetic sense that takes offence, so I ask
Philip whether it is the intensity of his feelings that makes it
impossible for him to discuss his work or his play without continual
reference to the process of perdition and the realm of lost souls; or
whether it is habit. No sooner have I put my question than I am sorry.
There is nothing the young soul is so afraid of as of satire. It can
understand being petted and it can understand being whipped; but the
sting behind the smile, the lash beneath the caress, throws the young
soul into helpless panic. It feels itself baited and knows not whither
it may flee. I have always thought that the worst type of bully is the
teacher in school or in college who indulges a pretty talent for satire
at the expense of his pupils. It is a cowardly and a demoralising
practice. It means not only hitting some one who is powerless to retort,
it means confusing the sense of truth in the adolescent mind. Here is
some one quite grown up who smiles and means to hurt you, who says good
and means bad, who says yes and means no. The young soul stares at you
and sees the standards of the universe in chaos about itself.
And I feel all the more guilty in Philip's case because I know that the
lad speaks only a mechanical lingo which goes with his bull-dog pipe and
the aggressive shade of his neckwear and his socks. The very pain and
alarm my question raises in him shows well enough that his soul has kept
young and clear amid his world of "muckers" and "grinds" and "cads" and
"rotten sneaks," and all the men and things and conditions he is in the
habit of depicting in various stages of damnation. "Now, you're making
fun of me," says Philip. "We fellows don't know how to pick out words
that sound nice, but mean a--I beg your pardon--a good deal more than
they say. Anyhow, I suppose, if I try from now on till doomsday I shall
never be able to speak like you."