SIDE TALKS WITH THE PHILISTINES: BEING SUNDRY BITS OF WISDOM WHICH HAVE
BEEN HERETOFORE SECRETED, AND ARE NOW SET FORTH IN PRINT.
If THE PHILISTINE disturbs placid self-complacency anywhere, as one or
two of its critics intimate, it is sorry, for there is no such happiness
attainable anywhere this side of Nirvana as its serene contemplation of
the charms of self which Narcissus and some more modern fakirs exemplify;
and the magazine of to-day is its gospel. But so good a Philistine as
Horace Greeley is my authority for believing that the still pool in which
self-love sees the reflection it feeds upon is a breeder of death, not
life, and effervescence is the sworn foe of the morbid. Not the things
we do that we ought not to do, but the things left undone that we ought
to do are the primary count leading up to the confession that “there
is no health in us.” The other follows. Stagnation and the miasma of
self-consciousness co-exist and are not to be separated. Wherefore,
fellow-egoists, let us get a gait on.
* * * * *
I like the broad flourish with which some imaginative writers connect
widely separated events in a stroke of the pen and omit all that lies
between as mere incident. It seems to me a proof of the theory put
forward by my good friend Elbert Hubbard that genius is a feminine
element of character—in man or woman. For example, I find this statement
in the latest of the _Little Journeys_: “Moses was sent adrift, but the
tide carried him into power.” I didn’t know just what that meant till I
recalled the discovery of the bulrush cradle. A less intuitive writer
wouldn’t have bridged eighty years in that summary way. He might have
hinted at Moses’s police court record—told how he killed an Egyptian for
calling him a son of a Populist or something and skun out for half a
lifetime and yet became a Prince of Egypt and spent forty years or so at
court before he took the road with the forefathers of Brickmaker Tourgee.
But to connect the condensed milk baby in the market basket on the Nile
with the law-giver of Israel in one movement, as the music people say,
is a pretty long span and suggests the liberty David Copperfield takes
with his own biography in the best book but one written by the subject
of the latest _Little Journey_. “I was born:” he says—and all else is
irrelevant. I take it that Mr. Hubbard agrees with John Boyle O’Reilly
that “the world was made when a man was born.” The feminine element
of genius which Mr. Hubbard tells us makes poets is manifest in that
formula. If the author of the _Journeys_ will permit, I would suggest
that the same mother instinct that crops out there is manifested in
the grasp of a life in the compass of a sentence which puzzled me at
the first. To be born and to die is the record of existence, to which
all else is tributary; and the pangs of birth and death thrill all the
poet-strains. Only the tragedy that sweeps along the strings lives to
echo in human hearts. It is the deathless minor chord that distinguishes
the melody of true poetry from the dancing cadences of rhyme in all
literature. The undertone is the soul of all song, in verse or in the
unmeasured periods of epic prose.
* * * * *
Mention of Moses recalls the perhaps unique fact that a priest of the
most austere of churches rolled off a tongue, musical with brogue, in
his newspaper sanctum—for he is a priest of the pen too—this romantic
version of the basket story which I have never seen anywhere but in his
paper—then in the process of make-up:
On Egypt’s banks, convaynient to the Nile,
Great Pharaoh’s daughter went to bathe in shtyle,
And shtooping down, as everyone supposes
To scratch her shin, she shpied the infant Moses:
Then turning to her maids, in accents wild
Cried: “Tare an’ ’ouns, girls, which o’ yes owns the chyild?”
* * * * *
I observe that the editor of the _Arena_ is about to make a contract with
the Michigan Wheel Company of Lansing, Michigan, for large quantities
of its product to give as prizes to new contributors only, the old ones
being already well supplied.
* * * * *
The following advertisement is clipped from one of the October magazines: