gone, when we were doing better than we ever had before, that the sad
blow fell upon us which has cast a shadow over our household, and
which has left me, at the age of forty, a widow in all but name and
a pauper in anticipation, if not already one in fact. My husband had
been invited to speak before a certain literary club or society, and as
was always his custom, had accepted without hesitation. Little did he
realize, when he carelessly mentioned this appointment to me, that it
would be his last public appearance for a long time to come--perhaps
forever! Little did I know when he left our apartment that evening,
looking so debonair and engaging in his faultless evening attire, that
I should next behold him a pitiful wreck--a driveling idiot! Yet, Mr.
_Idler_, this was, alas! what befell your wretched correspondent. He
came back to me from that reading a man without understanding, a mental
incompetent, a man who, despite his stalwart frame and glowing health
of body, exhibited all the symptoms of senile decay! A man who could
scarcely scrawl his own name in legible fashion, to say nothing of
inditing sonnets, quatrains and ballads.
And what, Mr. _Idler_, do you suppose those heartless wretches who
composed that literary society had done to my innocent and harmless
husband? Not content with having him read his verses, _they had
insisted that he explain them_! And he, poor weak man that he was,
yielded to the unhappy vanity which is the birthright of all poets,
and had attempted to comply with their request. The result you already
know. His mind was completely overturned. He has spent the time since
that dreadful evening in dictating to an imaginary stenographer a
critical appreciation of each rhyme in _Mother Goose_. Only once
has he attempted anything in the way of original poetry, which I
hastened to jot down in shorthand, and which was so puerile, so empty
of all meaning, that I could not forbear to weep heartbrokenly as I
transcribed my notes.
Now, Mr. _Idler_, what redress have I against those inhuman creatures,
those compassionless brutes, who brought my husband to this pass? Can
I sue them in a court of law? Or must I bear without compensation the
dreadful sorrow which has befallen me? I beg of you, advise me at once,
as I do not know which way to turn.
I am, Sir, distractedly yours,
BEDELIA BARDLET.
P. S.--All is come right after all, Mr. _Idler_. After writing you
the above, yesterday morning, I determined to make one more desperate
trial. I took around to an editor the one original poem, of which I
spoke, which my husband had dictated in his madness. That editor has
just called me on the telephone to say that the poem will be printed in
the next number of his magazine, and that he finds it by far the best
that my husband has ever submitted. And so, please God, it may turn out
that his misfortune will prove to be a blessing in disguise.
THE LOCK-STEP
_To the Editor of The Idler._
DEAR SIR: Thackeray once said: “Every one knows what harm the bad may
do, but who knows the mischief done by the good?” It appears to me
that there is a valuable suggestion in this query which merits the
consideration of all men who live under a civilized government, and
especially the attention of young men who are about to enter upon
the serious business of life. Young people, being by nature somewhat
lacking in logic, are prone to consider everything that is good _per
se_ as a thing which must necessarily be good in its effect, and
similarly to class all thing which are bad in themselves as bad in
their effects. Nothing could be more erroneous than this assumption.
There is no man who will maintain that a beating is a thing which is
good in itself; yet I am old-fashioned enough to believe that many a
beating has been very salutary in its effect. Early in life, I fell
into this common error of confusing the inherent quality of an act with
the quality of its effect, and it is in the hope that I may save some
worthy young man the miseries resulting from such an error that I am
writing this letter.
As Mr. James Coolidge Carter points out in his book, _Law: Its Origin,
Growth and Function_, and as Blackstone and others pointed out before
him, all law originates in custom. As a custom becomes general--so
general as to be termed the common custom among a given people--it is
usually enacted as law. And even where such legislative sanction is
wanting, a general custom takes on the force of law and operates as
law, as is the case with the great body of the common law of England.
Thus, a custom, which in the beginning all are free to adopt or to
reject as they may see fit, eventually acquires the force of a rule to
which all are obliged to conform, whether from strict legal necessity
or merely by force of public opinion.
The law, theoretically at least and actually in most cases, is merely
the expression of a public sentiment. It is the constant tendency of
all uniform and generally prevalent customs and opinions to take on
the form of law. The general disapproval of profanity, for instance,
results in laws providing penalties for the use of profane language
in public places. Practically all ordinances may be traced to the
same source of public sentiment. Not all laws, however, represent
the will of the majority. Certain of our laws are representative of
the general opinion of all mankind, others of the sentiments of a
majority of mankind, and still others of the ideas and prejudices of
an active minority. To the extent that such habits, ideas, customs,
opinions and prejudices become crystallized into law, the members of
a community become enslaved to those habits, ideas, customs, opinions
and prejudices; since a departure from them is followed by penalties
and punishments. And there are some customs which, while not actually
laws, exert quite as strong an influence upon the average citizen as
the duly enacted statutes. The fear of social ostracism is often quite
as effective a check upon the inclinations of an individual as the fear
of legal punishment.
Now, as every man is the slave of general laws and customs, so, in a
lesser sense, is he the slave of his own personal habits. And oddly
enough this is more often true of good habits than of bad ones.
Should the town drunkard make a sudden resolution to reform, the town
may laugh, but nobody will condemn his resolution to mend his ways;
nobody will be scandalized at his change of habits. But should the
leader of the local prohibitionists suddenly resolve to test the joys
of inebriety, what a protest would go up on all sides! Even the town
drunkard would sneer and despise him as a man who had fallen from his
high estate. Much as the inebriate may dislike the sincere teetotaler,
he dislikes the ex-teetotaler even more. No, every man is a slave to
his good habits and he can not hope to change them without exciting the
animosity of all who know him.
I recall reading not long ago a story of an eastern governor who was
caught in the act of smoking a cigarette. Now, there was nothing
especially horrifying about the fact that he smoked cigarettes except
for the fact that he was the vice-president of an anti-cigarette
society. Under the circumstances this governor, who is in all
probability a capable and fairly honest executive, has endangered, if
he has not destroyed, his political future--and all for the matter of
a cigarette! While it may seem an injustice to him that he be made
to suffer a political eclipse for so slight a lapse, there is hardly
a smoker who will not heartily agree with the idly busy people who
make up the anti-cigarette league, that the governor deserves all the
punishment his outraged associates may choose to inflict upon him. He
has been a double renegade; for he has betrayed his fellow smokers by
publicly indorsing the aims of the society, and he has betrayed his
fellow members of the society by privately indulging in the very habit
which the society condemns.
And the general public may very justly condemn him not because he
smokes cigarettes--but because he has played the hypocrite. This
statesman is evidently one of those foolish men who believe that it
pays to appear better than one really is, and that an undeserved
reputation for abstinence and virtue is better than none. And of all
the possible attitudes that he might have assumed in this connection,
the one which he did assume was the worst, for it was the most
hypocritical and insincere. And what monumental folly! For the sake of
a cigarette he has jeopardized his career--by such a slender thread is
the Damoclean sword of public opprobrium suspended!
But I am digressing. I did not intend to write you a dissertation upon
the follies of politicians, but to set forth, in some sort, the results
of my own stupidity in failing to discover early in life the tyranny of
custom and habit.
I am, as you may possibly have conjectured, a member of the legal
profession; which profession I have followed with some degree of
success for the last thirty years. I think I may say without boasting
that I have attained an enviable reputation among my colleagues of the
bar as an able advocate and a man possessed of a logical mind and a
rather extensive knowledge of the “delightful fictions of the law.” I
have no complaint to make upon the score of my professional career.
If it has not led me to eminence, it has at least preserved me from
want. My practise, while general and not so profitable as that of some
legal specialists of my acquaintance, is yet sufficiently lucrative to
enable me to maintain a comfortable establishment at home and to pay
without pinching the expenses of my son’s collegiate and my daughter’s
“finishing school” education. I have a comfortable home, a healthy
and happy family, a prosperous business, a large number of congenial
friends and a hale and hearty constitution. Doubtless you will say
that I am blessed beyond the majority of mankind. Doubtless I am, and
doubtless, too, beyond my deserts. But for all these blessings, which
are obviously much to be desired, there is, so to speak, a fly in the
ointment of my contentment. And that is just this--_I have too good a
reputation_! In me, Sir, you may behold a man who has become an abject
slave to good Reputation. Totally unknown to the great majority of
my millions of fellow countrymen, and having but a modest degree of
celebrity among the members of my own profession, I am yet compelled
to be as careful of my speech and as circumspect in my actions as
if I were the Czar of all the Russias! I am bound hand, foot and
tongue by the ties of a lifetime; I am manacled at the cart-tail of
Respectability; I am pilloried in the pillory of Dignified Demeanor!
If you will bear with me a bit longer, I shall endeavor to explain my
present situation.
I was born and reared in the little Missouri town where I now reside. I
am personally acquainted with practically every man, woman and child in
the place, which, while not exactly a village, is hardly large enough
to be called a city outside of the columns of our local newspapers. The
present county attorney is a young man of thirty whom I trotted on my
knee and for whom I made kites many years ago. The county judge and I
fell out many years ago because he insisted that we had been playing
marbles for “keeps”, while I maintained that we had been playing merely
for fun. We are now the best of friends, however, and there is no judge
in the state who passes heavier sentences on convicted gamblers than
he. The pastor of the church which I attend is a lad who in former
years was a member of the Sunday-school class I taught and which used
to embarrass me with all sorts of questions concerning the wives of
Cain and Abel and the origin of the inhabitants of the Land of Nod. And
so it is; I know them all and they all know me.
“Jimmy” Vance is our family physician; he is the family physician for
at least a third of our population. He has been helping the people
of our town to be born and to die for more than thirty years--but
he is still “Jimmy”. Jimmy and I were born in the same year. It was
once a joke with us to call ourselves “twins” on this account. But
Jimmy and I are “twins” no longer. Jimmy is still a smooth-faced
boy at fifty-five, while I am a gray-bearded oldster. You may gather
something of my life when I tell you that though my Christian names
are Jeremiah Samuel (I do not give my surname for reasons you will
understand), I have never, since my twenty-first year, been addressed
either as “Jerry” or “Sam”. My wife calls me “Jeremiah”, as do my other
relatives, while my business associates and friends never grow more
familiar than “Jeremiah S.”
When I determined to enter upon the study and practise of the law, my
maternal uncle, who was himself a practising attorney, became a sort of
supplementary preceptor to me by virtue of his avuncular relationship.
He assisted me in my studies and when the time came for me to be
admitted to the bar, he gave me a deal of what he no doubt considered
sound advice as to my future conduct. “Jeremiah,” said he, “there
is no profession on earth which is a more serious business than the
law. Men do not go to law for fun. Nobody brings a lawsuit for mere
amusement. When clients come to you they will come because they have
serious business on hand and they want a sober competent man to attend
to it for them. It is no joke to them and they don’t want you to joke
about it. Now, my advice to you--which you may take or leave as you
see fit--is always to keep a straight face. No matter how funny a case
may seem to you, don’t laugh. Your dignity will be more than half your
capital; see that you don’t forget your dignity.”
Such was the advice of my maternal uncle. And such was the character
I assumed upon entering the practise of the law. From the day I drew
my first real brief I became the very essence of dignity. I even
wooed and won my wife in the character of a dignified young man of
serious mind and purpose. She has never in all these years suspected
my innate frivolity. Should I yield to my natural impulse and indulge
in the nonsense and fun which has ever been so dear to my heart, I am
convinced that she would at once lose all respect for me, if, indeed,
she did not think me suddenly insane. I am grave. Under all conditions
and circumstances I am as grave as an undertaker. I do smile now and
then, but it is generally the indulgent superior smile which I labored
so hard to acquire when young and which I can not now shake off. I have
been dignified so long that my dignity has become a part of me--not
really a part of my inward personality--but a part of my outward
appearance; I should feel naked and ashamed without it; it would seem
like going about half-dressed. I am so grave that nobody ever tells me
a funny story excepting the kind that one tells a minister. They are
afraid to be natural when in my presence. As Midas turned everything he
touched to gold, so I turn all my friends to bores. No sooner do I come
into my house than the whole family stops talking and waits to hear
what I have to say. Nobody dares to interrupt me; nobody presumes to
contradict me, unless it be old Brownly, who is our oldest inhabitant
and so considers himself somewhere near my own age. Every one is grave
when with me. That is, every one but Jimmy. Jimmy has always seen
through my pose and Jimmy takes a malicious pleasure in pretending he
is young when with me.
From the day I entered upon the practise of the law, I modeled my
conduct upon that of my maternal uncle who was, as my boy Tom says,
“as cheerful as a crutch.” I abandoned the bright colored scarfs which
have always delighted my eye, and I donned the sober black bow tie
which I wear to this day. Striped and checked clothing gave way to the
non-committal pepper-and-salt suit of indefinite hue which has been my
unvarying garb from that day to this. And I grew that Vandyke beard,
to which, I am convinced, I owed my early reputation for learning and
even now owe a good part of the respect which I command. My beard is as
fixed an institution as our local literary club. Fashion has at least
relieved me of the necessity of wearing a top hat, or “plug” as we call
it here; but fashion will never relieve me of my beard, for beards may
come and beards may go, but mine grows on forever. Should I shave that
beard it would electrify the community. My wife would regard me with
suspicion, my children with pity, my friends with mirth and my clients
with horror. I verily believe that old Brown the banker, who is my best
client, would be less shocked should I tell him that I had forgotten
how to frame a complaint or draw a mortgage, than if he should walk
into my office and find me clean-shaven.
And as it is with dress, so it is with other things. Jimmy Vance,
although a doctor, never affected that dignity which has come to be
my strongest personal characteristic. Jimmy never imitated anybody’s
dignity. And as a consequence Jimmy is as free as the wind. If he
wants to smoke, he does it. If he wants to drink, he takes a drink.
If he wants to go roller-skating, he goes. And nobody ever thinks
of objecting to anything he does. Jimmy has never led any one to
expect any particular sort of conduct from him. He is full of
surprises and nobody likes him the less for it. I can drink at my
club--occasionally--or at a banquet, or at home; but I can not go into
a bar like Jimmy and shake dice with a traveling man. I can smoke,
but I could not chew tobacco. I can read, but I can not read light
novels--that is, not unless I hide away to do it. If I were to go into
our public library and ask for _The Siege of the Seven Suitors_ I
honestly think that old Miss Peters, our librarian, would faint dead
away. Now it isn’t that I want to _do_ these things which irks me,
so much as the fact that I want to be able to do them if I feel like
it. I thank God I have escaped the gravest danger which lies in the
acquisition of too good habits--I have never become what so many men
of super-excellent reputations do become--a hypocrite. I have been a
poser, a pretender, a rebel--ah, I have fairly seethed with rebellion
against the tyranny of this fictitious self at times!--but I have
never broken my habits on the sly. I have lived up to the straw man
I so foolishly put in my place; I have gone around and around in my
lock-step of respectability when I felt that I might gladly have died
for a single year of absolute personal freedom; I have made my bed and
like Damiens I have lain chained to it with iron chains for years; and
never before now have I cried aloud!
And Jimmy! What a life is Jimmy’s! Jimmy is as prosperous as I; as
respected as I; far happier than I; and ah, how much more is Jimmy
loved than I!
When the girls go away to boarding-school, Jimmy kisses them good-by;
when they come home again, Jimmy kisses them hello. Jimmy never misses
an opportunity to kiss them, coming or going. But who cares? Nobody.
“It’s only old Jimmy,” the girls say. “It’s only old Jimmy,” echo their
sweethearts. “It’s only Jimmy’s way!” giggle their mothers--for Jimmy
kisses them, too; Jimmy is no fool. But suppose I should try it? Who
would say, “It’s only old Jeremiah?”
Since there is small danger that your magazine will ever be read by
any one who will recognize me in this letter, I don’t mind confessing
that I did try it once; it is the only sin of the sort that I have
on my conscience after twenty-five years of dignity, domestic and
foreign. It was last year that it happened. The girl had been visiting
one of my daughter’s chums for the Christmas vacation and she was one
of the guests at the Christmas party we had at our house. I came into
the front hall and found her standing all alone, directly under the
mistletoe. I looked at her standing there so sweet and pretty and so
unconscious of the mistletoe, and I wondered how it would feel to kiss
some one on the lips. I have been kissed on the forehead for years.
Even my children kiss me on the forehead. They learned to do that
early, when they explained that my beard was “cratchy”. I looked at the
girl again. I was tempted and I fell. That is, I tried to fall, but she
wouldn’t let me.
“Why not?” I asked her. “You let my boy Tom do it.”
“Oh, but _he’s_ only a boy!” she said.
“Well,” I insisted, “you let Jimmy do it!”
“Oh, but he’s an _old_ man!” she exclaimed.
“Yes!” said I, “and so am I an old man!”
“Oh, but,” she protested, “you’re not _that kind_ of an old man!”
That’s it! That’s always been it, and that always will be it--I’m not
_that kind_ of an old man!
J. S.
THE FRUIT OF FAME
_To the Editor of The Idler._
DEAR SIR: I have told many strange and distressing stories in my
time; tales of struggle, of suffering, of sorrow and of bitter
disappointment; for I, Sir, am an author, and the telling of tales has
long been my vocation. But of all the tales which I have spun from
the thread of my inner consciousness, there is none, I believe, more
strange or more filled with disillusionment than the true story which I
am about to tell you now.
I began writing at an early age. Indeed, I was writing short stories
while yet in the high school and selling them before I had done with
college. The history of my younger years does not differ greatly from
that of most young authors; it is the history of an existence which
would have been inexpressibly sordid had it not been glorified by
youthful hope and ambition. I married young and was forced to write
constantly in order to make both ends meet. The years went slipping by
almost unnoticed until suddenly one day I awoke to find myself upon the
verge of middle age and realized that for years I had been postponing
the writing of my first real book, meanwhile falling unconsciously into
the habit of giving all of my attention to the market value of what
I wrote and growing more and more indifferent to the question of its
literary merit. I had, in fact, become a confirmed hack-writer.
The discovery shocked me into action. I determined then and there that
I would write a novel worthy of my powers if I had to give to that task
the time which should be employed in rest and sleep. I had never taken
many holidays; now I took none at all. Every odd moment was employed
on the great task which should lift me out of the rut and transform me
from a mere fiction machine into a creative artist. I shall not bore
you with the details of that work; how I toiled far into the night and
arose before daybreak to finish a chapter or retouch a paragraph; how
I struggled with my style which had become corrupted and florid from
the writing of sensational stories of adventure; how I tossed in my bed
when I should have been sleeping, made wakeful by the excitement under
which I labored. Suffice it to say, through infinite pains and toil I
finally wrote the last line of _The Pin-headed Girl_, and sent it off
to Messrs. Buckram and Sons with a high heart. It was accepted.
The publishers, according to their usual custom, offered me a
royalty of ten per cent.; for you must know, Sir, that it is only
the established and successful author who can make his own terms. We
poor devils who are appearing in cloth for the first time must be
content with what is offered, for no publisher considers a meritorious
manuscript a recommendation in any way equal to a well-known name. The
book of a famous author, like a notorious brand of soap, is supposed
to sell itself, whereas, in the case of an unknown scribbler, a demand
for the work must be created by advertising. Now it is an axiom with
publishers that a modern novel, unless it happen to be a story of
extraordinary vitality, is dead in six months. With the birth of the
autumn list, the spring list dies, which is to say, when the books
which appear in the autumn are thrown upon the market, the demand for
those which appeared in the spring is immediately checked and often
dies out altogether. In six months novels are _old_; good only for
bargain sales, second-hand stores and circulating libraries. It is
therefore necessary that a book achieve a good sale in the first six
months if it is to enjoy such a sale at all.
Realizing this and taking into consideration the fact that _The
Pin-headed Girl_ was the work of a literary nobody, my publishers set
industriously to work to create a reputation for me. I will say for
them that they spared no expense in making my name familiar to the
public. It was flaunted on every side, so that no man could ride in the
subway, pick up a magazine or open a theater program without being made
acquainted with the fact that Hackett A. Long was the author of _The
Pin-headed Girl_. No man could read a literary supplement or a monthly
review without learning that I took coffee with my breakfast; had a
fondness for Russian boar-hounds (never having owned one); preferred
reading opera scores to hearing the singers; did most of my work
between the hours of three and five in the afternoon; disliked Bohemian
restaurants; bought my cigarettes by the hundred; wore a wing collar;
and many other things, some of which were true and some not. If you
glanced at any of the illustrated papers at that time, you must have
seen me riding in my six-cylinder roadster (loaned for the occasion by
the obliging publisher), sitting upon the stoop of my cottage by the
sea, or seated, pen in hand, at my desk in the very act of producing
literature. I assure you, Sir, your correspondent was no inconsiderable
figure in the public eye at that time.