It is a marvelous truth that this golden era of the world’s history has
inspired no great poets that rank with Byron and Burns and Tom Moore and
a long list of other immortals who have enriched literature with their
songs; and it has developed but few prose writers worthy to wear the
mantles of Blackstone and Kent in law, of Gibbon and Macaulay in history,
and Scott and Bulwer in romance and fiction.
It is well we call it the golden era, for it is an era of commercialism,
when men are trampling literature and art and music under their feet
in the mad rush for gold and the gilded glory that it buys. To be a
millionaire is greater in the estimation of modern worshipers of mammon
than to be a Goldsmith; and a multimillionaire is greater in their
gold-jaundiced eyes than a William Shakespeare. The highest aspiration of
these nervous and strenuous generations is the acquirement and hoarding
of gold. Religion is tinged with it. Politics is its ally—and alloy
in the ratio of sixteen of gold to one of Patriotism. And most of the
business and social relations of this enlightened age are purely golden
and measured only by the circumference of a dollar. The English poet
sounded the keynote of true philosophy when he sang:
“Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”
The true wealth of a nation rests not so much on bricks of gold as upon
golden thought—the riches of brain and heart—the treasures of truth and
the pure and beautiful sentiments of life. In the wild scramble for
sordid gain and the golden reins of power in these wing-footed days of
avarice and materialism, the angels of happiness no longer beckon from
the landscape and the stream nor call from the sweet solitudes of the
forest; but they stand tip-toe on the burnished domes and glittering
towers of the city and the town, with crowns of gold in their hands. And
the brain and brawn of the land gather there from the hills and hollows
to climb after them on a thousand ladders of dreams. But the environments
of domes and towers, while they stimulate the brain to grasp great
financial problems and to weave the web of glory around the thrones of
money kings, contract the nobler and better ideals and impulses of the
heart to the gilded forms of artificial pleasure.
Did you ever watch a bevy of city swells and society belles swinging and
whirling under flaming chandeliers until the coat-tails of the swells
popped like whip crackers and the skirts of the belles flapped like the
sails of a schooner in a high wind? That was a piping gale of pleasure in
high life in the town. Did you ever attend a great reception in the heart
of the metropolis? It was a gorgeous scene of icicles and spectacles,
of broadcloth, and jewels arrayed in white slippers and costly gowns
of richest colors; and the icicles and spectacles bowed to the jewels,
and the jewels bowed to the icicles and spectacles and they held sweet
converse on the subject of their bicycles and tricycles and various and
sundry articles and drank champagne and sherry and all got very merry and
wound up with oysters and dill pickles. And then the tipsy icicles and
spectacles got in their elegant vehicles and went home with the jewels in
the morning. That was the cream of urban civilization. Did you ever gaze
on a gaudy throng of bald-headed Apollos and painted Minervas walling
their eyes in speechless rapture before the garish lights of the grand
opera? How the fans and ribbons fluttered and the side-whiskers swayed
and spluttered amid the inscrutable harmonies of Wagner! That was the
tuneless pandemonium of urban music. Did you ever watch the bulls and
bears of finance turn the stock exchange into a howling wilderness of
confusion in the struggle to raise or lower prices? That was the third
heaven of artificial pleasure and excitement in the city.
But what is a thrill of victory in the gambling hell of frenzied finance
compared with the joy a fisherman feels down on the farm when a game
trout strikes his baited hook in the darkening eddy of a crystal stream
and the good reel sings as he gives him line and the fishing rod bends
and the waters splash? What is the gilded club room where the wizards of
finance meet to sip and smoke and shuffle the cards of fortune compared
with a fisherman’s tent and a fisherman’s luck on the bank of a moonlit
river where hearts are trumps and souls overflow with song and story?
Did you ever hear the tale of Mark Antony, the funeral orator of Rome
and the Romeo of the Nile? He went angling in Egypt one day on the royal
barge with the beautiful Cleopatra and he fished and fished and fished,
unrewarded by a nibble, until the hours grew dull and heavy. But the
cunning queen conceived a plan to change her lover’s luck and unfolded
the scheme to a slave; and the slave secretly dived from the larboard
side of the boat and hung a dried herring on the General’s hook and then
gave his line a vigorous pull. “By Jupiter!” shouted Mark Antony, “I have
hooked a monstrous fish.” “Take care, my lord, and give him line lest
he drag thee into the sea,” cried the dark-eyed queen, as she chuckled
behind her fan.
“By the gods! that fish shall flounder on thy deck, or I shall flounder
beneath the waves!” cried the impetuous Roman. He squared himself and
gave a mighty jerk, but fell sprawling on his back at the feet of the
laughing queen, and when he looked up and saw nothing but a little dried
herring dangling among the ropes above him, he blandly smiled and dryly
said: “He was a monstrous fish while biting, but between his bite and my
jerk, he has wonderfully shriveled. But he’s the oldest looking fish and
has the loudest smell of any that ever perfumed the royal barge.”
And so many an ambitious Antony sits in the stock exchange of the
great city and drops his hook in the sea of speculation, and he fishes
and fishes with his little wad of hard earned cash, until some shrewd
manipulator, just to change his luck, takes the little wad off and gives
the line a heavy pull, and when our guileless Antony thinks he has hooked
a million, he jerks and falls at the feet of fickle fortune, and finds
dangling in the air above him only the dried herring of a shrivelled
hope, and there is nothing left but the aged look of an empty purse and
the smell of a dream that is vanished!
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