For instance, when _The Sunday Jigger_ comes out with a four-page
revelation of your Republican candidate's past, in which we learn how,
in 1873, he put out the eyes of a maiden aunt with a red-hot poker, and
stabbed a negro cook in the back with a skewer, because she would not
permit him to put rat-poison in his grandfather's coffee, you know
perfectly well that that story has been put forth for the purpose of
turning the maiden aunt, negro, and grandfather votes against him. You
know well enough that he either never did what is charged against him,
or at least that the story is greatly exaggerated--he may have stuck a
pin into the cook, and played some boyish trick upon some of his
relatives--but the story on the face of it is untrue and therefore
harmless. Similarly with the Democratic candidate. When the _Daily Flim
Flam_ asserts that he believes that the working-man is entitled to four
cents a day for sixteen hours' work, and has repeatedly avowed that
bread and water is the proper food for motormen, everybody with
common-sense realizes at once that even the _Flim Flam_ doesn't believe
the story. It hurts no one, therefore, and provokes a great deal of
innocent mirth. You don't yourself believe that last yarn about the
Prohibition candidate, do you?"
"I haven't heard any yarn about him," said the Bibliomaniac.
"That he is the owner of a brewery up in Rochester, and backs fifteen
saloons and a pool-room in New York?" said the Idiot.
"Of course I don't," said the Bibliomaniac. "Who does?"
"Nobody," said the Idiot; "and therefore the story doesn't hurt the
man's reputation a bit, or interfere with his chances of election in the
least. Take that other story published in a New York newspaper that on
the 10th of last August Thompson Bondifeller's yacht was seen anchored
for six hours off Tom Watson's farm, two hundred miles from the sea, and
that the Populist candidate, disguised as a bank president, went off
with the trust magnate on a cruise from Atlanta, Georgia, to
Oklahoma--you don't believe that, do you?"
"It's preposterous on the face of it," said Mr. Bib.
"Well, that's the way the thing works," said the Idiot. "And that's why
I think there's a lot of bully good fun to be had out of a political
campaign. I love anything that arouses the imagination of a people too
much given over to the pursuit of the cold, hard dollar. If it wasn't
for these quadrennial political campaigns to spur the fancy on to
glorious flights we should become a dull, hard, prosaic, unimaginative
people, and that would be death to progress. No people can progress that
lacks imagination. Politics is an emery-wheel that keeps our wits
polished."
"Well, granting all that you say is true," said the Bibliomaniac, "the
intrusion upon a man's private life that politics makes possible--surely
you cannot condone that."
The Idiot laughed.
"That's the strangest argument of all," he said. "The very idea of a man
who deliberately chooses public life as the sphere of his activities
seeking to hide behind his private life is preposterous. The fellow who
does that, Mr. Bib, wants to lead a double life, and that is
reprehensible. The man who offers himself to the people hasn't any
business to tie a string to any part of him. If Jim Jones wants to be
President of the United States the people who are asked to put him there
have a right to know what kind of a person Jim Jones is in his
dressing-gown and slippers. If he beats his mother-in-law, and eats
asparagus with the sugar-tongs, and doesn't pay his grocer, the public
have a right to know it. If he has children, the voters are perfectly
justified in asking what kind of children they are, since the voters own
the White House furniture, and if the Jim Jones children wipe their
feet on plush chairs, and shoot holes in the paintings with their
bean-snappers and putty-blowers, Uncle Sam, as a landlord and owner of
the premises, ought to be warned beforehand. You wouldn't yourself rent
a furnished residence to a man whose children were known to have built
bonfires in the parlor of their last known home, would you?"
"I think not," smiled the Bibliomaniac.
"Then you cannot complain if Uncle Sam is equally solicitous about the
personal paraphernalia of the man who asks to occupy his little cottage
on the Potomac," said the Idiot. "So it happens that when a man runs for
the Presidency the persons who intrude upon his private life, as you put
it, are conferring a real service upon their fellow-citizens. When I
hear from an authentic source that Mr. So-and-So, the candidate of the
Thisorthatic party for the Presidency, is married to an estimable lady
who refers to all Frenchmen as parricides, because she believes they
have come from Paris, I have a right to consider whether or not I wish
to vote to place such a lady at the head of my official table at White
House banquets, where she is likely, sooner or later, to encounter the
French ambassador, and the man who gives me the necessary information is
doing me a service. You may say that the lady is not running for a
public office, and that, therefore, she should be protected from public
scrutiny, but that is a fallacy. A man's wife is his better half and his
children are a good part of the remainder, and what they do or don't do
becomes a matter of legitimate public concern. As a matter of fact, a
public man _can_ have no private life."
"Then you approve of these stories of candidates' cousins, the prattling
anecdotes of their grandchildren, these paragraphs narrating the doings
of their uncles-in-law, and all that?" sneered the Bibliomaniac.
"Certainly, I do," said the Idiot. "When I hear that Judge Torkin's
grandson, aged four, has come out for his grandfather's opponent I am
delighted, and give the judge credit for the independent spirit which
heredity accounts for; when it is told to me that Tom Watson's uncle is
going to vote for Tom because he knows Tom doesn't believe what he says,
I am almost inclined to vote for him as the uncle of his country; when I
hear that Debs's son, aged three, has punched his daddy in the eye, on
general principles I feel that there's a baby I want in the White House;
and when it is told to me that the Prohibition candidate's third cousin
has just been cured of delirium tremens, I feel that possibly there is a
family average there that may be struck to the advantage of the
country."
"Say, Mr. Idiot," put in the Poet, at this point, "who are you going to
vote for, anyhow?"
"Don't ask me," laughed the Idiot. "I don't know yet. I admire all the
candidates personally very much."
"But what are your politics--Republican or Democratic?" asked the
Lawyer.
"Oh, that's different," said the Idiot. "I'm a Sammycrat."
"A what?" cried the Idiot's fellow-boarders in unison.
"A Sammycrat," said the Idiot. "I'm for Uncle Sam every time. He's the
best ever."
XV
ON SHORT COURSES AT COLLEGE
Mr. Pedagog threw down the morning paper with an ejaculation of
impatience.
"I don't know what on earth we are coming to!" he said, stirring his
coffee vigorously. "These new-fangled notions of our college presidents
seem to me to be destructive in their tendency."
"What's up now? Somebody flunked a football team?" asked the Idiot.
"No, I quite approve of that," said Mr. Pedagog; "but this matter of
reducing the college course from four to two years is so radical a
suggestion that I tremble for the future of education."
"Oh, I wouldn't if I were you, Mr. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "Your
trembling won't help matters any, and, after all, when men like
President Eliot of Harvard and Dr. Butler of Columbia recommend the
short course the idea must have some virtue."
"Well, if it stops where they do I don't suppose any great harm will be
done," said Mr. Pedagog. "But what guarantee have we that fifty years
from now some successor to these gentlemen won't propose a one-year
course?"
"None," said the Idiot. "Fact is, we don't want any guarantee--or at
least I don't. They can turn colleges into bicycle academies fifty years
from now for all I care. I expect to be doing time in some other sphere
fifty years from now, so why should I vex my soul about it?"
"That's rather a selfish view, isn't it, Mr. Idiot?" asked Mr.
Whitechoker. "Don't you wish to see the world getting better and better
every day?"
"No," said the Idiot. "It's so mighty good as it is, this bully old
globe, that I hate to see people monkeying with it all the time. Of
course, I wasn't around it in the old days, but I don't believe the
world's any better off now than it was in the days of Adam."
"Great Heavens! What a thing to say!" cried the Poet.
"Well, I've said it," rejoined the Idiot. "What has it all come to,
anyhow--all this business of man's trying to better the world? It's just
added to his expenses, that's all. And what does he get out of it that
Adam didn't get? Money? Adam didn't need money. He had his garden truck,
his tailor, his fuel supply, his amusements--all the things we have to
pay cash for--right in his backyard. All he had to do was to reach out
and take what we fellows nowadays have to toil eight or ten hours a day
to earn. Literature? His position was positively enviable as far as
literature is concerned. He had the situation in his own hands. He
wasn't prevented from writing 'Hamlet,' as I am, because somebody else
had already done it. He didn't have to sit up till midnight seven nights
a week to keep up with the historical novels of the day. Art? There were
pictures on every side of him, splendid in color, instinct of life,
perfect in their technique, and all from the hand of that first of Old
Masters, Nature herself. He hadn't any Rosa Bonheurs or Landseers on his
farm, but he could get all the cow pictures he wanted from the back
window of his bungalow without their costing him a cent. Drama? Life was
a succession of rising curtains to Adam, and while, of course, he had
the errant Eve to deal with, the garden was free from Notorious Mrs.
Ebbsmiths, there wasn't a Magda from one end of the apple-orchard to the
other, and not a First, Second, or Third Mrs. Tanqueray in sight. Music?
The woods were full of it--the orioles singing their cantatas, the
nightingales warbling their concertos, the eagles screeching out their
Wagnerian measures, the bluejays piping their intermezzos, and no
Italian organ-grinders doing De Koven under his window from one year's
end to the other. Gorry! I wish sometimes Adam had known a good thing
when he had it and hadn't broken the monologue."
"The what?" demanded Mr. Brief.
"The monologue," repeated the Idiot. "The one commandment. If ten
commandments make a decalogue, one commandment makes a monologue,
doesn't it?"
"You're a philologist and a half," said the Bibliomaniac, with a laugh.
"No credit to me," returned the Idiot. "A ten years' residence in this
boarding-house has resulted practically in my having enjoyed a diet of
words. I have literally eaten syllables--"
"I hope you haven't eaten any of your own," said the Bibliomaniac. "That
would ruin the digestion of an ostrich."
"That's true enough," said the Idiot. "Rich foods will overthrow any
kind of a digestion in the long run. But to come back to the college
tendencies, Mr. Pedagog, it is my belief that in this short-course
business we haven't more than started. It's my firm conviction that some
day we shall find universities conferring degrees 'while you wait,' as
it were. A man, for instance, visiting Boston for a week will some day
be able to run out to Harvard, pay a small fee, pass an examination,
and get a bachelor's degree, as a sort of souvenir of his visit; another
chap, coming to New York for a brief holiday, instead of stealing a
spoon from the Waldorf for his collection of souvenirs, can ring up
Columbia College, tell 'em all he knows over the wire, and get a
sheepskin by return mail; while at New Haven you'll be able to stop off
at the railway station and buy your B. A. at the lunch-counter--they may
even go so far as to let the newsboys on the train confer them without
making the applicant get off at all. Then the golden age of education
will begin. There'll be more college graduates to the square inch than
you can now find in any ten square miles in Massachusetts, and our
professional men, instead of beginning the long wait at thirty, will be
in full practice at twenty-one."
"That is the limit!" ejaculated Mr. Brief.
"Oh, no indeed," said the Idiot. "There's another step. That's the
gramophone course, in which a man won't have to leave home at all to
secure a degree from any college he chooses. By tabulating his knowledge
and dictating it into a gramophone he can send the cylinder to the
university authorities, have it carefully examined, and receive his
degree on a postal-card within forty-eight hours. That strikes me as
being the limit, unless some of the ten-cent magazines offer an LL. D.
degree with a set of Kipling and a punching-bag as a premium for a one
year's subscription."
"And you think that will be a good thing?" demanded the Bibliomaniac.
"No, I didn't say so," said the Idiot. "In one respect I think it would
be a very bad thing. Such a method would involve the utter destruction
of the football and rowing seasons, unless the universities took some
decided measures looking toward the preservation of these branches of
undergraduate endeavor. It is coming to be recognized as a fact that a
man can be branded with the mark of intellectual distinction in
absentia, as the Aryan tribes used to put it, but a man can't win
athletic prowess without giving the matter attention in propria
persona, to adopt the phraseology of the days of Uncle Remus. You can't
stroke a crew by mail any more than you can stroke a cat by freight, and
it doesn't make any difference how wonderful he may be physically, a
Yale man selling dry-goods out in Nebraska can't play football with a
Harvard student employed in a grocery store at New Orleans by telephone.
You can do it with chess, but not with basket ball. There are some
things in university life that require the individual attention of the
student. Unless something is done by our colleges, then, to care for
this very important branch of their service to growing youth, the new
scheme will meet with much opposition from the public."
"What would you, in your infinite wisdom, suggest?" asked the Doctor.
"The wise man, when he points out an objection to another's plans,
suggests a remedy."
"That's easy," said the Idiot. "I should have what I should call
residential terms for those who wished to avail themselves of athletic
training under academic auspices. The leading colleges could announce
that they were open for business from October 1st to December 1st for
the study of the Theory and Practice of Gridirony--"
"Excuse me," said Mr. Pedagog. "But what was that word?"
"Gridirony," observed the Idiot. "That would be my idea of the proper
academic designation of a course in football, a game which is played on
the gridiron. It is more euphonious than goalology or leather spheroids,
which have suggested themselves to me."
"Go on!" sighed the Doctor. "As a word-mint you are unrivalled."
"There could be a term in baseballistics; another in lacrossetics; a
fourth in aquatics, and so on all through the list of intercollegiate
sports, each in the season best suited to its completest development."
"It's not a bad idea, that," said Mr. Pedagog. "A parent sending his boy
to college under such conditions would have a fairly good idea of what
the lad was doing. As matters are now, it's a question whether the
undergraduate acquires as much of Euripides as he does of Travis, and as
far as I can find out there are more Yale men around who know all about
Bob Cook and Hinkey than there are who are versed in Chaucer, Milton,
and Shakespeare."
"But what have these things to do with the arts?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.
"A man may know all about golf, base and foot ball and rowing, and yet
be far removed from the true ideals of culture. You couldn't give a man
a B. A. degree because he was a perfect quarter rush, or whatever else
it is they call him."
"That's a good criticism," observed the Idiot, "and there isn't a doubt
in my mind that the various faculties of our various colleges will meet
it by the establishment of a new degree which shall cover the case."
"Again I would suggest that it is up to you to cover that point," said
Mr. Brief. "You have outlined a pretty specific scheme. The notion that
you haven't brains enough to invent a particular degree is to my mind
preposterous."
"Right," said the Idiot. "And I think I have it. When I was in college
they used to confer a degree upon chaps who didn't quite succeed in
passing their finals which was known as A. B. Sp. Gr.--they were mostly
fellows who had played more football than Herodotus who got them. The
Sp. Gr. meant 'by special favor of the Faculty.' I think I should
advocate that, only changing its meaning to 'Great Sport.'"
Mr. Pedagog laughed heartily. "You are a great Idiot," he said. "I
wonder they don't call you to a full professorship of idiocy somewhere."
"I guess it's because they know I wouldn't go," said the Idiot.
"Did you say you were in college ever?" sneered the Bibliomaniac, rising
from the table.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "I went to Columbia for two weeks in the early
nineties. I got a special A. B. at the beginning of the third week for
my proficiency in sciolism and horseplay. I used a pony in an
examination and stuck too closely to the text."
"You talk like it," snapped the Bibliomaniac.
"Thank you," returned the Idiot, suavely. "I ought to. I was one of the
few men in my class who really earned his degree by persistent effort."
XVI
THE HORSE SHOW
"I suppose, Mr. Idiot," observed Mr. Brief, as the Idiot took his
accustomed place at the breakfast-table, "that you have been putting in
a good deal of your time this week at the Horse Show?"
"Yes," said the Idiot, "I was there every night it was open. I go to all
the shows--Horse, Dog, Baby, Flower, Electrical--it doesn't matter what.
It's first-rate fun."
"Pretty fine lot of horses, this year?" asked the Doctor.
"Don't know," said the Idiot. "I heard there were some there, but I
didn't see 'em."
"What?" cried the Doctor. "Went to the Horse Show and didn't see the
horses?"
"No," said the Idiot. "Why should I? I don't know a cob from a lazy
back. Of course I know that the four-legged beast that goes when you say
get ap is a horse, but beyond that my equine education has been
neglected. I can see all the horses I want to look at on the street,
anyhow."
"Then what in thunder do you go to the Horse Show for?" demanded the
Bibliomaniac. "To sleep?"
"No," rejoined the Idiot. "It's too noisy for that. I go to see the
people. People are far more interesting to me than horses, and I get
more solid fun out of seeing the nabobs go through their paces than
could be got out of a million nags of high degree kicking up their heels
in the ring. If they'd make the horses do all sorts of stunts, it might
be different, but they don't. They show you the same old stuff year in
and year out, and things that you can see almost any fine day in the
Park during the season. You and I know that a four-horse team can pull a
tally-ho coach around without breaking its collective neck. We know that
two horses harnessed together fore and aft instead of abreast are
called a tandem, and can drag a cart on two wheels and about a mile high
a reasonable distance without falling dead. There isn't anything new or
startling in their performance, and why anybody should pay to see them
doing the commonplace, every-day act I don't know. It isn't as if they
had a lot of thoroughbreds on exhibition who could sit down at a table
and play a round of bridge whist or poker. That would be worth seeing.
So would a horse that could play 'Cavalleria Rusticana' on the piano,
but when it comes to dragging a hansom-cab or a grocery-wagon around the
tanbark, why, it seems to me to lack novelty."
"The idea of a horse playing bridge whist!" jeered the Bibliomaniac.
"What a preposterous proposition!"
"Well, I've seen fellows with less sense than the average horse make a
pretty good stab at it at the club," said the Idiot. "Perhaps my
suggestion is extreme, but I put it that way merely to emphasize my
point. I've seen an educated pig play cards, though, and I don't see
why they can't put the horse through very much the same course of
treatment and teach him to do something that would make him more of an
object of interest when he has his week of glory. I don't care what it
is as long as it is out of the ordinary."
"There is nothing in the world that is more impressive than a fine horse
in action," said the Doctor. "What you suggest would take away from his
dignity and make him a freak."
"I didn't say it wouldn't," rejoined the Idiot. "In fact, my remarks
implied that it would. You don't quite understand my meaning. If I owned
a stable I'd much rather my horses didn't play bridge whist, because, in
all probability, they'd be sending into the house at all hours of the
night asking me to come over to the barn and make a fourth hand. It's
bad enough having your neighbors doing that sort of thing without
encouraging your horse to go into the business. Nor would it please me
as a lover of horseback-riding to have a mount that could play grand
opera on the piano. The chances are it would spoil three good
things--the horse, the piano, and the opera--but if I were getting up a
show and asking people from all over the country to pay good money to
get into it, then I should want just such things. In the ordinary daily
pursuits of equine life the horse suits me just as he is, but for the
extraordinary requirements of an exhibition he lacks diverting
qualities. He's more solemn than a play by Sudermann or Blanketty
Bjornsen; he is as lacking in originality as a comic-opera score by Sir
Reginald de Bergerac, and his drawing powers, outside of cab-work, as
far as I am concerned, are absolutely nil. A horse that can draw a
picture I'd travel miles to see. A horse that can't draw anything but a
T-cart or an ice-wagon hasn't two cents' worth of interest in my eyes."
"But can't you see the beauty in the action of a horse?" demanded the
Doctor.
"It all depends on his actions," said the Idiot. "I've seen horses whose
actions were highly uncivilized."
"I mean his form--not his behavior," said the Doctor.
"Well, I've never understood enough about horses to speak intelligently
on that point," observed the Idiot. "It's incomprehensible to me how
your so-called judges reason. If a horse trots along hiking his
fore-legs 'way up in the air as if he were grinding an invisible
hand-organ with both feet, people rave over his high-stepping and call
him all sorts of fine names. But if he does the same thing with his
hind-legs they call it springhalt or stringhalt, or something of that
kind, and set him down as a beastly old plug. The scheme seems to me to
be inconsistent, and if I were a horse I'm blessed if I think I'd know
what to do. How a thing can be an accomplishment in front and a blemish
behind is beyond me, but there is the fact. They give a blue ribbon to
the front-hiker and kick the hind-hiker out of the show altogether--they
wouldn't even pin a Bryan button on his breast."
"I fancy a baby show is about your size," said the Doctor.
"Well--yes," said the Idiot, "I guess perhaps you are right, as far as
the exhibit is concerned. There's something almost human about a baby,
and it's the human element always that takes hold of me. It's the human
element in the Horse Show that takes me and most other people as well.
Fact is, so many go to see the people and so few to see the horses that
I have an idea that some day they'll have it with only one horse--just
enough of a nag to enable them to call it a Horse Show--and pay proper
attention to the real things that make it a success even now."
The Doctor sniffed contemptuously. "What factors in your judgment
contribute most to the success of the Horse Show?" he asked.
"Duds chiefly," said the Idiot, "and the people who are inside of them.
If there were a law passed requiring every woman who goes to the Horse
Show to wear a simple gown in order not to scare the horses, ninety per
cent. of 'em would stay at home, and all the blue-ribbon steeds in
creation couldn't drag them to the Garden--and nobody'd blame them for
it, either. Similarly with the men. You don't suppose for an instant, do
you, that young Hawkins Van Bluevane would give seven cents for the
Horse Show if it didn't give him a chance to appear every afternoon in
his Carnegie plaid waistcoat?"
"That's a new one on me," said Mr. Brief. "Is there such a thing as a
Carnegie plaid?"