“Young man,” said the Melancholy Author, “I do not commonly permit
myself to be ‘interviewed’; what paper do you represent?”
The Timorous Reporter spoke the name of the great journal that was
connected with him.
“I never have heard of it,” said the Melancholy Author. “I trust that
it is devoted to the interests of Literature.”
Assurance was given that it had a Poets’ Corner and that among its
regular contributors it numbered both Aurora Angelina Aylmer and
Plantagenet Binks, the satirist.
“Indeed,” said the great man, “you surprise me! I had supposed that
satire, once so large and wholesome an element in English letters, was
long dead and d—— pardon me—buried. You must bear with me if I do not
concede the existence of Mr. Binks. Satire cannot co-exist with so
foolish sentiments as ‘the brotherhood of man,’ ‘the trusteeship of
wealth,’ moral irresponsibility, tolerance, Socialism and the rest of
it. Who can ‘lash the rascals naked through the world’ in an age that
holds crime to be a disease, and converts the prison into a sanitarium?”
The Timorous Reporter ventured to ask if he considered crime a symptom
of mental health. By way of fortifying himself for a reply, the
melancholy one visited the sideboard and toped a merciless quantity of
something imperfectly known to his visitor from the arid South.
“Crime, sir,” said he, partly recovering, “is merely a high degree of
selfishness directed by a low degree of intelligence. If selfishness
is a disease none of us is altogether well. We are all selfish, or
we should not be living, but most of us have the discernment to see
that our permanent advantage does not lie in gratification of our
malevolence by murder, nor in augmenting our possessions by theft.
Those of us who think otherwise should be assisted to a saner view by
punishment. It is sad, so sad, to reflect that many of us escape it.”
“But it is agreed,” said the journalist, “by all our illustrious
sociologists—Brand Whitlock, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs and Emma
Goldman—that punishment is useless, that it does not deter; and they
prove it by the number of convictions recorded against individual
criminals. Will you kindly say if they are right?”
“They know that punishment deters—not perfectly, for nothing is
perfect, but it deters. If every human institution that lamentably
fails to accomplish its full purpose is to be abolished none will
remain.”
The Timorous Reporter begged to be considered worthy to know what,
apart from its great wisdom and interest, all this had to do with
satire.
“Satire,” said the Melancholy Author, “is punishment. As such it has
fallen into public disfavor through disbelief in its justice and
efficacy. So the rascals go unlashed. Instead of ridicule we have
solemn reprobation; for wit we have ‘humor’—with a slang word in the
first line, two in the second and three in the third. Why, sir, the
American reading public hardly knows that there ever was a distinctive
kind of writing known, technically, as satire—that it was once not
only a glory to literature but, incidentally, a terror to all manner
of civic and personal unworth. If we had to-day an Aristophanes, a
Jonathan Swift or an Alexander Pope, he would indubitably be put into a
comfortable prison with all sanitary advantages, fed upon yellow-legged
pullets and ensainted by the Little Brothers of the Bad. For they would
think him a thief. In the same error, the churches would pray for him
and the women compete for his hand in marriage.”
The thought of so great a perversion of justice overcame the creator
of the vision and he sank into a chair already occupied by the cat—a
contested seat.