perspire. This Andrew, it appears, is a sea cook who has been mellowed
and transfigured by exhaustive study of the Bhagavad Gītā, one of the
sacred nonsense books of the Hindus. He doesn’t know who his father was,
and he remembers his mother only as one dying in a strange city. When
she finally passed away he took to the high seas and mastered marine
cookery. Thus for many years, up and down the world. Then he went ashore
at Manila and became chef to an army packtrain. Then he proceeded to
China, to Japan. Then to India, where he entered the forestry service
and plodded the Himalayan heights, always with the Bhagavad Gītā under
his arm. At some time or other, during his years of culinary seafaring,
he saved the life of a Yankee ship captain, and that captain, later
dying, left him untold millions in South America. But it is long after
all this is past that we have chiefly to do with him. He is now a young
Monte Cristo at large in New York, a Monte Cristo worshiped and gurgled
over by a crowd of mushy old maids, a hero of Uneeda-biscuit parties in
God-forsaken studios, the madness and despair of senescent virgins.
But it is not Andrew’s wealth that inflames these old girls, nor even
his manly beauty, but rather his revolutionary and astounding sapience,
his great gift for solemn and incomprehensible utterance, his skill as a
metaphysician. They hang upon his every word. His rhetoric makes their
heads swim. Once he gets fully under way, they almost swoon.... And what
girls they are! Alas, what pathetic neck-stretching toward tinsel stars!
What eager hearing of the soulful, gassy stuff! One of them has red hair
and “wine dark eyes, now cryptic black, now suffused with red glows like
the night sky above a prairie fire.” Another is “tall and lovely in a
tragic, flower-like way” and performs upon the violoncello. A third is
“a tanned woman rather variously weathered,” who writes stupefying
epigrams about Whitman and Nietzsche—making the latter’s name Nietschze,
of course! A fourth is “the Gray One”—O mystic appellation! A fifth—but
enough! You get the picture. You can imagine how Andrew’s sagacity
staggers these poor dears. You can see them fighting for him, each
against all, with sharp, psychical excaliburs.
Arm in arm with all this exaltation of Woman, of course, goes a great
suspicion of mere woman. The combination is as old as Christian
mysticism, and Havelock Ellis has discussed its origin and nature at
great length. On the one hand is the _Übermensch_; on the other hand is
the temptress, the Lorelei. The Madonna and Mother Eve, the celestial
virgins and the succubi! The hero of “Fate Knocks at the Door,” for all
his flaming words, still distrusts his goddess. His colleague of “Down
Among Men” is poisoned by the same suspicions. Woman has led him up to
grace, she has shown him the Upward Path, she has illuminated him with
her Mystic Motherhood—but the moment she lets go his hand he takes to
his heels. What is worse, he sends a friend to her (I forget her name,
and his) to explain in detail how unfavorably any further communion with
her would corrupt his high mission, _i. e._, to save the downtrodden by
writing plays that fail and books that not even Americans will read. An
intellectual milk-toast! A mixture of Dr. Frank Crane and Mother
Tingley, of Edward Bok and the Archangel Eddy!...
So far, not much of this ineffable stuff has got among the best-sellers,
but I believe that it is on its way. Despite materialism and pragmatism,
mysticism is steadily growing in fashion. I hear of paunchy Freemasons
holding sacramental meetings on Maundy Thursday, of Senators in Congress
railing against _materia medica_, of Presidents invoking divine
intercession at Cabinet meetings. The New Thoughters march on; they have
at least a dozen prosperous magazines, and one of them has a circulation
comparable to that of any 20-cent repository of lingerie fiction. Such
things as Karma, the Ineffable Essence and the Zeitgeist become familiar
fauna, chained up in the cage of every woman’s club. Thousands of
American women know far more about the Subconscious than they know about
plain sewing. The pungency of myrrh and frankincense is mingled with
_odeur de femme_. Physiology is formally repealed and repudiated; its
laws are all lies. No doubt the fleshly best-seller of the last decade,
with its blushing amorousness, its flashes of underwear, its obstetrics
between chapters, will give place to a more delicate piece of
trade-goods to-morrow. In this New Thought novel the hero and heroine
will seek each other out, not to spoon obscenely behind the door, but
for the purpose of uplifting the race. Kissing is already unsanitary; in
a few years it may be downright sacrilegious, a crime against some
obscure avatar or other, a business libidinous and accursed.
XXI. THREE AMERICAN IMMORTALS
1
_Aristotelean Obsequies_
I take the following from the Boston _Herald_ of May 1, 1882:
A beautiful floral book stood at the left of the pulpit, being
spread out on a stand.... Its last page was composed of white
carnations, white daisies and light-colored immortelles. On the
leaf was displayed, in neat letters of purple immortelles, the
word “Finis.” This device was about two feet square, and its
border was composed of different colored tea-roses. The other
portion of the book was composed of dark and light-colored
flowers.... The front of the large pulpit was covered with a mass
of white pine boughs laid on loosely. In the center of this mass
of boughs appeared a large harp composed of yellow jonquils....
Above this harp was a handsome bouquet of dark pansies. On each
side appeared large clusters of calla lilies.
Well, what have we here? The funeral of a Grand Exalted Pishposh of the
Odd Fellows, of an East Side Tammany leader, of an aged and much
respected brothel-keeper? Nay. What we have here is the funeral of Ralph
Waldo Emerson. It was thus that New England lavished the loveliest
fruits of the Puritan æsthetic upon the bier of her greatest son. It was
thus that Puritan _Kultur_ mourned a philosopher.
2
_Edgar Allan Poe_
The myth that there is a monument to Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore is
widely believed; there are even persons who, stopping off in Baltimore
to eat oysters, go to look at it. As a matter of fact, no such monument
exists. All that the explorer actually finds is a cheap and hideous
tombstone in the corner of a Presbyterian churchyard—a tombstone quite
as bad as the worst in Père La Chaise. For twenty-six years after Poe’s
death there was not even this: the grave remained wholly unmarked. Poe
had surviving relatives in Baltimore, and they were well-to-do. One day
one of them ordered a local stonecutter to put a plain stone over the
grave. The stonecutter hacked it out and was preparing to haul it to the
churchyard when a runaway freight-train smashed into his stone-yard and
broke the stone to bits. Thereafter the Poes seem to have forgotten
Cousin Edgar; at all events, nothing further was done.
The existing tombstone was erected by a committee of Baltimore
schoolmarms, and cost about $1,000. It took the dear girls ten long
years to raise the money. They started out with a “literary
entertainment” which yielded $380. This was in 1865. Six years later the
fund had made such slow progress that, with accumulated interest, it
came to but $587.02. Three years more went by: it now reached $627.55.
Then some anonymous Poeista came down with $100, two others gave $50
each, one of the devoted schoolmarms raised $52 in nickels and dimes,
and George W. Childs agreed to pay any remaining deficit. During all
this time not a single American author of position gave the project any
aid. And when, finally, a stone was carved and set up and the time came
for the unveiling, the only one who appeared at the ceremony was Walt
Whitman. All the other persons present were Baltimore nobodies—chiefly
schoolteachers and preachers. There were three set speeches—one by the
principal of a local high school, the second by a teacher in the same
seminary, and the third by a man who was invited to give his “personal
recollections” of Poe, but who announced in his third sentence that “I
never saw Poe but once, and our interview did not last an hour.”
This was the gaudiest Poe celebration ever held in America. The poet has
never enjoyed such august posthumous attentions as those which lately
flattered the shade of James Russell Lowell. At his actual burial, in
1849, exactly eight persons were present, of whom six were relatives. He
was planted, as I have said, in a Presbyterian churchyard, among
generations of honest believers in infant damnation, but the officiating
clergyman was a Methodist. Two days after his death a Baptist gentleman
of God, the illustrious Rufus W. Griswold, printed a defamatory article
upon him in the New York _Tribune_, and for years it set the tone of
native criticism of him. And so he rests: thrust among Presbyterians by
a Methodist and formally damned by a Baptist.
3
_Memorial Service_
Let us summon from the shades the immortal soul of James Harlan, born in
1820, entered into rest in 1899. In the year 1865 this Harlan resigned
from the United States Senate to enter the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln as
Secretary of the Interior. One of the clerks in that department, at $600
a year, was Walt Whitman, lately emerged from three years of hard
service as an army nurse during the Civil War. One day, discovering that
Whitman was the author of a book called “Leaves of Grass,” Harlan
ordered him incontinently kicked out, and it was done forthwith. Let us
remember this event and this man; he is too precious to die. Let us
repair, once a year, to our accustomed houses of worship and there give
thanks to God that one day in 1865 brought together the greatest poet
that America has ever produced and the damndest ass.
THE END
INDEX
Ade, George, 98, 114 _et seq._
Adler, Alfred, 170
_Ailsa Page_, 134
American Academy of Arts and Letters, 115, 138
_American Language, The_, 210
_Androcles and the Lion_, 185 _et seq._
_Angela’s Business_, 139
_Ann Veronica_, 25, 31
_Another Book on the Theater_, 211
Archer, William, 25, 174
Arnold, Matthew, 194
_Artie_, 121
_Atlantic Monthly_, 52, 134, 173, 174
Augier, Emile, 106
_Avariés, Les_, 107, 201
Bahr, Hermann, 16
Balmforth, Ramsden, 186
Balzac, H., 50
Barber, Granville, 219
_Bealby_, 24, 32
Beck, James M., 33
Beethoven, L. van, 18, 72, 94
Belasco, David, 213, 219
Belloc, Hillaire, 31
Bennett, Arnold, 31, 36 _et seq._
Beyerlein, F. A., 106
Bierce, Ambrose, 130
Bierbaum, O. J., 131
Blasco Ibáñez, 24, 145
Bleibtreu, K., 106
_Book of Prefaces, A_, 210
_Boon_, 31
Boynton, H. W., 14
Brahms, Johannes, 18
Braithwaite, W. S., 83
Brandes, Georg, 17
Brieux, Eugene, 61, 107, 201, 219
Brooks, Van Wyck, 34
Brownell, W. C., 11, 14
_Buried Alive_, 46
Bynner, Witter, 85
Cabell, James Branch, 144
_Call of the Wild, The_, 236
Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 16, 191, 212
Cather, Willa Sibert, 130
_Century, The_, 174
_Certain Rich Man, A_, 140
Chambers, R. W., 73, 117, 129 _et seq._, 148
_Chap-Book, The_, 134
Chesterton, G. K., 27, 124
Childs, George W., 248
Churchill, Winston, 37, 131
Clemens, S. L., 52, 57, 97, 114, 115, 118
Cobb, Irvin, 97 _et seq._, 134
_Cobb’s Anatomy_, 99
Comfort, W. L., 240 _et seq._
Conrad, Joseph, 11, 34, 38, 40, 44, 56, 97, 112, 144
_Cosmopolitan, The_, 175 _et seq._
Craig, Gordon, 208
Crane, Frank, 46, 244
_Criterion, The_, 129, 130
Croce, Benedetto, 12, 212
Curtis, George W., 114
Dewey, John, 61 _et seq._
_Dial, The_, 64
_Doll’s House, A_, 22, 23
Dreiser, Theodore, 14, 34, 38, 47, 54, 97, 116, 119, 130, 144
_Ehre, Die_, 105
Ellis, Havelock, 244
Emerson, R. W., 115, 191 _et seq._, 246
_Everybody’s Magazine_, 175
_Family, The_ (Parsons), 155
_Family, The_ (Poole), 147
_Fate Knocks at the Door_, 241
_Fear and Conventionality_, 155 _et seq._
_First and Last Things_, 22
Fletcher, J. G., 92
_Forester’s Daughter, The_, 136
_Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The_, 24, 145
France, Anatole, 34, 131
_Frau Sorge_, 105
Freud, Sigmund, 151, 170, 199
Frost, Robert, 84, 89, 92
_Frühlings Erwachen_, 201
Garland, Hamlin, 134 _et seq._
_Gay Rebellion, The_, 133
George, W. L., 40
Giovannitti, Ettore, 90, 92
_Godey’s Lady’s Book_, 174
Goethe, J. W., 12, 16, 194, 212
Grimm, Hermann, 194
Griswold, Rufus, 19, 172, 249
H. D., 92
Haeckel, Ernst, 45
Hagedorn, Hermann, 86
Hale, William Bayard, 34
Hamilton, Clayton, 140, 148 _et seq._, 220
_Harbor, The_, 146
Hardy, Thomas, 34
Harlan, James, 249
_Harper’s Magazine_, 173
Harrison, H. S., 117, 139 _et seq._, 141
Harvey, Alexander, 52
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 106, 213
Hazlitt, Wm., 16
Hearst, W. R., 175 _et seq._
_Hearst’s Magazine_, 176
_Heimat_, 105
_Higher Learning in America, The_, 65, 67, 71, 81
_His Second Wife_, 147
_History of Mr. Polly, The_, 25, 31
_Hohe Lied, Das_, 107
Holz, Arno, 105
Howe, E. W., 56, 118, 119
Howells, W. D., 52 _et seq._, 97, 118, 144
_Huckleberry Finn_, 53
Huneker, James, 17, 19, 57, 129, 130
Ibsen, Henrik, 12, 106, 107, 119, 219
_Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution_, 65
_Indian Lily, The_, 107 _et seq._
_Instinct of Workmanship, The_, 65
_In the Heart of a Fool_, 140
James, William, 60 _et seq._, 154, 193
_Joan and Peter_, 25 _et seq._, 31, 32, 33
_John Barleycorn_, 236
Johnson, Owen, 98, 148
_Jungle, The_, 145, 146
_Katzensteg, Der_, 105
Kauffman, R. W., 199
Kilmer, Joyce, 86
_King in Yellow, The_, 134
Kipling, Rudyard, 27
Kreymborg, Alfred, 83
_Ladies’ Home Journal_, 53, 126, 143, 177
Lardner, Ring W., 98
_Leatherwood God, The_, 54
Le Bon, Gustave, 154
Lindsay, Vachel, 83, 84, 89, 92, 94, 96
_Lion’s Share, The_, 46, 51
_Little Lady of the Big House, The_, 239
Lloyd-George, David, 33
London, Jack, 37, 236 _et seq._
Lowell, Amy, 83, 86, 87, 92, 96
Lowell, J. R., 115, 173, 248
Lowes, John Livingstone, 88
Mabie, H. W., 16
McClure, John, 96
McClure, S. S., 175
_McClure’s Magazine_, 175
MacLane, Mary, 123 _et seq._, 134
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 61, 79, 219
_Magazine in America, The_, 171 _et seq._
_Magda_, 105
_Man and Superman_, 182
Marden, O. S., 46
_Marriage_, 22, 34
Marx, Karl, 66, 238
_Masks and Minstrels of New Germany_, 130
Masters, Edgar Lee, 83, 88, 92, 96
Meltzer, C. H., 57, 129
_Men vs. the Man_, 60
_Mercure de France_, 210
Mitchell, D. O., 115, 131
Monroe, Harriet, 83, 91
Moody, Wm. Vaughn, 57
_Moonlit Way, The_, 131
More, Paul Elmer, 17, 53
_Mr. Britling Sees It Through_, 24, 25
_Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents_, 211
Munsey, Frank A., 175
_Munsey’s Magazine_, 175
Nasby, Petroleum V., 114
Nathan, G. J., 208 _et seq._
_Nation, The_, 32, 64, 179
National Institute of Arts and Letters, 115, 116, 129 _et seq._
_Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation, The_, 65
_New Leaf Mills_, 56
_New Machiavelli, The_, 31
_New Republic, The_, 64
_New Thought_, 192, 245
Nietzsche, F. W., 18, 24, 28, 32, 45, 61, 155, 182, 185, 192, 194, 243
Norris, Frank, 54, 57, 121
_North American Review_, 123
Norton, Charles Eliot, 173
_Old-Fashioned Woman, The_, 155
_One Man_, 224 _et seq._
Oppenheim, James, 86, 92, 94
O’Sullivan, Vincent, 144
_Paris Nights_, 51
Parsons, Elsie Clews, 155 _et seq._
_Passionate Friends, The_, 23, 30
Pattee, F. L., 117
Phelps, W. L., 11, 14, 116
Phillips, D. G., 131
Poe, E. A., 19, 52, 97, 115, 247 _et seq._
_Poetry_, 83
Pollard, Percival, 57
Poole, Ernest, 145 _et seq._
_Popular Theater, The_, 209
Pound, Ezra, 90, 92, 94
_Pretty Lady, The_, 42, 48, 51, 129
_Putnam’s_, 173
_Queed_, 139
Reese, Lizette W., 96
Repplier, Agnes, 56, 199
_Research Magnificent, The_, 24, 33
_Rise of Silas Lapham, The_, 54
Robinson, E. A., 90
Rolland, Romaine, 33
_Roll-Call, The_, 42, 50, 51
Roosevelt, Theodore, 61, 119, 124, 142, 178
Saint-Beuve, 16
Sandburg, Carl, 86, 92, 94
_Saturday Evening Post, The_, 100, 176
_Scarlet Plague, The_, 239
_Scribner’s_, 174
_Shadow World, The_, 136
Shakespeare, 19, 201
Shaw, G. B., 181 _et seq._, 199, 218
Sherman, S. P., 11, 14, 130
Sinclair, Upton, 145
_Sodoms Ende_, 106
_Son of the Middle Border, A_, 134, 135
_Soul of a Bishop, The_, 25, 31, 32
_Speaking of Operations_—, 99
Spingarn, J. E., 10 _et seq._, 212
_Spoon River Anthology, The_, 83
Stedman, E. C., 95, 115, 173
Steele, Robert, 226 _et seq._
Stockton, F. R., 115
Stoddard, R. H., 94, 115
_Story of a Country Town, The_, 56
Sudermann, Hermann, 105 _et seq._
Tassin, Algernon, 171 _et seq._
_Their Day in Court_, 131
_Theory of Business Enterprise, The_, 65
_Theory of the Leisure Class, The_, 65, 67, 70, 71, 76
Thoma, Ludwig, 108, 213
Thomas, Augustus, 215
Thompson, Vance, 129
_Those Times and These_, 98
_Times_, New York, 13, 24, 131
_Tono-Bungay_, 22, 25, 29, 34
_Town Topics_, 130
Towne, C. H., 86
_Tribune_, New York, 33, 180, 249
Trites, W. B., 57
Tyndall, John, 194
_Undying Fire, The_, 33
Untermeyer, Louis, 88, 91, 92
_V. V.’s Eyes_, 138
Van Dyke, Henry, 95
Veblen, Thorstein, 59 _et seq._, 154
Wagner, Richard, 238
Walker, J. B., 175
Ward, Artemas, 114
Wedekind, Frank, 201
Wells, H. G., 22 _et seq._, 36, 37
Wharton, Edith, 57, 144
White, William Allen, 139 _et seq._
Whitman, Walt, 86, 92, 93, 115, 243, 247, 249
_Whom God Hath Joined_, 50, 51
_Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon, The_, 23
Wilde, Oscar, 13
Wilson, Woodrow, 33, 34, 119, 178
Winter, William, 173, 214, 220, 223
Wright, Harold Bell, 141
Zola, Emile, 50, 106, 107
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s note:
1. Silently corrected typographical errors.
2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.
3. Changed ‘Athanæums’ to ‘Athenæums’ on p. 78.
4. Changed ‘at’ to ‘as’ on p. 103.