have been really pretty to look at. Andrew Jackson made a considerable
dent in the history of his period, but when it comes to beauty, there
isn't a floor-walker in a department store anywhere that hasn't got him
backed clear off the pedestal. In addition to that, the sort of clothes
we've been wearing for the last century or so do not show up especially
well in marble. Putting classical draperies on our departed solons has
been tried, but carving a statesman with only a towel draped over him,
like a Roman senator coming out of a Turkish bath, is a departure from
the real facts and must be embarrassing to his shade. The greatest
celebrities were ever the most modest of men. I'll bet the spirit of the
Father of His Country blushes every time he flits over that statue of
himself alongside the Capitol at Washington--the one showing him sitting
in a bath cabinet with nothing on but a sheet.
Sticking to the actual conditions doesn't seem to help much either.
Future generations will come and stand in front of the statue of a
leader of thought who flourished back about 1840, say, and wonder how
anybody ever had feet like those and lived. Horace Greeley's chin
whiskers no doubt looked all right on Horace when he was alive, but when
done in bronze they invariably present a droopy not to say dropsical
appearance; and the kind of bone-handled umbrella that Daniel Webster
habitually carried has never yet been successfully worked out in marble.
When you contemplate the average statue of Lincoln--and most of them, as
you may have noticed, are very average--you do not see there the majesty
and the grandeur and the abiding sorrow of the man and the tragedy of
his life. At least I know I do not see those things. I see a pair of
massive square-toed boots, such as I'm sure Father Abe never wore--he
couldn't have worn 'em and walked a step--and I see a beegum hat
weighing a ton and a half, and I say to myself: "This is not the Abraham
Lincoln who freed the slaves and penned the Gettysburg address. No, sir!
A man with those legs would never have been president--he'd have been in
a dime museum exhibiting his legs for ten cents a look--and they'd have
been worth the money too."
Nobody seems to have noticed it, but we undoubtedly had the cube form of
expression in our native sculpture long before it came out in painting.
To get a better idea of what I'm trying to drive at, just take a trip up
through Central Park the next time you are in New York and pause a while
before those bronzes of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns which stand on
the Mall. They are called bronzes, but to me they always looked more
like castings. I don't care if you are as Scotch as a haggis, I know in
advance what your feelings will be. If you decide that these two men
ever looked in life like those two bronzes you are going to lose some of
your love and veneration for them right there on the spot; or else you
are going to be filled with an intense hate for the persons who have
libeled them thus, after they were dead and gone and not in position to
protect themselves legally. But you don't necessarily have to come to
New York--you've probably got some decoration in your home town that is
equally sad. There've been a lot of good stone-masons spoiled in this
country to make enough sculptors to go round.
But while we are thinking these things about art and not daring to
express them, I take note that new schools may come and new schools may
go, but there is one class of pictures that always gets the money and
continues to give general satisfaction among the masses.
I refer to the moving pictures.
_SPORT_
[Illustration]
As I understand it, sport is hard work for which you do not get paid.
If, for hire, you should consent to go forth and spend eight hours a day
slamming a large and heavy hammer at a mark, that would be manual toil,
and you would belong to the union and carry a card, and have political
speeches made to you by persons out for the labor vote. But if you do
this without pay, and keep it up for more than eight hours on a stretch,
it then becomes sport of a very high order--and if you continue it for a
considerable period of time, at more or less expense to yourself, you
are eventually given a neat German-silver badge, costing about two
dollars, which you treasure devotedly ever after. A man who walks
twenty-five miles a day for a month without getting anything for
it--except two lines on the sporting page--is a devotee of
pedestrianism, and thereby acquires great merit among his fellow
athletes. A man who walks twenty-five miles a day for a month and gets
paid for it is a letter-carrier.
Also sport is largely a point of view. A skinny youth who flits forth
from a gymnasium attired in the scenario of a union suit, with a design
of a winged Welsh rarebit on his chest, and runs many miles at top speed
through the crowded marts of trade, is highly spoken of and has medals
hung on him. If he flits forth from a hospital somewhat similarly
attired, and does the same thing, the case is diagnosed as temporary
insanity--and we drape a strait-jacket on him and send for his folks.
Such is the narrow margin that divides Marathon and mania; and it helps
to prove that sport is mainly a state of mind.
I am speaking now with reference to our own country. Different nations
have different conceptions of this subject. Golf and eating haggis in a
state of original sin are the national pastimes of the Scotch, a hardy
race. At submarine boating and military ballooning the French
acknowledge no superiors. Their balloons go up and never come down, and
their submarines go down and never come up. The Irish are born club
swingers, as witness any police force; and the Swiss, as is well known,
have no equals at Alpine mountain climbing, chasing cuckoos into wooden
clocks, and running hotels. I've always believed that, if the truth were
only known, the reason why the Swiss Family Robinson did so well in that
desert clime was because they opened a hotel and took in the natives to
board.
Among certain branches of the Teutonic races the favorite indoor sport
is suicide by gas, and the favorite outdoor sport is going to a
_schutzenfest_ and singing _Ach du lieber Augustin!_ coming home. To
Italy the rest of us are indebted for unparalleled skill in eating
spaghetti with one tool--they use the putting iron all the way round.
Our cousins, the English, excel at archery, tea-drinking and putting the
fifty-six pound protest. Thus we lead the world at contesting Olympian
games and winning them, and they lead the world at losing them first and
then contesting them. In catch-as-catch-can wrestling between
Suffragettes and policemen the English also hold the present
championship at all weights. And so it goes.
We in America have a range of sports and pastimes that is as wide as our
continent, which is fairly wide as continents go. In using the editorial
we here I do not mean, however, to include myself. At sport I am no more
than an inoffensive onlooker. One time or another I have tried many of
our national diversions and have found that those which are not
strenuous enough are entirely too strenuous for a person of fairly
settled habits. It is much easier to look on and less fatiguing to the
system. I find that the best results along sporting lines are attained
by taking a comfortable seat up in the grandstand, lighting a good cigar
and leaning back and letting somebody else do the heavy work. Reading
about it is also a very good way.
Take fishing, now, for example. What can be more delightful on a bright,
pleasant afternoon, when the wind is in exactly the right quarter, than
to take up a standard work on fishing, written by some gifted traveling
passenger agent, and with him to snatch the elusive finny tribe out of
their native element, while the reel whirs deliriously and the hooked
trophy leaps high in air, struggling against the feathered barb of the
deceptive lure, and a waiter is handy if you press the button? I have
forgotten the rest of the description; but any railroad line making a
specialty of summer-resort business will be glad to send you the full
details by mail, prepaid. In literature, fishing is indeed an
exhilarating sport; but, so far as my experience goes, it does not pan
out when you carry the idea farther.
To begin with, there is the matter of tackle. Some people think
collecting orchids is expensive--and I guess it is, the way the orchid
market is at present; and some say matching up pearls costs money. They
should try buying fishing tackle once. If J. Pierpont Morgan had gone in
for fishing tackle instead of works of art he would have died in the
hands of a receiver. Any self-respecting dealer in sporting goods would
be ashamed to look his dependent family in the face afterward if he
suffered you to escape from his lair equipped for even the simplest
fishing expedition unless he had sawed off about ninety dollars' worth
of fishing knickknacks on you.
[Illustration: "EVERYTHING YOU CATCH IS SECOND-HAND"]
Let us say, then, that you have mortgaged the old home and have acquired
enough fishing tackle to last you for a whole day. Then you go forth,
always conceding that you are an amateur fisherman who fishes for fun as
distinguished from a professional fisherman who fishes for fish--and you
get into a rowboat that you undertake to pull yourself and that starts
out by weighing half a ton and gets half a ton heavier at each stroke.
You pull and pull until your spine begins to unravel at both ends, and
your palms get so full of water blisters you feel as though you were
carrying a bunch of hothouse grapes in each hand. And after going about
nine miles you unwittingly anchor off the mouth of a popular garbage
dump and everything you catch is second-hand. The sun beats down upon
you with unabated fervor and the back of your neck colors up like a
meerschaum pipe; and after about ten minutes you begin to yearn with
a great, passionate yearning for a stiff collar and some dry clothes,
and other delights of civilization.
If, on the other hand, I am being guided by an experienced angler it has
been my observation that he invariably takes me to a spot where the fish
bit greedily yesterday and will bite avariciously tomorrow, but, owing
to a series of unavoidable circumstances, are doing very little in the
biting line today. Or if by any chance they should be biting they at
once contract an intense aversion for my goods. Others may catch them as
freely as the measles, but toward me fish are never what you would call
infectious. I'm one of those immunes. Or else the person in charge
forgets to bring any bait along. This frequently happens when I am in
the party.
One day last summer I went fishing in the Savannah River, and we
traveled miles and miles to reach the fishing-ground. We found the water
there alive with fish, and anchored where they were thickest; and then
the person who was guiding the expedition discovered that he had left
the bait on the wharf. He is the most absent-minded man south of the
Ohio anyhow. In the old days before Georgia went dry he had to give up
carrying a crook-handled umbrella. He would invariably leave it hanging
on the rail. So I should have kept the bait in mind myself--but I
didn't, being engaged at the time in sun-burning a deep, radiant
magenta. However it was not a fast color--long before night it was
peeling off in long, painful strips.
Suppose you do catch something! You cast and cast, sometimes burying
your hook in submerged débris and sometimes in tender portions of your
own person. After a while you land a fish; but a fish in a boat is
rarely so attractive as he was in a book. One of the drawbacks about a
fish is that he becomes dead so soon--and so thoroughly.
I have been speaking thus far of river fishing. I would not undertake to
describe at length the joys of brook fishing, because I tried it only
once. Once was indeed sufficient, not to say ample. On this occasion I
was chaperoned by an old, experienced brook fisherman. I was astonished
when I got my first view of the stream. It seemed to me no more than a
trickle of moisture over a bed of boulders--a gentle perspiration
coursing down the face of Nature, as it were. Any time they tapped a
patient for dropsy up that creek there would be a destructive freshet, I
judged; but, as it developed, this brook was deceptive--it was full of
deep, cold holes. I found all these holes.
I didn't miss a single one. While I was finding them and then crawling
out of them, my companion was catching fish. He caught quite a number,
some of them being nearly three inches long. They were speckled and had
rudimentary gills and suggestions of fins, and he said they were brook
trout--and I presume they were; but if they had been larger they would
have been sardines. You cannot deceive me regarding the varieties of
fish that come in cans. I would say that the best way to land a brook
trout is to go to a restaurant and order one from a waiter in whom you
have confidence. In that way you will avoid those deep holes.
Nor have I ever shone as a huntsman. If the shadowy roeshad is not for
me neither is her cousin, the buxom roebuck. Nor do I think I will ever
go in for mountain-climbing as a steady thing, having tried it. Poets
are fond of dwelling upon the beauties of the everlasting hills,
swimming in purple and gold--but no poet ever climbed one. If he ever
did he would quit boosting and start knocking. I was induced to scale a
large mountain in the northern part of New York. It belonged to the
state; and, like so many other things the state undertakes to run, it
was neglected. No effort whatever had been made to make it cozy and
comfortable for the citizen. It was one of those mountains that from a
distance look smooth and gentle of ascent, but turn out to be rugged and
seamy and full of rocks with sharp corners on them at about the height
of the average human knee or shin. The lady for whom that mountain in
Mexico, Chapultepec, is named--oh, yes, Miss Anna Peck--would have had a
perfectly lovely time scaling that mountain; but I didn't.
[Illustration: "HE COULD BEAT ME CLIMBING, BUT AT PANTING I HAD HIM
LICKED TO A WHISPER"]
After we had climbed upward at an acute angle for several hundred
miles--my companion said yards, but I know better; it was miles--I threw
myself prone upon the softer surfaces of a large granite slab, feeling
that I could go no farther. I also wished to have plenty of room in
which to pant. He could beat me climbing, but at panting I had him
licked to a whisper. He was a person without sympathy. In his bosom the
milk of human kindness had clabbered and turned to a brick-cheese. He
stood there and laughed. There are times to laugh, but this was not one
of the times. Anyway I always did despise those people who are built
like sounding boards and have fine acoustic qualities inside their
heads--and not much of anything else; but never did I despise them more
than at that moment. He sent his grating, raucous, discordant, ill-timed
guffaws reverberating off among the precipitous crags, and then he
turned from me and went forging ahead.
He was almost out of sight when I remembered about there being bears on
that mountain; so I rose and undertook to forge ahead too. I was not a
great success at it however. I know now that if ever I should turn to a
life of crime forgery would not be my forte. I do not forge readily.
Eventually, though, I reached the summit, he being already there. We had
come up for the view, but I seemed to have lost my interest in views;
so, while he looked at the view, I reclined in a prostrate position and
resumed panting. That was three years ago and I am still somewhat behind
with my pants. I am going to take a week off sometime and pant steadily
and try to catch up; but the outing taught me one thing--I learned a
simple way of descending a steep mountain. If one is of a circular style
of construction it is very simple. One rolls.
Camping is highly spoken of, and I have tried camping a number of times.
When I go camping it rains. It begins to rain when I start and it keeps
on raining until I come back. It never fails. I have often thought that
drought-sufferers in various parts of the country who seek to attract
rain in dry spells make a mistake. They try the old-fashioned Methodist
way of praying for it, or the new scientific way of shooting dynamite
bombs off and trying to blast it out of the heavens; when, as a matter
of fact, the best plan would be to send for me and get me to go camping
in the arid district. It would then rain heavily and without cessation.
It is a fine thing to talk about the perfumed and restful bed of balsam
boughs, and the crackle of the campfire at dusk, and the dip in the
mirrored bosom of the pellucid lake at dawn--old Emerson Hough does all
that to perfection; but these things assume a different aspect when it
rains. There are three conditions in life when any latent selfishness in
a man's being, however far down it may be buried ordinarily, will come
surging to the surface--when he is courting a girl against strong
opposition; when he is playing a gentleman's game of poker, purely for
sociability; and when he is camping out and it rains. Before a man makes
up his mind that he will take a girl to be his wife he should induce her
to go in surf bathing and see how she looks when she comes out; and
before he makes up his mind that he will take a man to be his best
friend he should go camping with him in the rainy season--the answer in
both cases being that then he won't do either one.
I remember going camping once with a man who before that had appeared to
be all that one could ask in the way of a chosen comrade; but after we
had spent four days cooped up together in an eight-by-ten tent that was
built with sloping shoulders, like an Englishman's overcoat, listening
to the sough of the wind through the wet pine trees without, and dodging
the streams of water that percolated through the dripping roof within, I
could think of more than seven thousand things about that man that I
cordially disliked.
His whiskers gradually became the most distasteful of all to me. Either
he hadn't brought a razor along or it was too wet for shaving--or
something; and his whiskers grew out, and they were bristly and red in
color, which was something I had not suspected before. As I sat there
with the little rivulets running down the back of my neck and the rust
forming on my amalgam fillings and mold on my shoes and mushrooms
sprouting under my hatband, it seemed to me that he had taken an unfair
advantage of me by having red whiskers. Viewed through the drizzle they
appeared to be the reddest, the most inflammatory, the most
poisonous-looking whiskers I ever saw! They were too red to be natural.
I decided finally that he must have been scared by a Jersey bull so that
his whiskers turned red in a single night--and I was getting ready to
twit him about it; but he beat me to it. It seemed that all this time he
had been feeling more and more deeply offended at the way in which my
ears were adjusted to my head. He couldn't make up his mind, he said,
which way he would hate me more--with my ears or without them; but he
was willing to take a butcher knife and experiment. He also said that,
as an expert bookkeeper, he wouldn't know whether to enter my ears as
outstanding losses or amounts brought forward. Going into those woods we
were just the same as Damon and Pythias; but coming out his bite would
have been instant death, and I felt toward him exactly as the tarantula
does toward the centipede. We were the original Blue-Gum Twins.
Coming now to aquatic sports as distinguished from pastimes ashore, I
feel that I am better qualified to speak authoritatively, having had
more experience in that direction. Let us start with canoeing. Canoeing
is a sport fraught with constant surprises. A canoeing trip is rarely
the same thing twice in succession; and particularly is this true in
streams where the temperature of the water is subject to change. It is
comparatively easy to paddle a canoe if you only remember to scoop
toward you. You merely reverse the process by which truly refined people
imbibe soup. Even if you never master the art of paddling you may still
get along fairly well if you know how to swim. On the whole I would say
that one is liable to enjoy a longer career as a canoeist where one
swims but can't paddle, than where one paddles but can't swim.
Approaching the subject of motor-boating as compared with sailboating,
we find the situation becoming complicated and growing technical. In
sailing, as is generally known, you depend upon the wind; and there are
only two things the wind does--one is to blow and the other is not to
blow. But when you begin to figure up the things that a motor boat will
do when you don't want it to, and won't do when you do want it to, you
are face to face with one of the most complicated mathematical jobs
known to the realm of mechanical science.
A motor boat undoubtedly has a larger and fancier repertoire of cute
tricks and unexpected ways than anything in the nature of machinery. I
know this to be true, because I have a relative who suffers from
motor-boatitis in an advanced form. He has owned many different brands
of motor boats--that is one reason, I think, why he is not wealthier; in
fact he has had about all the kinds there are except a kind that will
start when you wish it to and stop when you expect it to. His motor
boats do nearly everything--backfire, and fail to spark, and clog up,
and blow up, and break down, and smash up and drift ashore, and drift
out from shore, and have the asthma and the heaves and impediments of
speech; but he has never yet owned one that could be depended upon to
do the two things I have just mentioned.
After trying various models and discarding them, he now has one of the
most complete motor boats made. It has what is known as a hunting cabin,
it being so called, I think, because the moment anybody gets into it he
has to get out again while the owner crawls in and takes up all the
seats and hunts for something. It is the theory that one could live
afloat in this hunting cabin--and so one could if one were only a
dachshund and inured to exposure. It is plenty wide enough for the
average dachshund and plenty high enough, too, but not more than about
two-thirds long enough. If one were a dachshund one would either have to
coil up or else remain partly outdoors. Also, on board is a galley,
which would be a success in every way if you could find a style of cook
who could get used to sitting on one hole of the stove while he cooked
on the other. One of those talented parlor magicians who does light
housekeeping in a borrowed high hat by breaking raw eggs into it and
then taking out omelet souffles, might fill the bill--only I never have
chanced to see a parlor magician yet who could crowd himself and his
feet into that galley at the same time.
The principal feature of this motor boat, however, is the engine, which
is a very complicated and beautiful thing, with coils and plugs and
brakes strewed about over it here and there, and a big flywheel
superimposed right in front. It is the theory that, by opening several
cocks and closing several others, and adjusting about fifteen or twenty
little duflickers just so, and then revolving this wheel briskly with a
crank provided for that purpose, the engine can be started. It is
supposed to say chug-chug a couple of times impatiently, and then go
scooting away, chug-chugging like an inspired slide-trombone.
Such is the theory, but such is not the fact. I've seen the owner crank
her until his backbone comes unjointed, without getting any response
whatsoever. And then, just when he is about to succumb to hate and
overexertion, the thing says tut-tut reprovingly--and then gives one
tired pish and a low mournful tush and coughs about a pint of warm
gasoline into his face and dies as dead as Jesse James. I've seen her do
that time and time again; but if she ever does start, the only way to
stop her is to steer into some solid immovable object, such as the
Western Hemisphere.
At that, motor-boating for an amateur such as I am has certain
advantages over sailboating. A motor-boatist--even the most reckless
kind--knows enough to stay ashore when a West Indian hurricane is
romping along the coast, playfully chasing its own tail like a young
puppy; but that kind of a situation is just pie for your seasoned
sailboatist.