_Special to Our Readers_
Many of our readers whom we have met have asked: "Why don't you give
us the names of your contributors?" and we suppose that many whom we
have not had the pleasure of meeting have the same curiosity.
Well, in the first place, we wish our articles to be taken on their
merits, and each, so far as practicable, to carry whatever authority
the REVIEW as a whole may be able to attain.
Next, among the popular fashions that we do not wish to follow is that
of exploiting names.
And finally, to be very candid, we need to profit by whatever
discussion may be aroused by speculation regarding the authorship of
the contributions.
Three months of anonymity, however, will be enough to secure the first
consideration, to lessen the objections inherent in the second, and to
give us most of whatever benefit may be realized from the third; and
therefore in such lists of contents of previous numbers as are
included in our advertising pages, we shall indicate the authors.
Moreover our advertising pages will often include lists of our most
frequent contributors, and this may add zest to such guessing at the
authorship of contributions as our readers may care to do.
Virtually all our contributors approve the anonymity, perhaps partly
because the names of most of them are so well known as to make farther
publicity a matter of indifference.
* * * * *
Another question often put to us by friends is: "How are you getting
along?"
Well (again), as our title indicates, we entered upon the enterprise
with our eyes wide open to the fact that it could never be popular.
Our only hope was that there might be enough people with standards
above the popular, to support the undertaking. We still feel justified
in entertaining that hope. Of course some ludicrous failures to
understand what we are about have been forced upon our attention, but
not as many as we expected; and we looked for more letters like the
first one following, which, we are surprised and glad to say, is the
only one of the kind we have received. All other dissent has been
expressed with intelligence and courtesy; and this is the only
occasion when our motives have been impugned. We think we can trust
our readers to understand why we give the letter, and also the answer
which the writer of the letter did not expect us to send. The former
seems to us one of the most interesting and instructive contributions
it has been our privilege to present, though not exactly for the
reasons which make our other contributions worth while. We are glad to
repeat, however, that the indications, so far, are that there is less
of this sort of thing about than we had supposed.
Here is the letter, in its essentials:
... This number contains some of the most insidious and dangerous
fallacies that it has been my fortune to peruse in many years,
and that are only intended to craftily instil into the minds of
the "rather large class" of people the erroneous doctrines thus
covertly inculcated by insinuations and to promote the consequent
satisfaction with their comparatively hard lot and the necessity
of contentment with their own condition as well as with that of
those who are subjects of a more forlorn state.
Now I am going to make a proposition to you that will prove
conclusively that your object in publishing that REVIEW is solely
for the purpose last above enumerated, as I do not hope that you
will accept my proposition; and that the REVIEW is supported by
the capital of the men who are a part of the financial oligarchy
that is bent on ruining the poorer classes of this country: I
will write you an article in opposition to the _Irrepressible
Conflict_ and the _Juggernaut of the Majority_, which will be
written in as good a diction as either of those articles and not
more controversial in tone and style than _Irrepressible
Conflict_, and shall expect as much pay for it as either of those
two articles secured to their respective authors, or as much as
it is worth if those articles were produced by respective members
of the said oligarchy; and shall insist, if you refuse to publish
it, that it is the substance and doctrine of it that make it
unavailable and _not_ the diction and style. I have a right to
ask this as the public press which claims to be the leaders of
public opinion, are teeming with just such articles as these that
I have criticised and are published for the _express purpose_ of
leading me and the remainder of the public astray on vital
questions affecting the material interests of us all,--in other
words, there is a comprehensive and well formed conspiracy among
publishers of almost _all_ newspapers and magazines to do as I
have said and to refuse to permit the other side to be heard. I
do not expect to ever get an answer to this letter but I shall
make just such use of the reticence and your silence as my poor
judgment teach me is legitimate and proper.
Our answer was:
... THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW is entirely the property of its
publishers.
It is not a forum for discussion, but a pulpit for the preaching
of what we believe to be sound doctrine. As you don't believe our
doctrine is sound, probably we would not believe yours is sound:
so your challenge to us to put it in our pulpit is of course
outside the case. You should send it to somebody of your own way
of thinking, or set up a pulpit of your own--into which we
certainly should not wish to challenge you to insert anything of
ours.
A change of subject may be welcome.
If any of our readers have been expecting an article on Psychical
Research in this number, their disappointment at not finding one may
be somewhat assuaged by the realization that the article in the first
number was of four times the average length. The apparent neglect here
however, is not real, but it has been impracticable to get what we
wanted. We hope to be more fortunate in the future.
_A Specimen of "Uplift" Legislation_
Since the bull against the comet, there has probably been no assertion
of authority as absurd as one recently furnished by our National
Government. Yet there was no attention called to it in the debate
preceding the passage of the act containing it, and we do not remember
seeing any notice of it in the press, although it was immense enough
and pitiful enough to justify Iliads.
For years, government--and no government more energetically than
President Wilson's--had been hammering away at the trusts, especially
those producing petroleum, steel and tobacco. Yet petroleum, steel and
tobacco are not necessaries of life, nor have their prices been rising
as much as the prices of necessaries of life. These have been rising
more than anything else. What has been done about them by the
government that has been destroying the trusts in other things? It has
simply gone out of its way to specially legalize a trust in these
things. In a bill providing money to fight trusts in comparatively
non-essential things, Congress specially exempted from prosecution any
trust that may be formed by the farmers to raise the price of food.
Other trusts claim to lower the prices of their products, and
sometimes have done it; but our government has not merely authorized
the farmers to form trusts, to raise the price of foods, but has
specially authorized them, in the letter of the law, to use methods
denied to everybody else but wage-earners; and this at a time when the
one problem above all others was how to lower the price of foods, and
when the high price was the one burden above all others on the poor.
This piece of imbecility was virtually a "rider" on the
trade-union-exemption rider, and was of course "playing politics" to
catch support for the principal rider.
_A Model of Divinatory Criticism_
In our efforts to uphold the dignity of letters, of course we intend
that each of our contributions shall be as nearly as possible a
perfect example from its special field, and ordinarily it would ill
become us to suggest the possibility of degrees of perfection. But our
readers will, we trust, find justification for our calling special
attention to the following model of divinatory criticism.
The fact that it has already passed the ordeal of the Authors' Club,
though a trifling derogation from its novelty, is much weightier as a
reason for presenting it for the careful consideration of our readers.
[Ed.]
* * * * *
The subject is the proper interpretation of a familiar lyric poem,
which runs, in the _textus receptus_, as follows:
Dr. Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain;
He stepped in a puddle up to his middle
And never went there again.
The question is, What does this poem mean? What does it mean, that is,
in its intimate and ultimate essence? According to the conventional
interpretation these lines are didactic. Their higher import--what we
may call their spiritual center of gravity--is believed to reside in a
pragmatic moral conveyed, or at least adumbrated, in the last line:
"He never went there again." The idea is supposed to be--remember that
I am now speaking of the conventional interpretation--that he never
went there again because he had learned wisdom by experience--the
annoying experience of the puddle. According to this view the dominant
note of the poem is not lyrical feeling, but what literary critics are
wont to call--usually with a shade of contempt--ethicism. It is
supposed to be a sort of psalm of life--pitched to be sure in a minor
key, but essentially didactic.
I wish to show you that this conventional interpretation is altogether
wrong. I shall try to prove that we have to do here, not with a
shallow didactic rime, not with a piece of brain-spun ethicism, such
as a common poetaster might produce, but with a lyrical ballad of
deeply felt tragic import.
I call your attention, in the first place, to the singular ambiguity
in that famous last line. "He never went there again." "Never went
where?" one instinctively asks. Are we to understand merely that
Foster henceforth avoided the particular puddle into which he had
stepped, or that he in after time discontinued his visits to
Gloucester altogether? This is evidently a question of vital
importance, and the poem at first does not seem to answer it at all.
In the absence of biographical data extraneous to the text, we can
only attack the problem by analytic methods. Let us consider the only
two possible hypotheses.
1. That Foster never went to Gloucester again. This supposition is
utterly untenable, because it is clearly inconsistent with Foster's
character, which can be read from the poem itself with entire
certainty. In the first place, he was clearly a doctor of medicine.
Had he been a doctor of laws, or letters, or philosophy, there would
have been no special urgency in his call to Gloucester, and he would
surely have waited until the weather should clear up. Secondly he was
a youngish doctor. Had he been an elderly practitioner he would not
have gone himself, but would have sent his assistant. Or perhaps he
would have telephoned that he would come immediately, and would then
have quietly waited for the rain to cease. But our Dr. Foster
"went"--went in a shower of rain. From this we see, in the third
place, that he was a man of energy, capable of self-abnegation,
dominated by a strong sense of professional duty. Now can we suppose
that such a man would have renounced forever his practice in
Gloucester merely because he had stepped casually into a puddle in a
well meant effort to reach the place? The supposition is an insult to
his intelligence and to ours. No doubt the incident of the puddle was
humiliating, but we do not read that there were spectators. In the
absence of specific evidence to the contrary we must assume that
Foster was alone. That being so, a man of his character would surely
have extricated himself from his unpleasant dilemma, given vent to his
emotions in language suited to the occasion, and gone on his way. It
is simply impossible to believe that he can have taken from the puddle
such a deep and lasting chagrin that he would have been willing to
renounce forevermore his growing practice in Gloucester.
2. We turn now to the other hypothesis, according to which Mater Anser
means merely that Foster never again stepped in that particular
puddle. This supposition makes the whole poem trivial to the point of
banality. Why in the world should any man in his senses deliberately
step into a deep puddle a second time? Remember too that it was
raining at the time. The puddle did not exist ordinarily, but was a
transitory affair due to the freshet. Had Foster chosen to come back
the next day, there would have been no puddle there, hence nothing to
be afraid of. To assume that a man of Foster's intelligence would have
retained through life a morbid dread of a mere depression in the
ground where he had once encountered a puddle is contrary to all
reason. Evidently we must seek some other interpretation for that
mysterious last line, "He never went there again."
And now observe, please, a singular technical defect in a poem which
is otherwise technically perfect. I refer to the dubious rime
_puddle-middle_. There has never been a time in the history of the
English language, so far as I know, when that was a tolerable rime. If
puddle were of French origin and had retained its French _ü_-sound,
"He stepped in a püddle up to his middle" might perhaps pass muster.
But _puddle_ is not of French origin. It was this bad rime, coupled
with the anatomical vagueness of the phrase "up to his middle," which
led me to conjecture that the _textus receptus_ must be corrupt. It is
pretty evident that Mater Anser originally wrote not "middle," but
some word which was taken for "middle" by a pestilent scribe. And what
word can that possibly have been but "noddle"? Perhaps a captious
critic may object that, as a matter of rime, _puddle-noddle_ is not
much better than _puddle-middle_. But remember that in early English o
and u were often confused. It is altogether likely that the word which
we pronounce _puddle_ was familiar to Mater Anser's dialect as
_poddle_. What she wrote was: He stepped in a poddle up to his noddle.
In the light flashed on the poem by this recension of the text, we
penetrate at once the mystery of that last line, "He never went there
again," because he never went anywhere again. He perished. His
promising career came then and there to an untimely end. We now
understand why it is that the career of Dr. Foster subsequent to his
memorable expedition to Gloucester has failed to interest the Muse.
There was no subsequent career.
I trust I have made it clear that Dr. Foster is the hero of a tragical
ballad. He is evidently a being of the same order as Achilles and
Siegfried--those dazzling heroes of the Dawn who are destined to run a
brilliant career in the pride of their youthful strength, and then to
meet with an untimely end. It is true that Achilles and Siegfried are
invulnerable, except in one place, and that we hear nothing of
Foster's invulnerability. But if you look closely you will find
something in his case that is quite analogous. The underlying idea of
the invulnerability is always simply this: That the hero is fated to
die in one particular way, and in no other. Now it is clear that
Foster was fated to die by water. Water was his enemy, his fate. A
pious mother had no doubt brought him up to dread and avoid it. When
he set out on that last journey he of course took an umbrella, but his
precautions did not end there. In view of the inclement weather he of
course felt the need of something to fortify the inner man, but he
durst not and did not drink water. He drank something else. Just what
it was we are not told, but it was evidently something that made him a
little unsteady on his feet. And so, just as in the case of Oedipus,
the very precautions that he took to avoid his predestined fate only
served to precipitate it.
* * * * *
I conclude by summing up briefly what my interpretation does for the
advancement of science.
1. It converts what has been supposed to be a rather trivial didactic
rime into a tragical ballad of heart-rending pathos.