believes that Mlle. Lenglen was ill, but he feels that she erred, not
because she resigned, but because she did it with so little grace. She
seemed to have no appreciation of the hardship which the sudden
termination of the match imposed upon Mrs. Molla Bjurstedt Mallory.
However, Molla did and came off the court swearing.
It was an embarrassing moment, but possibly a moral can be dug from it
all the same. For the first time in the experience of many, a new sort
of athletic tradition was vividly presented. No one will deny that the
French knew the gesture of Thermopylae as well as the next one, but they
have never thought to associate it with sports. The gorgeous and gallant
Carpentier has, upon occasions in his ring career, resigned. He showed
no lack of nerve on these occasions, but merely followed a line of
conduct which is foreign to us. Pitted at those particular times against
men who were too heavy for him and facing certain defeat, he admitted
their superiority somewhat before the inevitable end. Like a chess
master, he sensed the fact that victory was no longer in the balance,
and that nothing remained to be done except some mopping up. Such
perfunctory and merely academic action did not seem to him to come
properly within the realm of sport, particularly if he was to be the man
mopped up.
American sport commentators who knew these facts in the record of
Carpentier were disposed to announce before his match with Dempsey that
he would most certainly seek to avoid a knockout by stopping as soon as
he was hurt. His astounding courage surprised them. And yet it was
exactly the sort of courage they should have expected. He did not fight
on through gruelling punishment just for the sake of being a martyr. He
went through it because up to the very end he believed that his great
right hand punch might win for him, and even at the last Carpentier was
still swinging.
In spite of the sentimental objections of the old-fashioned follower of
sports, the tradition which was bred out of Sparta by Anglo-Saxon has
begun to decay. Referees do step in and end unequal contests. Ring
followers themselves are known to cry, "Stop the fight" at times when
the match has become no longer a contest. "Mollycoddles!" shriek the
ghosts of the bareknuckle days who float over the ring, but we do not
heed their voices. Again, we have decreasing patience with the severely
injured football player who struggles against the restraining arms of
the coaches when they would take him out because of his disabilities.
To-day he is less a hero than a rather dramatically self-conscious young
man who puts a gesture above the success of his team.
There is still ground for the modification of a sporting tradition which
has made those things which we call games become at moments ordeals
having no relation to sport. Losing is still considered such a serious
business that an elaborate ritual has been built up as to what
constitutes good losing. We not only demand that a man shall die, if
need be, for the Lawn Tennis Championship of Eastern Rhode Island, but
we go so far as to prescribe the exact manner in which he shall die. A
set, silent and determined demeanor is generally favored.
From Japan have come hints of something better in this direction. Every
American engaged in sport should be required to spend an afternoon in
watching Zenzo Shimidzu of the Japanese Davis Cup team. Shimidzu's
contribution to sport is the revelation that a man may try hard and yet
have lots of fun even when things go against him. He seems to reserve
his most winning smile for his losing shots. Once in his match against
Bill Johnston he was within a point of set and down from the sky a high
short lob was descending. Shimidzu was ready for what seemed a certain
kill. He was as eager as an avenging sparrow. Back came his racquet and
down it swung upon the ball, only to drive it a foot out of court.
Immediately, the little man burst into a silent gale of merriment. The
fact that he had a set within his grasp and had thrown it away seemed to
him almost the funniest thing which had ever happened to him.
Of course, this is a manner which might be difficult for us Americans to
acquire. Unlike the Japanese we have only a limited sense of humor. Its
limits end for the most part with things which happen to other people.
We laugh at the pictures in which we see Happy Hooligan being kicked by
the mule, but we would not be able to laugh if we ourselves met the same
mule under similar circumstances. However, in an effort to popularize
the light and easy demeanor in sporting competition it is fair to point
out that it is not only a beautiful thing but that it is also
effective.
Shimidzu almost beat Tilden by the very fact that he refused to do
anything but smile when things went against him. The tall American would
smash a ball to a far corner of the court for what seemed a certain
kill, but the little man would leap across the turf and send it back.
And as he stroked the ball he smiled. It was discouraging enough for
Tilden to be pitted against a Gibraltar, but it seemed still more
hopeless from the fact that even when he managed to split the rock it
broke only into the broadest of grins.
Ten years of work by one of our most prominent editors for a war with
Japan were swept away by the Davis Cup matches. It is hard to understand
how there can be any race problem concerning a people with so excellent
a backhand and so genial a disposition. Indeed, many of the things which
our friends from California have told us about Japan did not seem to be
so. All of us have heard endlessly about the rapidity with which the
Japanese increase. There was no proof of it at Forest Hills. When the
doubles match started there were on one side of the net two Japanese.
When the match ended, almost four hours later, there was still just two
Japanese.
XXIII
ARE EDITORS PEOPLE?
One of the characters in "A Prince There Was" is the editor of a
magazine and, curiously enough, he has been made the hero of the film.
Of course, there may be something to be said for editors. Indeed, we
have heard them trying to say it, and yet they remain among the forces
of darkness and of mystery. By every rule of logic the editor in any
story ought to be the villain.
It is not the darkness so much as the mystery which disturbs us. Only
rarely have we been able to understand what an editor was talking about.
Sometimes we have suspected that neither of us did. There was, for
instance, the man who tapped upon his flat-topped desk and said with
great precision and deliberation, "When you are writing for _Blank's
Magazine_, you want to remember that _Blank's_ is a magazine which is
read at five o'clock in the afternoon."
He was our first editor. Disillusion had not yet set in. We still
believed in Santa Claus and sanctums. And so we took home with us the
advice about five o'clock and pondered. We remembered it perfectly, but
that was not much good. "_Blank's_ is a magazine which is read at five
o'clock in the afternoon." How were we to interpret this declaration of
a principle? It was beyond our powers to write with ladyfingers.
Possibly the editor meant that our style needed a little more lemon in
it. There could be no complaint, we felt sure, against the sugar. Ten
years of hard service on a New York morning newspaper had granulated us
pretty thoroughly.
Having made up our mind that a slight increase in the acid content per
column might enable us to qualify with the editor as a man who could
write for five o'clock in the afternoon, we were suddenly confronted
with a new problem. _Blank's_ was an international magazine. Did the
editor mean five o'clock by London or San Francisco time? Until we knew
the answer there was no good running our head against rejection slips.
There was no way to tell whether he would like an essay entitled "On
Pipe Smoking Before Breakfast in Surrey," or whether he would prefer a
little something on "Is the Garden of Eden Mentioned in the Bible
Actually California?" Naturally, if one were writing with San
Francisco's five o'clock in mind he would go on to make some comparison
between Los Angeles and the serpent.
After extended deliberation, we decided that perhaps it would be best
not to try to write for _Blank's_ at all. It might put a strain upon the
versatility of a young man too hard for him to bear. Suppose, for
instance, he worked faithfully and molded his style to meet all the
demands and requirements of five o'clock in the afternoon, and then
suppose just as he was in the middle of a long novel, daylight saving
should be introduced? His art would then be exactly one hour off and he
would be obliged to turn back his hands along with those of the clock.
Of course, even though you understand an editor you may not agree with
him. The makers of magazines incline a little to dogma. Give a man a
swivel chair and he will begin to lean back and tell you what the public
wants. Gazing through his window over the throng of Broadway, a faraway
look will come into his eyes and he will begin to speak very earnestly
about the farmer in Iowa. The farmer in Iowa is enormously convenient to
editors. He is as handy as a rejection slip. In refusing manuscripts
which he doesn't want to take, an editor almost invariably blames it on
some distant subscriber. "I like this very much myself," he will
explain. "It's great stuff. I wish I could use it. That part about the
bobbed hair is a scream. But none of it would mean anything to the
farmer in Iowa. Won't you show me something again that isn't quite so
sophisticated?"
Riding through Iowa, we always make it a point to shake our fist at the
landscape. And if by any chance the train passes a farmer we try to hit
him with some handy missile. And why not? He kept us out of print. At
least they said he did.
And yet though editors are invariably doleful about the capacity of the
farmer in Iowa and points west, it would be quite inaccurate to suggest
any fundamental pessimism. An editor is always optimistic, particularly
when a contributor asks for his check. But it really is a sincere and
deep grained hopefulness. No editor could live from day to day without
the faculty or arguing himself into the belief that the next number of
his magazine is not going to be quite so bad as the last one.
Unfortunately he is not content to be a solitary tippler in good cheer.
He feels that it is his duty to discover authors and inspirit them.
Indeed, the average editor cannot escape feeling that telling a writer
to do something is almost the same thing as performing it himself.
The editorial mind, so called, is afflicted with the King Cole complex.
Types subject to this delusion are apt to believe that all they need do
to get a thing is to call for it. You may remember that King Cole called
for his bowl just as if there were no such thing as a Volstead
amendment. "What we want is humor," says an editor, and he expects the
unfortunate author to trot around the corner and come back with a quart
of quips.
An editor would classify "What we want is humor" as a piece of
cooperation on his part. It seems to him a perfect division of labor.
After all, nothing remains for the author to do except to write.
Sometimes the mogul of a magazine will be even more specific. We
confessed to an editor once that we were not very fertile in ideas, and
he said, "Never mind, I'll think up something for you."
"Let me see," he continued, and crinkled his brow in that profound way
which editors have. Suddenly the wrinkles vanished and his face lighted
up. "That's it," he cried. "I want you to go and do us a series
something like Mr. Dooley." He leaned back and fairly beamed
satisfaction. He had done his best to make a humorist out of us. If
failure followed it could only be because of shortsightedness and
stubbornness on our part. We had our assignment.
XXIV
WE HAVE WITH US THIS EVENING----
We have always wondered just what it is which frightens the after dinner
speaker. He is protected by tradition, the Christian religion and the
game laws. And yet he trembles. Perhaps he knows that he is going to be
terrible, but it is common knowledge that after dinner speakers seldom
reform. The life gets them. It was thought, once upon a time, that the
practice was in some way connected with alcoholic stimulation, but this
has since been disproved. After dinner speaking is a separate vice.
Total abstainers from every other evil practice are not immune.
The chief fault is that an irrationally inverted formula has come into
being. The after dinner speaker almost invariably begins with his
apology. He is generally becomingly frank when he first gets to his
feet. There is always a confident prophecy that the audience is not
going to be very much interested in what he has to say and the admission
that he is pretty sure to do the job badly. Unfortunately, no speaker
ever succeeds in deterring himself by these forebodings of disaster. He
never fails to go on and prove the truth of his own estimate of
inefficiency.
Many men profess to find the greatest difficulty in getting to their
feet. Perhaps this is sincere, but the task does not seem to be
one-sixteenth as hard as sitting down again. People whose vision is
perfect in every other respect suffer from a curious astigmatism which
prevents them from recognizing a stopping point when they come to it. We
suggest to some ingenious inventor that he devise a combination of time
clock and trip hammer by which a dull, blunt instrument shall be
liberated at the end of five minutes so that it may fall with great
force, killing the after dinner speaker and amusing the spectators. The
mechanical difficulties might be great, but the machine would be even
more useful if it could be attuned in some way so that the hammer should
fall, if necessary, before the expiration of the five minutes, the
instant the speaker said, "That reminds me of the story about the two
Irishmen."
Funny stories are endurable, in moderation, if only the teller is
perfectly frank in introducing them for their own sake and not
pretending that they have any conceivable relationship to the endowment
fund of Wellesley College, or the present condition of the silk business
in America. To such length has hypocrisy gone, that there is now at
large and dining out, a gentleman who makes a practice of kicking the
leg of the table and then remarking, "Doesn't that sound like a
cannon?--Speaking of cannon, that reminds me----"
Another young man of our own acquaintance has been using the same
anecdote for all sorts of occasions for the last four years. His story
concerns an American soldier who drove a four-mule team past the first
line trench in the darkness and started rumbling along an old road that
led across no-man's-land. He had gone a few yards when a doughboy jumped
up out of a listening post and began to signal to him. "What's the
matter?" shouted the driver.
"Shush! Shush!" hissed the outpost with great terror and intensity.
"You're driving right toward the German lines. For Heaven's sake go back
and don't speak above a whisper."
"Whisper, Hell!" roared the driver. "I've got to turn four mules
around."
It may be that there actually was such an outpost and such a driver, but
neither had any intention of acting as a perpetual symbol and yet we
know positively that this particular story has been introduced as an
argument for buying another Liberty Bond of the fourth issue; as a
justification for the vehemence of the American novelists of the younger
generation; and as a reason for the tendency to overstatement in the
dramatic and literary criticism of New York newspapers. We are also
under the impression that it was used in a debate concerning the
propriety of a motion picture censorship in New York state.
Indeed the speaker whom we have in mind never failed to use the mule
story, no matter what the nature of the occasion, unless he substituted
the one about the man who wanted to go to Seville. He was a farmer, this
man, and he lived some few miles away from Seville in a little
ramshackle farm house. It had been his ambition of a lifetime to go to
Seville and upon one particular morning he came out of the house
carrying a suitcase.
"Where are you going?" asked his wife.
"To Seville," replied the farmer.
His wife was a very pious woman and she added by way of correction, "You
mean, God willing."
"No," objected the farmer, dogmatically, "I mean I'm going to Seville."
Now Heaven was angered by this impiety and the dogmatic farmer was
immediately transformed into a frog. Before the very eyes of his wife he
lost his mortal form and hopped with a great splash into the big pond
behind the house. To that pond the good woman went every day for a year
and prayed that her husband should be restored to his natural form. On
the first morning of the second year the big frog began to grow bigger
and bigger and suddenly he was no longer a frog but a man. Out of the
pond he leaped and ran straightaway into the house. He came out carrying
a suitcase.
"Where are you going?" exclaimed the startled wife.
"To Seville," said the farmer.
"You mean," his wife implored in abject terror, "God willing."
"No," answered the farmer, "to Seville or back to the frog pond!"
The young man of whom we are writing first heard the story from Major
General Robert Lee Bullard in a training school in Lyons. The doughty
warrior told it in reply to the question, "What is this offensive spirit
of which you've been telling us?" But with a sea change the story took
up many other and varied roles. It served as the climax of an eloquent
speech in favor of the release of political prisoners; it began an
address urging greater originality upon the dramatists of America and it
was conscripted at a luncheon to Hughie Jennings to explain the
speaker's interpretation of the fundamental reason for the victory of
the New York Giants over the Yankees in the world's series of last
season.
Speaking of baseball, a great football coach once said that he could
develop a championship eleven any time at all out of good material and
seven simple plays well learned. Likewise, an after-dinner speaker can
manage tolerably well with a limited supply of stories, if only they are
elastic enough in interpretation and he covers a sufficiently wide range
of territory in his dining rambles.
It is our experience that the most inveterate story tellers among public
speakers are ministers. Unfortunately, the average clergyman has a
tendency to select tales a little rowdy in an effort to set himself down
among his listeners as a fellow member in good standing of the
fraternity of Adam. Still more unfortunately the ministerial speaker
often attempts to modify and deodorize the anecdote a little and, on top
of that, gets it just a little wrong. No matter who the narrator may be,
nothing is quite so ghastly as the improper story when told to an
audience of more than ten or eleven listeners. Even more than a poetic
drama a purple story needs a group, small and select. Any one interested
in preserving impropriety might very well endow a chain of thimble
theaters with a maximum seating capacity of ten. Some such step is
needed or the off color yarn will disappear entirely from American life.
It was nurtured upon big mirrors and brass rails and, these being
lacking, there is no proper atmosphere in which it may suitably be
reared. Most certainly the anecdote of doubtful character does not
belong to large banquets even of visiting Elks. Literature of this sort
is fragile. It represents what the Freudians call an escape, and the
most brazen of us is a little shamefaced about taking off his
inhibitions in front of a hundred people, mostly strangers.
There must be something wrong with after-dinner speaking because it is
notoriously the lowest form of American oratory. It if were not for
Chauncey M. Depew whole generations in this country would have been born
and lived and died without once having any memory worth preserving after
the demitasse. The trouble, we think, is that dinner guests are much too
friendly. It is the custom that the man at the speakers' table may not
be heckled. He is privileged and privilege has made him dull. According
to our observation there is never anything of interest said with the
laying of cornerstones or the dedication of new high school buildings.
On the other hand, we have frequently been amused and excited by tilts
at political conventions and mass meetings.
William Jennings Bryan is among the prize bores of the world when he
gets up to do his canned material about _The Prince of Peace_, but no
sensitive soul can fail to admire this same Commoner if he has ever had
the privilege of hearing him talk down political foes upon the floor of
a convention. All the labored tricks of oratory are forgotten then. Give
Mr. Bryan some one at whom he may with propriety shake a finger and he
becomes direct, vivid and moving.
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt was a speaker of somewhat the same type. He
did not talk well unless there was some living and present person for
him to speak against. Upon one occasion we heard him make a particularly
dreary discourse, and incidentally a political one, until he came to a
point where a group in the audience took exception to some statement and
attempted to howl him down. It was like the touch of a whip on the
flanks of a stake horse. Roosevelt returned to the statement and said it
over again, only this time he said it much more dogmatically and twice
as well. Before that speech was done he had climbed to the top of a
table and was putting all his back and shoulders into every word. Even
his platitudes seemed to be knockout blows. He was inspiring. He was
magnificent.
The after-dinner speaker needs this same stimulus of emotion. He ought
to have something into which he can get his teeth. Every well conducted
banquet should include a special committee to heckle the guests of
honor. Even a dreary person might be aroused to fervor if his opening
sentence was met with a mocking roar of, "Is that so!" Loud cries of
"Make him sit down" would undoubtedly serve to make the speaker forget
his entire stock of anecdotes about Pat and Mike. There would be no calm
in which he could be reminded of anything except that certain
desperadoes were not willing to listen, and that, by the Old Harry, he
was going to give it to them so hot and heavy that they would have to.
The scheme may sound a little cruel, but we ought to face the fact that
a time has come when we must choose between cutting off the heads of our
after-dinner speakers or slapping them in the face. We believe that they
deserve to have a chance to show us whether or not they have a right to
live.
XXV
THE YOUNG PESSIMISTS
Bert Williams used to tell a story about a man on a lonely road at night
who suddenly saw a ghost come out of the forest and begin to follow him.
The man walked faster and the ghost increased his pace. Then the man
broke into a run with the ghost right on his heels. Mile after mile,
faster and faster, they went until at last the man dropped at the side
of the road exhausted. The ghost perched beside him on a large rock and
boomed, "That was quite a run we had." "Yes" gasped the man, "and as
soon as I get my breath we're going to have another one."
Our young American pessimists see man at the moment he drops beside the
road, and without further investigation decide that it is all up with
him. To be sure, they may not be very far wrong in the ultimate fate of
man, but at least they anticipate his end. They do not stick with him
until the finish; and this second-wind flight, however useless, is
something so characteristic of life that it belongs in the record. I
have at least a sneaking suspicion that now and again there happens
along a runner so staunch and courageous that he keeps up the fight
until cock-crow and thus escapes all the apparitions which would
overthrow him. Of course, it is a long shot and the young pessimists
are much too logical to wait for such miraculous chances. As a matter of
fact, they don't call themselves pessimists, but prefer to be known as
rationalists, realists, or some such name which carries with it the hint
of wisdom.