Let the world wag as it may, the wits must live by waggery.
The optimists who are so comfortably situated that they can support
optimism without any severe strain upon their imaginations, say, “What
is, is right.” But they fail to tackle the corollary proposition, “What
isn’t, isn’t.”
I received a book the other day from one of the leading publishers for
review, and for three days and nights I have labored with it. It is one
of those dull and dreary affairs, without even the single redeeming
grace of conscious striving egotism, and it is written by one of the
most prominent members of the New York Scratchback Club, a man whose
name is in everybody’s mouth in the country. I wrote a scorching review
of the book, in my happiest vein of gory glee; but upon reflection I
shall not print it. This author is too infernally stupid to deserve so
good an “ad.”
The poets are not the only sufferers in these sober strenuous days,
in which the beautiful distractions of idleness are not properly
understood or appreciated. Full many a wag is born to waste his wit
upon the desert air--or the thick skull of an anthropoid on the “night
desk.”
It has been suggested by an undiscouraged friend of humanity that,
at the close of the Age of Consent discussion, a committee should be
organized among the society women who live in the highly fashionable
locality in Boston that is honored with the presence of Mrs. Helen H.
Gardener, to raise necessary funds to defray the cost of giving the
sources of this lady’s literary inspiration a good Spring cleaning. He
urges, and with some apparent show of reason, that after her arduous
labors as the historian of the Age of Consent movement, Mrs. Gardener
cannot wait until spring, and her consent should be sought at an
early date. Mrs. Gardener is well known as a sort of social tornado
in fiction, though I believe she claims to belong to the Red Cross
or Sanitary school of writers. She is, anyhow, the head and front of
the inodorous infliction called the Age of Consent agitation, and the
author of that delightfully aromatic literary confection--you should
read it held off in a pair of tongs--“Is this your son, my Lord?” We
can say with _empressement_, no, thank God! This particular kind of
pathological fiction is only possible to a certain haunted, morbid
feminine imagination.
Hall Caine tells young authors that when they are tempted to describe
a scene of more than usual delicacy to refrain from it, if it is not
absolutely necessary to the story. What about writing your story
around a delicate situation, as Shakespeare did in “The Rape of
Lucrece”? A delicate situation, delicately expressed, requires more
talent than an indelicate one indelicately described.
A great many readers of the powerful poem called “The Wail of the Hack
Writer” in this issue, picturing a mood of revulsion and despair common
enough among all writers who have to earn a livelihood by the pen, will
be surprised in coming upon the name of the author, Sam Walter Foss.
This is an interesting phase of personality. This poem reveals a new
and serious personality in a writer already known to a wider circle of
readers than few of us can ever hope to reach. For years the name of
Sam Walter Foss has been synonymous with the most bubbling humor and
spontaneous, genial fun. One could guess this man took life smiling
from the laugh in all his work, and his optimistic, large belief in his
fellows. And the superficial reader, caught with these merry jingles
and this good-natured philosophy, might naturally think that Mr. Foss
was a man who took all life as a joke, who hated serious books, and
never saw the sad side of life. The optimism of the man is in his work,
but it is not a narrow optimism, and all this light fun is born of a
deep and serious interest in the human drama being played out today.
The man himself is a serious man in all his ideas and interests in
life, and there is a serious undercurrent of purpose in all his fun
making.
Yvette Guilbert, the famous Paris chanteuse, who is now singing at the
Olympia in New York, is said to give in her repertoire some humorous
songs with more point in them than our English speaking audiences are
accustomed to. As two thirds of her English speaking audiences will
not be able to thoroughly understand her, even those who can read and
speak French being unable to follow it closely when sung, it must be
interesting to watch the faces of her audiences. While Mlle. Guilbert
is singing her sweet ditties of love-lorn maiden’s hopes and trials, it
is ten to one the greater part of her audience will be imagining all
sorts of wicked, depraved things are being publicly sown in the hearts
of our innocent people. London has pronounced her songs shocking. We
can scarcely expect Mlle. Guilbert will be much better understood on
this side, for the Anglo-Saxon has rarely the temperament to catch
the play of Gallic humor. So half the audience will sit and dream in
abandonment of the wicked things wicked people are reported to do; and
those who are so fortunate as to have wicked thoughts of their own will
think them, and Mlle. Guilbert will have to bear all their blushes.
The FLY LEAF appeals to the Young Man and Young Woman’s sense of
humor. It is time some of us youngsters were allowed to belong to
some generation, and if we do not assert our right to be _now_, we
shall experience some difficulty in squeezing into the ranks of the
generations unborn. The old fogies fail to see the reasonableness of
this. If the younger generation also fails to perceive our right to
exist, it will bring our gray hairs in sorrow to the grave--for we are
but belated boys, after all. This is a world in which it takes one a
long while to grow up, when one is poor--especially in Grub Street.
When I get so poor that I cannot afford to buy any more clothes, I
intend to dress in _Fly Leaves_, as I believe this badge of honorable
endeavor will save me somewhat from the scoffs of the mob, in a
community that holds letters in the high esteem they are held in
Boston. Then when I am dead and gone ten cities will contend for the
honor of my birth. I never tell where I was born. It is unwise; for
people will never forgive the impertinence of your being born among
them.
All these personal notes are relevant in up-to-date journalism, because
this is an age of confidences; and not to let the public know all about
one’s private life is to argue one’s self unknown. I may begin on my
autobiography in earnest, in a little while. I have “Passions” in great
number and variety.
To J. W. S.: No, my dear friend, I sympathize with your ambition, but
you cannot bribe the Editor of the FLY LEAF with any such consideration
as a year’s subscription to print your Ode. We have not yet been
tempted, as some of our popular contemporaries are every month, with an
offer to purchase an edition of fifty thousand and dine the editor; but
conscious virtue inclines us to repudiate your one dollar and get the
full credit of it with posterity.
A young lady writes to me from a western city and encloses her
photograph, which shows her to be a blooming, chubby-cheeked beauty
of eighteen summers. She says, in her letter, she is studying very
hard and sitting up night after night until daybreak, reading all the
great authors of our era: E. P. Roe, Edward W. Bok, Richard Harding
Davis and Dr. J. G. Holland, with the intention of adopting literature
as a career. These are all truly “great masters,” and their selection
shows an unerring judgment in one contemplating a career in _American_
contemporary literature. I made the mistake of choosing certain obscure
Elizabethans and seventeenth century Englishmen as my masters; and
so have never got out of Grub Street. A woman can scarcely offend
against the canons of morality if she models her ideals of fictitious
propriety after the examples of these litterateurs who have made
simpering the grace and distinction of our epoch. It was unkind of fate
to deny these great minds the innocency of petticoats, but they have
remained wonderfully unspotted from the world. They have reduced all
morality to etiquette. But I am afraid my young lady will spoil her
beauty with all this strain to rid her mind of original predilections
after the manner of these “masters,” and she may develop that shocking
severity of countenance, which is so appallingly rife among our female
moralists in any illustrated book catalogue. All women are beautiful,
of course; but those who try to look like seers in their photographs
usually look as if life were a perpetual washing day with them. It
seems that scribbling often fatally undermines geniality in the female
temperament, and indeed most women write novels because they lack a
sense of humor. This severe superciliousness of our female celebrities,
I hold, is a warning to the New Woman to cultivate flippant male
society as much as possible. I warn my correspondent not to grow a face
that appals young love and stops clocks.
The _Arena_ should not hide its light under a bushel. It should put out
a sign, “Worlds reformed while you wait!”
The actress who finds herself too fat to be cast for the heroine
(heroines are always slender) and has to thin down upon a diet of
nothing but beef tea and hot water with a squeeze of lemon in it for
three months, buys fame almost as dearly as do the poets. Ambition
seems to have a trick of cheating the stomach; but asceticism and
mortification of the flesh on the stage have strangely enough made
their belated appearance with the advent of The Woman who Did.
The great trouble with human nature is that it is everywhere. If it
were only confined like a mad dog and rampaged solely in one country or
continent, we could take ideal views of life. And we could be patriots
without being scoundrels.
To the sentimental: Please do not forget that it was Dr. Johnson and
not the writer who said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”