SIDE TALKS WITH THE PHILISTINES: BEING SUNDRY BITS OF WISDOM WHICH HAVE BEEN HERETOFORE SECRETED, AND ARE NOW SET FORTH IN PRINT.

If The Philistine disturbs placid self-complacency anywhere, as one or two of its critics intimate, it is sorry, for there is no such happiness attainable anywhere this side of Nirvana as its serene contemplation of the charms of self which Narcissus and some more modern fakirs exemplify; and the magazine of to-day is its gospel. But so good a Philistine as Horace Greeley is my authority for believing that the still pool in which self-love sees the reflection it feeds upon is a breeder of death, not life, and effervescence is the sworn foe of the morbid. Not the things we do that we ought not to do, but the things left undone that we ought to do are the primary count leading up to the confession that “there is no health in us.” The other follows. Stagnation and the miasma of self-consciousness co-exist and are not to be separated. Wherefore, fellow-egoists, let us get a gait on.

I like the broad flourish with which some imaginative writers connect widely separated events in a stroke of the pen and omit all that lies between as mere incident. It seems to me a proof of the theory put forward by my good friend Elbert Hubbard that genius is a feminine element of character—in man or woman. For example, I find this statement in the latest of the Little Journeys: “Moses was sent adrift, but the tide carried him into power.” I didn’t know just what that meant till I recalled the discovery of the bulrush cradle. A less intuitive writer wouldn’t have bridged eighty years in that summary way. He might have hinted at Moses’s police court record—told how he killed an Egyptian for calling him a son of a Populist or something and skun out for half a lifetime and yet became a Prince of Egypt and spent forty years or so at court before he took the road with the forefathers of Brickmaker Tourgee. But to connect the condensed milk baby in the market basket on the Nile with the law-giver of Israel in one movement, as the music people say, is a pretty long span and suggests the liberty David Copperfield takes with his own biography in the best book but one written by the subject of the latest Little Journey. “I was born:” he says—and all else is irrelevant. I take it that Mr. Hubbard agrees with John Boyle O’Reilly that “the world was made when a man was born.” The feminine element of genius which Mr. Hubbard tells us makes poets is manifest in that formula. If the author of the Journeys will permit, I would suggest that the same mother instinct that crops out there is manifested in the grasp of a life in the compass of a sentence which puzzled me at the first. To be born and to die is the record of existence, to which all else is tributary; and the pangs of birth and death thrill all the poet-strains. Only the tragedy that sweeps along the strings lives to echo in human hearts. It is the deathless minor chord that distinguishes the melody of true poetry from the dancing cadences of rhyme in all literature. The undertone is the soul of all song, in verse or in the unmeasured periods of epic prose.

Mention of Moses recalls the perhaps unique fact that a priest of the most austere of churches rolled off a tongue, musical with brogue, in his newspaper sanctum—for he is a priest of the pen too—this romantic version of the basket story which I have never seen anywhere but in his paper—then in the process of make-up:

I observe that the editor of the Arena is about to make a contract with the Michigan Wheel Company of Lansing, Michigan, for large quantities of its product to give as prizes to new contributors only, the old ones being already well supplied.

The following advertisement is clipped from one of the October magazines:

MANUSCRIPT RECORD.

A handsome method for keeping track of manuscripts. Contains space for recording one hundred manuscripts, showing title, where sent, number of words, when returned or accepted, when paid for and amount, when published, postage account, etc. Each page a complete history of one manuscript, from the time it is first sent out, until published and paid for. Price, $1.25. Sent postpaid to any address on receipt of price.

The Bohemian Publishing Co., Pike Building, Cincinnati, O.

I have sent for this book, as it is my intention to write one hundred manuscripts, and I desire to keep track of them until published and paid for. I have therefore ordered the book bound in cast iron.

In a recent number of Modern Art protest is filed against the editor of the Chip-Munk continuing to ask that startling question “Do You Keep a Dog?” In God’s name, what right have the Chicago Decadents to thus pry into our private affairs? Is it not bad enough when the Chip-Munk advises us to drink Guzzle’s beer and use Culby’s soap without being interrogated as to what we “keep?”

Among the revivals which occur now and then in everything is a discussion of an old “science” of reading characters by the hair. I don’t know much about it, but from what I have heard I believe a pair of old she-bears set back the theory for a few centuries when they chewed up the small boys that poked fun at Elijah. The old man would be rated as having no character, according to these “readers,” for he had no hair, but Providence and the early Ursulines vindicated him.

A new woman who has been reading God’s Fool laid it down at the last chapter with a long sigh. “What do you think of it,” I asked. “It is dramatic,” she said, “terribly dramatic at the end,” and then added, after a pause, “I wonder what the reading of the next generation will be like. We have reached a force and directness of narration that seems to me to be pretty near the limit of possibility. What will we have next?” “What do you think?” I asked. “I think,” she said, “we will have a reaction. We will take in more and give out less. We are near one of the great periods of what has been called revelation in the past. Our literature is shallow but perfect, relatively, in expression. Our art is the same throughout. Our politics are personal. Our religion is liberal, and loose in the joints. Our social life is insincere and imitative. Our lives have nothing in them to stir the deeps. There will be a reaction. The finesse of expression will be set aside for the tremendous earnestness that accompanies great events and prints their lessons on receptive minds. A break-up in Europe it may be, or some other social convulsion, that will change the tide. We are pretty near at the top of the flood now.” That’s the new woman’s view. I wonder how near she’s right?

Three hundred and twenty-seven thousand of my friends have individually sent to me a recent number of my Philadelphia contemporary, Footlights, in which it refers to The Philistine variously as a crow, a dicky bird and “a birdie of the jackass breed.” I am glad to be catalogued in this ornithological manner, and my friends may accept the listing as they please. As for myself, I’d rather be a good honest wild ass of the desert with long fuzzy ears than a poor imitation bird-of-paradise—stuffed by one hundred and seventeen geniuses.

A matter of architecture has been involved in the social problem which the Arena has ever with it—like a stutter or a beer breath. According to an alleged novel recently published by the Arena Company and called Edith, a Story of Chinatown, a feature of the tabooed district of Los Angeles, California, is a bay window projection on the houses devoted to vice, wherein beauty spreads lures for the eyes of passers-by. The heroine of this lovely romance is one of these persons, sinned against in the prologue and sinning in the present, but discovered by a miraculous New York reporter on a vacation and returned to her broken-hearted parents and a good life. A benediction, with a remote hint of the Lohengrin march, ends the story. The Arena gives two pages to a review of the book, which is very kind of the publisher, and tells us therein that a description of Alameda street and of Dupont street, San Francisco, which is worse, is its purpose. The Arena can be depended on for a full stock of “terrible examples.”

The Literary Digest is falling into line admirably. Recently it printed a translation from some French source from which I clip the following:

A Parisian literary man has been complaining that authors are not represented at international expositions in the same sense as are painters and sculptors. The complaint has provoked sarcastic comment from M. Maurice Goncourt, who, in Charivari (Paris), suggests that, since an exhibition of their works would not be sufficiently striking, the authors themselves should be put on show in cages!

“All the writers who are at present the incontestable masters of romance and journalism will transport, during the period of the Exposition, their working rooms to a section specially provided for them.

“The public will see them there as they really are at home, surrounded with their furniture, their books, all their accessories, and in working costume.

“From such an hour to such an hour—as at home—they will work on their articles, poems, or novels.

“That would draw a crowd; that would be truly interesting!

“They could be looked at through a sheet of glass or a lattice—silently, so as not to interfere with their inspiration.

“The administration could even put up signs like this:

PLEASE THROW NOTHING TO THE POETS,

or—more particularly for the pretty visitors:

DON’T EXCITE THE PSYCHOLOGISTS.

All this sounds much as though it had been written by the keeper of The Literary Shop, but I don’t believe it was. Supposing, however, such an exhibit were held at Atlanta with the Fair now in progress. Imagine Mr. Gilder and James Knapp Reeve, Mr. Le Gallienne and Laura Jean Libbey, Count Tolstoi and Mrs. Mary Jane Holmes, each in his or her own coop like a Leghorn chicken! Imagine Colonel S. S. McClure (Limited) with his Menagerie of Trained Thoroughbreds, each one of them exhibiting by his emaciation the horrible results of syndicate writing! Imagine Cy Warman pawing madly at the bars of his cage trying to tell Sweet Marie about the secret in his heart! Then imagine Little Tin God of Philadelphia, cuddled up in his basket, writing his masterpiece, How to Feed a Sick Kitten! To them then would enter Major John Boyd Thacher, the pride and joy of the Albany Democracy, and judge equally both the just and the unjust. It’s a great idea.

One of my correspondents tells me that “the editor of the Lark uses execrable perfume on his note paper.” This item is for the future reference of Mr. Burgess when he writes about his literary passions.

Several solemn newspapers have taken seriously to the extent of half a column or so the proposal of a San Francisco publishing house to “bring out good literature in a cheap form,” which sounds much like the advance agent talk of most publishing houses. It isn’t a joke, to be sure, but a good deal depends on what is meant by “good literature.” Thundering in the prologue is not a novelty, but there may be a storm coming for all that.

I note that the brilliant Bok has gone to writing proverbs. Here is one culled at random from “A Handful of Laconics,” printed under his honored signature in his September output:

It is singular and yet a fact that what we are most loath to believe possessed by others is what we are incapable of ourselves.

It is my wish to call the particular attention of my readers to this nugget. From a literary and philosophic standpoint literature contains nothing like it. Examine Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger or Solomon, and you will not find its fellow. Read it again, and read it slowly: “It-is-singular-yet-a-fact-that-what-we-are-most-loath-to-believe-possessed-by-others-is-what-we-are-incapable-of-ourselves.” This is undoubtedly the finest thing in the language and a reward of one million dollars will be paid to any Philistine who will furnish the solution. There is no bar against reading it backwards. It reads a little better backwards than forwards, but I do not think that is it.

I desire to record a discovery. I found a magazine the other day with the advertising pages uncut.

I doubt if Bliss Carman has had a more enthusiastic admirer than I. When his Vagabondia appeared I sent a copy to Her, which was the greatest compliment I could pay the book. In the magazines, notably in Town Topics, he has printed verses that were well worth preserving as some of the best of the decade. In the great mass, however, which he has published, there have been lines which nobody on earth could understand. They were worse than Stephen Crane’s, for he at least has a vague idea somewhere, though he rarely does us the favor to express it in a seemly manner. Now I want to protest, not only against Mr. Carman, but against Life, which gave us The Whale and the Sprat which Mr. Carman wrote recently. Here are two of the stanzas:

How Mr. Metcalfe ever allowed such drivel to get into his columns I cannot understand. Possibly while he was in Japan the compositor set the stuff in the waste basket instead of that on the copy hook.

Vogue asserts that “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” is the ninth commandment. On information and belief, no doubt.

Because Mr. Rockefeller sneers at Mr. Pullman for giving but a paltry hundred thousand for a church at Albion, Orleans County, New York, Mr. Pullman retorts that Rockefeller is only a malmsey-nosed varlet anyway, whose grease his axles are not worthy to unloose. I am not quite ready to take George M. into the Philistinic fold, but he is surely coming my way.

I rejoice to find a thoughtful article by Richard Burton on the “Renascence of Old English Expression” in the current Forum—and not so much for what is in the article in detail as for its recognition of the main fact that there is something besides Bunthornism in the harking back to the simple dignity of early English. Our author, it will be noted, has little use for the overflowing maimed vowels of Normanesque “Renaissance.” Plain Latin renascence is good enough in a plea for the Saxon. But it is odd if so simple a thing as a rising from death into new life has no Saxon equivalent. Why not “re birth!”

Since the Mule-Spinners at Cohoes and Fall River went out on a strike I understand that subscriptions to The Writer have fallen off one-third.

Neith Boyce is a poet who never beats the brush piles of thought without starting good game. She writes good honest verse and she also writes “Book Notes and News” and other things for the New Cycle. The New Cycle, by the way, is not published by the Pope Manufacturing Company as one might suppose, but it is a monthly magazine “devoted to Education, Social Economics, Literature and Art.” I once edited a magazine devoted to Education, but the subject proved too large for the brainful syndicate that employed me; I have also written a book on Art; and once, having nothing to do, I lectured for a space on Social Economics, but God help me! I never in a small monthly magazine attempted to tell all about Education, Social Economics, Literature and Art.

But the New Cycle is interesting, and if its various departments were as well cared for as its Book Notes and News it would be a greater success than it is. Neith Boyce has an unfailing insight and her touch is as light and as sure as my own; and moreover there is a tang to her wit that all bookish Philistines might well cultivate. In classic lore I have always looked up to Miss Boyce as the Court of last Appeal, but is it not possible that Minerva sometimes nods? Read this:

“An attraction of the eminently respectable Harper’s Weekly will be a series of papers called ‘A Houseboat on the Styx’ by Mr. Bangs of Yonkers. Nothing is sacred to this funny man. Not content with taking his fling at the defunct majesty of Napoleon he now proposes to take Pluto by the beard and make copy of the pale shadows that throng the Stygian shores.”

It may be so, but I did not know that Pluto had whiskers. And how does Miss Boyce dispose of the legend concerning the smooth face and giddy ways of old Mr. Pluto when he took to wife the young and blooming Persephone? Charon wears a Vandyke as we well know; while Mephisto is usually represented as clean-shaved or at best a moustache and goatee; but hereafter I’ll never think of Pluto without calling up in mind Mr. Peffer of Kansas. Go to, Fair Lady! think you because barber shops are closed in York State on Sundays that they are shut in Hades all the week? Next!

A lecturer on Egypt, telling the natives of Buffalo, N. Y., about the marvels in stone built on that strip of mud, illustrated the proportions of the Nile Valley by saying “It it eleven hundred miles long in Egypt proper and seven miles wide for most of its length. If the city of Buffalo were laid crosswise in the valley, it would bisect the kingdom.” And a Rochester man who had strayed into the fold was mean enough to add: “And if Buffalo was there, that’s the way it would lie—cross-ways.” That’s the way they talk in Rochester.

I quote this paragraph from Alice and respectfully refer it to the editor of Mlle New York with the hope that he can see the point as plainly as he sees most things:

All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera glass. At last he said, “You’re travelling the wrong way,” and shut up the window and went away.

On his way to Montreal Mr. Hall Caine stopped off one day at East Aurora. The Pink Tea given in his honor at the office of The Philistine was largely attended by the farmers from both up the creek and down the creek. In fact, as my old friend Billy McGlory used to say, “Ye cudden’t see de street fer dust.”

The Boston Commonwealth (what satire there is in that name!) is a nice paper, but its editor has not smiled for forty years; and all of his little writers carry so much culture that they are round-shouldered, flat-chested, bow-legged and near-sighted. They belong to the large class that invariably miss the point of things and use dignity for a mask to hide their lack of a sense of fun. The Commonwealth accuses us of being envious of the Chip-Munk; of being violently prejudiced against Mr. Cudahy’s book, and of speaking irreverently of Boston. Go to thou old granny Commonwealth, why sit you like your grandsire carved in alabaster and creep into the jaundice by being peevish?

The Book-Peddler is doing great service in promotion of what passes for literature in the paper and ink stores. I cannot but think what a similar publication devoted to literature, not trade, could do to save the valuable time of the reading public. Since Solomon’s time a good many things have changed, but in one there is no improvement. “Of the making of many books there is no end,” and that is a heap sadder than the lamentation of Maud Muller and His Honor.

Concerning Mr. Grant Allen’s book and the manner in which its title has been made the basis of several others more or less reminiscent, my most valued correspondent writes me that the novelists are missing much by not calling a story The Woman Who Is Simply Dying To. In my well known philanthropic way I throw out this suggestion hoping that somebody may make many dollars by the adoption of the title for a decadent tale.

The Vanastorbilts are really under great obligations to Mrs. Rorer’s Household News for the simple daily menus for poor folks which are a feature. There’s nothing so cheap as good living—in a magazine. When bread sticks and banana chutney and peaches and rice and cantaloupe can be mowed away by a poor man before the seven o’clock whistle blows no hard worker ought to lack muscle for his daily toil. We have printed assurance of Mrs. Bellow that “These menus have been arranged on a scientific plan, are thoroughly hygienic, and contain all that is necessary for proper living.” It is luck after all that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the hygienic mouth aforesaid.

Messrs. Lo & Behold, publishers of works on moral pathology, Boston, are making great efforts to club the Arena. I understand they propose offering season tickets to museums of morbid anatomy as prizes.

I note a somewhat guarded statement by Dr. Swan M. Burnett denying that he and his wife have separated or are undergoing that mutually humiliating process. All there is of it, he says, is that her work keeps her abroad and his keeps him in Washington. The doctor’s friends say, however, that the doctor and the writist live apart and have done so for years and that he is tired of being referred to as Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s husband. I think more likely he objects to being identified at the banks and elsewhere as the father of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

The Pell Mell Gazette of last Saturday contains a cablegram from Mr. Hall Caine, dated at East Aurora, N. Y., wherein the author of The Manxman reports that the prospect for next year’s crop of ginger is very promising.

I suppose it’s all right for the publisher of Munsey’s to tell how he made that magazine jump from 20,000 to half a million copies a month by shutting out middlemen and reaching the hungering and thirsting public direct. That’s his cue. If the publisher didn’t blow his horn who would? I opine, however, that the fish would sell without it, and that the editor of Munsey’s could tell them something a good deal more interesting in the same space. What does the great public, with its multitude of aims and desires, care how such an effect was accomplished? All that could safely remain within the veil. It would be more to the point if the editor or publisher of Mr. Bok’s collection of wax works would tell by what miracle he got a circulation. It is easy in the other case, regardless of the smart publisher. The time passed long ago when a horse being led to water could be forced to drink. The public must have wanted Munsey’s when it was shut out by the middleman or they wouldn’t have compelled the dealers to send for it, and that implies that there’s something in it besides self-consciousness and the publisher’s tactical brilliancy. But how on earth came the embodied ego and its sisters and cousins and aunts to get a hearing anywhere? Is Ruth Ashmore, alias Bab, at the bottom of it?

A certain gentleman of my acquaintance, having heard until he is sick of it that it takes nine Taylors to make a man, continues to boldly assert that it takes two Chatfields to make a Taylor.

When the Philistine was started six months ago I had no idea that it would now have half a million subscribers.

I am reminded by a Boston newspaper of the continued existence of a belief that criticism of books and other things more or less remotely connected with literature is largely a matter of prejudice and that the imprints on title pages determine the authors’ fate. Yet the same article goes on to quote the Chip-Munk firm as proof that merit will win sometimes in spite of such drawbacks. It seems to me the instance proves too much.

And here, just at the last, I want to set down what I have just read in a delightful book written by Katherine Cheever Meredith—Johanna Staats—because it seems to fit one’s mood at this time of year. This is it:

“Oh, I play with Miss Gray Blanket and I play with Fanny.”

“Fanny? The little girl?”

“Yes. After it’s dark, you know, I play with her. Then I talk to her. She never answers. But I play she’s so tired she can’t. Of course I can’t play that when it’s light. For then I could see that she wasn’t there. But in the dark she might be.”

“Exactly,” responded Poole abstractedly. He was thinking that many men and women indulge in the same game. Sometimes with their faith in each other; but more often, though, with their creeds.