Title: The Fly Leaf, No. 2, Vol. 1, January 1896
Author: Various
Language: English
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  The Fly Leaf

  [Illustration]

  A Pamphlet Periodical of
  the New--the New Man,
  New Woman, New Ideas,
  Whimsies and Things.

  CONDUCTED BY WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE.

  WITH PICTURE NOTES BY
  H. MARMADUKE RUSSELL.

  Published Monthly by the Fly Leaf Publishing Co.,
  Boston, Mass. Subscription One Dollar a Year.
  Single Copies 10 Cents. January, 1896. Number
  Two.



A Word of Praise in Season.


Philip Hale, the well-known and brilliant Boston literary and musical
critic writes as follows:

  “Walter Blackburn Harte is beyond doubt and peradventure the leading
  essayist in Boston today. For Boston perhaps you had better read ‘the
  United States.’ His matter is original and brave, his style is clear,
  polished when effect is to be gained thereby, blunt when the blow
  of the bludgeon should fall, and at times delightfully whimsical,
  rambling, paradoxical, fantastical. But read for yourself, Miss
  Eustacia; and Harte’s ‘Meditations in Motley’ will remain one of your
  favorite books. And now Mr. Harte is the editor of THE FLY LEAF. The
  first number is out, and let us earnestly call your attention to it.”

  A vigorous writer and thoroughly animated by the idea that the field
  of letters in this country should bloom with the genius of its youth.
  If THE FLY LEAF doesn’t achieve a great success it will not be for
  lack of talent and energy on the part of its director.--_The Boston
  Traveller._

  A new and wholly up to date brochure, THE FLY LEAF, has just
  appeared under the conductorship of Walter Blackburn Harte, one of
  the brightest young men in American literature.--_The Boston Home
  Journal._

  Promises to be something of a novelty in periodical literature, for
  it is filled with piquant comments on current fads and fashions, and
  contains some spicy and whimsical essays in miniature, written in a
  vivid impressionistic manner.--_The Boston Transcript._

These are a few press notices. But all the young men and women in every
city and town in the United States are discussing THE FLY LEAF and
spreading its fame.



The Fly Leaf

  No. 2.      January, 1896.      Vol. 1.



THE MONK.


  We were gay fellows, all of us,
  And christened him “the Monk.”
  He sat among us silently,
  His wine was never drunk.
  He heard the music passionate,
  But did not join the dance,
  Unmoved, he saw white arms and throats,
  Unloving, caught Love’s glance.
  I asked him why he cared to live,
    “Because,” responded he,--
  “_I like to watch these pictures
  Of the things inside of me._”

                         CLAUDE F. BRAGDON.



THE VISION OF YOUTH.


[Illustration]

It may be accepted as an axiom that the strong are always audacious,
and so when we hear of any man in literature who is shocking and
rumpling all the susceptibilities of nice, quiet, drowsy people we may
be sure that his capital crime is independence of thought and opinion.
He is looking at life for himself, instead of through the refracted
lenses of old class habit or antiquated religious dogma. And it is
a thousand to one he has the criminal audacity to be young; for the
vision of youth is clearer and more sure, and more pitying than the old
green or crimson goggles of selfish age, that would paint the world as
popes and kings and classes and governments, with rewards and honors to
give, would have it. All men whose life and work make for the uplifting
of human conditions and thought are set in the way of truth before
reaching thirty. If a man is timorous before thirty, he will be an
unmitigable coward, perhaps knave, for the rest of his days. And today
the only profession which demands any active spirit of heroism is the
calling of literature, that has become the _Deus ex machina_ of all
modern civilized life.

[Illustration]

Every truly ambitious writer, or for that matter, every manly writer,
be he a genius or a mediocrity, has certain large ideal aims to serve
in all his literature. It is not enough for a manly man to simply evoke
applause. A nude nymph from the gutter of Paris dancing a can-can on
a cafe table, also lives by popular suffrage, and wins such popular
approbation as is never given to literature--the incoherent cries
in which the whole body emits its tingling void of aching, sensuous
delight, the deep, whole-hearted greed of the flaming instincts and
soul of the race.

There are a thousand arts and tricks that gain applause and good pay,
and have the world’s countenance (and ours, for we are not such rigid
moralists as to try to upset nature); but it is the business of the
artist to gain respect, not for himself as an individual, for in that
capacity we can allow much to temptation, but for his precious art,
which is the voice of all the dumb ones of our kind. Surely, if there
is any thing that Almighty God could forbear in tenderness to destroy,
of all man’s sad attempts to win a home in this inhospitable world, it
is the written pages that hold the highest aspirations of the human
soul--some pages that we, in our overweening pride in the glory of our
fellows, think hold a beauty and breadth that must partake of Divinity
itself. But the wind of deathless Time is rushing even now, and we know
that nothing can escape its touch.

It is the final business of literature to quicken the spirit of
humanity and stir those noblest impulses that make us despise the mere
grovelling life of those who have not learned the irony of _things_.
We hide ourselves like guilty creatures among our dusty, dusty
possessions, afraid to waste time for living and thought, and so the
days and nights that should be ours pass and we enjoy them not. Only a
few poets possess the days and nights, and even they know the sweetness
of life mostly in sorrow.

All literature is trivial that lacks this large relevance to human
life, and so, in looking over the bulk of contemporary American
literature, it is to be feared that neither charity nor policy can make
it out to be very important. It is destitute of any of the spirit of
genius, and it is for the most part merely a travesty of the small talk
of the surface life of so-called “good society.” It nowhere touches
upon the reality of human passion, existent under every mask of custom
and artificial seeming of refinement, and its inspiration is evident in
every hasty line--money and advertising.

[Illustration]

To be quite candid, could any other country boast such an utterly
mediocre, uninspired group of literary artisans as is represented
by the Scratchback Club of New York, which in its membership really
furnishes all that passes for contemporary “American” literature in
our periodicals? They show the intellectual and imaginative poverty of
a people merely pushing and ingenious. They reveal the shallowness of
the prevailing idea that mere education furnishes those deep forces
of personality which have made all true literature, and all true
cultivation, with or without education. There is none of the audacity
of real spontaneous thought in these men and women’s work; it is all
written to order, as mechanically as an auctioneer’s catalogue.

But it is well to have a definite aim in literature, and the pens
concerned in the production of the FLY LEAF are at least inspired by
a sense of the fluidity of this excellent medium of prose, and though
they may fail in the haste of periodical writing to achieve the perfect
ends of art, at least they will not wantonly strive to debase the
public judgment and taste by pandering to the narrow minds of ignorant
prudes, after the fashion of the popular periodical literature of the
day.

The FLY LEAF has a definite aim and purpose in being, and that is, to
get more latitude in literature written in English, and to make the
work of the real writers of our end of the century better known to
the great democracy of readers. These are the younger men and not the
old, fogy carpenters, brought up to write moral tracts under Dr. J. G.
Holland at the close of the fifties. The FLY LEAF looks to the younger
generation to enable it to make its aims a force in our intellectual
and literary life here in America.

There is a revolt and a quickening sense of changes and forces in the
air. The work of any individual writer or worker can effect little
or nothing. But the earnest enthusiasm of a little band of men and
women, inspired with a belief in the impartiality of the good God and
the perpetual renewal of imagination and thought and genius in every
branch of the race, can set such an enthusiasm for better things and
higher ideals in not merely the substance but the spirit of all our
art endeavor as shall bring in a harvest of real, robust literature
from every quarter of this country--largely from the most unsuspected
quarters. It is this scattered interest in a nobler ideal than obtains
in our contemporary periodical literature that the FLY LEAF will
attempt to focus. At present nearly all the writers with any individual
style and force and robustness and largeness of aim are shut out of
American periodical literature, because such qualities in literature
are deemed _too shocking_ nowadays.

The FLY LEAF believes there are still readers who appreciate boldness,
original conceptions, audacity of treatment, and the varied play of
fancy over the whole and not merely a part of human existence. These
are the qualities that gave us our standard English literature, and
in the early days inspired our greatest writers in America. They must
be the impulse and inspiration of today, if Americans are not content
to be represented in literature by snobbish boys trying to write like
“ladies,” and women who write without effort like the deuce knows what.

When we say we appeal to the younger people it must not be thought
that we appeal to the children--although since they are so far
more critical than their grandparents, we shall not dare to forget
them altogether. We mean that we desire to enlist the interests and
sympathies of our own generation--say those born sometime in the
sixties and since. Our grandparents may be very good folk and quite
smart in getting around today, but they were largely brought up on
almanacs, and their literary tastes are narrow and eccentric without
being picturesque. They belong to ancient times without holding the
antique novelties of the really far away ancient times, which were
really more in touch with the intellectual bustle and eager curiosity
of our day than those gray years of smug Anglo-Saxon absorption in a
civilization of mere bread and beer that lie immediately behind us,
and still cast the chill shadow of their prurient morality over all
our literature. Even some of the direct parents of this generation
are a little threadbare in their craniums. They have read domestic
literature all their lives and of course are incapable of thought.
The stirring gray matter is found in the heads of those born not much
further back, say, than ’49, the year of gold. Let us resolve to make
this _fin de siecle_ the golden age of American literature. And if
there are, as I suspect there are, some belated grandparents still on
earth, animated with the spirit and ideals of Milton and the Martyrs,
young at heart in their enthusiasm for the truth, for the art that
touches and ennobles life, and for freedom of thought and expression,
these are of us also, and will gladly find in the FLY LEAF, in its
burst of youth, the ideals that have always permeated robust and honest
literature--especially in the old days when a man might swing or burn
for an audacious pamphlet. With such old fogies we have no bone of
contention. But the old fogies in petticoats, the gingerbread writers,
we shall probably toss up in a blanket nine times as high as the
moon--when we are not so pressed for space and time.

[Illustration]



GREY EYES.


  Brown eyes for passion and blue eyes for life,
  Pink eyes and green eyes and black eyes for strife,
          But the eyes of my love are grey.

  Bright eyes that are happy, dull eyes that are sad,
  Wide innocent eyes and eyes to make mad,
          But I love the soft eyes that are grey.

  I love the soft eyes that are grey, love,
  And grey’ll be the eyes of the angels above,
          For in heaven your eyes will be grey.

                                         SHERWIN CODY.



A GEOLOGICAL PARABLE.


It was at the place afterwards called Solenhofen. The weather was
miserable, as Jurassic weather usually was. The rain beat steadily
down, and carbon dioxide was still upon the earth.

The Archaeopteryx was feeling pretty gloomy, for at that morning’s
meeting of the Amalgamated Association of Enaliosaurians he had been
blackballed. He was looked down upon by the Pterodactyl and the
Ichthyosaurus deigned not to notice him. Cast out by the Reptilia, and
Aves not being thought of, he became a wanderer upon the face of the
earth. “Alas!” sighed the poor Archaeopteryx, “this world is no place
for me.” And he laid him down and died; and became imbedded in the rock.

And ages afterward a featherless biped, called man, dug him up, and
marvelled at him, crying, “Lo, the original Avis and fountain-head
of all our feathered flocks!” And they placed him with great
reverence in a case, and his name became a by-word in the land. But
the Archaeopteryx knew it not. And the descendant for whom he had
suffered and died strutted proudly about the barn-yard, crowing lustily
cock-a-doodle-do!

                                                      S. P. CARRICK, JR.



THE WAIL OF THE HACK WRITER.


  Ah, dreary is the toil for dull
    And shallow thought--the chaff-choked grain,
  That comes from just beneath the skull,
    Not from the brain within the brain.

  But all the dull, chaff-nourished tribe
    Must have its favorite food of bran,
  And he who writes must let the scribe
    Murder the poet in the man.

  Oft must he stem the tides that roll
    From thought’s interior deep, and, dead
  To their far voices, sell his soul--
    No, not for gold, for bread.

  And he must leave the heights that shine
    And hasten down their arduous steeps
  To feed the million-throated swine,
    That gulps its garbage and then sleeps.

                                  SAM WALTER FOSS.



ADONIS IN TATTERS.

A PARABLE ON THE POWER OF BEAUTY.


The audience at a parlor lecture in a Beacon Street drawing room is
apt to be rather intense and rapt in its attention, and discreet
in its enthusiasm, with the emphasis of discernment which subdued,
well-bred applause confers. At Mrs. Reginald Beveridge Vincent’s this
is always particularly noticeable, for Mrs. Vincent is one of the
social law givers of the “smart” set, and her rooms on these occasions
are thronged with all sorts of ambitious social strugglers, who pay
insidious homage to their hostess in their admiration of the idols for
whom she stands sponsor. There are all sorts of people here, and among
them many of the great army of the small celebrities, who are somewhat
more distinguished than prosperous, and who would fain pass from the
appreciation of imaginative literature to the serious consideration of
dining. The fact is, the socially nebulous, who rebel against their
birth’s invidious bar and strive to get out of the obscurity of the
mass of humanity, are really the backbone of the enthusiasm for letters
in fashionable society. These rather dubious folk, with no redeeming
big bank account, are spurred by ambition to attach themselves to some
sort of superiority--the superiority not always inherently residing in
them; and so literature becomes their easy spoil. They constitute the
one stable element in all literary gatherings out of Grub Street; and
even Mrs. Vincent, with all her social prestige, could not dispense
with them. And so they come, and dream of passing the rubicon, and so
on to more important functions. There are many who are considered good
enough and worthy to sit at a feast of reason and a flow of soul, who
would never be deemed eligible for the holier function of stuffing with
baked meats and wines. These literary afternoons, it may be noted, for
the benefit of the ambitious, serve an incidental purpose as a sort of
preliminary investigation into the character, standing and desirability
of new acquaintances. Many are called to the feast of literature--but
few are chosen to break bread at dinner. But the success of parlor
lectures, at the most dispiriting hour of the afternoon in winter when
the city streets are sunless and melancholy and depressing, depends
almost entirely upon the lure of social hopes, that influence the more
or less obscure to give up the comfort of their mediocre leisure to
swell the triumph of those who secure the glory of the passing show of
life. The woman who wants to shine as a patron of the fine arts must
not neglect these mixed social elements, or her rooms will be empty.
Exemplary activity in church politics and an interest in letters, are
the humble beginnings, the corduroy roads, as it were, of many who
ultimately shine with more certain lustre as leaders of the german.
Therefore, every wise blue stocking is affable and accessible to the
crowd of dubious persons whose admirations may be depended upon--unless
hope burns stronger in some other quarter. One thing is certain: the
grand dames of the upper social heavens are not to be depended upon
when literature or philosophy is the only attraction offered, even
when a grand dame is herself holding the reception. There are so many
petty jealousies, and so many rival courts; and, moreover, the grand
dames have so many questions of social diplomacy to occupy them--men,
for instance (_nice_, eligible men are scarce); consequently they do
not often come under the spell of the literary impressario, who gains
a precarious subsistence in the lap of luxury; and, besides, the
afternoon is the meridian of the shopping fever.

The large drawing room was crowded on this particular afternoon, and
Mrs. Vincent was in high feather, for she had secured the new poet of
the season, Mr. Blanco Winterbourne, to give his lecture on “Ideals
of Beauty in Modern Life.” This was in itself a victory. Winterbourne
was a brand new poet, who had dropped straight from the skies and been
immediately accepted in London, so that he had all the freshness and
glamour of a debutante, and his reputation being still in the making in
the inner circles of society, the gold dust was still upon his wings,
unbrushed and untarnished by the chill after-thoughts of envious Grub
Street criticism.

Everybody sat in an attitude of rare rapture, and every time the
lecturer uttered some especially well sounding and uplifting sentiment,
and paused a moment for the rapid click of eyes, some fine idealist
in the group would fix the hostess’s wandering glance with a gleam of
appreciation. This was intended to isolate him in her memory as a man
of discernment and culture worthy of remembrance in the Elysian domain
of dining. There is indeed something almost pathetic in this intense
concentration of mind, this painful anxiety of appreciation, which
is so evidently the tribute to the hostess and not to the new genius
himself. Only so much rapture goes to the lecturer as appearances
demand. The glory of the occasion belongs to the patron; for skill
and talent are largely a matter of labor and discipline, whereas the
recognition of excellence is the quick flash of pure intellect, genius!
But the audience is charitable enough, and the most terrible ordeal for
the lecturer, fresh from Parnassus or Grub Street, is the pervasive
and distracting rustling and swishing of silken skirts--a sound that
is the most tangible symbol of women’s potent whims in the sensuous
consciousness of man.

[Illustration]

There was one exception to the general air of complete absorption and
satisfaction, and this was a queer, oval cynical face, half in the
light of the waning day, and half in the shadow of the curtains.
It belonged to a young man, who leaned half forward in a rigid,
high-backed chair, and alternately glanced curiously from face to face
in the audience, and then turned completely about and looked out across
the bare tree-tops of the Common. A look of weariness, and even of
contempt, crept about his eyes and mouth, as certain high-flown phrases
reached his ears.

Here is a bit of rapid rhetoric that evoked the applause of the
company, and made him only curl his lip. “The dominion of beauty
obtains forever in the human heart, and so long as this is so, no
class nor humanity at large can be utterly bad; for the discernment of
beauty involves the recognition of moral feeling. All permanent beauty
is essentially moral and is sure of ready acceptance, especially among
women, in whom the religious instinct is strongest. Modern life can
never annihilate this innate and instinctive perception of intellectual
nobility and pure beauty. Nay, since the form is the body of the soul,
the finest type of pure physical beauty will always rightly command our
admiration. It breaks through all creeds and castes, and holds the race
in unity of feeling and thought.”

The lecture closed in a culminating clapping of hands, and the guests
all moved forward to congratulate the lecturer and the patron. The
young man turned and studied the different groups with an amused smile.

A lady, who had been watching the young man’s mocking comment on the
scene in the changing expression of his eyes and pursed lips, suddenly
arose from a divan in the angle of the room, and crossed over to where
he sat in the afternoon twilight.

She stopped him from arising with a gesture, and sank down into a seat
beside him.

“You do not seem particularly pleased with Mr. Blanco Winterbourne’s
lecture?”

[Illustration]

“Well, it doesn’t interest me, because you see I come into contact with
life as it really is. I have heard all this cant about the beauty of
purity and character before so many times, but when I see beauty of
character in life I find it always taken advantage of. And as for the
dignity of physical beauty, I need scarcely tell one of your sex the
difference between a beauty in rags and a beauty in silks.”

“Oh, but I protest, that although the world is gross, and the half
of us are mere Mammon worshippers, there is an instinct of delight,
and irresistible attraction for us, especially for we women, in sheer
beauty without any trappings of finery.”

“Ah, indeed; that sounds like the magnanimity of humanity, universally
asserted by popular moralists. But your sex is really the least
amenable, as I could easily prove to you.”

“Then prove it.”

“I will, if you can put on your hat and coat and come at once.”

“Well, I’m in a blaze of curiosity for the adventure.”

       *       *       *       *       *

As they crossed Beacon Street a beggar boy stepped up to them, and in
piping tones of want asked the lady for alms. She glanced for a moment
into his face with a blank look of negation on her own, and with a sort
of comprehensive intake of his dirt and rags she gathered her skirts
about her and passed through the turnpike and down the steps to the
Common. But her companion lingered behind, and presently joined her,
half dragging the boy by his tattered sleeve.

“Come here, Miss Lorillard, and look at the boy. I want to know if this
isn’t beauty?”

She turned and looked into the boy’s face, as her companion held it
up to the light between his two hands. The extraordinary and perfect
beauty of his features seized upon her in a sort of wonderment. Where
had she ever seen such a face before?--And her memory swept through the
galleries of Europe. In none of them. How was it she had not noticed it
at first? The dirt? It was incomparable--it seemed superhuman in its
sweetness and beauty, its appeal, and its glow of divinity. God’s hand
was plainly set in that face.

“This is the boy,” said the young man, laconically, watching her
expression. “Come along.”

And linking his arm in that of the ragged youngster, the trio sauntered
along with the fashionable throng coming out of the matinees.

[Illustration]

“Get out of my way, you ugly little sweep,” said one woman, elbowing
the boy off the pavement; and the men pushed him hither and thither.
The fashionable women looked right through the ragged urchin and his
evidently dubious companions, as if they were glass, and their gaze
seemed to bite like frost. Not one woman remarked the surpassing
loveliness of the boy’s perfect face.

At the corner of the Common the young man sent the boy about his
business.

“Who is he, and what does all this mean?”

“That is Adonis--the one-time victor of Venus. He fell upon evil days
when clothes made the king, and rags the knave.”

                                               WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE.



LIFE.


I sometimes think life is but a see-saw board, with hope at one end
and despair at the other. First hope goes up, and despair goes down,
and then it reverses. There seems to be no break in the steady rise
and fall. We live on, clinging to the belief that hope will outbalance
despair, but it does not, and men come and men go, and life still
teeters away.

                                                  JOSEPH ANDREWS CONE.



A SONNET FOR POETS.


  Sometimes birds sing not though the morn is fair;
    Sometimes flowers folded lie beneath the sun;
    Sometimes no dew falls though the day is done;
  Sometimes where fruit should grow the branch is bare;
  Sometimes the truest poet must forbear
    To make his music, though the hour is one
    With perfect beauty ended and begun:
  Sometimes his power has left him to despair,
  Sometimes he standeth spelled and dumb, though all
    Is great around him, though he plainly sees
      The beauty, and the grand sound plainly hears.
  But if, ere glories vanish, it befall
    That his sweet tongue doth loosen; as it frees
      He thrills with rapture, hymning through his tears.

                                 WILLIAM FRANCIS BARNARD.



THE LITTLE GREEN HAT.


They were coming out of the matinee, and there was something in the way
he took her arm and swung her out of the crush, that the experienced
eye of the married man or married woman could at once detect as the
assurance of the husband, accustomed to being adored, and quietly and
covertly conscious of other feminine eyes in the crowd.

He turned up her fur collar and they walked along in silence. She was
scrutinizing each face in the slowly moving throng. He was picking
his way, falling in her wake to give room to the opposing stream, and
occasionally to glance behind and strengthen some impression of a
silhouette, that awoke a momentary pang, and then faded into the blur
of faces, the rustle of silks and the subtle perfume of a well dressed
crowd of women.

Once he turned half round sharply, as a tall, handsome woman swept
by, creaking and rustling like a great galleon in a swell of wind
and rolling sea. His wife brought back his eyes with a glance of
interrogation.

“Pretty little green hat, that,” he said. “I think it would just suit
you.”

“Ah yes,” answered she. “Strange you never notice hats in the
milliners’ windows.”

                                                          JONATHAN PENN.



THE NEW GOD.


It is altogether fitting and proper, as Abraham Lincoln would say if he
were not dead, that that there should be an immediate definition of the
“New God.” It is not easy to define the New Woman--not easy to define
the New Man, nor to formulate New Ideas, but, in these days, when the
passion for money getting over-shadows everything else in life, and
colors our religion and philosophy, with the cheap cynicism of poor
cheated greed, it is easy to define the New God. In the first place, He
is everything that the Old God was not; and that is saying everything
that the Modern Dives wishes said--and for which he pays his preacher.
The successful modern preacher has to be a man of great intellectual
parts, and some knowledge of affairs. He must be a man of the world,
for it is the function of a new prophet in a successful metropolitan
church to preach the New God. And this is most effectively done while
occupying the Old Pulpit. An adroit and conservative judicial spirit
has entirely renovated and made respectable the gift of prophecy in
the Christian church. So we see the churches filled with the social
charity of sweet and silken equality, and all things are kept as sweet
and peaceful as possible in this atmosphere that once reeked with
sulphurous fumes for the wicked. But the sweet savor of camphor and
smelling salts has stifled the sulphur,--and all other disagreeable
odors in God’s House.

The churches of today are mostly mausoleums in which rest the crumbling
remains of the ancient God. But an intellectual age still delights
in the glamor of impressive ritual, and his name and attributes are
enshrined in Creed, Decalogue and Hymn. But the old Law is serenely
disobeyed, with the assurance that the New God is much too good or much
too distant to perplex himself with the peccadillos of good society.
As a certain French countess said in the court of Louis XV., “The good
God would surely think twice before damning people of quality”--and
undoubtedly the New God is more liberal and refined than the old one.

The New God, like the cynic man of the world, takes the world as he
finds it. He is a being of an infinite indifference to syndicates
(_sin_-di-cates!), deals (in which lurks the de’il!), coal oil
monopolies (whence come endowments that throttle free speech on social
questions), sugar trusts (that capture Congress), and the ways of a man
with a maid--or, what is quite as wonderful--the ways of a new maid
with an old man.

The New God is a dilettante in religion, who winks (when bribed with a
good service in a fine church) and looks the other way when broad-cloth
and satin sow unto the flesh.

It is to be suspected that the New Girl in her way is better than the
New God. If the New Man becomes any worse, he ought to--well, it would
be impolitic to say what he ought to do. But between the New God and
the cynics of Mammon this world does not seem to promise the millennium
or Utopia just yet a while.

                                                              L. LEMMAH.



THE SCHOOL OF NECESSITY.


If we are to come into our inheritance as an artistic people, let us
hear less of Art with a big A. Let us turn from the oracle of the
Personally Conducted and make bonfires of our Baedeckers.

The “Old Masters” were plain men, for the most part, with the virtues
and vices of their time, and would kill a man or paint a Madonna with
equal skill and enthusiasm. Art was to them only one form of a manifold
activity, not a problem to be solved nor a fetish to be worshipped.
Cellini made salt cellars and bragged about them long before he cast
his Perseus. Michaelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling because the
Pope commanded him, and not because he was divinely inspired to do it.
Raphael and Rubens ran picture factories which turned out paintings
of a certain brand, like so many barrels of flour. Shakespeare patched
together threadbare scenes and situations for special occasions, as
managers now prepare a Christmas pantomime; and Balzac wrote the
“Comedie Humaine” to pay his debts.

Literature is not a thing of limited editions, nor painting of spring
exhibitions. While you are seeking the coming novelist between rich
covers he may be doing a daily “story” for some sensational morning
paper; and the new Raphael you think of as hid away in some sequestered
north-lit studio may be designing labels for boxes in a lithograph
factory.

Respect, therefore, the poster, though it _is_ obtrusive, and despise
not the Japanese print, though it be cheap. Admit that there is more
merit in the pen and ink picture of which are printed a million copies,
than in the etching on your library walls, of which there are only ten.

Believe that the baths and aqueducts of Rome, however marvellous, are
puerile as feats of engineering compared with a city floated on Lake
Michigan mud; and learn that while you drowse over your “standard
authors” of today the work of him who will be the standard author of
tomorrow may be appearing in these despised pages.

                                                 CLAUDE FAYETTE BRAGDON.



BUBBLE AND SQUEAK.


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.”



THE LONDON ACADEMY

  The Leading Critical Literary Journal of London, in a long review of
  “MEDITATIONS IN MOTLEY,” by WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE, says, among other
  things:


“When any book of good criticism comes it should be welcomed and made
known for the benefit of the persons who care for such works. The book
under notice is one of these. It is, so far as I know, the first from
the author’s pen; but his writings are well known, and those who read
his present book will, with some eagerness, await its successor. For it
is a book in which wit and bright, if often satirical, humor are made
the vehicle for no flimsy affectations, but for genuine thought. Mr.
Ruskin has affirmed that the virtue of originality is not newness, but
genuineness.

“In this true sense Mr. Harte’s book is original. Here is his own
thought on several topics, pleasantly displayed, and no mere echo or
second-hand production of the ideas of others. If Mr. Harte continues
to act up to this sentiment, [a long quotation from the book under
consideration] as he does in the present book, he may not achieve the
triumph of twentieth editions, but he will be a power for good--as
every true man of letters is, and must be in the world. If it were
practicable I should be much disposed to let the author recommend
himself by giving copious quotations from these essays. At his
best--that is, in his most characteristic and seemingly unconscious
passages--he reminds one of Montaigne: the charming inconsequence, the
egotism free from arrogance.”


PRICE IN HANDSOME CLOTH, $1.25.

_For sale by all Booksellers, or sent Postpaid on receipt of Price by
the Publishers_,


  The Arena Publishing Co.,
  Copley Square, Boston, Mass.



In Mens Sana, in Corpore Sano.


Some wicked nurses lull crying, starving children by putting the rubber
bulb of an empty nursing bottle into their mouths. This fills the babe
with evil wind and destroys its judgment, character, digestion and
intellect. The old fashioned popular periodicals do the same thing
for inquiring and curious minds, seeking nourishment and amusement.
They give them a bottle of windy pap, called _nice, pure domestic
literature_, and the result is the same as with the poor baby--only
aggravated.

THE FLY LEAF is a robust, masculine, periodical for grown-up, common
sense young men and women. It takes the point of view of the young man
of today in literature and life. It is new, but sane. Its audacity
is integrity of opinion and not mere eccentricity. It advocates
greater freedom in American literature, and it discusses the aims and
tendencies of the new movement and new writers.

THE FLY LEAF is young, but not such a cherub that it lacks wisdom
teeth, and those who appreciate waggery are laughing over its little
ironies. It is certain the new babe can live by its wits very well in
a community which appreciates wit as keenly as does the great American
public.


  THE FLY LEAF,
  269 St. Botolph Street, Boston, Mass.



TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Fly Leaf, No. 2, Vol. 1, January 1896" ***

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