Title: The Fly Leaf, No. 5, Vol. 1, April 1896
Author: Various
Language: English
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  THE FLY LEAF is distinctive among all the Bibelots.--FOOTLIGHTS,
    PHILADELPHIA.

  The Fly Leaf

  A Pamphlet Periodical of
  the Century-End, for Curious
  Persons and Booklovers.

  CONDUCTED BY WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE.

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



Unique and Distinctive in Bibelot Literature.

THE CRITICS AGREE IN SAYING THE FLY LEAF FILLS A FIELD OF ITS OWN.


THE FLY LEAF is distinctive among all the Bibelots.--FOOTLIGHTS,
Philadelphia.

It is a delightfully keen little swashbuckler.--THE ECHO, Chicago.

The latest of the Bibelots. In my opinion it is the only one of the
lot, including the “Chap-Book,” “Philistine,” etc., which knows what it
is driving at. The editor of the “Chap-Book” toddles along, following
or attempting to follow, the twists and turns of the public taste--at
least that is what he wrote in a Note not long ago--and the editor of
the “Philistine” curses and swears, and devastates the atmosphere,
trying his best to kill everything. “THE FLY LEAF” at once impressed me
that Mr. Harte knows what he wants, and seriously intends to have it. I
hope he will.--THE NORTH AMERICAN, Philadelphia.

It will pay any one who wishes to keep up with the literary procession
to peruse this sprightly little periodical.--THE EXAMINER, San
Francisco, Cal.

That bright little bundle of anecdote, comment, essay, poetry and
fiction, “THE FLY LEAF,” of Boston, comes out in particularly good
style. It gives rich promise of many good things to come.--THE
COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER, New York.

Number two of Walter Blackburn Harte’s dainty monthly “THE FLY LEAF,”
is out, and filled with the spirit of youth and beauty in literature,
and zealous with culture, taste and faith toward higher ideals, it is
going about doing good.

Mr. Harte is strong, brilliant and brave as an essayist of the
movement, and is making friends everywhere. The poetry and prose is all
of high merit.--THE BOSTON GLOBE.

The thing I like about Mr. Harte is his splendid spirit of Americanism,
his optimistic belief in native literature and native writers; his
hatred of all things bordering on toadyism or servile flattery of
foreign gods to the exclusion of home talent. This is the key-note of
THE FLY LEAF, and Mr. Harte will be apt to say some trenchant, candid
and always interesting things in its pages.--THE UNION AND ADVERTISER,
Rochester, N. Y.

These are a few criticisms of the first two numbers, selected from
a great heap of enthusiastic notices. THE FLY LEAF is promoting a
Campaign for the Young Man in Literature. All the young men and women
in America are discussing its unique and original literature, and
spreading its fame.



The Fly Leaf

  No. 5.      April, 1896.      Vol. 1.



TO THE ILLUSTRATOR.


  Send us some fancy cuts to go
    With our great author’s next;
  Give them the proper twist, that so
    We can ad. lib. insert the text.

  TWENTY MINUTES AFTER.

  Here are the words, 1000 just;
    Ideas left out, as you implore,
  Makes prices double; but I trust
    Your sales will mount a million more.

  A LITTLE LATER.

  Herewith the pictures, full of fizz!
    But why on writers waste your type?
  Give us a chance and this pen-biz
    From off your pages we will wipe.

                             --ADAM QUINCE.



THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE HARLOT IN THE PASSING SHOW.


I am well aware that the true lover of books is too wise to take a one
idea’d bigot of a reformer to his cosy fireside. I therefore preface my
observations under this somewhat alarming caption with an assurance
that I am inspired by no visionary enthusiasm to turn aside the course
of human nature.

These few notes deal with certain superficial aspects of the general
consciousness, as molded and modified by the social, civil and moral
influences of our time. They show certain forces incident to the
development of some measure of mental life in the mass. They are not
made in any spirit of arrogant ascetism, or in the hope of radically
mending the everyday morals of mankind by precept or persuasion. The
morals of mankind are already under the care of a certain apostolic
succession, that with great wisdom has substituted faith for morality
as better suited to the constitution of human nature. These enlightened
trustees of infallible revelation are ably reinforced by a great many
reformers, and they need no support from profane literature. Indeed the
professional moralists find extremely good picking in the widespread
hallucination that presents morality in the fascinating form of a rabid
curiosity about the doings of others. They rather resent scientific
criticism, and I shall never intrench upon the workers in this field,
alluring as are all impossible reforms to me, so long as there is any
sort of following for common sense. But I think certain psychological
forces at work in the swelter of this century-end are worthy of
some sort of record; and at this moment I am thinking exclusively of
American conditions and phases, which are the least likely to find an
historian, and not of Max Nordau’s pictures of contemporary Europe.

There is so much pinching of the spirit done in the name of morality
that it is not surprising that some who care most for the spiritual
side of life view all moral propagandas with some disfavor. In these
few pages I simply wish to make a plea for a little sweetness and
sanity from the Epicurean standpoint. Among the grossest satyrs the
ideal concerns of the intellect and imagination often find their most
inspiring welcome, while among moralists and reformers of human nature
they are regarded with indifference or open animosity. For this reason
it is important that a well defined distinction should be made in the
reader’s mind between the claims of simple sanity and the absurd dreams
of perfectibility which form the insensate ambition of moralists. The
aims of literature can never be those of reform.

Every generous mind is impelled at some time or other to try to wholly
mend or end the perversities of human nature, but, in spite of the
faith and example of the saints and martyrs, a few years’ experience
shows the folly of it. The folly of a Utopian moralist and reformer is
greater than the folly of the mob itself. Even the old Hebrew prophets,
with all their fine fury and mystical reliance on the arm of Jehovah,
and their undoubted leadership and influence, failed to lessen the
potent and eternal allurement of carnal pleasure and indulgence one jot
or tittle. The world has grown too old for any but mad persons to dream
of combatting those evils which are inevitable in the constitution of
things. But since nearly all the consolations of life are not inherent
in human nature but are the painful conquests of the mind, are, in a
word, artificial creations of man’s own subjective life, and not at all
incident to the ordinary course of life in a wild and natural state,
we must strive to maintain a distinction between the interests of the
imagination and intellect, and the concerns of everyday human nature.

It is not, therefore, in any intolerant spirit that would deny the
inevitableness of the carnal life that I touch upon “The Apotheosis of
the Harlot.” I simply wish to show, in the broadest and most liberal
temper, that even the most inevitable and legitimate passion of
humanity must be kept restrained within bounds, or the whole of human
life forfeits its hope and dignity and purpose. Nature can parody
herself in the excess of madness. The sanity of human life, social
institutions, and all intellectual activity is imperilled when the
passions of the blood, and especially passions perverted, obtain an
exaggerated dominance over the emotions and passions of the mind. That
there is a decided drift toward this ascendancy of the Pander and the
Harlot in the social and intellectual life of modern democracy, is
beyond all sort of doubt, and cannot be blinked by any clear minded
and untainted observer. That is, any observer who is not in fee of
one of these gigantic enterprises which flourish upon the epidemic of
mediocrity. There is an odd and strange obliquity of moral vision that
accompanies optimism professed as a probable investment in the follies
of the credulous.

Of course the triumph of the Harlot in great affairs and destinies
is nothing new. She has swayed courts and kings and empires from
antiquity, and there is no moral force in human society that can
ever disturb this firmly established and most stable of all human
institutions. Dynasties totter, empires fall into ruins, religions
decline, philosophies shrivel to empty names, nations perish and their
history is lost, civilization advances or decays, but the Harlot
plays her fateful part in the destinies of the race. She is almost as
important a factor in molding the purpose and character of humanity
as the mother. Her potent and unassailable dominion of the minds of
men is due to the eternal fantasy of human passion, and whatever may
be the prevailing code of morals, she will hold her sway of wreck and
ruin to the end of time. To rail against an institution so inherent
in the constitution of human affairs is sheer folly. Indeed, it may
be almost said to be flying in the face of Providence, since the only
providence which we know to be effective in this world is the unfailing
crookedness of human nature.

This view of Providence in human affairs makes turning on Providence
a less heinous offence than the phrase suggests to some with minds in
pawn; and there are always some idealists ready to oppose human nature
itself, in rash dreams of the conquest of life for love and beauty
and the spirit. It is not the eternal witchery and potency of the
Harlot I wish to emphasize in this place, for that needs no argument,
but the fact that with the progress of modern democracy this ancient
institution, hitherto confined within the limits of civic life, the
court and political affairs, has suddenly loomed up as the one great
overshadowing fact and potency of human existence. And so in spite of
my parade of common sense and sanity I may be held to be an impossible
idealist in many quarters, for I am opposing my own individual tastes
and those of a small minority, to the overwhelming tide of human
nature. I find the reign of the Harlot irksome--especially in the
distractions of literature and the theatre.

Some sort of parity has hitherto been maintained, for a period of
historical development, between human nature in its unbridled enjoyment
of sensation, and those concerns of the intellectual life, which have
been the occupation and solace of the few, to whom the pleasures of
artifice have grown more necessary than those of sense, and, in moments
of clearness and calm, dearer than life itself. With the progress of
modern democracy, ordinary human nature has sought factitious and
unusual excitements, and plunged into a course of sophistication. It
has insidiously encroached upon this realm of artificial delights of
the intellect, which the aliens of the race have painfully wrested
from life and nature. The Harlot astride Pegasus is the end of popular
education.

The authority of religion and the force of superstition, which for
centuries kept the arts and literature somewhat remote from the common
ideals and passions of the mass of men, have declined, and with their
eclipse the ideals of the great mass of vulgar appetites have grown
with social freedom and popular education, until, at this hour, we see
the greatest tyranny of history established, of which the Triumphant
Harlot is the head and front and fitting symbol. It is the pitiless
despotism of the millions of uplifted, cruel, greedy maws that hold
the fateful pence that decide every question of life and thought in
this age of enlightenment. Every clod’s dirty penny or vote counts
for as much as a head full of brains. It is a sublime spectacle. It
is not the fact of the prosperity of the Harlot in democracy which is
at all remarkable, for of course she has not depended upon societies
or governments, but upon human nature for her queenship; it is the
glorification of her arts and her power, in the open prostitution of
the printing press in her honor and worship, the deification of her
calling and character in the popular imagination, the dedication of
the theatres solely to her exploitation, and the trafficking in her
person and perversities, which is the stock in trade of the picture
periodicals devoted to the edification of the millions--these things
are not only maddening and nauseating, but they belong distinctly and
peculiarly to this end of the century. It is a form of insane sex
worship which is destitute of every vestige of glamor, of poetry, of
real excuse in nature. It is a grotesque parody of all the beauty
and dignity of human life. It is the grim and ironical ending of the
emancipation of the appetites of the millions, in the thousand and
one delusions of popular education. Ancient religions included the
glorification of sex. But this is the exaltation of the lowest type of
humanity--the sexless Pander to that grim disease of imagination which
is peculiar to our hypocrisy of ascetic morality.

In the hourly prints of the day we pick up, at every turn in the
city, on hoardings, on every theatre bill board, in the shop
windows--everywhere the triumphant, glorious and illustrious Harlot
of the day or season, in one of her many roles, as dancer, actress,
singer, society woman, erotic novelist and the rest, confronts us in
her overwhelming and audacious supremacy of finery, wealth, comfort and
the adulation of the community. We get her triumphs, her person, her
biographies, her lovers, her scandals, her clothes and her character
(these are all about the same, too) with the painstaking detail of
sober history. Some of the queans, who have discovered the secret of
perpetual rejuvenation, we cannot escape by any chance. These we seem
doomed to get forced upon us forever. There may be great poets, great
thinkers, great philosophers and teachers in our contemporary world,
but there is no room for them in the tide of current history-making or
in the popular interest and imagination. The glorified Harlot alone is
worthy to fill the mirror of the time; she alone can warm the cockles
of the heart of democracy. It is for this that the great democracy has
mastered the three R’s.

Aspasia in the full noontide of the greatness of Pericles, Lais
just turned into the wonder of the world in the marble of Appeles,
and Phyrne made immortal by Praxiteles as Venus rising, rosy, nude
and dishevelled from the sea, are wantons who will ever hold the
imaginations of men enthralled. But it is certain that in the very
meridian of their glory, with poets, philosophers and the greatest
artists of history at their feet, their fame never filled the narrow
confines of the ancient world as that of the season’s kicking strumpet
of the Music-hall fills the modern world with its enlarged boundaries.
The fame and name of every fresh bawd from the canaille is now cabled
to the four corners of the earth. The notorious harlot of each season’s
revels is the female Colossus of the modern world. She is the goddess
of the world of traffic. There, aloft, above the reach of all hungry,
envious paupers, she rules and overshadows two hemispheres with her
legs astride.

                                                 WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE.



WHEN SHAKESPEARE WROTE.


  When Shakespeare wrote his mighty plays,
  Superb in action, thought and phrase,
    He got but meagre vague renown
    Beyond the wits of London Town:--
  To know the great the world delays.

  Obscure he walked the urban ways:
  From queen and courtier came the praise,
    The sneer, the cuff, the smile, the frown,
            When Shakespeare wrote.

  But in our modern modish days
  From sheer caprice the critic slays,
    Or seeks to put the poet’s crown
    Upon some pompous pedant clown.
  No poetasters wore the bays
            When Shakespeare wrote.

                                A. T. SCHUMAN.



A LITTLE COMMENTARY ON CULTURED EUROPE.


I wish some eminent psychologist and impartial student of ineradicable
racial traits would calmly investigate the popular myth of an
“American” literature.

I valiantly insist upon the existence of literature in America, but do
not see much prospect for an “American” literature.

I wonder if the critics who are optimistic about an “American”
literature ever stop to consider the fact that two-thirds of the
people who live in this country are of different stock than ours,
and different racial traditions and language. Then they are from the
depth of savagery. They are illiterate and brutal, and possessed of an
unconquerable phlegm that cannot tolerate such trivial, foolish things
as the arts and literature. Moreover, they are utterly out of sympathy
with the ideals of our race.

We often speak of Europe as the home of the arts and their uplifting
influences. It is true enough, of course, but here is one of the
ironies of that old cradle of misery. This is only the gloss of
barbarism. How many Americans remember Europe is also the home of the
illiterate and utterly incurable mob of low and bestial intelligences?
How many Americans, in thinking of the low ebb of intellectual life
here, ever consider that a great deal of intellectual and aesthetic
interest and activity in this country, among Americans of English
descent, is smothered and strangled by the popular pandering to the
appetites of an unassimilated mass of low intelligences, only to be
reached by coarse sensationalism and vulgar prints?

We are recommended to go to Europe for aesthetic training. We could get
along much better with a sturdy stock of native observers, if we could
only keep out the hordes of ignorant and degraded savages that flock
here from every hell-hole in Europe, and then spread like a great itch
throughout the country.

When one looks at the great blotches of ignorant and inferior races
which dot the map of the United States in different industrial
sections, one wonders where and when an “American” literature or
“American” anything will come in. Emigration is all right when it comes
from the right quarters, but the recent social history of this country
shows how it is absorbing the barbaric scum of Europe.

                                                          JONATHAN PENN.



DEPENDENCE.


  SHE.

  Since thou hast come, dear heart, I live no more
    Save in the hours when thou art by. Thy grave,
    Full penetrating voice and speech I crave,
  And all thy cares.... I wonder how before
  This satisfied companionship I bore
    The old dull days, for thou with marriage gave
    So much! And yet,--bear with me, dear!--My brave
  Heart seems defenceless now! Those days of yore
    Full of ambitious dreams, beyond my reach
  Have vanished far. O love me! since the whole
    Of life is narrowed down to this! and teach
  Me willing subjugation, as years roll,--
    Be more than lost ambitions I beseech,--
  My lord and husband, since thou hast my soul!

  HE.

  Dear one, dost think thou art alone in this
    Great overwhelming conflict of love’s might?
    Dost think thou art dependent, and my right
  Is subjugating thee? O sweet, the bliss
  Of marriage lies beyond such talk as this!
    True love is most dependent, and all right
    Is yours as mine, since our supreme delight
  Lies with each other; then let us not miss
    The joy of this full time by hint of war,
  Or agonize ourselves with distant fears,--
    A truce to these misgivings! With such store
  Of love we’ll front our happiness, that years
    Will bring us compensations more and more.
  I master? nay, a beggar,--see these tears!

                                  JOHN ARMSTRONG.



PARILEE’S DREAM.

  “Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?”


Her husband turned on his pillow and looked at her. She was asleep, and
the smiles that played over her features, now and again interrupted by
a look of gentle sadness, showed that she was dreaming. He was about
to wake her, but he hesitated to break in upon what he knew must be a
very sweet vision, and, keeping his eyes upon her face, he awaited the
end.

They had been married two years. He had come suddenly into her life,
taking her away from several admirers and out of a continuous round
of pleasure and excitement, and after a short courtship they had wed.
Parilee often said to herself: “How much better off I am,” and thought
with satisfaction that instead of being a silly and superficial girl
she was a wife, and at the head of a home. There had been hardly a
discord in their lives since the day of their union; and Parilee
believed she was quite happy.

As she lay there, her lips moved in the words, “I love you,” and her
face flushed so deeply that her husband, doubting his eyes, speculated
as to whether she was really asleep.

As the early light of the sun burst into the room, she started up,
thinking, “What a dream for me!”

At her old home she had wandered along by the creek which ran through
her father’s fields. She had been in quest of something, but what that
something was she did not know; there was a longing and a longing, very
deep and sad. Suddenly she had seen Tom Harding coming toward her.
Taking him by the hand, she had led him to a large rock near, and they
had both sat down upon it. Then, in a trembling voice she had said:
“Tom, I’ve been seeking you such a long time; I love you.”

Looking at her searchingly and with tenderness, Tom had replied, oh, so
softly; “You love me! I have long loved you, too”; and had taken her in
his arms and kissed her.

“What were you dreaming about?” her husband asked, as she stirred and
opened her eyes; “I saw you smiling in your sleep.” She did not answer,
but went over her dream again and again, recalling every minute detail.
Sweeter sensations never lingered after a real kiss. She revelled
in memory as she looked out on the morning sky and thought of Tom’s
embrace.

“Were you dreaming of me, Parilee?”

She hesitated, thinking: “I can’t tell him of my dream; it was not
such a thing as a wife would want to repeat to her husband. Perhaps
I ought to tell him, though. No, it will not be best; he would be
displeased. I would better let him think that his surmise is correct
than to make him sad or jealous. Besides, I am not responsible for what
happens in my sleep. If the dream had included a thought or recognition
of Harry, I should think that I was harboring improper feelings. But it
was only a dream.”

“Yes, Harry, I was dreaming of our old lover days.”

When her husband started for his office he gave Parilee his accustomed
farewell kiss. To him it was the same as usual, but to her it seemed
slightly insipid; the dream kiss was still upon her lips.

“It is because we have been married so long; I have grown used to him,”
she reasoned when left alone. “I love Harry, and always shall.” Then
she sat down by the window, looked far away into space, and went over
the dream again.

“I wonder where Tom is now,” she questioned in her thought. “Probably
married by this time.” A disagreeable feeling went to her heart. “He
loved me before I met Harry. What changes time brings.” And she mused
on.

                                                            OLGA ARNOLD.



THE NEW CIRCE.


  No islet-kingdom has this fair-haired one,
  Of drugs no knowledge, philtres brews not she,
  Yet many self-sure men has she undone
  By her own ways of pleasant sorcery.
  She whirls in no mad dances dervishly,
  Nor with incantatory crooning charms
  Her hapless slaves, who yet would not be free
  While with a conq’ring smile she soothes, disarms,
  Born of some slight neglect, their fears, doubts and alarms.

  She has no wand nor needs one. Her demesne
  Is ev’ry drawing-room. A slender chair
  Be-carved and gilt, her throne that any queen
  Might wish to sit upon. About her there
  They crowd, the subjects of this guileless fair,
  Fain for the services she may commend;
  Content forever the sweet bonds to wear,--
  That even Egypt’s moly cannot rend,--
  If she, though loving not, to love them will pretend.

                                             EDWARD W. BARNARD.



BUBBLE AND SQUEAK.


The great books teach us to smile at life.


The old proverb that there is nothing new under the sun gives much
latitude to dullards and plagiarists, who are altogether destitute
of the fascination of a mood or manner. Egoism is the last virtue of
modern literature.


It is not so much what a man says, but what he looks, with women. It is
the fantasy of wickedness that flashes from eye to eye among dumb clods
that keeps poetry perennially in the world.


If the sun shone only upon the righteous, he would not need to get up
so early in the morning.


I have my livelihood to earn, and consequently I am an optimist.


There is something intellectually lacking in all converts to brand
new dogmas and creeds. A deep sense of wickedness is but a phase of
immaturity of mind.


A woman who is not at heart a tyrant in her dreams of love is a
perversion of nature.


So far as can be learned at this distance, there is only one industry
in the new South which is really in a flourishing condition, and that
is the unlimited production of abominable trashy “literature.”


If some half baked people would consent to go to night school instead
of covering endless reams with horrible aberrations, the progress of
aesthetics would be more rapid in America. Some people cannot realize
that mere mellifluous meanderings in verse or plain prose are simply
indications of an affection of the gray matter, akin to a cold in the
head, and are of no more significance to the outside world than the
week’s washing.


The instability of all industrial and business life in America is one
of the horrors of existence here, and it is one of the factors that
make culture impossible here. A nation on the jump runs to “smartness”
but not to intellect. There is only one class in our society that
enjoys stability, and that is the Police. Whether we may expect any
aesthetic appreciation from this quarter remains to be seen.


“To amuse respectable people,” said Moliere, “what a strange task.” And
God was good enough to allow Moliere to live and write for the Court
of Louis XIV. It is a great privilege for a writer to know precisely
the follies and moods of his audience. Moliere himself showed how
much appreciation of wit and sanity can be cultivated in a court of
folly. But how can the most assiduous student of human nature gauge
the vagaries of taste in a democracy? The amusing of respectable, and
other people, is the wreck of imagination and authorship in this happy
land of Educational Eclipse. Here, all are what is called “educated.”
But how few care for or know anything of that self education which
constitutes culture?


The poor alone trust in Providence. The rich own Providence.


TO AMARYLLIS: As you did not enclose postage for the return of your
manuscript, I address you through this medium. Your verses are good
enough from one point of view; but unfortunately this is a Bibelot of
Literature, and these are picture-book verses. They are in the right
key, though, for we have tried them on the office cat with gratifying
results. The cat was seized with a fit of melancholy, and has not been
out for two nights. It will be a sin if you do not send these potent
poems to the editor of the _Century_ magazine.


The woman who has plenty of red blood corpuscles, a body that is a
body and not a poetic wraith of the spirit, seems to be tumbling into
fiction nowadays. As the new heroine she is rudely disturbing the reign
of the pink and white saints, expressly made in Paris dollhouses for
the heroines of English novels, who open and close their eyes and smile
in every chapter.


Educate yourself to tell little lies easily and artistically, and the
big ones will take care of themselves.


The trouble with the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois is they have no
picturesqueness. They have an abundance of vices, but no redeeming ones.


The majority of men are Christians and pagans, Democrats and
Republicans, princes and paupers, and what not, first of all, and
themselves last of all--usually only in crises.


The salvation of stupidity in this world is that the instinct of
self-preservation has given it an undisputed currency among the masses
of men as common-sense.


Democracy is the damnation of ideals. Old John Calvin, if he were
living and working out his logic in the midst of modern life, would
have laid even greater distress upon total depravity and the eternal
damnation of the majority. That is the only dream which can console us
for the dominion of the vulgar in this life; and, unfortunately, there
is no substantial logic or evidence to support it. If instead of having
lived a quiet life in Geneva, in the sixteenth century, Calvin were
living to-day in the heart of New York or Chicago, he would have made
his theology more terrible. The kernel of his doctrines was evidently
derived from the observation of human society, and a career amid the
brutality of our modern cities would have left no room in his creed for
any compromises. The perseverance of the saints is not in evidence in
the cut-throat scramble of modern life.

This doctrine of damnation has always condoned for me many of the
intolerable narrownesses in Calvinism. If it is probable that God
himself cannot contemplate an invasion of the mob without trepidation,
I cannot see what argument can be made in support of democracy in our
social and intellectual life here below. I envy all those who hold
this doctrine of damnation without any troublesome doubts. Calvin had
evidently fathomed human nature, even if he did not enjoy any special
revelation of the life hereafter.


About the only woman whose novels I am curious to read at this moment
is Diana of the Crossways. And her “Princess Egeria” and the rest are
out of reach forever.


Now here is a nice psychological point. A very clever woman, who knows
men and women as only some wonderful women can, and who yet has never
written a novel, came to me the other day, as to a Father Confessor of
the smaller sophistries of conscience, upon which religion affords no
certain light and assurance. The point she wished to know was whether
she was a new woman or simply a harmless flirt of the old school. As I
could not decide this momentous matter, I concluded to ventilate it in
print, suppressing the name of my friend. The situation is this: She
loves her husband with all her heart, but yet she sometimes lacks the
moral courage to tell some men whom she meets casually that she is a
married woman.


It does not seem to add to England’s glory to appoint Uriah Heep to the
job of court clown. The old jesters made better sport.


I sometimes wonder what peculiar influence in their environment
makes so many literary critics attached to the editorial staff of
periodicals, whose chief staple is some denominational form of
religious conviction, so offensively positive and dogmatic. They are
seldom troubled with any judicial hesitations. They proclaim their
ipse dixits with a solemnity and excess of asseveration and finality
which is hideously funny to the lay mind, that takes its own peculiar
predilections and distastes, with a shade of something approximating
good-natured tolerance of the possible tastes of others. I think
this critical attitude of the religious Pontifex is largely due to
some profound mental and moral confusion. He is so accustomed to
dealing out fire and brimstone and damnation with a callous and easy
conscience to all who differ with him in the domain of religious
belief, and especially to those who occupy the agnostic and rational
attitude toward the eternal problems of life, that he finally gets into
the trick of using the thunder of Jehovah for smaller offences and
occasions.

Here is a case in point. A solemn and inspired lunatic writes, in
the New York “Independent,” of George Meredith, the greatest living
writer in the English speaking world, in this utterly mendacious and
injudicious fashion. “The most elaborately feminine man in English
literary life.” “The Amazing Marriage” is then described as “a
crazy structure gorgeously decorated, in which dwell nympholepts,
aged satyrs, erotic wives and foredoomed maidens, all moving on to
rainbow-hued destruction or jaundiced delight.”

This in a religious paper that makes a great parade of its dignity, and
is always finding fault with the _honest opinions_ of others, because
they are apt to be so _irreverent_, looks like that simple and vulgar
bid for pre-eminence in heresy, which will always catch the greedy
ears of the envious and mediocre mob, that is glad to see hateful
superiority spattered with mud. I suppose this view of the modern
man of letters who is inflexibly true to his aims and the dignity of
his calling, and who is, moreover, the master of his craft, is to be
attributed to the superintellectual quality of the inspiration that
directs all organs of religious opinion.


It is a little hard to understand the criticism which hails the revival
of the old familiar blood and thunder fiction of our boyhood days as
the renaissance of genius in fiction. All this sort of literature,
whether wrapt in mediæval properties or not, is fatally melodramatic
and unreal, and constitutes so much lumber and nothing else, if it
should remain in the memory. But as all our picture periodicals and
Sunday papers are filled with nothing but blood and thunder stuff from
Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope and the rest, it is obviously the taste of
the time. I am meditating a new magazine on these popular lines. It is
to be called: “The Antique Renascence; a Magazine of Pistol Shots and
Rape.”


One of the metropolitan Sunday papers advertises every week in
triumphant and gigantic capitals how many square miles of spruce
forest were converted into paper for the Sunday edition. The number of
square miles of forest that is disappearing in this way is something
appalling. It seems to a few reactionary wits, unintoxicated with the
spectacle of this modern progress, that sacrificing half a spruce
forest to make a Sunday paper is much worse than butchering a little
chain-gang of Christians to make a Roman holiday.


It is a simple death notice in the Boston _Evening Events_, for
February 2, 1896. It reads thus:

“Miss Priscilla Prim, of 29976 Beacon street, Boston, died suddenly
of a severe mental shock yesterday evening. Miss Prim was well known
as the possessor of a very large fortune, a philanthropist, and a
patron of the arts and all sorts of moral reforms and missions, and her
decease will be mourned by all lovers of liberal culture.”

She had just finished her supper, when a niece from Chicago, who was
stopping in her house, to come out this season in the “smart set,”
handed her a copy of the February FLY LEAF, fresh and virgin from the
press that evening. It contained some opinions which are regarded as
heterodox and impossible in “The Ladies’ Own Humbug and Treasury of
Misinformation.” It appeared to lack reverence for the unsupported
tradition of “culture” that lingers in modern materialistic,
money-grubbing Boston, in every well-regulated household, quite
independently of the fact that in thousands there is no evidence of
civilization in the shape of books, ancient or modern. This flippancy
is undoubtedly immoral, and its heinousness may be judged by its effect
in this instance.

Miss Prim was mad, indignant, furious, and fumed at the mouth with the
passion of her outraged moral feelings. She sprang to her feet to write
a letter of protest to the editor of the _Events_, when she stumbled
over the only work of literature in the establishment--it was Mrs.
Parloa’s Appledore Cookbook, by the way--and falling face forward upon
the floor, she expired immediately of a severe bump and excess of moral
emotion.

It is time the old fierce Puritanical spirit was calmed in the blood of
the hereditary Bostonians; but the old generation dies glum and hard,
and will refuse Heaven if the Almighty is so captious as to demand a
sense of humor.


Mr. Chauncey M. Depew is reported to have said that Fame depends
entirely upon being civil to interviewers. English visitors should
remember this--and a few, who want to feather their nests, are
beginning to appreciate the wisdom of our worldly sage. Conan Doyle
and Hall Caine have taken “the tip,” and have even been quite civil
and polite about American institutions and social life since gaining
their own shores. This little simple art of glossing is one the British
should cultivate. They are at present the most hateful people on earth.
The world is getting crowded now and they should endeavor to become
less obnoxious. English celebrities can extend their fame with their
courtesies.


A very pathetic and significant incident occurred in one of the leading
hotels of Boston the other day. It is fraught with a warning for the
injudicious, that needs no additional emphasis from me. But do not turn
aside and skip the paragraph because it has _a moral_!

A well-known Temperance lecturer and social reformer from Shebogan
Falls, Arizona, who was stopping at the house, was suddenly taken
violently sick, and showed unmistakable signs of suffering from
delirium tremens. The gentleman had then been in the hotel for
twenty-four hours and he was known to have touched no liquor. A search
of his room and grip revealed no intoxicants. The doctors called in
were positive about the symptoms, and yet the man’s breath contained
no hint of alcohol. The stomach pump afforded no more confirmation.
But he was in the throes of delirium tremens, nevertheless, and the
doctors were perplexed. All sorts of elaborate theories of hereditary
influences were proposed and discussed, and the man’s history and
ancestry were looked up. Suddenly he recovered, and an explanation was
soon forthcoming.

A well thumbed and dismantled copy of the ARENA magazine was discovered
under his bed.


Those who are interested in the diffusion of good literature among
all classes in America, should make themselves acquainted with the
publications of Thomas B. Mosher, of Portland, Me. A good book in
his list to put upon the shelf, to begin with, is the beautifully
bound volume of the Bibelot for 1895. In making a collection of
belles-lettres, the authors and books after all, who give most
pleasure, one provides a sure refuge always at hand for any sudden
invasion of the blues or ennui, and there is solace here for weightier
sorrows, too. For the brave idealists condemned to struggle in this
alien world, who can still unpack their minds of all sordid sorrows and
bitterness and carry merry and piping hearts to Arcady, are surely not
lacking in a profound philosophy--and the philosophy which includes
the life of the philosopher is rare indeed.

It is for this reason that the poets and fantastists are closer to
our moods through the changing years than all other writers. When the
historians, philosophers and social prophets and the rest find us
indifferent and content to let the world slide, when great names and
ideals no longer stir or move us, when experience has disenchanted
us with life and humanity, and so stript history and philosophy and
religion of all significance, when all our enthusiasms are gone, love
is an exchange of domestic services for the sake of economy, and
friendship is a long laid ghost of youth--then we can recur again
and again to the authors who turn our chimney corner into that wider
dominion of freedom the human spirit can never quite relinquish in its
dreams. Fine spun logic and all the metaphysics of the ages cannot
bring us back to faith and hope and charity then; but these few blessed
spirits who found their way to Arcady occasionally, give us a spell of
oblivion, if not much philosophy, and often a pinch of fortitude for
our return to the doom of disenchantment.

The republic of beauty is not an important territory or marked very
clearly on the current maps of Democracy. But there are still some
who cherish the ancient boon of poetry and beauty, and such will
appreciate a volume like “The Bibelot,” filled with the literature that
blows through our foetid life like God’s wind through a hospital. It
is one of the few books that cannot fail to hit the taste of any real
book lover. It contains selections from William Blake, James Thomson,
Francois Villon, a discourse of Walter Pater’s on Marcus Aurelius,
Fragments from Sappho, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, the Pathos of
the Rose in Poetry, extracts from Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul,” Robert
Louis Stevenson’s “A Lodging for the Night: A Story of Villon,” and
other masterpieces of literature. It is a priceless book for the poor
student, for these selections have been culled from scarce editions and
sources not generally accessible.

If our young readers will read the Bibelot, they may acquire the sense
of beauty and power of discrimination, and the taste for the best in
literature, old and new. They will then become callous to the tawdry
domestic twaddle that has been circulated as “literature” in the
respectable domestic periodicals, for the past two decades, in this
country, and will learn to distinguish genuine literature from mere
merchandise. Perhaps then it will be possible for sincere and earnest
work to find currency in books in America, as it has not been since the
popular picture periodicals took the place of books in our breakneck
economy.


Anthony Hope is one of the few authors of the day honest enough to
confess that he reads very little. He is too busy writing. This is one
of the evils of the age. The writers outnumber the readers. Every man
or woman who takes to writing is a reader lost, for writers almost
invariably only read and reread their own works. But all authors are
not as candid as Anthony Hope.


That volume of lectures on “The Art of Making a Newspaper,” which all
“the bright young men” in American journalism have been studying, is
marred with the omission of an important historical matter. This is
the origin and career of Mr. Dana’s “office cat.” Charles A. Dana is
the most picturesque personality in contemporary American public life.
He is more definitely in the popular imagination of this generation
than any man engaged in literature proper, and so every characteristic
detail and whimsy of the “Sun’s” school of journalism should be
recorded for the benefit of posterity. The “office cat” has played
a great part in the “Sun’s” art and artifice, and its omission is a
national catastrophe.

                                                  HABAKKUK HIGGINBOTHAM.



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.



Economists and Politicians


Talk and write of the waste of society and the waste of health and the
waste of luxury and poverty. But they never remark upon the equally
disastrous and wanton

WASTE OF WIT

Which has for so long been the result of old-fogyism and timorous
commercialism in periodical Literature. If Statistics could be compiled
of the fine wits and humorists and writers of individual talents and
power whose brains and productions are spoiled or altogether suppressed
under the old regime of the Popular Literature for the weak minded they
would be appalling. There is a ruthless waste of good wit in America,
in behalf of good dullness.

THE FLY LEAF aims to stem this tide of wasted wit. There are ever so
many clever writers in America, though they are seldom heard of. These
Younger Spirits are the backbone of THE FLY LEAF, which will present
the Best and most Individual Literature of the Day--as much as can be
squeezed into a Bibelot.

It is not quantity but quality we seek to provide. THE FLY LEAF
interests all cultivated Independent minds, which can recognize “a good
thing” at sight. It appeals to Thoughtful and Bookish People, and it
will never pander to the Mob that buys its Literature by weight.

Every issue is the most amusing and Unexpected little Bundle of
Surprises. It is the only Periodical in America that has Wit to waste.
Others have more Cash but no Wit.

  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.

  Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Fly Leaf, No. 5, Vol. 1, April 1896" ***

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