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Title: The Philistine: a periodical of protest (Vol. I, No. 5, October 1895)
Author: Various
Language: English
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OF PROTEST (VOL. I, NO. 5, OCTOBER 1895) ***
The Philistine
A Periodical of Protest.
_Would to God my name were not so terrible
to the enemy as it is._—HENRY VIII.
[Illustration: No. Five.]
Printed Every Little While
for The Society of The Philistines
and Published by
Them Monthly. Subscription,
One Dollar Yearly
Single Copies, 10 Cents.
October, 1895.
_SPECIAL._
The Bibelot for 1895, complete in the original wrappers, uncut, is now
supplied on full paid subscriptions only, at 75 cents net.
On completion of Volume I in December the price will be $1.00 net in
wrappers, and $1.50 net in covers. INVARIABLY POSTPAID.
Covers for Volume I ready in November. These will be in old style boards,
in keeping with the artistic make-up of THE BIBELOT, and are supplied at
30 cents, postpaid. _End papers and Title-page are included_, whereby the
local binder can case up the volume at about the cost of postage were it,
as is usual, returned to the publisher for binding.
Back Numbers are 10 cents each, subject to further advance as the edition
decreases.
=Numbers Issued:=
_I._ _Lyrics from William Blake._
_II._ _Ballades from Francois Villon._
_III._ _Mediæval Latin Students’ Songs._
_IV._ _A Discourse of Marcus Aurelius._
_V._ _Fragments from Sappho._
_VI._ _Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets._
_VII._ _The Pathos of the Rose in Poetry._
_VIII._ _Lyrics from James Thomson (B. V.)_
_IX._ _Hand and Soul: D. G. Rosetti._
_X._ _A Book of Airs from Campion, (October.)_
THOMAS B. MOSHER, Publisher,
Portland, Maine.
_LITTLE JOURNEYS_
To the Homes of Good Men and Great.
_A series of literary studies published in monthly numbers, tastefully
printed on hand-made paper, with attractive title-page._
By ELBERT HUBBARD
The publishers announce that Little Journeys will be issued monthly and
that each number will treat of recent visits made by Mr. Elbert Hubbard
to the homes and haunts of various eminent persons. The subjects for the
first twelve numbers have been arranged as follows:
1. George Eliot
2. Thomas Carlyle
3. John Ruskin
4. W. E. Gladstone
5. J. M. W. Turner
6. Jonathan Swift
7. Victor Hugo
8. Wm. Wordsworth
9. W. M. Thackeray
10. Charles Dickens
11. Oliver Goldsmith
12. Shakespeare
_LITTLE JOURNEYS: Published Monthly, 50 cents a year. Single copies, 5
cents, postage paid._
Published by G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS,
27 and 29 West 23d Street, New York.
24 Bedford Street, Strand, London.
AT THIS TIME THE PROPRIETORS OF THE ROYCROFT PRINTING SHOP, at East
Aurora, New York, announce the publication about Christmas time of an
exquisite edition of the JOURNAL OF KOHELETH, otherwise the Book of
Ecclesiastes, reparagraphed.
With a bit of an introduction by Mr. Elbert Hubbard, whimsical, perhaps,
but sincere, wherein the rich quality of the text is commended to those
over thirty, and under: with explanations, always reverent, that may be
useful.
=This book, printed by hand on Dickinson’s hand made paper, will mark
an era in the art of printing in America. The edition, limited to 750
copies, will be bound in flexible Japan vellum, wrapped and boxed. Each
book numbered, and signed by the editor.=
Yes, do you send me a book for my birthday. Not a bargain book, bought
from a haberdasher, but a beautiful book, a book to caress—peculiar,
distinctive and individual: a book that hath first caught your eye and
then pleased your fancy, written by an author with a tender whim—all
right out of his heart. We will read it together in the gloaming, and
when the gathering dusk doth blur the page we’ll sit with hearts too full
for speech and think it over.—DOROTHY WORDSWORTH TO COLERIDGE.
THE PHILISTINE.
Edited by H. P. TABER.
THE ROYCROFT PRINTING SHOP,
East Aurora, New York,
Publishers.
THE PHILISTINE is published monthly at $1 a year, 10 cents a single
copy. Subscriptions may be left with newsdealers or sent direct to the
publishers. The trade supplied by the AMERICAN NEWS COMPANY and its
branches. Foreign agencies, BRENTANO’S, 37 Avenue de l’Opera, Paris; G.
P. PUTNAM’S SONS, 24 Bedford street, Strand, London.
Business communications should be addressed to THE PHILISTINE, East
Aurora, New York. Matter intended for publication may be sent to the same
address or to Box 6, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
_Entered at the Postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as
mail matter of the second class._
_COPYRIGHT, 1895, by H. P. Taber._
* * * * *
=The Book Shop=, Rare Books, Garfield Building, Bond street, Cleveland,
Ohio.
* * * * *
=George P. Humphrey=, Old Books, Catalogues issued, 25 Exchange street,
Rochester, N. Y.
THE PHILISTINE.
NO. 5. October, 1895. VOL. 1.
RHADAMANTHINA IVRA.
_Castigat auditque dolos subigitque fateri._
It was the custom of the Roman _Prætor Urbanus_ when entering upon his
duties to post up in plain view of the public a brief exposition of the
principles which were to guide him in passing judgment during his year of
office. It seems fit that the PHILISTINE should likewise issue its own
EDICTVM PERPETVVM setting forth the scope and ultimate purpose of such
literary criticisms as may appear from time to time in its pages.
It is offenders only who are to be deemed worthy of Reviews in these
columns and as the worst possible offence of which they can be guilty,
since it includes all specific or lesser faults, is the bare fact of
their existence in type, it will be our aim to hold up to the merited
scorn of an outraged world the responsible progenitors of such unblessed
offspring, the Publisher, and his partner in sin, the Author of the book.
In thus reversing that order in criminality which has hitherto obtained
in the assizes of criticism we are moved by the consideration among
others: the writing of any book, good or bad, is a matter of concern
to its author alone so long as it remains in manuscript. Its merits or
demerits have alike no existence to the public; however shameless its
morals, feeble its plot or intolerable its dullness these are all equally
powerless for mischief so long as it has not been put into type and
launched upon a much suffering, helpless world. Then its career of evil
begins. For this the Publisher is solely responsible; he and he alone is
able to remedy the abuses which have long been calling out to heaven for
suppression, by setting up some sort of standard as to the minimum of
those defects which shall bar any manuscript whatever from his favorable
consideration. What this minimum ought to be we shall take pleasure in
enlightening him from time to time in these pages.
It may be urged that the weapon of scorn has been used and abused time
out of mind; we reply that the objector is in error in one essential.
The dart is an old one indeed, but its point has been blunted, not in
the fattening tissues of this chief offender but on the scantily clad
bones of his weaker accomplice, the much-abused author. In issuing an
illegitimate book the Author is the victim of the sweetest and most
pathetic fallacy known to men: _he believes his work is good_; while the
publisher knows better. One is animated by love and nature, the other
has only a lust for dollars. In such offenses as we are discussing, no
less than in certain others needing no more explicit designation, it is
not the deed itself but its exposure which calls forth the protests of a
PHILISTINE public. Those Little Sisters in Sin, _A Superfluous Woman_ and
_Bessie Costrell_ might have faded to oblivion in their swaddling clothes
had no publisher been found to expose them to daylight.
It will be understood therefore that our column of Reviews exists, not
to aid struggling authors or enterprising publishers to launch their
craft upon the already crowded ocean of Literature, but as the Pillory
where manifest culprits are exposed to the jibes of the crowd, to the end
that others who are meditating like deeds may be warned by such penalty
to desist. Nor need the idle stocks ever yawn in emptiness so long as
upon his right hand and his left a man beholds such a richness of backs
itching for the lash.
And since we have promised that instruction shall go hand in hand with
castigation we will not close until we have pointed out for the future
guidance of those who may wish to avoid one at least of the many by-paths
of reprobation, that in any novel we regard the existence of page Four
Hundred of readable type as confession on the part of both Publisher and
Author that neither of them has yet learned the foremost and greatest of
the arts of their trade—the art to blot.
_De confessis sicuti de manifestis—supplicium sumendum est._
A TRINITY OF OFFENDERS.
1. THE LAND OF THE SUN, _a third rate guide-book to Mexico, and
incidentally a Touter for one of its Railways_; by Christian
Reid, a woman who once wrote a good novel, superfluously
illustrated, 12mo. cloth, pp. 355. D. Appleton & Co., N. Y.,
$1.75.
2. LOVE IN IDLENESS, by F. Marion Crawford, author of ETC.,
_etc._, & etc., absurdly illustrated, crown 8vo., cloth,
gilt-edge, pp. 218. Macmillan & Co., N. Y., $2.00.
3. ADVICE TO LITERARY ASPIRANTS—_One Hundred Ways to Become
Famous for One Dollar_, by Mr. Arthur Lewis, illustrated,
12mo., pp. 247. Dodd, Rott & Co., N. Y., $1.00.
1. We are but too familiar, all of us, with the devices of the
quack-medicine advertiser, his trick of getting us to read his puff in
spite of ourselves. It is an old yet still successful dodge. The first
sentence in a column of the morning paper promises a little ten minute
romance. As we proceed our interest quickens. We inadvertently glance
to the end to learn whether the hero is destined to the rope or the
heroine reserved for the altar. There stands forth the mark of the Beast,
“_Butcher’s Bilious Bouncer_, sure cure for the Liver, price ten cents.”
According as nature has allied us to Democritus or to Archilochus we
laugh or swear at our gullibility while we turn to some other item, but
if fair-minded men we do not swear at the editor, for we know that he
lives by letting for hire his numberless columns with no restriction on
his advertisers save that their matter does not exclude his paper from
the United States Mail.
It is far different, however, when trusting in an author’s name or at
least in the imprint of a publisher of high standing, a man takes up a
book which he has bought in the expectation of finding it a readable or
at all events a genuine novel, but soon discovers it to be a string of
sausages, whose thin membrane of such romance as it does afford exists
merely to encase a solid stuffing of railroad advertisements, “scenic
route” business and such secondhand truck. Yet of such is the _Land of
the Sun_. Before reading it myself I tendered it to a friend in answer
to his request for the latest novel. A few days after, he returned it
saying, “It opens more like an advertisement of the Bullseye Parlor Car
Company.”
Now it so happens that the people who made the book are also publishers
of guide-books and among these of a guide-book to Mexico, _eo nomine_,
it had been fitter and more worthy their own high standing had they not
stooped to palm off such a farrago upon a man whose thoughts at the time
were not how to get to Mexico nor what could be seen if he went there,
but simply the means of beguiling an evening, lolling at ease in his
smoking jacket.
As to the lady who was once equal to writing _The Land of the Sky_, one
feels sorrow at her fall, and cannot help wondering if sin of this sort
yields her either profit or pleasure.
2. If a reader were asked to single out some one publisher whose name
should be guarantee that in buying a book one would get fair equivalent
for his money, not in paper and ink alone, but in the stuff of its ideas,
he would not often go amiss were he to name Macmillans. It is with double
pain therefore that he resents being led astray into paying Two Dollars
for such a trifling effusion as _Love in Idleness_. He is hurt not only
by the one and one-half dollars lost in excess of any just valuation of
the book, but also and perhaps by a less reparable loss of the confidence
long deserved by the class of Macmillan publications. In short he feels
that both publisher and writer have conspired to cinch him and the rest
of the reading public, and here, too, the heavier share of the reproach
must fall upon the man. If Mr. Marion Crawford, pluming himself upon
such past achievements as _Mr. Isaacs_, chooses to value the weakling of
his decadence at such extravagant figures that it must be listed at Two
Dollars if it is to appear in decent type, there is surely no need that
his accomplice be Macmillan. Doubtless there be publishers whose horns
would be exalted were Crawford’s name to shine upon their title pages,
but Macmillan is not of such cattle; he stands among the very topmost
already, wherefore he should be above impostures.
The book is freely illustrated, but the pictures have nothing to do with
the persons and incidents of the story.
3. As the editor of the Only Real Sure-Enough _Chip-Munk_ so truthfully
points out in his every issue, man is an imitative animal. But whether
it is equally true that there are hundreds and hundreds of imitation
chip-munks, all made like those calico cats that do duty as bric-a-brac,
I cannot say. Yet the undisputed statement, made in such a solemn way,
that man is imitative, must stand.
On ascending a certain beautiful little bay along the coast of Maine, the
traveller is confronted by the startling legend, painted on the face of
a great palisade: _This is Belfast, the Home of Gringo’s Vermifuge—One
Hundred Doses for One Dollar_.
And to-day at Franklin, Ohio, as the train stops at the water tank one
sees in the pasture opposite, an immense bill board, and on the board in
gigantic letters are the words: _This is Franklin, the Home of Jingo’s
Advice to Authors—One Hundred Places to sell Manuscript, One Dollar_.
That a place is needed to sell manuscript I will admit—in fact I am
looking for such a place, but I only require _one_ place, not a hundred.
So I am suspicious of Mr. Jingo: I think that he offers just ninety-nine
times more than is meet, and so I turn to Mr. Arthur Lewis of Albany,
who has in the press a book with a title suspiciously like the Ohio
publication. It is called _Advice to Literary Aspirants—One Hundred Ways
to Become Famous for One Dollar_. Advance sheets of this work show that
the author has expended considerable care on it. He marshals statistics
to show that only one out of 97,621 of the men who write books ever
secure even a tuppence worth of fame. In fact he proves that fame and
good writing have no more to do with each other than Art and Truth,
Virtue and Profession, Marriage and Constancy. He therefore concludes
that the Literary Aspirant should secure his Fame first and launch his
Literature afterward, and in this way take the tide at its flood and move
on to fortune. To this end the gifted author gives one hundred ways of
securing fame. He starts with Homicide and runs through to Arson and
Bridge Jumping, giving incidentally fourteen different kinds of Scandal
and how to bring it about.
In my own mind I have always made a distinction between illustrious men,
famous men and notorious men, but Mr. Lewis avers that in our day and
generation such fine shades are all obliterated by the bright iridescence
of the standard dollar. An author, he says, succeeds only as his books
sell, and if his name is on the lips of rumor, women especially will
besiege the stores and demand his tomes.
Now we must admit that the fine sophistry that Mr. Lewis brings to bear
is interesting, but is it Art? Further than this, does it fill a vacuum
in the great economic cosmos of Letters? I do not think that it does,
and therefore do not hesitate to flatly give it as my opinion that while
the author is sincere, the publishers are moved by no other motive than
to secure the money of ambitious young men and women, having first
victimized Mr. Lewis for the cost of plates and the first edition. That
the work, like all skillful sophistry, is inspiring to the young, there
is no doubt, but the final effect of the book on society I believe will
be damaging, and therefore I cannot conscientiously recommend it.
A JOURNALISTIC NOTE.
Our valued co-worker in the vineyard, the Rev. George H. Hepworth, has
begun to cast his Sunday _Herald_ sermons in the first person singular
and affix his distinguished name thereto. If this will make these sermons
no better it will at least make them no worse.
As long-time admirers of these admirable Sabbath sermocinations THE
PHILISTINE welcomes this innovation. And we think we know the wherefore
of it. The Rev. Mr. Hepworth’s name attached to an article denunciatory
of sin will have a tendency to strike terror into the heart of Beelzebub,
and it was for this reason, no doubt, that Mr. Bennett directed Brother
Hepworth to take the field in person.
Unquestionably this will add a new and livelier interest to the church.
Each combatant knows exactly whom he is fighting. It is now Hepworth
against Satan with a fair field and no favor. We have no hesitancy
in saying that so far as Mr. Hepworth is concerned there will be no
_Valkyrie_ business. Moreover there is no desire to shirk responsibility.
What he has to say he will say fearlessly over his own signature, and if
those against whom these ecclesiastical thunderbolts are launched do not
like them they know what they can do. Wot t’ell!
ROBERT W. CRISWELL.
“_De mortuis nil nisi bonum._”
“Speak no evil of the dead:”
Standard story that of Cain;
Sence his vitle spark has fled,
Dast a soul of him complain?
Did his brother mortle harm,
Lied about the thing, to God;
His’n the fust abandoned farm;
Skipped to Canady or Nod.
Like some latter-day ex-gent,
Sorry—for his punishment.
Judas did a traitor’s deed,
’Scuse, I beg, the mention here,
Bein’ his life has gone to seed
(Scattered far and wide, I fear),
Of him may no ill be sayed,
Though this miscreant for gain
The one perfec’ Man betrayed
To be crucified and slain:
Went and killed hisself withal—
After readin’ Ingersoll.
Stay! That max’m mayn’t be true;
In old heathen Rome ’twas bred;
Livin’ men should have in view
What’s the status of ’em dead.
Conduc’ stands—time don’t forswear’t—
Even to a lord’s disgrace,
When with Cain and Judas Scairt
He has went ter his own place.
Cains and Judases, don’t guess
Death will make you a success.
L. S. GOODWIN.
SIDE TALKS WITH THE PHILISTINES: BEING SUNDRY BITS OF WISDOM WHICH HAVE
BEEN HERETOFORE SECRETED, AND ARE NOW SET FORTH IN PRINT.
If THE PHILISTINE disturbs placid self-complacency anywhere, as one or
two of its critics intimate, it is sorry, for there is no such happiness
attainable anywhere this side of Nirvana as its serene contemplation of
the charms of self which Narcissus and some more modern fakirs exemplify;
and the magazine of to-day is its gospel. But so good a Philistine as
Horace Greeley is my authority for believing that the still pool in which
self-love sees the reflection it feeds upon is a breeder of death, not
life, and effervescence is the sworn foe of the morbid. Not the things
we do that we ought not to do, but the things left undone that we ought
to do are the primary count leading up to the confession that “there
is no health in us.” The other follows. Stagnation and the miasma of
self-consciousness co-exist and are not to be separated. Wherefore,
fellow-egoists, let us get a gait on.
* * * * *
I like the broad flourish with which some imaginative writers connect
widely separated events in a stroke of the pen and omit all that lies
between as mere incident. It seems to me a proof of the theory put
forward by my good friend Elbert Hubbard that genius is a feminine
element of character—in man or woman. For example, I find this statement
in the latest of the _Little Journeys_: “Moses was sent adrift, but the
tide carried him into power.” I didn’t know just what that meant till I
recalled the discovery of the bulrush cradle. A less intuitive writer
wouldn’t have bridged eighty years in that summary way. He might have
hinted at Moses’s police court record—told how he killed an Egyptian for
calling him a son of a Populist or something and skun out for half a
lifetime and yet became a Prince of Egypt and spent forty years or so at
court before he took the road with the forefathers of Brickmaker Tourgee.
But to connect the condensed milk baby in the market basket on the Nile
with the law-giver of Israel in one movement, as the music people say,
is a pretty long span and suggests the liberty David Copperfield takes
with his own biography in the best book but one written by the subject
of the latest _Little Journey_. “I was born:” he says—and all else is
irrelevant. I take it that Mr. Hubbard agrees with John Boyle O’Reilly
that “the world was made when a man was born.” The feminine element
of genius which Mr. Hubbard tells us makes poets is manifest in that
formula. If the author of the _Journeys_ will permit, I would suggest
that the same mother instinct that crops out there is manifested in
the grasp of a life in the compass of a sentence which puzzled me at
the first. To be born and to die is the record of existence, to which
all else is tributary; and the pangs of birth and death thrill all the
poet-strains. Only the tragedy that sweeps along the strings lives to
echo in human hearts. It is the deathless minor chord that distinguishes
the melody of true poetry from the dancing cadences of rhyme in all
literature. The undertone is the soul of all song, in verse or in the
unmeasured periods of epic prose.
* * * * *
Mention of Moses recalls the perhaps unique fact that a priest of the
most austere of churches rolled off a tongue, musical with brogue, in
his newspaper sanctum—for he is a priest of the pen too—this romantic
version of the basket story which I have never seen anywhere but in his
paper—then in the process of make-up:
On Egypt’s banks, convaynient to the Nile,
Great Pharaoh’s daughter went to bathe in shtyle,
And shtooping down, as everyone supposes
To scratch her shin, she shpied the infant Moses:
Then turning to her maids, in accents wild
Cried: “Tare an’ ’ouns, girls, which o’ yes owns the chyild?”
* * * * *
I observe that the editor of the _Arena_ is about to make a contract with
the Michigan Wheel Company of Lansing, Michigan, for large quantities
of its product to give as prizes to new contributors only, the old ones
being already well supplied.
* * * * *
The following advertisement is clipped from one of the October magazines:
MANUSCRIPT RECORD.
A handsome method for keeping track of manuscripts. Contains
space for recording one hundred manuscripts, showing title,
where sent, number of words, when returned or accepted, when
paid for and amount, when published, postage account, etc. Each
page a complete history of one manuscript, from the time it is
first sent out, until published and paid for. Price, $1.25.
Sent postpaid to any address on receipt of price.
THE BOHEMIAN PUBLISHING CO.,
Pike Building, Cincinnati, O.
I have sent for this book, as it is my intention to write one hundred
manuscripts, and I desire to keep track of them until published and paid
for. I have therefore ordered the book bound in cast iron.
* * * * *
In a recent number of _Modern Art_ protest is filed against the editor of
the _Chip-Munk_ continuing to ask that startling question “Do You Keep
a Dog?” In God’s name, what right have the Chicago Decadents to thus
pry into our private affairs? Is it not bad enough when the _Chip-Munk_
advises us to drink Guzzle’s beer and use Culby’s soap without being
interrogated as to what we “keep?”
* * * * *
Among the revivals which occur now and then in everything is a discussion
of an old “science” of reading characters by the hair. I don’t know much
about it, but from what I have heard I believe a pair of old she-bears
set back the theory for a few centuries when they chewed up the small
boys that poked fun at Elijah. The old man would be rated as having
no character, according to these “readers,” for he had no hair, but
Providence and the early Ursulines vindicated him.
* * * * *
A new woman who has been reading _God’s Fool_ laid it down at the last
chapter with a long sigh. “What do you think of it,” I asked. “It is
dramatic,” she said, “terribly dramatic at the end,” and then added,
after a pause, “I wonder what the reading of the next generation will
be like. We have reached a force and directness of narration that seems
to me to be pretty near the limit of possibility. What will we have
next?” “What do you think?” I asked. “I think,” she said, “we will have
a reaction. We will take in more and give out less. We are near one of
the great periods of what has been called revelation in the past. Our
literature is shallow but perfect, relatively, in expression. Our art is
the same throughout. Our politics are personal. Our religion is liberal,
and loose in the joints. Our social life is insincere and imitative.
Our lives have nothing in them to stir the deeps. There will be a
reaction. The finesse of expression will be set aside for the tremendous
earnestness that accompanies great events and prints their lessons on
receptive minds. A break-up in Europe it may be, or some other social
convulsion, that will change the tide. We are pretty near at the top of
the flood now.” That’s the new woman’s view. I wonder how near she’s
right?
* * * * *
Three hundred and twenty-seven thousand of my friends have individually
sent to me a recent number of my Philadelphia contemporary, _Footlights_,
in which it refers to THE PHILISTINE variously as a crow, a dicky bird
and “a birdie of the jackass breed.” I am glad to be catalogued in this
ornithological manner, and my friends may accept the listing as they
please. As for myself, I’d rather be a good honest wild ass of the desert
with long fuzzy ears than a poor imitation bird-of-paradise—stuffed by
one hundred and seventeen geniuses.
* * * * *
A matter of architecture has been involved in the social problem which
the _Arena_ has ever with it—like a stutter or a beer breath. According
to an alleged novel recently published by the Arena Company and called
_Edith, a Story of Chinatown_, a feature of the tabooed district of Los
Angeles, California, is a bay window projection on the houses devoted
to vice, wherein beauty spreads lures for the eyes of passers-by. The
heroine of this lovely romance is one of these persons, sinned against in
the prologue and sinning in the present, but discovered by a miraculous
New York reporter on a vacation and returned to her broken-hearted
parents and a good life. A benediction, with a remote hint of the
Lohengrin march, ends the story. The _Arena_ gives two pages to a review
of the book, which is very kind of the publisher, and tells us therein
that a description of Alameda street and of Dupont street, San Francisco,
which is worse, is its purpose. The _Arena_ can be depended on for a full
stock of “terrible examples.”
* * * * *
The _Literary Digest_ is falling into line admirably. Recently it printed
a translation from some French source from which I clip the following:
A Parisian literary man has been complaining that authors are
not represented at international expositions in the same sense
as are painters and sculptors. The complaint has provoked
sarcastic comment from M. Maurice Goncourt, who, in _Charivari_
(Paris), suggests that, since an exhibition of their works
would not be sufficiently striking, the authors themselves
should be put on show in cages!
“All the writers who are at present the incontestable masters
of romance and journalism will transport, during the period
of the Exposition, their working rooms to a section specially
provided for them.
“The public will see them there as they really are at home,
surrounded with their furniture, their books, all their
accessories, and in working costume.
“From such an hour to such an hour—as at home—they will work on
their articles, poems, or novels.
“That would draw a crowd; that would be truly interesting!
“They could be looked at through a sheet of glass or a
lattice—silently, so as not to interfere with their inspiration.
“The administration could even put up signs like this:
PLEASE THROW NOTHING TO THE POETS,
or—more particularly for the pretty visitors:
DON’T EXCITE THE PSYCHOLOGISTS.
All this sounds much as though it had been written by the keeper of _The
Literary Shop_, but I don’t believe it was. Supposing, however, such an
exhibit were held at Atlanta with the Fair now in progress. Imagine Mr.
Gilder and James Knapp Reeve, Mr. Le Gallienne and Laura Jean Libbey,
Count Tolstoi and Mrs. Mary Jane Holmes, each in his or her own coop
like a Leghorn chicken! Imagine Colonel S. S. McClure (Limited) with his
Menagerie of Trained Thoroughbreds, each one of them exhibiting by his
emaciation the horrible results of syndicate writing! Imagine Cy Warman
pawing madly at the bars of his cage trying to tell Sweet Marie about
the secret in his heart! Then imagine Little Tin God of Philadelphia,
cuddled up in his basket, writing his masterpiece, _How to Feed a Sick
Kitten!_ To them then would enter Major John Boyd Thacher, the pride and
joy of the Albany Democracy, and judge equally both the just and the
unjust. It’s a great idea.
* * * * *
One of my correspondents tells me that “the editor of the _Lark_ uses
execrable perfume on his note paper.” This item is for the future
reference of Mr. Burgess when he writes about his literary passions.
* * * * *
Several solemn newspapers have taken seriously to the extent of half a
column or so the proposal of a San Francisco publishing house to “bring
out good literature in a cheap form,” which sounds much like the advance
agent talk of most publishing houses. It isn’t a joke, to be sure, but a
good deal depends on what is meant by “good literature.” Thundering in
the prologue is not a novelty, but there may be a storm coming for all
that.
* * * * *
I note that the brilliant Bok has gone to writing proverbs. Here is one
culled at random from “A Handful of Laconics,” printed under his honored
signature in his September output:
It is singular and yet a fact that what we are most loath
to believe possessed by others is what we are incapable of
ourselves.
It is my wish to call the particular attention of my readers to
this nugget. From a literary and philosophic standpoint literature
contains nothing like it. Examine Rochefoucauld, Montaigne,
Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger or Solomon, and you
will not find its fellow. Read it again, and read it slowly:
“It-is-singular-yet-a-fact-that-what-we-are-most-loath-to-believe-
possessed-by-others-is-what-we-are-incapable-of-ourselves.”
This is undoubtedly the finest thing in the language and a reward of
one million dollars will be paid to any PHILISTINE who will furnish the
solution. There is no bar against reading it backwards. It reads a little
better backwards than forwards, but I do not think that is it.
* * * * *
I desire to record a discovery. I found a magazine the other day with the
advertising pages uncut.
* * * * *
I doubt if Bliss Carman has had a more enthusiastic admirer than I. When
his _Vagabondia_ appeared I sent a copy to Her, which was the greatest
compliment I could pay the book. In the magazines, notably in _Town
Topics_, he has printed verses that were well worth preserving as some
of the best of the decade. In the great mass, however, which he has
published, there have been lines which nobody on earth could understand.
They were worse than Stephen Crane’s, for he at least has a vague idea
somewhere, though he rarely does us the favor to express it in a seemly
manner. Now I want to protest, not only against Mr. Carman, but against
_Life_, which gave us _The Whale and the Sprat_ which Mr. Carman wrote
recently. Here are two of the stanzas:
My dear Mr. Sprat,
I really am grat-
Ified at your offer.
So down they both sat.
Said the Sprat to the Whale,
I admire your tail;
I should think it would be
Of great use in a gale.
How Mr. Metcalfe ever allowed such drivel to get into his columns I
cannot understand. Possibly while he was in Japan the compositor set the
stuff in the waste basket instead of that on the copy hook.
* * * * *
_Vogue_ asserts that “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” is the
ninth commandment. On information and belief, no doubt.
* * * * *
Because Mr. Rockefeller sneers at Mr. Pullman for giving but a paltry
hundred thousand for a church at Albion, Orleans County, New York, Mr.
Pullman retorts that Rockefeller is only a malmsey-nosed varlet anyway,
whose grease his axles are not worthy to unloose. I am not quite ready to
take George M. into the Philistinic fold, but he is surely coming my way.
* * * * *
I rejoice to find a thoughtful article by Richard Burton on the
“Renascence of Old English Expression” in the current _Forum_—and not
so much for what is in the article in detail as for its recognition of
the main fact that there is something besides Bunthornism in the harking
back to the simple dignity of early English. Our author, it will be
noted, has little use for the overflowing maimed vowels of Normanesque
“Renaissance.” Plain Latin renascence is good enough in a plea for the
Saxon. But it is odd if so simple a thing as a rising from death into new
life has no Saxon equivalent. Why not “re birth!”
* * * * *
Since the Mule-Spinners at Cohoes and Fall River went out on a strike I
understand that subscriptions to _The Writer_ have fallen off one-third.
* * * * *
Neith Boyce is a poet who never beats the brush piles of thought without
starting good game. She writes good honest verse and she also writes
“Book Notes and News” and other things for the _New Cycle_. The _New
Cycle_, by the way, is not published by the Pope Manufacturing Company as
one might suppose, but it is a monthly magazine “devoted to Education,
Social Economics, Literature and Art.” I once edited a magazine devoted
to Education, but the subject proved too large for the brainful syndicate
that employed me; I have also written a book on Art; and once, having
nothing to do, I lectured for a space on Social Economics, but God help
me! I never in a small monthly magazine attempted to tell all about
Education, Social Economics, Literature _and_ Art.
But the _New Cycle_ is interesting, and if its various departments were
as well cared for as its Book Notes and News it would be a greater
success than it is. Neith Boyce has an unfailing insight and her touch is
as light and as sure as my own; and moreover there is a tang to her wit
that all bookish Philistines might well cultivate. In classic lore I have
always looked up to Miss Boyce as the Court of last Appeal, but is it not
possible that Minerva sometimes nods? Read this:
“An attraction of the eminently respectable _Harper’s Weekly_
will be a series of papers called ‘A Houseboat on the Styx’
by Mr. Bangs of Yonkers. Nothing is sacred to this funny man.
Not content with taking his fling at the defunct majesty of
Napoleon he now proposes to take Pluto by the beard and make
copy of the pale shadows that throng the Stygian shores.”
It may be so, but I did not know that Pluto had whiskers. And how does
Miss Boyce dispose of the legend concerning the smooth face and giddy
ways of old Mr. Pluto when he took to wife the young and blooming
Persephone? Charon wears a Vandyke as we well know; while Mephisto is
usually represented as clean-shaved or at best a moustache and goatee;
but hereafter I’ll never think of Pluto without calling up in mind Mr.
Peffer of Kansas. Go to, Fair Lady! think you because barber shops are
closed in York State on Sundays that they are shut in Hades all the week?
Next!
* * * * *
A lecturer on Egypt, telling the natives of Buffalo, N. Y., about the
marvels in stone built on that strip of mud, illustrated the proportions
of the Nile Valley by saying “It it eleven hundred miles long in Egypt
proper and seven miles wide for most of its length. If the city of
Buffalo were laid crosswise in the valley, it would bisect the kingdom.”
And a Rochester man who had strayed into the fold was mean enough to
add: “And if Buffalo was there, that’s the way it would lie—cross-ways.”
That’s the way they talk in Rochester.
* * * * *
I quote this paragraph from _Alice_ and respectfully refer it to the
editor of _Mlle New York_ with the hope that he can see the point as
plainly as he sees most things:
All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a
telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera
glass. At last he said, “You’re travelling the wrong way,” and
shut up the window and went away.
* * * * *
On his way to Montreal Mr. Hall Caine stopped off one day at East Aurora.
The Pink Tea given in his honor at the office of THE PHILISTINE was
largely attended by the farmers from both up the creek and down the
creek. In fact, as my old friend Billy McGlory used to say, “Ye cudden’t
see de street fer dust.”
* * * * *
The Boston _Commonwealth_ (what satire there is in that name!) is a nice
paper, but its editor has not smiled for forty years; and all of his
little writers carry so much culture that they are round-shouldered,
flat-chested, bow-legged and near-sighted. They belong to the large class
that invariably miss the point of things and use dignity for a mask to
hide their lack of a sense of fun. The _Commonwealth_ accuses us of
being envious of the _Chip-Munk_; of being violently prejudiced against
Mr. Cudahy’s book, and of speaking irreverently of Boston. Go to thou
old granny _Commonwealth_, why sit you like your grandsire carved in
alabaster and creep into the jaundice by being peevish?
* * * * *
The _Book-Peddler_ is doing great service in promotion of what passes
for literature in the paper and ink stores. I cannot but think what a
similar publication devoted to literature, not trade, could do to save
the valuable time of the reading public. Since Solomon’s time a good
many things have changed, but in one there is no improvement. “Of the
making of many books there is no end,” and that is a heap sadder than the
lamentation of Maud Muller and His Honor.
* * * * *
Concerning Mr. Grant Allen’s book and the manner in which its title has
been made the basis of several others more or less reminiscent, my most
valued correspondent writes me that the novelists are missing much by
not calling a story _The Woman Who Is Simply Dying To_. In my well known
philanthropic way I throw out this suggestion hoping that somebody may
make many dollars by the adoption of the title for a decadent tale.
* * * * *
The Vanastorbilts are really under great obligations to Mrs. Rorer’s
_Household News_ for the simple daily menus for poor folks which are a
feature. There’s nothing so cheap as good living—in a magazine. When
bread sticks and banana chutney and peaches and rice and cantaloupe
can be mowed away by a poor man before the seven o’clock whistle
blows no hard worker ought to lack muscle for his daily toil. We have
printed assurance of Mrs. Bellow that “These menus have been arranged
on a scientific plan, are thoroughly hygienic, and contain all that
is necessary for proper living.” It is luck after all that man does
not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
hygienic mouth aforesaid.
* * * * *
Messrs. Lo & Behold, publishers of works on moral pathology, Boston,
are making great efforts to club the _Arena_. I understand they propose
offering season tickets to museums of morbid anatomy as prizes.
* * * * *
I note a somewhat guarded statement by Dr. Swan M. Burnett denying
that he and his wife have separated or are undergoing that mutually
humiliating process. All there is of it, he says, is that her work keeps
her abroad and his keeps him in Washington. The doctor’s friends say,
however, that the doctor and the writist live apart and have done so for
years and that he is tired of being referred to as Mrs. Frances Hodgson
Burnett’s husband. I think more likely he objects to being identified at
the banks and elsewhere as the father of Little Lord Fauntleroy.
* * * * *
The _Pell Mell Gazette_ of last Saturday contains a cablegram from Mr.
Hall Caine, dated at East Aurora, N. Y., wherein the author of _The
Manxman_ reports that the prospect for next year’s crop of ginger is very
promising.
* * * * *
I suppose it’s all right for the publisher of _Munsey’s_ to tell how he
made that magazine jump from 20,000 to half a million copies a month
by shutting out middlemen and reaching the hungering and thirsting
public direct. That’s his cue. If the publisher didn’t blow his horn
who would? I opine, however, that the fish would sell without it, and
that the editor of _Munsey’s_ could tell them something a good deal more
interesting in the same space. What does the great public, with its
multitude of aims and desires, care how such an effect was accomplished?
All that could safely remain within the veil. It would be more to the
point if the editor or publisher of Mr. Bok’s collection of wax works
would tell by what miracle he got a circulation. It is easy in the other
case, regardless of the smart publisher. The time passed long ago when a
horse being led to water could be forced to drink. The public must have
wanted _Munsey’s_ when it was shut out by the middleman or they wouldn’t
have compelled the dealers to send for it, and that implies that there’s
something in it besides self-consciousness and the publisher’s tactical
brilliancy. But how on earth came the embodied ego and its sisters and
cousins and aunts to get a hearing anywhere? Is Ruth Ashmore, _alias_
Bab, at the bottom of it?
* * * * *
A certain gentleman of my acquaintance, having heard until he is sick of
it that it takes nine Taylors to make a man, continues to boldly assert
that it takes two Chatfields to make a Taylor.
* * * * *
When the PHILISTINE was started six months ago I had no idea that it
would now have half a million subscribers.
* * * * *
I am reminded by a Boston newspaper of the continued existence of a
belief that criticism of books and other things more or less remotely
connected with literature is largely a matter of prejudice and that the
imprints on title pages determine the authors’ fate. Yet the same article
goes on to quote the _Chip-Munk_ firm as proof that merit will win
sometimes in spite of such drawbacks. It seems to me the instance proves
too much.
* * * * *
And here, just at the last, I want to set down what I have just read
in a delightful book written by Katherine Cheever Meredith—Johanna
Staats—because it seems to fit one’s mood at this time of year. This is
it:
“Oh, I play with Miss Gray Blanket and I play with Fanny.”
“Fanny? The little girl?”
“Yes. After it’s dark, you know, I play with her. Then I talk
to her. She never answers. But I play she’s so tired she can’t.
Of course I can’t play _that_ when it’s light. For then I could
_see_ that she wasn’t there. But in the dark she _might_ be.”
“Exactly,” responded Poole abstractedly. He was thinking that
many men and women indulge in the same game. Sometimes with
their faith in each other; but more often, though, with their
creeds.
FANFARRONADE.
Let no man deem himself of Fate the King,
Or challenge Fortune with a voice defiant—
A tiny pebble in a shepherd’s sling
Once overthrew a proud and boastful giant.
CLARENCE URMY.
NOTHING BUT LEAVES.
It was one of those November days when the wind swoops down the mountain
sides, bringing an avalanche of leaves—disked oak leaves—and then leaving
them for a moment in the valley basin, gathers them in her mighty hands
and tosses them again almost to the mountain tops.
Chris found a sympathy in the dizzy, whirling, swirling leaves. His hopes
had withered so, and now a girl’s changeful hand had been as reckless
with him as was the wind with these: like wrath in death and envy
afterwards.
Poor Chris’s spiritual kingdom was suffering the nature of an
insurrection, for though he loved her he was too proud to tell her she
had misjudged him. The dissipation of his hopes now was tinged with
regret, just as the wanton winds seem to us ruthless as we remember when
these leaves were planes and green, not disked and brown.
Mockingly came the dance of leaves around his feet—each like a thing
alive—to beckon him here, there, to elude him, to laugh at him.
“It’s too hard to bear!” groaned Chris, between his teeth. “How could she
believe it! How could she!”
A flurry of hurrying, scurrying leaves swept past him, a company of
mocking, dancing leaves; from right and left they came, and scarce ten
steps before him they met and swirled up—up into a monstrous wraith with
beckoning hands. Chris’s conflict took form. “I’ll do it! I’ll do it!
I’ll show her! She’ll regret this day!” and he threw back his head and
with flashing eyes started forward with resolute steps.
A lost leaf wavered, dipped, paused, then with a timid wafture touched
his crisp curls.
His blood surged up, for it was like the caress of a loving hand.
“Oh no,” said Chris, “I may be wrong—I’ll tell her so;” and holding the
lost leaf very gently between his two hands he walked swiftly back.
HONOR EASTON.
[Illustration: A FLOWER FROM THE CENTURY PLANT.
BY CHARLES DINNEH GIVES’EM.
The Princess Stony-eye kept on saying nothing.]
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Philistine: a periodical of protest (Vol. I, No. 5, October 1895)" ***
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