POST- IMPRESSIONS 
 
POST -IMPRESSIONS 
 
 An Irresponsible Chronicle 
 
 BY ' 
 SIMEON STRUNSKY 
 
 Author of "The Patient Observer," "Through 
 the Outlooking Glass," etc. 
 
 1 -J O 
 S a 1 '7 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 1914 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1913, 
 
 BY THE EVENING POST COMPANY, 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1914, 
 BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 Published, March, 1914 
 
 The papers in the present volume were published 
 during 1913 in the Saturday Magazine of the New 
 York Evening Post. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I ALMA MATER BROADWAY . 
 
 II THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE . 
 
 III SUMMER READING . 
 
 IV NOCTURNE 
 
 V HAROLD'S SOUL, I . 
 
 VI EDUCATIONAL 
 
 VII MORGAN 
 
 VIII THE MODERN INQUISITION ._ 
 
 IX THORNS IN THE CUSHION 
 
 X LOW-GRADE CITIZENS . 
 
 XI ROMANCE __.-_ 
 
 XII WANDERLUST 
 
 XIII UNREVISED SCHEDULES 
 
 XIV SOMEWHAT CONFUSED 
 
 XV HAROLD'S SOUL, II ... 
 
 XVI RHETORIC 21 
 
 XVII REAL PEOPLE 
 
 XVIII DIFFERENT 
 
 XIX ACADEMIC FREEDOM . 
 
 XX THE HEAVENLY MAID 
 
 XXI SHEATH-GOWNS .... 
 
 XXII WITH THE EDITOR'S REGRETS 
 
 XXIII A MAD WORLD 
 
 PAGE 
 1 
 
 8 
 
 17 
 26 
 35 
 44 
 53 
 
 ._M 
 
 72 
 
 80 
 
 89 
 
 99 
 
 108 
 
 117 
 
 126 
 
 134 
 
 141 
 
 150 
 
 157 
 
 166 
 
 176 
 
 185 
 
 194 
 
 580173 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XXIV PH.D 202 
 
 XXV Two AND Two ...... 211 
 
 XXVI BRICK AND MORTAR . . . 220 
 
 XXVII INCOHERENT 228 
 
 XXVIII REALISM 236 
 
 XXIX ART . . 239 
 
 XXX THE PACE OF LIFE .... 242 
 
 XXXI MARCUS AURELIUS, 1914 . . 244 
 
 XXXII BY THE TURN OF A HAND . . 247 
 
 XXXIII THE QUARRY SLAVE ., . . 250 
 
 XXXIV MONOTONY OF THE POLES . . 253 
 
POST- IMPRESSIONS 
 
ALMA MATER BROADWAY 
 
 HE came in without having himself an- 
 nounced, nodded cheerfully, and dropped into 
 a chair across the desk from where I sat. 
 
 " I am not interfering with your work, am 
 I?" he said. 
 
 " To tell the truth," I replied, this is the 
 busiest day in the week for me." 
 
 " Fine," he said. " That means your mind 
 is working at its best, brain cells exploding 
 in great shape, and you can follow my argu- 
 ment without the slightest difficulty. What 
 I have to say is of the highest importance. 
 It concerns the present condition of the 
 stage." 
 
 " In that case," I said, " you want to see 
 Mr. Smith. He is the editor responsible for 
 our dramatic page." 
 
 " I want to speak to the irresponsible ed- 
 itor," he said. " I asked and they showed 
 
IMP SESSIONS 
 
 m ipL- t lief el I; tfcink ' I had better begin at 
 the beginning." 
 
 I sighed and looked out of the window. 
 But that made no difference. He, too, looked 
 out of the window and spoke as follows: 
 
 " Last night," he said, " I attended the 
 first performance of A. B. Johnson's power- 
 ful four-act drama entitled * H 2 O.' It was 
 a remorseless exposure of the phenomena at- 
 tending the condensation of steam. In the 
 old days before the theatre became perfectly 
 free the general public knew nothing of the 
 consequences that ensue when you bring 
 water to a temperature of 12 degrees Fah- 
 renheit. The public didn't know and didn't 
 care. Those who did know kept the secret 
 to themselves. I am not exaggerating when 
 I say that there was a conspiracy of silence 
 on the subject. A play like * H 2 O ' would 
 have been impossible. The public would not 
 have tolerated such thoroughgoing realism as 
 Johnson employs in his first act, for in- 
 stance. With absolute fidelity to things as 
 they are he puts before us a miniature recip- 
 
ALMA MATER BROADWAY 3 
 
 locating engine, several turbine engines, and 
 the latest British and German models in boil- 
 ers, piston-rods, and valve-gears. When the 
 curtain rose on the most masterly presenta- 
 tion of a machine shop ever brought before 
 the public, the house rocked with applause. 
 But this was nothing compared to the deliri- 
 ous outburst that marked the climax of the 
 second act, when the hero, with his arm about 
 the woman he loves, proudly declares that 
 saturated steam under a pressure of 200 
 pounds shows 843.8 units of latent heat and 
 a volume of 2.294 cubic feet to the pound. 
 The curtain was raised eleven times, but the 
 audience would not be content until the au- 
 thor appeared before the footlights escorted 
 by a master plumber and the president of 
 the steamfitters' union. 
 
 " The third act was laid in the reception 
 room of a Tenderloin resort " 
 
 " I don't quite see," I said. 
 
 " That followed inevitably from the devel- 
 opment of the plot," he replied. " The hero- 
 ine, you must understand, had been abducted 
 
4 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 by the president of a rival steamfitters' union 
 and had been sold into a life of shame. She 
 is saved in the nick of time by an explosion 
 of the boiler due to superheated steam. In 
 the old days such a scene would have been 
 impossible and the author's lesson about 
 the effects of condensation and vaporization 
 would have been lost to the world." 
 
 " And the play will be a success? " I said. 
 
 " It's a knockout," he replied. " No play 
 of real life with a punch like that has been 
 produced since C. D. Brewster put on his 
 three-act tragi-comedy, ( Ad Valorem.' As 
 the title implies, the play sets out to demon- 
 strate the difference between the Payne- 
 Aldrich tariff law and the Underwood law, 
 item by item. I have rarely seen an audience 
 so deeply stirred as all of us were during the 
 long and pathetic scene toward the end of 
 the first act in which the author deals with 
 the chemical and mineral oil schedule. Are 
 you aware that under the Underwood law 
 the duty on formaldehyde is reduced from 
 twenty-five per cent, to one cent a pound? " 
 
ALMA MATER BROADWAY S 
 
 " I hardly ever go to the theatre nowa- 
 days," I said. 
 
 He looked at me reproachfully. 
 
 " Some day you will find yourself, quite 
 unexpectedly, facing a crisis in which your 
 ignorance of the duty on formaldehyde will 
 cost you dear, and then you will have cause 
 to regret your indifference toward the prog- 
 ress of the modern drama. However, the 
 third act of * Ad Valorem ' is laid in the re- 
 ception room of a Tenderloin resort." 
 
 "What?" I said. 
 
 " It was bound to be," he replied. " Freed 
 from all Puritanical restrictions,' the play- 
 wright of the present day follows wherever 
 his plot leads him in accordance with the 
 truth of life. In ' Ad Valorem,' for instance, 
 the fabulously rich importer of oils and 
 chemicals who is the villain of the piece has 
 succeeded in smuggling an enormously valu- 
 able consignment of formaldehyde out of the 
 Government warehouse. What is more nat- 
 ural than that he should conceal the smuggled 
 goods in the Tenderloin? The case is a per- 
 
6 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 fectly simple one. Forbid a playwright to 
 show the interior of a Tenderloin dive and 
 the public will never know the truth about the 
 Underwood bill. You see, there is nothing 
 about the tariff in the newspapers. There is 
 nothing in the magazines. College profes- 
 sors never mention the subject. Campaign 
 speakers ignore it. There is a conspiracy 
 of silence. Only the theatre offers us en- 
 lightenment on the subject. Under such con- 
 ditions would you keep the playwright from 
 telling us what he knows ? " 
 
 " Putting it that way " I said. 
 
 " I knew you would agree with me," he 
 went on. " Take, for instance, E. F. Bir- 
 mingham's realistic drama, ' The Shortest 
 Way,' in which the author has demonstrated 
 with implacable truthfulness and irresistible 
 logic that in any triangle the sum of two 
 sides is greater than the third. In a joint 
 letter to the freshman classes of Columbia 
 University and New York University, the 
 author and the producer of ' The Shortest 
 Way ' have pointed out that nowhere have 
 
ALMA MATER BROADWAY 7 
 
 the principles of plane geometry been so 
 clearly formulated as in the second act of the 
 play. The gunman has just shot down his 
 victim on the corner of Broadway and 
 Forty-second Street. He flees northward on 
 Broadway to Forty-third Street and then 
 doubles backward on Seventh Avenue. The 
 hero, who is a professor of mathematics, re- 
 calling his Euclid, runs westward on Forty- 
 second Street, and the curtain descends. At 
 the beginning of the next act we find that the 
 gunman has taken refuge in the reception 
 room of a Tender " 
 
 " I know," I replied. " He was driven 
 there by the irresistible logic of the drama- 
 tist's idea." 
 
 " Exactly," he said. And so left me. 
 
II 
 
 THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 
 
 FEOM the chapter entitled " My Milkman," 
 in Cooper's volume of " Contemporary Por- 
 traits," hitherto unpublished, through no 
 fault of his own, but because one publisher 
 declined to handle anything but typewritten 
 copy, and another suggested that if cut down 
 by half the book might be accepted by the 
 editor of some religious publication, and still 
 another editor thought that if several chap- 
 ters were expanded and a love story inserted, 
 the thing might do, otherwise there was no 
 market for essays, especially such as failed 
 to take a cheerful view of life, whereupon 
 Cooper insisted that his book was exception- 
 ally cheerful, inasmuch as it showed that life 
 could be tolerable in spite of being so queer, 
 to which the editor replied that serializing 
 a book of humour was quite out of the ques- 
 tion. " Then how about Pickwick? " said 
 8 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 9 
 
 Cooper but let us get back to the chapter 
 on the milkman. I quote : 
 
 Would sleep never come! I shifted the 
 pillow to the foot of the bed and back ; threw 
 off the covers ; pulled them over my head ; dis- 
 carded them; repeated the multiplication 
 table ; counted footsteps in the street beneath 
 my window; lit a cigarette; tried to go to 
 sleep sitting up and embracing my knees the 
 way they bury the dead in Yucatan. No use. 
 I would doze off, and immediately that unfor- 
 tunate column of figures would appear, de- 
 manding to be added up, and I unable to 
 determine whether sums written in Roman 
 numerals could be added up at all. That is 
 the disadvantage of taking conversation seri- 
 ously, after ten in the evening, or at any 
 time. I had been discussing the immigration 
 problem till nearly midnight, and now I was 
 busy adding up the annual influx from Aus- 
 tria-Hungary during the last twelve years 
 expressed in Roman numerals. Some people 
 are different k Their opinions don't hurt 
 them. I have heard people say the most bit- 
 
10 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ing things about the need of abolishing reli- 
 gion and the family, and five minutes later 
 ask for a caviare sandwich. Whereas I take 
 the total immigration from Austria-Hungary 
 for the last twelve years to bed with me and 
 cannot fall asleep. 
 
 I heard the rattle of wheels under my win- 
 dow. It was nearing daybreak. I looked at 
 my watch and it was close to five. I got up, 
 washed in cold water, dressed, and went out- 
 side. As I walked downstairs I heard the 
 clatter of bottles in the hallway below and 
 some one whistling cheerfully. It was the 
 milkman. His wagon was at the curb, and as 
 I passed down the front steps and stopped to 
 breathe in the sharp, clean, mystic air of 
 dawn, the milkman's horse raised his head, 
 gazed at me for a moment with a curious, 
 friendly scepticism, and sank back into 
 thoughtful contemplation of a spot eighteen 
 inches immediately in front of his fore-legs. 
 
 (Here one editor had written in the mar- 
 gin : " Amateurish beginning ; should have 
 led off with a crisp phrase or two addressed 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 11 
 
 to the milkman and then proceeded to a psy- 
 chological analysis of the milkman's horse.") 
 
 I said to the milkman : 
 
 " This life of yours must be wonderfully 
 conducive to seeing things from a new angle. 
 A world of chill and pure half-shadows ; the 
 happiest time of the twenty-four hours ; the 
 roisterers gone to bed and the factory-work- 
 ers not stirring for a good hour. I should 
 imagine that men in your line would all be 
 philosophers." 
 
 " It does get a bit lonely," he said. " But 
 I always carry an evening paper with me and 
 read a few lines from house to house. Do 
 you think they'll let Thaw off? " 
 
 " What do you think about it ? " I said. 
 " I haven't been following up the case." 
 
 " I have read every bit of the story," he 
 said. " He isn't any more crazy than you or 
 me. He's been punished enough; what's the 
 use of persecuting a man like that ? " 
 
 If Thaw were as sound in mind as my friend 
 the milkman, there would be no doubt that 
 he deserved his freedom. My new acquaint- 
 
12 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ance was so well set up, so clear-eyed, with 
 that ruddy glow which comes from shaving 
 and washing in cold water before dawn, with 
 the quiet air of peace and strength which 
 comes from working in the silent hours. I 
 thought what an upright, independent life a 
 milkman's must be, so free from the petty 
 chaffering and meanness that make up the 
 ordinary tradesman's routine. He has no 
 competition to contend with. He is no one's 
 servant. He deposits his wares at your door- 
 step and you take them or leave them as you 
 please. He can work in the dark because he 
 does not need the light to study your face 
 and overreach you. With no one to watch 
 him, with no one to criticise him, with leisure 
 and silence in which to work out his problems 
 I envied him. 
 
 (Here another editor had written: 
 " Tedious ; chance for an excellent bit of char- 
 acterisation in dialogue entirely missed.") 
 
 " You're an early riser," he said. 
 
 " Can't fall asleep," I said. " This air will 
 do me good." 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 13 
 
 " A brisk walk," he suggested. 
 
 " I'm too tired," I said. 
 
 He turned on the wagon step. " Jump 
 in," he said ; and when I was seated beside him 
 he clucked to the horse, who raised his droop- 
 ing head and started off diagonally across the 
 street, apparently confident that he would find 
 another cobblestone to contemplate, eighteen 
 inches in front of his fore-legs. 
 
 " A good many more people find it hard to 
 sleep nowadays than ever before," he said. 
 " You can tell by the windows that are lit up. 
 Though very often it's diphtheria or some- 
 thing of the sort. You hear the little things 
 whimper, and sometimes a man will run down 
 the street and pull the night-bell at the drug- 
 store." 
 
 " Then you don't read all the time while 
 you are driving? " 
 
 " Oh, you notice those things and keep on 
 reading. It isn't very noisy about this time 
 of the day." He laughed. 
 
 " I should think you'd be tired," I said. 
 
 He said they did not work them too hard 
 
14 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 in his line. The hours were reasonable. At 
 one time there was an attempt on the part of 
 the dairy companies to make the hours 
 longer; but the milkmen have some union of 
 their own, and there was a strike which ended 
 in the companies agreeing to pay for over- 
 time from 7 to 9 A. M. Their association 
 was more of a social and benefit society than 
 a trade union. Once a month in summer 
 they had an outing with lunch and some kind 
 of a cabaret show and dancing. They were 
 a contented lot. The work was not too ex- 
 acting. He could read the evening paper 
 when it got light enough, or sometimes he 
 could just sit still and think. 
 
 Think what? 
 
 Again I envied him. What extraordinary 
 facilities this man had for thinking straight, 
 for seeing things clearly in this crisp morn- 
 ing air, and around him silence and every- 
 thing as fresh, as frank, as fragrant as when 
 the world was still young. 
 
 He blushed and hesitated, but finally con- 
 fessed that for more than a year he had been 
 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE 15 
 
 carrying about in his head a scenario for a 
 moving-picture play. His story was natu- 
 rally interrupted at frequent intervals as he 
 went about the distribution of his milk bot- 
 tles. But stripped of repetitions and am- 
 biguities the plot he had evolved in the course 
 of more than a year's driving through the 
 silent streets was about as follows: 
 
 The infant daughter of an extremely 
 wealthy Mexican mine-owner is stolen by the 
 gipsies. When she grows up she is chosen 
 by the gipsy king for his bride. Before the 
 wedding takes place the gipsies plan to rob 
 the house of a Mexican millionaire who is no 
 other than the girl's father. She volunteers 
 to gain entrance into the house by posing as 
 a celebrated Spanish dancer. At night she 
 opens the door to her confederates. Leav- 
 ing the girl to keep watch over their pris- 
 oner, the gipsies go about ransacking the 
 house. The unhappy man groans and cries 
 out, " Ah, if only I could see my little Juan- 
 ita before I die." Father and daughter rec- 
 ognise each other, she releases him from his 
 
16 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 bonds, and arming themselves with Brown- 
 ing revolvers they shoot down the gipsy 
 marauders as they enter the room in single 
 file. Juanita marries the young overseer 
 whom the childless old man has designated 
 as his heir. 
 
 (Here one editor wrote: "An ordinary 
 plot ; nothing in it to show that it was written 
 by a milkman instead of a clergyman or a 
 structural iron worker.") 
 
 I think the criticism is a fair one. 
 
OUR vacation plans last year were of the 
 simplest. Personally, I said to Emmeline, 
 there was just one thing I longed for to get 
 away to some quiet place where I could lie on 
 my back under the trees and look up at the 
 clouds. To this Emmeline replied that in this 
 posture (1) I always smoke too much; (2) I 
 catch cold and begin to sneeze; (3) I don't 
 look at the clouds at all, but tire my eyes by 
 studying the baseball page in the full glare 
 of the sunj The newspaper habit is one 
 which I regularly forswear every summer on 
 leaving town. I hold to my resolution to this 
 extent that I refrain from going down to the 
 post office in the morning to buy a paper. 
 But toward eleven o'clock the strain be- 
 comes unendurable and I borrow a copy of 
 yesterday's paper after peering wistfully 
 
 over other people's shoulders. Emmeline 
 17 
 
18 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 thinks this habit all the more inexcusable be- 
 cause, working for a newspaper myself, I 
 ought to know there is never anything in 
 them. She can't imagine what drives me 
 on. I told her, perhaps it is the uncon- 
 scious hope that some day I shall find in 
 the paper something worth whilel 
 
 Actually, one soon discovers that the simple 
 act of lying on one's back on the grass and 
 looking up at the clouds involves an extraor- 
 dinary amount of preparation. I am in- 
 clined to think that there must be correspond- 
 ence courses which teach in ten lessons how 
 to lie on one's back properly and look up. 
 There must be text-books on how to tell the 
 cumuli from the cirrus. There must be use- 
 ful hints on how to relax and lose yourself 
 in the immensity of the blue void. | 
 
 The personal equipment one needs to gaze 
 at the clouds, if you believe the department 
 stores, is tremendous. English flannels; 
 French shirtings ; native khaki ; silks ; home- 
 spuns ; belts with a monogram buckle ; 
 flowered cravats in Colours to blend with the 
 
SUMMER READING 19 
 
 foliage ; safety razors ; extra blades for the 
 razors ; strops to sharpen the blades ; un- 
 guents to keep the strops flexible; nickeled 
 cases to keep the unguents in; and metal 
 polish for the nickeled cases. Arduous 
 labour is involved in going to Maple View 
 Farm from the comparatively simple civi- 
 lisation of New York. I am not certain 
 whether in the best circles one can properly 
 lie on one's back and look at the clouds with- 
 out a humidor and a thermos bottle. 
 
 Emmeline said I must be sure and not for- 
 get my fishing-pole, as that trout in the brook 
 behind the barn would probably be expect- 
 ing me. 
 
 It seems absurd for a full-grown man to 
 speak of hating a trout. But why deny it? 
 When I think of the utterly debased crea- 
 ture in the pool behind the barn, the ac- 
 cumulated results of ten thousand years of 
 civilisation drop from me, and my heart is 
 surcharged with venom. It all came about 
 so gradually. My landlord asked me one 
 morning whether J shouldn't like tc try my 
 
20 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 luck with his rod. I said I should. I took 
 his rod and hooked the blackberry bush on 
 the other side of the stream. I did better 
 on my next try. As my hook sank below 
 the surface, a thrill ran along the line, the 
 slender bamboo stem arched forward, and 
 I waited with my heart in my mouth for an 
 enormous trout to emerge and engage me 
 in a life-and-death struggle. But through 
 three long weeks he refused to emerge. Em- 
 meline said it was the bottom of the soap-box 
 whose upper edge is visible above the surface. 
 But that cannot be. No inanimate object 
 could elicit in any one the rage and the sense 
 of frustrated desire perhaps I had better 
 say no more. All my better instincts cor- 
 rode with the thought of that fish. It would 
 have been compensation, at least, if I had 
 ever caught any other fish in that brook. It 
 might have been a near relation, a favourite 
 son perhaps, and I should have had my re- 
 venge but there I go again. 
 
 What Emmeline wanted was a chance to 
 
SUMMER READING 21 
 
 catch up in her reading?" It had been a hard 
 winter and spring, with the doctor too fre- 
 quently in the house and books quite out of 
 the question^ There were a half-dozen 
 novels Emmeline had in mind, not to mention 
 Mr. Bryce's book on South America, John 
 Masefield, and Strindberg, whom she cor- 
 dially detests. I do too. I warned her 
 against drawing up too ambitious a list, but 
 she was determined to make a summer of it. 
 She said she felt illiterate and terribly old. 
 All I could do was to mention a few book- 
 shops where she could get the best choice 
 with the least expenditure of energy. 
 Nevertheless she came back from her first 
 day's shopping with a headache. 
 
 Eponge is a rough, Turkish-towel fabric, 
 selling in many widths, and eminently de- 
 sirable for out-of-door wear because of its 
 peculiar adaptability to the slim styles which 
 prevent walking. Eponge has this fatal de- 
 fect, however, that when it is advertised in 
 ready-made gowns at an astounding reduc- 
 tion from $39.50, all the desirable models 
 
22 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 sell out some time before ten o'clock in the 
 morning. Hence Emmeline's headache. She 
 took very little supper and expressed the be- 
 lief that our vacation would be a complete 
 failure. The mountains are always hot and 
 dusty and the crowd is a very mixed one. 
 | After a while Emmeline had a cup of tea 
 and felt better. We went over our list of 
 books for the summer and she wondered 
 whether it wouldn't pay to get a seamstress 
 into the house and avoid the exhausting trips 
 downtown. On second thoughts she decided 
 not to. I Next morning she was quite well 
 and asked me to remind her not to forget 
 Robert Herrick's new novel. She said she 
 might drop in at the office for lunch if she 
 got through early at the stores, and we 
 might look at books together. 
 
 Charmeuse is a shimmering, silk-like 
 material which lends itself admirably to sum- 
 mer wear, because it stains easily. But in 
 its effect on the shopper's nerves, charmeuse 
 is even worse than eponge. In fact, as a 
 preparation for a summer's reading, I don't 
 
SUMMER READING 23 
 
 know what is more exhausting than char- 
 meuse, unless it be crepe de Chine. Em- 
 meline did not drop in for lunch that day, 
 and when I came home at night, I found her 
 more depressed than ever. There was noth- 
 ing to be had downtown. Prices were impos- 
 sible and anything else wasn't fit to be 
 touched. It might be just as well to stay 
 in town for the summer as go away and take 
 the chance of getting typhoid. The situa- 
 tion was somewhat relieved by the arrival at 
 this juncture of several parcels, some long 
 and narrow, and others short and square. 
 One particularly heavy box felt as if it might 
 contain a set of Strindberg, but turned out to 
 be a really handsome coat in blue chinchilla 
 which Emmeline explained would be just the 
 thing for cool nights in the country. She 
 had bought it in despair at obtaining the 
 kind of crepe de Chine she wanted. The 
 crepe de Chine came in a smaller box. 
 
 At breakfast the next day we were tre- 
 mendously cheerful. I told Emmeline of the 
 handsome raincoat I had bought in prepara- 
 
24 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 tion for lying on my back on the grass and 
 looking up at the clouds. From that we 
 passed to the new Brieux play. But when 
 Emmeline intimated that she was going 
 downtown soon after breakfast, I grew anx- 
 ious. 
 
 "Do you think," I said, "that it will 
 really make any difference to Mr. Gals- 
 worthy whether you read him in a voile or in 
 a white cotton ratine ? " 
 
 " If that is the way you feel about it," 
 said Emmeline, " I can telephone and have 
 them take all these things back. I hate 
 them anyhow." 
 
 " What I mean is," I said, " that you don't 
 want to wear yourself out completely before 
 we leave the city. We have a month's read- 
 ing ahead of us. Let us begin it in peace 
 of mind." 
 
 " With nothing to wear ? " she said. 
 
 Tulle is a partly transparent material, 
 which in the hands of a skilful milliner be- 
 comes an invaluable aid to a thorough com- 
 prehension of the plays of M. Brieux, 
 
SUMMER READING 25 
 
 especially when studied amid the complexities 
 of life on Maple View Farm. As usual, it 
 is the department stores which have been first 
 to discover this fundamental connection in 
 life. They have everything necessary for the 
 thorough enjoyment of Mr. Bryce's book 
 on South America blouses, toques, para- 
 sols, and tennis shoes. Special bargains in 
 linen crash and batiste are offered on the 
 same day with a cut-rate edition of 
 " Damaged Goods." Reading Brieux in the 
 country is almost as complicated a diversion 
 as lying on one's back and looking up at the 
 clouds. 
 
IV 
 
 NOCTURNE 
 
 ONCE every three months, with fair regular- 
 ity, she was brought into the Night Court, 
 found guilty, and fined. She came in between 
 eleven o'clock and midnight, when the traffic 
 of the court is as its heaviest, and it would 
 be an hour, perhaps, before she was called 
 to the bar. When her turn came she would 
 rise from her seat at one end of the prisoners' 
 bench and confront the magistrate. 
 
 Her eyes did not reach to the level of the 
 magistrate's desk. A policeman in citizens' 
 clothes would mount the witness stand, take 
 oath with a seriousness of mien which was 
 surprising, in view of the frequency with 
 which he was called upon to repeat the for- 
 mula, and testify in an illiterate drone to a 
 definite infraction of the law of the State, 
 committed in his presence and with his en- 
 couragement. While he spoke the magis- 
 26 
 
NOCTURNE 27 
 
 trate would look at the ceiling. When she 
 was called upon to answer she defended her- 
 self with an obvious lie or two, while the 
 magistrate looked over her head. He would 
 then condemn her to pay the sum of ten dol- 
 lars to the State and let her go. 
 
 She came to look forward to her visits at 
 the Night Court. 
 
 The Night Court is no longer a centre of 
 general interest. During the first few 
 months after it was established, two or three 
 years ago, it was one of the great sights of a 
 great city. For the newspapers it was a 
 rich source of human-interest stories. It 
 replaced Chinatown in its appeal to visitors 
 from out of town. It stirred even the lan- 
 guid pulses of the native inhabitant with 
 its offerings of something new in the way 
 of " life." The sociologists, sincere and 
 amateur, crowded the benches and took notes. 
 
 To-day the novelty is worn off. The 
 newspapers long ago abandoned the Night 
 Court, clergymen go to it rarely for their 
 
28 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 texts, and the tango has taken its place. 
 But the sociologists and the casual visitor 
 have not disappeared. Serious people, anx- 
 ious for an immediate vision of the pity of 
 life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. 
 No session of the court is without its little 
 group of social investigators, among whom 
 the women are in the majority. Many of 
 them are young women, exceedingly sym- 
 pathetic, handsomely gowned., and very well 
 taken care of. 
 
 As she sat at one end of the prisoners' 
 bench waiting her turn before the magis- 
 trate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance 
 over the railing that separated her from the 
 handsomely gowned, gently bred, sym- 
 pathetic young women in the audience. She 
 observed with extraordinary admiration and 
 delight those charming faces softened in 
 pity, the graceful bearing, the admirably con- 
 structed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of 
 dress, which she compared with the best that 
 the windows in Sixth Avenue could show. She 
 was amazed to find such gowns actually be- 
 
NOCTURNE 29 
 
 ing worn instead of remaining as an unat- 
 tainable ideal on smiling lay figures in the 
 shop windows. 
 
 Occupants of the prisoners' bench are not 
 supposed to stare at the spectators. She 
 had to steal a glance now and then. Her 
 visits to the Night Court had become so 
 much a matter of routine that she would ven- 
 ture a peep over the railing while the case 
 immediately preceding her own was being 
 tried. Once or twice she was surprised by 
 the clerk who called her name. She stood 
 up mechanically and faced the magistrate 
 as Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted 
 the witness stand. 
 
 She had no grudge against Officer Smith. 
 She did not visualise him either as a person 
 or as a part of a system. He was merely 
 an incident of her trade. She had neither 
 the training nor the imagination to look 
 behind Officer Smith and see a communal 
 policy which has not the power to suppress, 
 nor the courage to acknowledge, nor the skill 
 to regulate, and so contents itself with send- 
 
30 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ing out full-fed policemen in civilian clothes 
 to work up the evidence that defends society 
 against her kind through the imposition of a 
 ten-dollar fine. 
 
 To some of the women on the visitors' 
 benches the cruelty of the process came home : 
 this business of setting a two-hundred-pound 
 policeman in citizens' clothes, backed up by 
 magistrates, clerks,' court criers, interpreters, 
 and court attendants, to worrying a ten-dol- 
 lar fine out of a half-grown woman under an 
 enormous imitation ostrich plume. The pro- 
 fessional sociologists were chiefly interested 
 in the money cost of this process to the tax- 
 payer, and they took notes on the propor- 
 tion of first offenders. Yet the Night Court 
 is a remarkable advance in civilisation. 
 Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner 
 would pay a commission to the professional 
 purveyor of bail. 
 
 Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or 
 new to the business, she would be given a 
 chance against Officer Smith. She would be 
 called to the witness chair and under oath 
 
NOCTURNE 31 
 
 be allowed to elaborate on the obvious lies 
 which constituted her usual defence. This 
 would give her the opportunity, between the 
 magistrate's questions, of sweeping the court- 
 room with a full, hungry look for as much 
 as half a minute at a time. She saw the 
 women in the audience only, and their 
 clothes. The pity in their eyes did not move 
 her, because she was not in the least interested 
 in what they thought, but in how they looked 
 and what they wore. They were part of 
 a world which she would read about she 
 read very little in the society columns of 
 the Sunday newspaper. They were the 
 women around whom headlines were written 
 and whose pictures were printed frequently 
 on the first page. 
 
 She could study them with comparative 
 leisure in the Night Court. Outside in the 
 course of her daily routine she might catch 
 an occasional glimpse of these same women, 
 through the windows of a passing taxi, or 
 in the matinee crowds, or going in and out 
 of the fashionable shops. But her work 
 
32 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 took her seldom into the region of taxicabs 
 and fashionable shops. The nature of her 
 occupation kept her to furtive corners and 
 the dark side of streets. Nor was she at such 
 times in the mood for just appreciation of the 
 beautiful things in life. More than any 
 other walk of life, hers was of an exacting 
 nature, calling for intense powers of con- 
 centration both as regards the public and 
 the police. It was different in the Night 
 Court. Here, having nothing to fear and 
 nothing out of the usual to hope for, she 
 might give herself up to the aesthetic contem- 
 plation of a beautiful world of which, at any 
 other time, she could catch mere fugitive as- 
 pects. 
 
 Sometimes I wonder why people think 
 that life is only what they see and hear, and 
 not what they read of. Take the Night 
 Court. The visitor really sees nothing and 
 hears nothing that he has not read a thou- 
 sand times in his newspaper and had it de- 
 scribed in greater detail and with better- 
 trained powers of observation than he can 
 
NOCTURNE 33 
 
 bring to bear in person. What new phase 
 of life is revealed by seeing in the body, 
 say, a dozen practitioners of a trade 
 of whom we know there are several tens of 
 thousands in New York? They have been 
 described by the human-interest reporters, 
 analysed by the statisticians, defended by the 
 social revolutionaries, and explained away 
 by the optimists. For that matter, to the 
 faithful reader of the newspapers, daily and 
 Sunday, what can there be new in this world 
 from the Pyramids by moonlight to the habits 
 of the night prowler ? Can the upper classes 
 really acquire for themselves, through slum- 
 ming parties and visits to the Night Court, 
 anything like the knowledge that books and 
 newspapers can furnish them? Can the 
 lower classes ever hope to obtain that com- 
 plete view of the Fifth Avenue set which the 
 Sunday columns offer them? And yet there 
 the case stands: only by seeing and hearing 
 for ourselves, however imperfectly, do we 
 get the sense of reality. 
 
 That is why our criminal courts are prob- 
 
34 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ably our most influential schools of democ- 
 racy. More than our settlement houses, 
 more than our subsidised dancing-schools 
 for shop-girls, tjiey encourage the get-to- 
 gether process through which one-half the 
 world learns how the other half lives. On 
 either side of the railing of the prisoners' 
 cage is an audience and a stage. 
 
 That is why she would look forward to 
 her regular visits at the Night Court. She 
 saw life there. 
 
V 
 
 HAROLD'S SOUL, I 
 
 I AGREE with the publishers of Miss Am- 
 arylis Pater's book, " The New Mother- 
 hood," that the subject is one which cannot 
 possibly be ignored. I have not only read 
 the book, but I have discussed it with Mrs. 
 Hogan, and with my eldest son Harold, who 
 will be seven next June. As a result I am 
 confronted with certain remarkable differ- 
 ences of opinion. 
 
 Twenty years ago, as I plainly recall, 
 the Sacred Function of Motherhood was not 
 a topic of popular interest. There were a 
 great many mothers then, of course, and 
 there were unquestionably many more 
 children than there are to-day. People, as 
 a rule, spoke of their mothers with fondness, 
 and sometimes even with reverence. The 
 habit had been forming for several thousand 
 
 years, in the course of which poets and 
 35 
 
36 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 painters never grew tired of describing 
 mothers who were engaged in such highly 
 useful occupations as bending over cradles, 
 watching by sick-beds, baking, mending, 
 teaching, laughing in play-rooms, weeping at 
 the Cross, manipulating with equal dexterity 
 the precious vials of love and sacrifice and 
 the carpet slipper of justice. But though 
 people had thus got into the way of accept- 
 ing their mothers as an essential part in the 
 scheme of things, they rarely thought it 
 necessary to write to the editor about the 
 Sacred Function of Motherhood. I mean in 
 the impersonal, scientific sense in which Am- 
 arylis Pater uses the phrase. 
 
 Life in general was a pitifully unorgan- 
 ised, rule-of-thumb affair in those days. 
 People fell in love because every one was do- 
 ing it and without any expressed intention 
 to advance the purposes of Evolution. They 
 did not marry because they were anxious 
 to render social service; but waited only till 
 they had saved up enough to furnish a home. 
 They bore children without regard to the 
 
HAROLD'S SOUL 37! 
 
 future of the race. When the child came 
 it was not a sociological event. The family 
 did not consider the occurrence sacred, as 
 Miss Vivian Holborn insists on calling it 
 in her frequent communications to the press. 
 The family contented itself with wishing the 
 mother well and hoping the baby would not 
 look too much like its father. 
 
 Here I thought it would be well to confirm 
 my own impressions by the testimony of a 
 competent witness. So I turned and called 
 through the open door into the dining-room. 
 
 " Mrs. Hogan," I said, " what do you 
 think of the Sacred Function of Mother- 
 hood? " 
 
 "What do I think of what?" said Mrs. 
 Hogan. 
 
 " Of the Sacred Function of Motherhood," 
 I repeated, rather timidly. 
 
 She looked at me with a distrustful eye, her 
 broom suspended in midair. 
 
 Mrs. Hogan comes in once a week to help 
 out. Distrust is her chronic attitude to- 
 ward me. She has all of the busy woman's 
 
38 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 aversion for a man about the house while 
 domestic operations are under way. But be- 
 sides, she cannot quite understand why a full- 
 grown and able-bodied man should be lolling 
 at his desk, pen in hand, when he ought to 
 be downtown working for his family. She 
 is aware, of course, that all the members of 
 my family are well-nourished, decently 
 dressed, and apparently quite happy. But 
 that only renders the source of my income 
 all the more dubious. When any one asks 
 Mrs. Hogan how many children she has, she 
 stares for some time at the ceiling before re- 
 plying. From which I gather that there 
 must be several. 
 
 " I refer to the business of being a mother, 
 Mrs. Hogan. Have you never felt what a 
 sacred thing that is ? " 
 
 " An' what would there be sacred about 
 the same? " she asked, seeing that I was quite 
 serious. " Bearin' a child every other year, 
 an' nursin' them, an' bringin' them through 
 sickness, an' stayin' up nights to sew an' 
 wash an' darn, an' drivin' them out to 
 
HAROLD'S SOUL 39 
 
 school, an' goin' out by the day's wurrk, 
 where's the time for anythin' sacred to come 
 into the life of a woman? " 
 
 " Just the same it does," I said. 
 " Motherhood, Mrs. Hogan, is so holy a 
 thing nowadays that a great many women are 
 afraid to touch it, preferring to write in the 
 magazines about it. Are you aware that 
 when you married Mr. Hogan you were per- 
 forming an act of social service? " 
 
 " I was not that," said Mrs. Hogan, " I 
 was doin* a service to Jim, besides plazin' 
 myself. 'Twas himself needed some one to 
 take care of him." 
 
 " But that would mean," I said, " that 
 you were false to your own highest self. If 
 you had read Miss Pater's book you would 
 know that any marriage entered into without 
 the sense of social service merely means that 
 a woman is selling herself to a man for life 
 for the mere price of maintenance." 
 
 " When I married Jim," said Mrs. Hogan, 
 " he was after being out of a job for six 
 months." 
 
40 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 She went back to her work more than ever 
 puzzled why my wife and the children should 
 look so well taken care of. 
 
 In those days I mean about the time 
 Mrs. Hogan was married to Jim, and I was at 
 college constructing my world of ideas out 
 of the now forgotten books which Mr. Gaynor 
 was always quoting I recall distinctly that 
 the sacred things were also the secret things. 
 What burned hot in the heart was allowed 
 to rest deep in the heart. Partly this was 
 because of a common habit of reticence 
 which we have so fortunately outgrown. But 
 another reason must have been that life then, 
 as I have said, was imperfectly organised. 
 To-day we have applied the principle of the 
 division of labour so that we no longer expect 
 the same person to do the work of the world 
 and to feel its sacred significance. Thus, 
 to-day there are women who are mothers 
 and other women who proclaim the sacred 
 function of motherhood. To-day there are 
 women who bring up their children, and other 
 women who, at the slightest provocation, thrill 
 
HAROLD'S SOUL 41 
 
 to the clear, immortal soul that looks out of 
 the innocent eyes of childhood. 
 
 At this moment the clear, immortal soul of 
 my boy, Harold, finds utterance in a suc- 
 cession of blood-curdling howls. He is 
 playing Indians again. The wailing accom- 
 paniment in high falsetto emanates from the 
 immortal soul of the baby. Those two im- 
 mortalities are at it again. 
 
 I call out, "Harold!" 
 
 There is a silence. 
 
 "Harold!" 
 
 With extreme deliberation he appears in 
 the doorway. I recognise him largely by in- 
 tuition, so utterly smeared up is he from 
 crawling in single file the entire length of the 
 hall on his stomach. Beneath that thick de- 
 posit of rich alluvial soil I assume that my 
 son exists. I ask him what he has been do- 
 ing with the baby. 
 
 He had been doing nothing at all. He had 
 merely tied her by one leg to a chair and pre- 
 tended to scalp her with a pair of ninepins. 
 He had performed a war dance around her 
 
42 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 and every time his ritual progress brought 
 him face to face with the baby he made be- 
 lieve to brain her, but he only meant to see 
 how near he could come without actually 
 touching her, and he would strike the chair 
 instead. He didn't know why the baby 
 shrieked. 
 
 " Harold," I said, " do you feel the sacred 
 innocence of childhood brooding in you? " 
 
 He was alarmed, but bravely attempted a 
 smile. 
 
 "Ah, father!" he said. 
 
 I looked at him severely. 
 
 " Do you know what I ought to do to you 
 in the name of the New Parenthood? " 
 
 " Ah, father ! " and his lip trembled. 
 
 " You are a disgrace to the eternal spark 
 in you," I said. 
 
 He lowered his head and began to cry. It 
 required an effort to be stern, but I persisted. 
 
 " Harold," I said, " you will go into your 
 room and stand in the corner for ten minutes. 
 Close the door behind you. I will tell you 
 when time is up." 
 
HAROLD'S SOUL 43 
 
 He dragged himself away heartbroken and 
 I found it was useless trying to write any 
 more. I had made two people utterly mis- 
 erable. I threw down my pen and rose to 
 take a book from the shelf, but stopped in the 
 act. Out of Harold's room came music. I 
 stole to the door and looked in. He had not 
 disobeyed orders. He had merely dressed 
 himself in one of the nurse's aprons and the 
 baby's cap, and standing erect in his corner, 
 he sang " Dixie," with all the fervour of his 
 fresh young voice. 
 
 About his appearance there was nothing 
 sacred. 
 
VI 
 
 EDUCATIONAL 
 
 HAJ,F-MINUTE lessons fdr up-to-the-minute 
 thinkers : 
 
 I. WORD STUDY 
 
 CHILD, noun; a student of sex hygiene; a 
 member of boy scout organisations and girls' 
 camp-fire organisations for the practice of 
 the kind of self-control that parents fail to 
 exercise; a member of school republics for 
 the study of politics while father reads the 
 sporting page; a ward of the State; a stu- 
 dent of the phenomena of alcoholism ; a handi- 
 cap carefully avoided by specialists in child- 
 study; one-third of a French family; the 
 holder of an inalienable title to happiness 
 which the Government must supply; in gen- 
 eral, a human being under thirteen years of 
 age who must be taught everything so that 
 he will be surprised at nothing when he is 
 
 thirty years of age. The ignorant and in- 
 44 
 
EDUCATIONAL 45 
 
 nocent offspring of a human couple, obs. 
 Synonyms : man-child ; girl-child ; love-child. 
 
 MOTHERHOOD, noun; a profession once 
 highly esteemed, but rejected by modern 
 spirits as too frequently automatic. 
 
 MOTHER, noun; a female progenitor; a 
 term often employed by the older poets in 
 connection with the ideas of love, sacri- 
 fice, and holiness, but now delicately de- 
 scribed by writers of the Harper's Weekly 
 temperament as being synonymous with cow. 
 
 EUGENICS, noun; a condition of intense 
 excitement over the future of the human 
 race among those who are doing nothing to 
 perpetuate it. 
 
 LITERATURE, noun; see SEX; WHITE 
 SLAVE. 
 
 DRAMA, noun; see SEX; WHITE SLAVE 
 
 PUNCH, noun; see DRAMA; LITERATURE; 
 MAGAZINE ADVERTISING. 
 
 ADENOIDS, noun; something that is cut out 
 of children. 
 
 SOCIAL-MINDEDNESS, noun; something that 
 is injected into children. 
 
46 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 II. GEOGEAPHY 
 
 ARGENTINA; where the tango comes from. 
 
 RUSSIA; where Anna Pavlova and ritual 
 murder trials come from. 
 
 PEKSIA; where the harem skirt comes 
 from, and other fashions eagerly embraced 
 by a generation which insists that woman 
 shall no longer be man's chattel and play- 
 thing. 
 
 AMERICA; where the profits of all-night 
 restaurants in Montmartre come from. 
 
 ASSYRIA, BABYLONIA, EGYPT, PERU, YUCA- 
 TAN, PATAGONIA; where the decorations for 
 Broadway lobster-palaces come from. 
 
 EQUATOR ; the earth's waistline, unfashion- 
 ably located in the same place year after 
 year. 
 
 TENDERLOIN; where the world's wisdom 
 comes from. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, NEW HAVEN, PRINCETON, 
 MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS ; the sites of once 
 celebrated educational institutions whose 
 
EDUCATIONAL 47 
 
 functions have now been taken over by 
 theatre managers on Broadway. 
 
 UNDERWORLD; the world now uppermost. 
 
 MOUNTAIN; a rugged elevation of the 
 earth's surface which comes to every self- 
 constituted little prophet when he snaps his 
 fingers, 
 
 SEA; where we are all at. 
 
 MEXICO CITY; residence of Huerta, the 
 most eminent living disciple of Nietzsche. 
 
 BULGARIA; a nation which scornfully re- 
 jected peace and reaped honour, widows, and 
 orphans; where the Servians were the other 
 day. 
 
 SERVIA ; where the Bulgarians may be next 
 week. 
 
 CHAUTAUQUA; any place outside the of- 
 fices of the State Department. 
 
 HI. ARITHMETIC 
 
 1. A ship carrying 800 passengers and 
 crew is in collision off the banks of New- 
 foundland, and 700 are saved. Describe t^e 
 
48 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 method by which the Evening Journal com- 
 putes 400 souls lost. 
 
 2. The salary of a police lieutenant is 
 about $2,500 a year. At what rate of in- 
 terest must this sum be invested to produce 
 a million dollars' worth of real estate in 
 ten years? 
 
 3. 2-f- 2=4f. Show this to be true other- 
 wise than by writing a four-act play with its 
 principal scene laid in a house of ill fame. 
 
 4. The loss to the nation from disease has 
 been estimated at $200,000,000 a year. 
 Show the profit that would accrue to the 
 nation from abolishing every form of disease 
 after deducting the cost of maintaining the 
 dependent widows and orphans of 50,000 doc- 
 tors who have starved to death. 
 
 5. In a certain gubernatorial campaign 
 several disinterested gentlemen contributed 
 $10,000 each to the campaign fund; yet the 
 total of campaign contributions was a little 
 over $5,000. Explain this. 
 
 6. If you were called upon to build a 
 bridge to the moon, which would you rather 
 
EDUCATIONAL 49 
 
 use, the total number of postage stamps on 
 rejected magazine contributions laid end to 
 end, or the total number of automobiles 
 shipped from Detroit placed end to end? 
 
 7. In a recent article on mortality statis- 
 tics in the World, the writer omitted to 
 divide his average death rate by 2. Was his 
 argument, because of that, two times as con- 
 vincing or only half as convincing? 
 
 8. Describe the modifications in the laws 
 of arithmetic introduced by Mr. Thomas W. 
 Lawson. 
 
 IV. HISTOEY 
 
 The supporters of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt 
 have frequently remarked that if Abraham 
 Lincoln were alive to-day, he would be with 
 them. Uncle Joe Cannon has expressed the 
 conviction that Abraham Lincoln if he were 
 alive to-day would be on his side. Is there 
 anything in history to indicate that Abra- 
 ham Lincoln, great man though he was, could 
 be in two places at the same time? 
 
 Mention three Republican administrations 
 in which the rainfall was twice as heavy as 
 
50 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 in any Democratic administration since 1837, 
 and show what this indicates for the pros- 
 perity of the country under Mr. Woodrow 
 Wilson. 
 
 Julius Caesar is said to have been in the 
 habit of dictating to three secretaries simul- 
 taneously. How does this compare with the 
 literary productivity of Mr. Arnold Bennett 
 and Mr. Jack London? 
 
 At the last meeting of the Tammany 
 aldermanic convention of the Fifth Assembly 
 District a speaker declared it to be the most 
 momentous event in the history of the world. 
 Compare the Fifth Assembly District con- 
 vention with (a) the battle of Marathon; 
 (b) the meeting of the States-General at 
 Versailles in 1789; (c) the signing of the 
 Emancipation Proclamation. 
 
 v. LOGIC 
 
 Prove that the department store is the 
 principal cause of prostitution by showing 
 that the department store is fifty-six years 
 
EDUCATIONAL 51 
 
 old and the social evil is forty thousand 
 years old. 
 
 The mortality rate in municipal foundling 
 asylums is 99^ per cent. Develop this 
 into an argument for the maintenance of all 
 children by the State. 
 
 Compare the arguments advanced in at 
 least four (4) New York newspapers to 
 show that the Giants would win with the 
 reasons given in the same newspapers why the 
 Athletics won. 
 
 Compare Richard Pearson Hobson's last 
 speech on the Japanese peril with Demos- 
 thenes's Oration on the Crown. 
 
 VI. SCIENCE 
 
 The classification of the sciences has al- 
 ways presented peculiar difficulties, but a 
 partial list would include the following: 
 
 Tonsorial Science, Sunday Supplement 
 
 Science, 
 
 Science of Bricklay- Domestic Science, 
 ing, 
 
52 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 Science of Cosmic Bohemian Science, 
 
 Love, 
 
 Science of Advertis- Science of Sir Oliver 
 
 ing, Lodge, 
 
 Scranton, Pa., Sci- Science of Packy 
 
 ence, McFarland, 
 
 Science of Puts and Science of Sexology, 
 
 Calls, 
 Anti-vivisectionist Science, Science. 
 
VII 
 
 MORGAN 
 
 WE were speaking of the man whose career 
 was written in terms of huge corporations and 
 incomparable art collections. 
 
 " What a life it was ! " said Cooper. 
 " From his office-desk he controlled the desti- 
 nies of one hundred million people. His 
 leisure hours were spent amidst the garnered 
 beauty of five thousand years. Isn't it al- 
 most an intolerable thought that the same 
 man should have been master of the Stock 
 Exchange and owner of that marvellous mu- 
 seum in white marble on Thirty-sixth 
 Street? 
 
 " Cooper," I said, " you sound like the 
 I. W. W." 
 
 " I am that," he retorted. " I express the 
 Inexhaustible Wonder of the World in the 
 face of this thing we call America. A nation 
 
 devoted to the principle that all men are born 
 63 
 
54 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 -^ 
 
 equal has produced the perfect type of finan- 
 cial absolutism. A people given up to ma- 
 terial aims has cornered the art treasures of 
 the ages. Need I say more? " 
 
 " You needn't," I said. " You have al- 
 ready touched the high-water mark in lyri- 
 cism." 
 
 But Harding waved me aside. 
 
 " I have also been thinking of that marble 
 palace on Thirty-sixth Street," he said. " I 
 can't help picturing the scene there on that 
 critical night in the fall of 1907 when Wall 
 Street was rocking to its foundations, and a 
 haggard group of millionaires were seeking 
 a way to stave off ruin. I imagine the glori- 
 ous Old Masters looking down from their 
 frames on that unhappy assembly of New 
 Masters the masters of our wealth, our 
 credit, our entire industrial civilisation. I 
 imagine Lorenzo the Magnificent leaning out 
 from the canvas and calling the attention of 
 his neighbour, Grolier, to that white-faced 
 company of great American collectors. The 
 
MORGAN 55 
 
 perspiring gentleman at the head of the table 
 had one of the choicest collections of trust 
 companies in existence. The man at his el- 
 bow was the owner of an unrivalled collection 
 of copper mines and smelters. Facing him 
 was an amateur who had gone in for insur- 
 ance companies. Others there had collected 
 railroads, or national banks, or holding com- 
 panies. .No wonder old Lorenzo was moved 
 at the prospect of so many matchless accumu- 
 lations, representing the devoted labour of 
 years, going under the hammer. Around the 
 walls the wonderful First Editions stood at 
 attention and some one was saying, * Natu- 
 rally, on the security of your first mortgage 
 bonds ' " 
 
 " Putting poetry aside," I said somewhat 
 impatiently, " what I should like to know is 
 whether this garnered beauty of five thousand 
 years, as Cooper calls it, really has any mean- 
 ing to its owners. I understand that most of 
 our great collections are bought in wholesale 
 lots, Shakespeare folios by the yard, Chinese 
 
56 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 porcelains by the roomful. Does a man 
 really take joy in his art treasures in such 
 circumstances ? " 
 
 " Of course he does," said Cooper. " If 
 we buy masterpieces in the bulk, that again 
 is the American of it. I am certain that this 
 man's extraordinary business success is to be 
 explained by the mental stimulus he derived 
 from his books and his pictures. His busi- 
 ness competitors really had no chance. 
 Their idea of recreation was yachts or cards 
 or roof-gardens. But he found rest in the 
 presence of the loveliest dreams of dead paint- 
 ers and poets. Can't you see how a man's 
 imagination in such surroundings would nat- 
 urally expand and embrace the world? No 
 wonder he thought in billions of dollars. 
 Why, I myself, if I could spend half an hour 
 before a Raphael whose radiant beauty brings 
 the tears to your eyes, could go out and float 
 a $100,000,000 corporation." 
 
 " Having first dried your tears, of course," 
 I suggested. 
 
 " Well, yes," he said. 
 
MORGAN 57 
 
 Harding had been showing signs of impa- 
 tience, a common trait with him when other 
 people are speaking. 
 
 " When a rich man dies," he said, " the first 
 thing people ask is what will the stock mar- 
 ket do. They were putting that question last 
 week. Your Wall Street broker is a sensitive 
 being. Nothing can happen at the other end 
 of the world but he must rush out and sell 
 or buy something. Returning, he says to the 
 junior partner, * I see there has been a big 
 battle at Scutari. Where's Scutari and what 
 are they fighting about ? ' ' Search me,' says 
 the junior partner, ' but I think you did right 
 in buying.' ' I sold,' says the broker. ' Who 
 won the battle? ' says the junior partner. ' I 
 don't recall,' says the broker. But he is con- 
 vinced that no big battle should be allowed to 
 pass without being reflected in Wall Street. 
 
 " But that is not what I wanted to say. 
 Suppose the market does go up two points or 
 loses two points. What is the effect on the 
 Stock Exchange compared with the crisis that 
 ensues in the art world when a rich American 
 
58 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 dies? There's where things begin to look 
 panicky. The quotations on Rembrandts 
 and Van Dycks are cut in two. There is con- 
 sternation in London auction rooms and Ve- 
 netian palaces. In some half-ruined little 
 Italian town the parish council has almost 
 made up its mind to ship to New York the 
 thirteenth-century altar piece which is the 
 glory of the cathedral. The news comes that 
 Croesus is dead and the parish authorities see 
 their dreams of new schools and a new chapel 
 and a modern water, supply vanish. That is 
 the crisis worth considering." 
 
 "Not to speak," I said, "of that little 
 shop on Fourth Avenue where they paint 
 Botticellis." 
 
 " I admit that Harding has made a very 
 interesting suggestion, though probably with- 
 out any deliberate intention on his part," said 
 Cooper. " This steady drain by Wall Street 
 upon Europe's art treasures is a civilising 
 process which scarcely receives the attention 
 it deserves, except when some Paris editor 
 loses his temper and calls us barbarians and 
 
MORGAN 59 
 
 despoilers. I am not sure who is the bar- 
 barian, the American trust magnate who 
 thinks a million francs is not too much for 
 one of Raphael's Madonnas, or the scion of 
 Europe's ancient nobility who thinks that no 
 Madonna is worth keeping if you can get a 
 million francs for it. According to the Eu- 
 ropean idea, the proper place for a master- 
 piece is a corner of the lounging-room where 
 the weary guest, after a hard day with the 
 hounds, may be tempted to stare at the can- 
 vas for a moment and say, * Nice little daub, 
 what? ' Their masterpieces are made to be 
 seldom seen and never heard of. 
 
 " Now see what we do with the same pic- 
 ture over here. Before it is brought into the 
 country all the papers have cable despatches 
 about it, and they have impressed its value on 
 the public mind by multiplying the real price 
 by five. Then we advertise it by raising the 
 question whether it is genuine or a fake. 
 Then we put it into a museum and countless 
 thousands besiege the doorkeeper and ask 
 which is the way to the million-dollar picture. 
 
60 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 Then the Sunday papers print a reproduc- 
 tion in colours suitable for framing, but it 
 isn't framed very often because the baby de- 
 stroys it while papa is busy with the comic 
 supplement. Then the New York correspond- 
 ents of the Chicago papers write columns 
 about the picture. Then it is taken up by 
 women's clubs, the reading circles, and the 
 Chautauqua. Before the process is com- 
 pleted that picture has entered into the daily 
 thought and speech of the American people." 
 
 Harding interrupted. 
 
 " The members of the European nobility 
 have seldom been interested in art. They 
 have been too busy wearing military uniforms 
 or pursuing the elusive fox all over the land- 
 scape." 
 
 " But that is just the point I was making," 
 said Cooper indignantly. 
 
 " Yes, but not so clearly as I have formu- 
 lated it," said Harding. " The fact is that 
 art has always flourished under the patronage 
 of the merchant class. The Athenians were 
 
MORGAN 61 
 
 a trading people. Lorenzo the Magnificent 
 came from a family of pawn-brokers. Rem- 
 brandt sold his pictures to the sturdy, and 
 quite homely, tea and coffee merchants of 
 Holland. It is preposterous to suppose that 
 because a man is lucky in the stock market 
 he is incapable of appreciating the very best 
 things in art. He is not incapable; only he 
 keeps his interests separate. From ten o'clock 
 to three our patron of the arts is busy down- 
 town attending to the unfortunate financiers 
 whom he has caught on the wrong side of the 
 market. If Cooper here were a Cubist 
 painter, and you gave him the run of a great 
 art collector's front office on settlement day, 
 he could produce any number of pictures en- 
 titled Nude Speculator Descending a Wall 
 Street Staircase." 
 
 " The European aristocracy doesn't al- 
 ways despise us," I said. " Occasionally an 
 American will be decorated by the Grand 
 Duke of Sonderklasse-Ganzgut with the cross 
 of the Bald Eagle of the Third Class, the 
 
62 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 person thus honoured being worth nine hun- 
 dred million dollars and the area of the 
 Prince's dominions being eighty-nine square 
 miles." 
 
VIII 
 
 THE MODERN INQUISITION 
 
 QUESTIONNAIRE: A favourite indoor amuse- 
 ment in uplift circles. 
 
 His eyes were bloodshot and he stared for- 
 ward into vacancy. 
 
 " We were married," he said, " shortly 
 after I was graduated from law school. For 
 just five years we were happy. We were in 
 love. I was making good in my profession. 
 Helen took delight in her household duties 
 and her baby. Then one day the exact 
 date is still engraved in letters of fire on my 
 memory I received a letter. It was from 
 the Society for the Propagation of Ethical 
 Statistics. It said that a study was being 
 made of the churchgoing habits of college 
 graduates, and there was a printed list of 
 questions which I was requested to answer. 
 I cannot recall the entire list, but these were 
 
 some of the items : 
 
 63 
 
64. POST-IMPRESSIONS' 
 
 " Do you go to church willingly or to 
 please your wife? 
 
 " Do you stay all through the sermon? 
 
 " What is the average amount you deposit 
 in the contribution plate (a) in summer; (b) 
 in winter? 
 
 " Is your choice of a particular church de- 
 termined by (a) creed; (b) the quality of the 
 preaching; (c) ventilation? 
 
 " Are you ever overtaken by sleep during 
 the sermon, and if so, at what point in the 
 sermon do you most readily yield to the in- 
 fluence? (Note: In answering this question 
 a state of recurrent drowsiness is to be con- 
 sidered as sleep.) 
 
 " Do you go to sleep most easily under (a) 
 an Episcopalian; (b) Presbyterian; (c) 
 Methodist; (d) Rabbi; (e) Ethical Cultur- 
 ist? (Note: Strike out all but one of the 
 above names.) 
 
 " Is your awakening attended by a sensa- 
 tion of remorse or merely one of profound as- 
 tonishment ? 
 
 " What do you consider to be the ideal 
 
THE MODERN INQUISITION 65 
 
 length for a sermon, leaving climatic condi- 
 tions out of account? 
 
 " I tossed the letter across the breakfast 
 table to Helen and intimated that I couldn't 
 spare the time for an answer. But Helen in- 
 sisted it was my duty as a college graduate. 
 If the science of sociology couldn't look to us 
 men of culture for its data, whom could it go 
 to? So I telephoned down to the office that 
 I would be late and sat down to draft my re- 
 ply. It was much more difficult than I imag- 
 ined. I was amazed to find how little I knew 
 of my own habits and processes of thoughts. 
 It took the greater part of the morning, and 
 when I finally did get down to the office I 
 learned that my most important client, an 
 aged gentleman of uncertain temper, had 
 gone off in a rage saying he would never 
 come back. He kept his word. 
 
 " That letter was the beginning. I had 
 no leisure to worry over this loss of a very 
 considerable part of my income, because the 
 next morning's mail brought a letter from the 
 Association for the Encouragement of the 
 
66 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 City Beautiful. It contained a very long 
 questionnaire which I was requested to fill out 
 and forward by return mail. I was asked to 
 state whether the character of the telegraph 
 poles in our neighbourhood was such as to 
 reflect credit on the civic spirit of the com- 
 munity, in respect to material (a) wood, (b) 
 ornamental iron ; and secondly, as to paint, 
 (a) yellow, (b) red, (c) green, (d) no paint 
 at all. I was also to say whether conditions 
 in our neighbours' back yards were conducive 
 to the propagation of the typhoid-bearing or 
 common house-fly and to give my estimate of 
 the number of flies so propagated in the 
 course of a week, in hundreds of thousands. 
 Finally, was the presence of the house-fly in 
 our community due to the negligence of in- 
 dividual citizens, or was it the direct result 
 of inefficient municipal government? And if 
 the latter, was our municipal administration 
 Republican or Democratic, and what were 
 the popular majorities for mayor since the 
 Spanish- American war? 
 
 " With Helen's assistance I managed to 
 
THE MODERN INQUISITION 67 
 
 send off my reply within two days. But 
 when I came down to my place of business I 
 found that I had missed an important long- 
 distance call from Chicago which the office- 
 boy had promised to transmit to me, but 
 failed to do so because he did not understand 
 it in the first place." 
 
 He sighed and stared at the floor. His 
 emaciated fingers beat a rapid tattoo on my 
 desk. He droned on in dull, impersonal 
 tones, as if this story of the wreck of a man's 
 happiness had no special concern for him. 
 
 " Well," he said, " you can foresee the end 
 for yourself. Within less than two months 
 my law business disappeared, because I sim- 
 ply could not devote the necessary time to it. 
 I resorted to desperate measures. I wrote to 
 our alumni secretary, asking him to remove 
 my name from the college catalogue; but it 
 was too late. My name was by this time the 
 common property of all the sociological lab- 
 oratories and research stations in the coun- 
 try. At home, want began to stare us in the 
 face. Worry over my financial condition, 
 
68 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 added to the long hours of labour involved in 
 filling out questionnaires, undermined my 
 health. I grew morose, ill-tempered, curt in 
 my behaviour to Helen and the child. We 
 still loved each other, but the glow and ten- 
 derness of our former relations had disap- 
 peared. 
 
 " Fortunately Helen did not feel my neg- 
 lect as she might. For by this time she, too, 
 was getting letters from sociological experi- 
 ment stations. Helen was graduated from a 
 New England college. Her letters, at first, 
 dealt with problems of domestic economy. 
 She had to write out model dietaries, state- 
 ments of weekly expenses, the relative merits 
 of white and coloured help. Later she was 
 led into the field of child psychology. Our 
 little Laura was hardly able to go out into 
 the open air, because her mother had to keep 
 her under observation during so many hours 
 of the day. The child grew pale and nerv- 
 ous. Helen grew thin. In her case, poor 
 girl, it was actual lack of food. There was 
 no money in the house. One night as we sat 
 
THE MODERN INQUISITION 69 
 
 down at table there was just a glass of milk 
 and a slice of bread and butter at Laura's 
 plate; for us there was nothing. At first I 
 failed to understand. Then I looked at 
 Helen and she was trying to smile through her 
 tears." 
 
 He sobbed and I turned and stared out of 
 the window. 
 
 " That night," he said, " I went out and 
 pawned my watch ; my great-grandfather had 
 worn it. People rally quickly under trouble, 
 and the next morning we were fairly cheerful. 
 I set to work on a list of questions from the 
 Bureau of Comparative Eugenics. Helen 
 was busy with a questionnaire on Reaction 
 Time in Children Under Six, from the Psy- 
 chological Department at Harvard. I was 
 resigned. I looked up and saw Laura play- 
 ing with her alphabet blocks. I thought: 
 Well, our lives may be spoiled, but there is 
 the child. Life had cast no shadow on the 
 current of her young days. At that moment 
 the hall-boy brought in a letter. It was ad- 
 dressed to Miss Laura Smith our baby. 
 
70 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 It was from the Wisconsin Laboratory of 
 Juvenile ^Esthetics. It contained a list of 
 questions for the child to answer. How 
 many hours a day did she play? Did she 
 prefer to play in the house or on the street? 
 Did she look into shop windows when she was 
 out walking or at moving-picture posters? 
 Was she afraid of dogs? I was crushed. 
 There was a mist before my eyes. I fell for- 
 ward on the table and wept." 
 
 His lip trembled, but the manhood was 
 not gone from him. He faced me with a 
 show of firmness. 
 
 " Mind you," he said, " I am not com- 
 plaining. The individual must suffer if the 
 world is to move forward. We have suffered, 
 but in a good cause." 
 
 I agreed. I recalled the tabulated results 
 of a particularly elaborate questionnaire 
 printed in the morning's news. Questions had 
 been sent to a thousand college graduates. 
 Of that number it appeared that 480 lived in 
 the country, 230 preferred the drama to fic- 
 tion, 198 were vegetarians, and 576 voted for 
 
THE MODERN INQUISITION 71 
 
 Mr. Wilson at the last Presidential election. 
 Those who voted the Democratic ticket were 
 less proficient in spelling than those who 
 foted for Colonel Roosevelt. Could any- 
 thing be more useful? 
 
IX 
 
 THORNS IN THE CUSHION 
 
 I HAVE a confession to make and I have my 
 desk to clean out. One is as hard to go at as 
 the other. If people would only refrain from 
 putting my^ books and papers in order when- 
 ever I am away, I could always find things 
 where I leave them and the embarrassment I 
 am about to relate would have been spared 
 me. After all, there is efficiency and effi- 
 ciency. If the book I need at any moment is 
 always buried beneath a pile of foreign news- 
 papers, it is only interfering with my work 
 to haul it out during my absence and put it 
 on the desk right in front of me, where I can- 
 not see it. 
 
 It was at Harding's place that I met Dr. 
 Gunther. Harding had insisted that we two 
 ought to know each other. After I had 
 spent half an hour in the Doctor's company 
 
 I agreed that had been worth my while; the 
 
 72 
 
THORNS IN THE CUSHION 73 
 
 rest is for him to say. Gunther is a physi- 
 cian of high standing, but his hobby is as- 
 tronomy, and it was quite evident that he is 
 as big an expert in that field as in his own 
 profession. We spent a delightful evening. 
 As he rose to say good-night, Gunther turned 
 to me and smiled in a timid fashion that was 
 altogether charming. 
 
 " I must confess," he said with a sort of 
 foreign dignity of speech, " that my desire 
 to make your acquaintance was not altogether 
 disinterested. I have here," pulling a large 
 envelope out of his pocket, " a few remarks 
 which I have thrown together at odd mo- 
 ments, and which it occurred to me might be 
 of interest to your readers. It is on a sub- 
 ject which I can honestly profess to know 
 something about. Perhaps you might pass it 
 on to your editor after you have glanced 
 through it and decided that it had a chance. 
 In case it is found unavailable for your pur- 
 poses, you must be under no compunction 
 about sending it back. You see, I have put 
 the manuscript into a stamped and addressed 
 
74 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 envelope. I know how busy you journalists 
 are." 
 
 I told him I would be delighted to do what 
 I could. I brought the manuscript to the of- 
 fice next morning, laid it on my desk, and 
 forgot about it. It was a Saturday. After 
 I left the office, the janitor's assistant, being 
 new to the place, came in and cleaned up my 
 room. When I looked for the paper on Mon- 
 day, I could not find it. At first I was not 
 alarmed, because I reasoned that in the 
 course of two or three weeks it would turn up. 
 
 But this was evidently Dr. Gunther's first 
 experience as a contributor to the press. 
 He was impatient. Within a week I had a 
 letter from him, dated Boston, where, as he 
 explained, he had been called on a matter of 
 private business which would keep him for 
 some time. Without at all wishing to seem 
 importunate, he asked whether my editor had 
 arrived at any decision with regard to his 
 manuscript. It was a vexing situation. I 
 shrank from writing and confessing how 
 clumsy I had been; and besides the paper 
 
THORNS IN THE CUSHION 75 
 
 was likely to be found at any moment. I saw 
 that I must fight for time. 
 
 What I am about to say will confirm many 
 good people in their opinion of the unscrupu- 
 lous nature of the newspaper profession ; but 
 the truth must be told. I determined to 
 write to Dr. Gunther as if I had read his arti- 
 cle. The terrible difficulty was that I did 
 not know what it was about. I was fairly sure 
 it had to do with one of two things, medicine 
 or astronomy. He had said, when he gave 
 me the manuscript, that it was a subject on 
 which he could claim special knowledge. But 
 which of the two was it? For some time I 
 hesitated, and then I wrote the following let- 
 ter: 
 
 " Dear Dr. Gunther : Before giving your 
 valuable paper a second and more thorough 
 reading, I must bring up a question which 
 suggests itself even after the most cursory 
 examination. It is this: Will your article 
 go well with illustrations, and if so where are 
 they to be had? You know that ours is a 
 picture supplement, appealing to a general 
 
76 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 audience, and there is every chance for insert- 
 ing illustrations into an article of scientific 
 nature abounding in such close-knit argument 
 as you present. Of course there is not the 
 least reason for haste in the matter. A re- 
 ply from you within the next four weeks will 
 be in time." 
 
 Next morning I found a telegram from 
 Boston on my desk. It said : " Naturally no 
 objection to pictures. Suggest you repro- 
 duce some of the illustrations from Lang- 
 ley's masterly work on the subject. Gun- 
 ther." 
 
 My ruse had succeeded. I was prepared 
 now to keep up a fairly active correspondence 
 until the missing paper was found. I knew 
 of Samuel Pierpont Langley, one of the 
 greatest of American astronomers and a pio- 
 neer of aviation. I turned to the encyclopae- 
 dia to see which one of Langley's books was 
 likely to be the one Gunther had in mind. 
 There, before me, was a biographical sketch 
 of John Newport Langley, an English physi- 
 ologist, who had published, among other 
 
THORNS IN THE CUSHION 77 
 
 things, a treatise " On the Liver," and an- 
 other " On the Salivary Glands." I recalled 
 that at Harding's house Gunther, after an 
 elaborate discussion of the present state of 
 meteorology, had drifted into a spirited ti- 
 rade against the evils of ill-cooked and un- 
 digested food. It might very well be this 
 paper " On the Salivary Glands " that Gun- 
 ther had in mind. 
 
 I delayed writing as long as I could while 
 the office was being ransacked for the missing 
 article. It was a hopeless search. The 
 manuscript had evidently been swept away 
 into the all-devouring waste basket, another 
 victim to mistaken ideals of efficiency. A few 
 days later came a long and friendly letter 
 from Gunther. Without wishing to flatter 
 me, he said that he was quite as much inter- 
 ested in my opinion of his article as in get- 
 ting it published. He hoped to hear from 
 me at my very earliest convenience. 
 
 I waited nearly a week, and yielding to 
 fate wrote as follows: 
 
 " Dear Dr. Gunther : The article is alto- 
 
78 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 gether admirable. It seems to me that there 
 are just two subjects which never lose their 
 appeal to the average man. One is the food 
 by which he lives. The other is the universe 
 in which he lives. They represent the oppo- 
 site poles in his nature, one being no less im- 
 portant than the other. Let the primitive 
 man but satisfy the cravings of his stomach, 
 and his awed gaze will turn to the illimitable 
 glory of the stars. I think of Pasteur's 
 epoch-making researches into the processes 
 of food-fermentation and then I think of 
 Galileo. If you ask me which is the greater 
 man, I will say frankly I do not know. Your 
 article will duly appear in our magazine, 
 though not for some time. In the meanwhile, 
 it may be that additions or changes will sug- 
 gest themselves to you. Very likely you have 
 a carbon copy of your manuscript at home. 
 Make such alterations as you see fit and send 
 the new manuscript to us as soon as you are 
 satisfied with it." 
 
 The foregoing letter was addressed to Dr. 
 Gunther in Boston. Two days later he wrote 
 
THORNS IN THE CUSHION 79 
 
 from his home address in New York. He 
 said : " I cannot speak adequately of the con- 
 sideration you have given to my poor literary 
 effort. Your letter offering me an oppor- 
 tunity to revise the manuscript reached me 
 just before I left for New York. At home I 
 found the original article awaiting me, in my 
 own envelope. Evidently it had occurred to 
 you that I might not have a copy of the arti- 
 cle at hand which is indeed the case and 
 so you hastened to Send me the original." 
 
 Of course the envelope containing the good 
 Doctor's manuscript had not fallen into the 
 hands of the janitor at all. It had caught 
 the quick eye of our conscientious mail-boy, 
 who saw his duty and promptly did it. It 
 only remains for me to persuade the manag- 
 ing editor to print the article when it comes 
 back. After what I have gone through, this 
 should not be difficult. Our readers, there- 
 fore, may look forward to a masterly article 
 on a subject of great interest. Whether it 
 is an astronomical article or a pure food ar- 
 ticle the reader will learn for himself. 
 
X 
 
 LOW-GRADE CITIZENS 
 
 COOPER was in a confidential mood. 
 
 " Isn't it true," he said, " that once so 
 often every one of us feels impelled to go out 
 and assassinate a college professor? " 
 
 " Why shouldn't one? " said Harding. 
 " No one would miss a professor except, pos- 
 sibly, his wife and the children." 
 
 " That's just it, his children," said Cooper. 
 " That's what makes a man hesitate. The 
 particular college professor I have in mind 
 recently published an article on Social Deca- 
 dence in the North American Review. He 
 deplored the tendency among our well-to-do 
 classes toward small families. At the same 
 time he deplored the mistaken zeal of our low- 
 income classes in trying to more than make 
 up for the negligence of their betters. He 
 said, 4 The American population may, there- 
 fore, be increasing most rapidly from that 
 80 
 
LOW-GRADE CITIZENS 81 
 
 group least fitted by heredity or by income 
 to develop social worth in their offspring. 
 Such a process of " reversed selection " must 
 mean, for the nation, a constant decrease in 
 the social worth of each succeeding genera- 
 tion.' He brought forward a good many 
 figures, but I have been so angry that I am 
 quite unable to recall what they are." 
 
 " In that case," Harding said, " you 
 should lose no time in seeking out the man 
 and slaying him before his side of the case 
 comes back to you." 
 
 " People," said Cooper, with that happy 
 gift of his for dropping a subject to suit his 
 own convenience, " have fallen into the habit 
 of saying that the art of letter-writing is ex- 
 tinct. They say we don't write the way 
 Madame de Sevigne did or Charles Lamb. 
 This is not true. 
 
 " For instance, on April 26, 1913, Charles 
 Crawl, a low-income American residing in the 
 soft-coal districts of western Pennsylvania, 
 wrote a letter which I have not been able to get 
 out of my mind. With that unhappy predilec- 
 
82 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 tion for getting into tight places which Is one 
 of the characteristics of our improvident, 
 low-income classes, Charles Crawl happened 
 to be in one of the lower workings of the Cin- 
 cinnati mine when an explosion of gas un- 
 avoidable, as in all mine disasters killed 
 nearly a hundred operatives. Charles Crawl 
 escaped injury, but after creeping through 
 the dark for two days he felt his strength go- 
 ing from him, and so, with a piece of chalk, 
 on his smudgy overalls, he wrote the following 
 letter : 
 
 " ' Good-bye, my children, God bless you.' 
 " He had two children, which for a man 
 of low social worth was doing quite well. 
 But on the other hand he was improvident 
 enough to leave his children without a mother. 
 When I was at coljege, my instructor in rhet- 
 oric was always saying that my failure to 
 write well was due to the fact that I had 
 nothing to say ; and he used to quote passages 
 from Isaiah to show how the thing should be 
 done. I think my rhetoric teacher would 
 
LOW-GRADE CITIZENS 83 
 
 have approved of Charles Crawl's epistolary 
 style. I think Isaiah would have." 
 
 " But we can't all of us work in the mines," 
 I said. 
 
 " Therefore it is not to you that America 
 is looking for the development of an episto- 
 lary art," said Cooper ; " an art in which we 
 are bound to take first place long before our 
 coal deposits are exhausted. Charles Crawl 
 had his predecessors. In November, 1909, 
 Samuel Howard was thoughtless enough to 
 let himself be killed, with several hundred 
 others, in the St. Paul's mine at Cherry, Illi- 
 nois. He, too, left a letter behind him. He 
 wrote : 
 
 If I am dead, give my diamond ring to Mamie 
 Robinson. The ring is at the post-office. I had 
 it sent there. The only thing I regret is my 
 brother that could help mother out after I am 
 dead and gone. I tried my best to get out and 
 could not. 
 
 You see, being a low-income man, of small so- 
 cial worth and pitifully inefficient, even when 
 
84 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 he did his best to get out, he could not. But 
 perhaps the subject tires you? " 
 
 " You might as well go on," said Harding. 
 " If you finish with this subject you will have 
 some other grievance." 
 
 " I have only two more examples of the 
 vulgar epistolary style to cite," said Cooper. 
 " Strictly speaking one of them is not a let- 
 ter. But it is to the point. On the night of 
 April 14, 1912, an Irishman named Dillon of 
 low social value, in fact a stoker, happened to 
 be swimming in the North Atlantic. The 
 Titanic had just sunk from beneath his feet. 
 But perhaps I had better quote the testimony 
 before the Mersey Commission, which, being 
 an official communication, is necessarily un- 
 answerable, as the late Sir W. S. Gilbert 
 pointed out: 
 
 Then he [Dillon] swam away from the noise 
 and came across Johnny Bannon on a grating 
 
 From the fact that Johnny Bannon had man- 
 aged to possess himself of a grating we are 
 justified in concluding that he was a man of 
 
LOW-GRADE CITIZENS 85 
 
 somewhat higher social worth than the wit- 
 ness, Dillon. However, 
 
 came across Johnny Bannon on a grating. 
 He said, " Cheero, Johnny," and Bannon an- 
 swered, " I am all right, Paddy." There was 
 not room on the grating for two, and Dillon, 
 saying, " Well, so long, Johnny," swam off 
 
 In thus leaving Johnny Bannon in undisputed 
 possession of the grating you see that Dillon 
 once more wrote himself down as a low-grade 
 man unfit for competitive survival. How- 
 ever, 
 
 " Well, so long, Johnny," swam off in the 
 direction of a star where Johnny Bannon had 
 seen a flashlight. 
 
 And as it turned out, it was, indeed, a flash- 
 light, and Dillon was pulled out of the water 
 to go on stoking and accelerating the process 
 of national decadence. 
 
 " My last letter," continued Cooper, " was 
 written in October, 1912, in the Tombs. The 
 author was one Frank Cirofici, known to the 
 patrons of educational moving-picture shows 
 
86 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 all over the country as Dago Frank. It 
 was addressed to one Big Jack Zelig, a dis- 
 tinguished ornament of our Great White 
 Way, cut down before his time by a bullet 
 from behind. Cirofici wrote: 
 
 I know the night I heard Jip and Lefty were 
 arrested I cried like a little baby. Dear pal, I 
 have more faith in you than in any living being 
 in this country. I tell you the truth right from 
 my heart. I don't know you long, Jack, and I 
 think if it wasn't for you, I don't know what 
 would happen to me. Being I am a Dago, of 
 course, you don't know what I know." 
 
 " Please," said Harding, " please don't 
 knock a hole into your own argument by ask- 
 ing us to shed tears over the undefiled wells 
 of purity that lie deep in the soul of the 
 Bowery gunman. You won't contend that 
 Dago Frank, when he leaves us, will be a loss 
 to the nation." 
 
 " It would be an act of delusion on my 
 part," said Cooper, " to expect you to see 
 what I am driving at without going to the 
 
LOW-GRADE CITIZENS 87 
 
 trouble of spelling it out for you, Harding, 
 even if you do belong to the classes of su- 
 perior social worth. What I want to express 
 is the justifiable wrath which possesses me 
 at this silly habit of taking a pile of figures 
 and adding them up and dividing by three 
 and deducing therefrom scarlet visions of 
 Decadence and the fall of Rome and Trafal- 
 gar, and all that rot. What if empires, and 
 republics, and incomes, and the size of fami- 
 lies do rise and fall? Does the soul of man 
 decay? Do the primitive loyalties decay? 
 As long as we have men like Charles Crawl 
 and Samuel Howard, do you think I care 
 whether or not Harvard graduates neglect 
 to reproduce their kind? The soul of man, 
 as embodied in Dillon with his ' So long, 
 Johnny,' is as sound to-day as it was ten 
 thousand years ago, before the human race 
 entered on its decline by putting on clothes. 
 And Cirofici, pouring his soul out to his 'pal,' 
 crying like a child over those poor lambs, 
 Lefty Lewis and Gyp the Blood " 
 
88 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 " If that's what you mean," said Harding 
 with suspicious humility, " I quite agree with 
 you. You know, I have often " 
 
 " Once you agree with me," said Cooper, 
 " I don't see why it is necessary for you to 
 continue." 
 
XI 
 
 ROMANCE 
 
 AT 5 :15 in the afternoon of an exceptionally 
 sultry day in August, John P. Wesley, forty- 
 seven years old, in business at No. 634 East 
 Twenty-sixth Street as a jobber in tools and 
 hardware, was descending the stairs to the 
 downtown platform of the Subway at 
 Twenty-eighth Street, when it occurred to 
 him suddenly how odd it was that he should 
 be going home. His grip tightened on the 
 hand rail and he stopped short in his tracks, 
 his eyes fixed on the ground in pained per- 
 plexity. The crowd behind him, thrown 
 back upon itself by this abrupt action, halted 
 only for a moment and flowed on. Cheerful 
 office-boys looked back at him and asked what 
 was the answer. Stout citizens elbowed him 
 aside without apology. But Wesley did not 
 mind. .He was asking himself why ,it was 
 
 that the end of the day's work should invari- 
 89 
 
90 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ably find him descending the stairs to the 
 downtown platform of the Subway. Was 
 there any reason for doing that, other than 
 habit? He wondered why it would not be 
 just as reasonable to cross the avenue and 
 take an uptown train instead. 
 
 Wesley had been taking the downtown 
 train at Twenty-eighth Street at 5 :15 in the 
 afternoon ever since there was a Subway. 
 At Brooklyn Bridge he changed to an express 
 and went to the end of the line. At the end 
 of the line there was a boat which took him 
 across the harbour. At the end of the boat 
 ride there was a trolley car which wound its 
 way up the hill and through streets lined with 
 yellow-bricked, easy-payment, two-family 
 houses, out into the open country, where it 
 dropped him at a cross road. At the end of 
 a ten minutes' walk there was a new house of 
 stucco and timber, standing away from the 
 road, its angular lines revealing mingled as- 
 pirations toward the Californian bungalow 
 and the English Tudor. In the house lived 
 a tall, slender, grey-haired woman who was 
 
ROMANCE 91 
 
 Wesley's wife, and two young girls who were 
 his daughters. They always came to the 
 door when his footsteps grated on the garden 
 path, and kissed him welcome. After dinner 
 he went out and watered the lawn, which, 
 after his wife and the girls, he loved most. 
 He plied the hose deliberately, his eye alert 
 for bald patches. Of late the lawn had not 
 been coming on well, because of a scorching 
 sun and the lack of rain. A quiet chat with 
 his wife on matters of domestic economy ush- 
 ered in the end of a busy day. At the end 
 of the day there was another day just like it. 
 
 And now, motionless in the crowd, Wesley 
 was asking whether right to the end of life 
 this succession of days would continue. Why 
 always the south-bound train? He was 
 aware that there were good reasons why. 
 One was the tall grey-haired woman and the 
 two young girls at home who were in the 
 habit of waiting for the sound of his footsteps 
 on the garden path. They were his life. 
 But apparently, too, there must be life along 
 
 
92 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 the uptown route of the Interborough. He 
 wanted to run amuck, to board a north-bound 
 train without any destination in mind, and 
 to keep on as far as his heart desired, to the 
 very end perhaps, to Van Cortlandt Park, 
 where they played polo, or the Bronx, where 
 there was a botanical museum and a zoo. 
 Even if he went only as far as Grand Central 
 Station, it would be an act of magnificent 
 daring. 
 
 Wesley climbed to the street, crossed 
 Fourth Avenue, descended to the uptown 
 platform, and entered a train without stop- 
 ping to see whether it was Broadway or 
 Lenox Avenue. Already he was thinking of 
 the three women at home in a remote, ob- 
 jective mood. They would be waiting for 
 him, no doubt, and he was sorry, but what 
 else could he do? He was not his own mas- 
 ter. Under the circumstances it was a com- 
 fort to know that all three of them were 
 women of poise, not given to making the 
 worst of things, and with enough work on 
 
ROMANCE 93 
 
 their hands to keep them from worrying 
 overmuch. 
 
 Having broken the great habit of his life 
 by taking an uptown train at 5 :15, Wesley 
 found it quite natural that his minor habits 
 should fall from him automatically. He did 
 not relax into his seat and lose himself in 
 the evening paper after his usual fashion. 
 He did not look at his paper at all, but at 
 the people about him. He had never seen 
 such men and women before, so fresh-tinted, 
 so outstanding, so electric. He seemed to 
 have opened his eyes on a mass of vivid 
 colours and sharp contours. It was the 
 same sensation he experienced when he used 
 to break his gold-rimmed spectacles, and 
 after he had groped for a day in the mists 
 of myopia, a new, bright world would leap 
 out at him through the new lenses. 
 
 Wesley did not make friends easily. In a 
 crowd he was peculiarly shy. Now he grew 
 garrulous. At first his innate timidity rose 
 up and choked him, but he fought it 
 
94 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 down. He turned to his neighbour on the 
 right, a thick-set, clean-shaven youth who 
 was painfully studying the comic pictures in 
 his evening newspaper, and remarked, in a 
 style utterly strange to him: 
 
 " Looks very much like the Giants had the 
 rag cinched ? " 
 
 The thick-set young man, whom Wesley 
 imagined to be a butcher's assistant or some- 
 thing of the sort, looked up from his paper 
 and said, " It certainly does seem as if the 
 New York team had established its title to the 
 championship." 
 
 Wesley cleared his throat again. 
 
 " When it comes to slugging the ball 
 you've got to hand it to them," he said. 
 
 " Assuredly," said the young man, fold- 
 ing up his paper with the evident design of 
 continuing the conversation. 
 
 Wesley was pleased and frightened. He 
 had tasted another new sensation. He had 
 broken through the frosty reserve of twenty 
 years and had spoken to a stranger after the 
 free and easy manner of men who make 
 
ROMANCE 95 
 
 friends in Pullman cars and at lunch coun- 
 ters. And the stranger, instead of repulsing 
 him, had admitted him, at the very first at- 
 tempt, into the fraternity of ordinary peo- 
 ple. It was pleasant to be one of the great 
 democracy of the crowd, something which 
 Wesley had never had time to be. But on 
 the other hand, he found the strain of con- 
 versation telling upon him. He did not 
 know how to go on. 
 
 The stranger went out, but Wesley did 
 not care. He was lost in a delicious reverie, 
 conscious only of being carried forward on 
 free-beating wings into a wonderful, un- 
 known land. The grinding of wheels and 
 brakes as the train halted at a station and 
 pulled out again made a languorous, soothing 
 music. The train clattered out of the tun- 
 nel into the open air, and Wesley was but 
 dimly aware of the change from dark to twi- 
 light. The way now ran through a region 
 of vague apartment houses. There were 
 trees, stretches of green field waiting for the 
 builder, and here or there a colonial manor 
 
96 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 house with sheltered windows, resigned to its 
 fate. Then came cottages with gardens. 
 And in one of these Wesley, shocked into 
 acute consciousness, saw a man with a rubber 
 hose watering a lawn. Wesley leaped to his 
 feet. 
 
 The train was at a standstill when he 
 awoke to the extraordinary fact that he was 
 twelve miles away from South Ferry, and 
 going in the wrong direction. The impera- 
 tive need of getting home as soon as he could 
 overwhelmed him. He dashed for the door, 
 but it slid shut in his face and the train pulled 
 out. His fellow passengers grinned. One 
 of the most amusing things in the world is 
 a tardy passenger who tries to fling himself 
 through a car door and flattens his nose 
 against the glass. It is hard to say why the 
 thing is amusing, but it is. Wesley did not 
 know that he was being laughed at. He 
 merely knew that he must go home. He got 
 out at the next station, and when he was 
 seated in a corner of the south-bound train, 
 he sighed with unutterable relief. He was 
 
ROMANCE 97 
 
 once more in a normal world where trains 
 ran to South Ferry instead of away from it. 
 He dropped off at his road crossing, just 
 two hours late, and found his wife waiting. 
 
 They walked on side by side without speak- 
 ing, but once or twice she turned and caught 
 him staring at her with a peculiar mixture 
 of wonder and unaccustomed tenderness. 
 
 Finally he broke out. 
 
 " It's good to see you again ! " 
 
 She laughed and was happy. His voice 
 stirred in her memories of long ago. 
 
 " It's good to have you back, dear," she 
 said. 
 
 " But you really look remarkably well," 
 he insisted. 
 
 " I rested this afternoon." 
 
 " That's what you should do every day," 
 he said. " Look at that old maple tree ! It 
 hasn't changed a bit ! " 
 
 " No,'* she said, and began to wonder. 
 
 " And the girls are well ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes." 
 
 "I can hardly wait till I see them," he 
 
98 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 said ; and then, to save himself, " I guess I 
 am getting old, Alice." 
 
 " You are younger to-night than you have 
 been for a long time," she said. 
 
 Jennie and her sister were waiting for 
 them on the porch. They wondered why 
 father's kiss fell so warmly on their cheeks. 
 He kissed them twice, which was very un- 
 usual; but being discreet young women they 
 asked no questions. After dinner Wesley 
 went out to look at the lawn. 
 
XII 
 
 WANDERLUST 
 
 APRIL sunlight on the river and the liners 
 putting out to sea. Paris ! Florence ! the 
 Alps ! the Mediterranean ! I turned away and 
 let my thoughts run back to the time when 
 Emmeline and I were in the habit of making, 
 once a year, the trip to Prospect Park South. 
 The Subway has brought this delightful 
 region within the radius of ordinary tourist 
 travel, though I am told that the element of 
 adventure has not been completely eliminated, 
 owing to the necessity of transferring at 
 Atlantic Avenue, where it is still the custom 
 of the traffic policemen to direct passengers, 
 to the wrong car. At the time of which I 
 am speaking, Prospect Park South lay off 
 the beaten track, but the difficulties of the 
 venture were atoned for by the delight of 
 finding one's self, at the journey's end, in a 
 world of new impressions, a world untouched 
 99 
 
100 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 by the rush and clamour of our own days, 
 and steeped in the colour and poetry which 
 Cook's, cotton goods, and the cinemaiagpP^* 
 have been wiping out in Europe and the Near 
 East. 
 
 There were no Baedekers then for travel- 
 lers to Prospect Park South. To-day I 
 presume guide-books and maps may be pur- 
 chased at the Manhattan end of the Brook- 
 lyn Bridge if people still go by that route. 
 We did without guide-books or guides, be- 
 cause the inhabitants of Prospect Park 
 South were a kindly folk and as a rule would 
 wait for visitors at the trolley stops, with 
 an umbrella. When this did not happen, 
 we asked our way from passers-by. These 
 were always strangers who had lost their 
 way. The inhabitants were either peace- 
 fully at home or waiting at the trolley stops. 
 For that* matter an inhabitant, when en- 
 countered by rare chance, was not really of 
 assistance. A resident always referred to 
 streets and avenues by the names they bore 
 when he first moved in ; and inasmuch as the 
 
WANDERLUST X01 
 
 streets in Prospect Park South are renamed 
 every year and the street numbers altered 
 
 - 
 
 at the same time, the settlers, who would find 
 their own homes by intuition, were worse 
 than useless as guides. On the other hand, 
 to meet a stranger who was lost was always 
 a help. It was a peculiarity of strangers 
 who were lost in Prospect Park South that 
 they would always be passing the street you 
 were looking for, while you in turn had just 
 turned in from the street they were looking 
 for, so that an exchange of information was 
 always mutually profitable. 
 
 The following hints for travellers to Pros- 
 pect Park South are based upon our ex- 
 periences of some years ago. Those who 
 go by the Interborough tube will probably 
 find that changed conditions have rendered 
 many of these rules obsolete. But for those 
 who go by way of Brooklyn Bridge they may 
 still be of some value. First then as to 
 dress. As a rule one should dress for Pros- 
 pect Park South very much as for a short 
 run to Europe. That is to say, woollens 
 
10 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 are always preferable, especially in the rainy 
 season (which in Prospect Park South is 
 coextensive with the visiting season), owing 
 
 I -^"""^l in |g | | |' O / ' O 
 
 to the long waits between cars. It is true, 
 as I have said, that the inhabitants of Pros- 
 pect Park South are accustomed to wait at 
 the trolley stations with an umbrella, and 
 no household is without a full assortment of 
 old mackintoshes and rubbers to lend to im- 
 provident visitors who believed the weather 
 reports in the paper. But house parties in 
 Prospect Park South are frequently large 
 and there may not be enough old raincoats 
 to go around. A light overcoat, an um- 
 brella, rubbers or a pair of stout shoes, and 
 a pocket electric light for reading names on 
 the street lamps at night, will be found suf- 
 ficient for the ordinary traveller. 
 
 The choice of route is important. Those 
 who, like us, live in upper Manhattan may 
 lay their plans (excluding the Subway) 
 either for the Ninth Avenue L or the Sixth 
 Avenue L. As far south as Fifty-third 
 Street the two lines coincide. Below Fifty- 
 
WANDERLUST 103 
 
 third Street the question of route should be 
 determined by one's personal preferences in 
 the matter of scenery; though not entirely. 
 Veteran travellers assure me that there is 
 also a difference in comfort. The curves 
 are sharper on Sixth Avenue, but there are 
 more flat wheels on the Ninth Avenue line. 
 According as the tourist is susceptible to 
 lateral or vertical disturbances he will make 
 his choice. The front and rear cars are to 
 be recommended above all others because a 
 seat may always be obtained. I recognise, 
 however, that if the traveller has long been 
 a resident of New York he will force his way 
 into the middle cars. Then, hanging from a 
 strap, he may curse the company and be in 
 turn cursed by the quick-tempered gentle- 
 man upon whose feet he is standing. 
 
 A phrase-book is not necessary. The 
 English language is used on both the Sixth 
 and Ninth Avenue lines, and being equally 
 incomprehensible, cannot be looked up in a 
 : ' dictionary. Only legal currency of the 
 United States is accepted at the ticket-of- 
 
104. POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 fices, but change is frequently given in 
 Canadian dimes. It is convenient, but not 
 essential, to supply one's self with reading 
 matter at the beginning of the trip. News- 
 papers are always to be had for the picking 
 on the floor of the cars. The question of 
 fresh air, a topic of constant unpleasant con- 
 troversy between American travellers and 
 Europeans on the Continent, need not con- 
 cern the traveller here. The matter is 
 regulated by the company management which 
 / keeps the windows closed in summer and 
 open in winter. Passengers of an independ- 
 ent turn of mind will be wary of opening- 
 windows on their own account. The sudden 
 entrance of air following upon the heavy 
 perspiration induced by the effort has been 
 known to lead to pneumonia. 
 
 With these few general considerations in 
 
 mind, we may proceed te -giy._A~rapi4 -sketch 
 
 of the- TOtrte the tourist traverses. As we 
 
 v" ( have said, down to Fifty- third Street the 
 
 '-passenger on the Sixth Avenue and on the 
 
 Ninth Avenue will pass through the same 
 
WANDERLUST 105 
 
 landscape. As the train makes the magnifi- 
 cent curve through One Hundred and Tenth 
 Street he will have before him on the right 
 the towering mass of the Cathedral of St. 
 John, which a kindly neighbour will tell him 
 is Columbia University, and on the left the 
 lovely, wooded heights of Central Park, 
 their base skirted by a low line of garages 
 and French dyeing establishments. At 
 Ninety-eighth Street, on the right, is a 
 water tower of red brick, which probably 
 has the distinction of being the tallest water 
 tower on Ninety-eighth Street. At Seventy- 
 seventh Street to the left is the Museum of 
 Natural History, which the same kindly in- 
 formant to whom we have referred will de- 
 scribe as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
 On every cross street to the right one may 
 catch a glimpse of the beautiful Riverside 
 Drive with the smoke from the New York 
 Central's freight engines rising above the 
 trees. 
 
 At Fifty-third Street the Sixth Avenue 
 trains diverge to the left for a short distance 
 
106 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 and then, turning south once more, carry 
 the traveller through a region heavily over- 
 grown with skeleton advertising signs of 
 woman's apparel and table waters. If the 
 Ninth Avenue route is selected the vista is one 
 of tenement houses and factories. At Thirty- 
 third Street is the new Pennsylvania Station, 
 the cost of which the same kindly neighbour 
 will exaggerate by several hundred millions 
 of dollars. 
 
 Ten blocks further down are the buildings 
 of the General Theological Seminary, so 
 beautiful in line and colour that no resident 
 of New York ever alludes to them. A few 
 minutes further down the train rounds a 
 curve and the traveller, if he goes in the 
 early morning, as every visitor to Prospect 
 Park South must, catches a glimpse of the 
 fairy land of steeples and battlements of 
 lower New York, a Camelot wreathed with 
 wisps of steam. For the lover of scenery 
 the Ninth Avenue is to be unhesitatingly rec- 
 ommended, whereas the Sixth Avenue route 
 will give pleasure to the citizen who takes 
 
WANDERLUST 10? 
 
 pride in the development of our garment in- 
 dustries. 
 
 I have no space to describe the interesting 
 views to be had while crossing Brooklyn 
 Bridge. I can only mention the harbour 
 with the sunlight upon it, a spectacle of love- 
 liness for which New York will be forgiven 
 much. Straight under the span of the 
 bridge is the pier from which Colonel Roose- 
 velt set sail for South America. On the left, 
 close to the edge of the river, is the beetling 
 mass of sugar refineries famous the world 
 over as the scene of an epoch-making ex- 
 periment in modifying the law of gravitation, 
 when the sugar company succeeded in weigh- 
 ing in three thousand pounds of sugar to 
 the ton and paying duty on the smaller 
 amount to the United States Government. 
 
 Of the trip through Brooklyn to Prospect 
 Park South I will not attempt to give any 
 description. For that matter I will not pre- 
 tend that on any of our journeys I have 
 carried away a definite idea of Brooklyn. 
 For that a lifetime is necessary. 
 
XIII 
 
 UNREVISED SCHEDULES 
 
 LIFE'S ironies beset us whichever way we 
 turn. The very day that Woodrow Wilson 
 signed the tariff bill, I discovered that Em- 
 meline is a Protectionist. 
 
 Thrice in the course of the evening I al- 
 luded, with pretended calm, to the signing 
 of the bill, without awakening the least re- 
 sponse in Emmeline. The tariff apparently 
 had no meaning to her. Thereupon I re- 
 proached her openly. 
 
 " It is characteristic of your sex," I said, 
 " not to betray the slightest interest in a 
 matter that comes so intimately home to you. 
 Here is a bill which is bound to affect the 
 problem of high prices. Every woman who 
 carries a market basket, every woman who 
 shops, every woman who has the management 
 of a household on her hands, is directly con- 
 cerned in the question of lower tariff duties. 
 108 
 
UNREVISED SCHEDULES 109 
 
 Yet I dare say you haven't read two lines on 
 the subject in your newspaper." 
 
 "What have we been paying duties on? " 
 she said. 
 
 " On everything," I replied with spirit. 
 " Anchors, for instance. We have been pay- 
 ing one cent a pound on them. That means 
 twenty dollars a ton. You know what the 
 average anchor weighs, so you can figure out 
 for yourself what we have been paying out 
 all these years for this commodity alone. 
 We have been paying 25 per cent, on bunion 
 plasters, 10 per cent, on animals' claws, and 
 25 per cent, on teazels." 
 
 " But we hardly ever use any of these 
 things," she said. 
 
 " I was simply illustrating the iniquitous 
 extremes to which our tariff advocates were 
 prepared to go," I said. " It may seem 
 natural to put a duty on beef, and shoes, and 
 cotton goods. But the tariff barons were 
 not content. Insatiable greed demanded 
 that a tax be put on teazels." 
 
 " What is a teazel? " she said. 
 
110 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 " I am not sure that I know," I replied. 
 " But that just illustrates one of the 
 favourite methods of the tariff plunderers. 
 It consisted in slapping a stiff duty on 
 articles people did not know the meaning of 
 and so would pay without protest. I say 
 teazels, but, of course, I mean meat, and 
 sugar, and cotton, and woollen goods, all of 
 which things will soon be within the reach of 
 all. I should imagine that women would be 
 grateful for what has been done to make the 
 living problem so much easier." 
 
 " Under the new tariff bill," she said, 
 " will there still be only twenty-four hours to 
 the day?" 
 
 " The new tariff doesn't repeal the laws 
 of astronomy," I replied. 
 
 " That is what I was thinking when you 
 spoke of the living problem being made easier 
 for us," she said. " Putting twelve more 
 hours into the day would be a help. Did 
 the old tariff have a big duty on hanging up 
 pictures ? " 
 
UNREVISED SCHEDULES 111 
 
 " I don't know what you are driving at," 
 I said, but in my heart I thought I knew. 
 
 " I mean," she said, " around moving time. 
 I have always thought there must be a very 
 heavy tax on every picture that a man hangs 
 up ; or rugs " 
 
 I decided that frivolity was the best way 
 out of a situation that had suddenly become 
 menacing. " Usually we don't hang up 
 rugs," I said. 
 
 " That may be an oversight on our part," 
 she replied. " Perhaps, if we hung up rugs 
 and put pictures on the floor it might ap- 
 peal to your passion for romance. You 
 might even find it exhilarating." 
 
 The idea seemed to fascinate her. 
 
 " There are a great many things," she 
 went on, " that I should like to see on the 
 free list. Seats in the Subway, for instance. 
 I stood up all the way from Twenty-third 
 Street this afternoon, but I suppose the duty 
 on a man's giving up his seat to a woman is 
 prohibitive. Then there's Mrs. Flanagan 
 
112 POST-IMPEESSIONS 
 
 who comes in by the day. She has a baby 
 who is teething and cries all night. I wish 
 there was a lower duty on babies' teeth, so 
 that they came easier; and on sleep for 
 mothers who have to go out by the day. I 
 also wish there was a lower duty on the 
 whisky that her husband consumes. She 
 could possibly afford to stay at home more 
 than she does." 
 
 "He'd only drink himself to death," I 
 said. 
 
 But she was not paying attention. 
 " There might be a lower duty on efficient 
 domestic help. It would be a relief." 
 
 " Foreign household help are not under 
 the tariff law at all," I said. " They come 
 in free." 
 
 " That's what the girl said yesterday when 
 she decided to quit, an hour before dinner. 
 And from the way she spoke to me I imagine 
 that her language also came in free. The 
 more I think of it the fewer advantages I can 
 see for us women under your new tariff bill." 
 And then the bitter truth came out. " I 
 
UNREVISED SCHEDULES 118 
 
 think that on the whole I am in favour of a 
 high tariff on most things." 
 
 " You are in favour of Protection," I 
 stammered, hardly believing my senses. 
 
 " I am in favour of protecting domestic 
 industry," said Emmeline, and I saw that 
 she had been reading the newspapers more 
 carefully than I imagined. 
 
 The protective system which Emmeline 
 outlined to me that evening would have made 
 Senator Penrose sob for joy. One of the 
 first things she demanded was a heavy duty 
 on tobacco. She said she would be satis- 
 fied with a flat rate of 100 per cent, on the 
 nasty article, with a super tax of 100 per 
 cent, on all half-smoked cigars left lying 
 around the house, and another 100 per cent, 
 on cigar ashes and half-burnt matches. Al- 
 coholic spirits should be totally excluded. 
 She wanted a pretty heavy duty on rain- 
 coats left lying on chairs when they should 
 be hung up on the proper hook. She was 
 also in favour of a prohibitive tax on all 
 arguments tending to prove that woman's 
 
114 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 natural sphere is the home. Lodge dues, 
 club dues, and the practice of reading news- 
 papers at the breakfast table should be 
 heavily taxed. There were a great many 
 other schedules she proposed, carrying a 
 minimum duty of seventy-five per cent. I 
 cannot pretend to remember all, but my im- 
 pression is that plays dealing with the social 
 evil and eugenics were among them. 
 
 By this time it will be apparent that Em- 
 meline's views on tariff legislation were some- 
 what confused. She evidently made no 
 distinction between import duties, internal 
 revenue taxes, and the police power of the 
 State. Before continuing our discussion I 
 therefore insisted that we restrict debate to 
 the specific question of import duties and 
 the cost of living. The simple fact was that 
 we had now changed from a high-tariff na- 
 tion to a low-tariff nation. How would this 
 affect ourselves and our neighbours? 
 
 Thereupon I was subjected to a severe 
 examination as to tariffs and prices in other 
 countries. My answers were, in a general 
 
UNREVISED SCHEDULES 115 
 
 fashion, correct, though possibly I may have 
 confused the British tariff system with that 
 of Germany. 
 
 " From your statements, so far as I can 
 make head or tail out of them," said Em- 
 meline, " I gather that in protection countries 
 the cost of food and clothing and rent is 
 always just a little ahead of wages and 
 salaries." 
 
 " You have followed me perfectly," I said. 
 
 " Whereas in low-tariff countries people's 
 wages and salaries are always just a little 
 behind the cost of food, clothing, and shelter. 
 
 " That is due to quite a different set of 
 causes," I said. 
 
 " I imagined," she said, " that the causes 
 must be other than those you mentioned. 
 But the fact remains that the choice which 
 confronts most of us is between having a little 
 less than we need, or needing a little more 
 than we have. If that is so, it seems to me 
 rather a waste of time to spend did you 
 say seventy-five years ? in revising the 
 tariff. I prefer my own kind of tariff," 
 
116 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 " And the cost of living? " I said. 
 
 " My kind of tariff gets much nearer to 
 solving that problem," she said. 
 
 " But then, why Mrs. Pankhurst? " I said. 
 " If the making of laws has nothing to do 
 with the comfort of life, why do you want to 
 vote?" 
 
 " Because we want to assert our equality 
 by sharing your illusions. Besides, we can 
 use the vote to bring about a state of things 
 when voting won't be necessary." 
 
 On further thought, Emmeline is not a 
 Protectionist; she is an Anarchist. 
 
XIV 
 
 SOMEWHAT CONFUSED 
 
 HE said: 
 
 " Last night my wife took me to a lecture 
 on Eugenics and the Future. The night be- 
 fore, we went to a lecture on the Social Im- 
 plications of the Tango. I enjoyed them 
 both immensely. Of course, after a long day 
 in the office, I am rather tired in the even- 
 ing. If I dozed off on either occasion it 
 must have been just for a moment. I fol- 
 lowed the arguments perfectly." 
 
 " Are you converted ? " I said. 
 
 He pushed his derby further back on his 
 head. 
 
 " Quite. I am not a mule. I know a good 
 argument) when I see one. Now, isn't it 
 true, as the speaker contended last night, 
 that the human animal, taking him by and 
 large, is not a beautiful object? When he 
 
 isn't bow-legged, he is knock-kneed. There 
 117 
 
118 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 are too many men prematurely bald. There 
 are too many women prematurely wrinkled 
 and fat. We are nothing but a sham- 
 bling, stoop-shouldered race, in a permanent 
 state of ill-health. In summer we get sun- 
 struck. In winter we get colds in the head. 
 Look at the ancient Greeks. Is there any 
 reason why we cannot produce a race as 
 healthy, as beautiful, as graceful in the free 
 play of muscle and limb? An erect, supple, 
 free-stepping race, breathing deeply of life, 
 looking the world full in the face, daring 
 everything, afraid of nothing. Our bodies 
 are divine, as much so as our souls. To go 
 on being a race of physical degenerates, a 
 snuffling, wheezing, perspiring race that is al- 
 ways running to the doctor, is mortal sin; 
 especially when the remedy is close at hand." 
 
 " You mean eugenics ? " I said. 
 
 " No," he said, " I refer to the tango. 
 The speaker last night or was it the night 
 before ? was absolutely convincing on the 
 point. I am sure you will agree." 
 
 To make sure that I would agree he inter- 
 
SOMEWHAT CONFUSED 119 
 
 rupted me just as I opened my mouth to 
 frame an objection. He continued rapidly: 
 
 " Take this matter of old age. There's 
 no reason why people should let themselves 
 grow old, is there now? And a properly 
 constituted race would see to it that old age 
 was postponed indefinitely. After all, when 
 a man says he is eighty years old or ninety 
 years old, it is only a figure of speech. Look 
 at Napoleon winning the battle of Leipzig 
 when he was seventy-eight years old." 
 
 " I never heard that before," I said. " I 
 thought Napoleon lost the battle of Leipzig, 
 and when he died " 
 
 " It may have been Hannibal," he said. 
 " At that point I may possibly have dozed 
 off. But the principle of the thing is the 
 same. Only a race of weaklings will suc- 
 cumb to the ravages of time without making 
 a fight for it. There is really nothing beau- 
 tiful in old age. You sit out the long winter 
 nights by the fire. Your eyes are too weak 
 for the fine print in the evening paper, and 
 when you ask your son to tell you about the 
 
120 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 new Currency Law he grows cross and 
 scolds the baby. When you stop to buy a 
 ticket in the Subway, people grow impatient 
 and murmur something about an old ladies' 
 home. It's all as plain as daylight. There 
 is no reason why people, as soon as they 
 get to be sixty, should reconcile themselves 
 to the idea of debility, warm gruel, and chest 
 protectors, when they might go on being 
 young, alert, graceful, full of the joy of life, 
 if they would only recognise the way of go- 
 ing about it." 
 
 " You mean the tango ? " I said. 
 
 " No," he said. " I was alluding to 
 eugenics." 
 
 He spoke with assurance, but from the 
 corner of his eye he threw me a wistful, fugi- 
 tive glance, as if to make sure from my 
 bearing that this was really what he meant. 
 I did not contradict him. I was thinking 
 of his wife. For the first time in my ex- 
 perience my sympathies were with the tired 
 business man. It is good for the tired busi- 
 ness man that his wife shall be alive to the 
 
SOMEWHAT CONFUSED 121 
 
 things that count ; but two nights in succes- 
 sion is rather hard. His wife, I knew, was 
 alive to every phase of our intense modern 
 existence, and in rapid succession. She did 
 not precisely burn with that hard, gemlike 
 flame which Mr. Pater recommended. Some- 
 times I thought she burned with a sixty-four- 
 candle power carbon glow. It was a bit 
 trying on the eyes. 
 
 \ 
 
 " Or take the question of sex," he said. 
 " What is there in sex emotion to be ashamed 
 of? It is the most primordial of feelings. 
 It comes before the law of gravitation, as 
 the speaker showed last night." 
 
 " Does it though? " I said. 
 
 " Well," he said, " perhaps it was the night 
 before last. Around this universal urge, of 
 which we ought to be proud, as the most 
 powerful force in Evolution (the speaker 
 last night was sure there could be no doubt 
 on the subject), we have built up an 
 elaborate structure of reticence and hypoc- 
 risy. All art, all literature, is of significance 
 only as it emphasises sex. If the Bible has 
 
122 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 impressed itself on the imagination of human- 
 ity for two thousand years, it is because it 
 contains the most beautiful love songs in all 
 literature. It is the force which drives the 
 sun in its course, as the Italian poet has 
 said. It has been the inspiration of all great 
 deeds. If we searched deeply enough, we 
 should find that sex was the inspiration behind 
 the discovery of America, the invention of 
 printing, and the building of the Roman aque- 
 ducts. Only the most benighted ignorance 
 will permit our prudish sentiments on the sub- 
 ject to stand in the way of a movement which 
 is sweeping the world like wildfire." 
 
 " Referring to eugenics ? " I said. 
 
 " No," he said, " I mean the tango." 
 
 He looked out of the window and pon- 
 dered. 
 
 " Yes," he said, " that was night before 
 last. What the speaker dwelt upon last 
 night was the subject of democracy. At 
 present we know nothing of true democracy, 
 of true equality. Society is divided into 
 classes with separate codes of morals and 
 
SOMEWHAT CONFUSED 123 
 
 standards of conduct. There are rich and 
 poor; workers and idlers; meat eaters and 
 vegetarians; the old and the young; the 
 literate, the illiterate, and the advocates of 
 simplified spelling. It isn't a world at all; 
 it is chaos. In the end it all resolves itself 
 into this : humanity is divided into the strong 
 and the weak. The surest way to do away 
 with inequality is to produce a race in which 
 every member is strong." 
 
 " You mean " I said. 
 
 " Pardon me," he said. " I haven't 
 finished. Let me sum up the speaker's con- 
 cluding sentence as I recall it. As we look 
 around us to-day there is unmistakably one 
 force which works for the elimination of that 
 inequality which is the source of all our 
 troubles ; a force which wipes out all distinc- 
 tion of class, of age, and of education, and 
 produces a world in which everybody is en- 
 gaged in doing the same thing as everybody 
 else." 
 
 " Oh, I see," I said. " You are now speak- 
 ing of the tango." 
 
124 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 " Not at all," he said, " I am referring to 
 eugenics. But perhaps you do not agree 
 with me ? " 
 
 I hesitated. He was watching me eagerly, 
 pushing his derby back until it stood upright 
 on its tail like a trained seal. 
 
 " I have done my best to agree with you," 
 I said, " but you have made it rather dif- 
 ficult for me. Nevertheless I do agree with 
 you. What I am thinking of now is some- 
 thing which the speaker last night omitted 
 to mention or was it the night before 
 last? And it is this. Under the conditions 
 which you describe, how beautifully complex 
 the art of thinking will become. At present 
 we can hardly be said to think at all. We 
 are cowards. We crawl along from one 
 truth to another. We timidly look back to 
 our premises before jumping at the conclu- 
 sion. We are horrified by inconsistencies. 
 We are enslaved by facts facts of nature, 
 facts of human nature, facts of experience. 
 How different it will all be when we can side- 
 step facts, when we can dip over incon- 
 
SOMEWHAT CONFUSED 125 
 
 sistencies, when we can hug boldly an ap- 
 parent contradiction and make it our own; 
 when thinking, in short, will not be a timid 
 regulated process, but a succession of dips, 
 twists, gallops, slides, bends, hurdles, sprints, 
 and pole vaults." 
 
 " You are thinking of the tango ? " he 
 said. 
 
 " No,'* I replied. " I had eugenics in 
 mind." 
 
XV 
 
 HAROLD'S SOUL, II 
 
 You, mothers and fathers [said this partic- 
 ular advertising folder which I found in my 
 morning's mail], do you know what goes on 
 in the soul of your child? 
 
 I, for one, know very little of what goes 
 on inside of Harold. My information on the 
 subject would hardly furnish material for a 
 single university extension lecture on child 
 psychology. It is an imperfect, unsystem- 
 atised knowledge based on accidental 
 glimpses into Harold's soul, odd flashes of 
 self-revelation, and occasional questions the 
 boy will put to me. I don't know whether 
 Harold is more reticent than the average boy 
 in the second elementary grade, but in his 
 case it does no good to cross-examine. He 
 grows confused, suspicious, and afraid. He 
 resents the intrusion of my rough fingers into 
 
 his sensitive world of ideas, So I clo not in- 
 126 
 
HAROLD'S SOUL 127 
 
 sist on detailed accounts of how the boy 
 passes his time in class or at play; for what 
 are time and space and grammatical sequence 
 to the child? I am content to wait, and 
 now and then I make discoveries. 
 
 Harold and I were discussing one day the 
 rather important question, raised by him- 
 self, from what height a man must fall down 
 in order to be killed. It began, I think, with 
 umbrellas and how they behave in a high 
 wind. From that we passed on to para- 
 chutes and balloons and the loftier mountain 
 tops. We dwelt for some time upon the dif- 
 ficulties and dangers of mountaineering. 
 
 " Once there was a man," said Harold, 
 " who used to drive six mules up a moun- 
 tain." 
 
 " Six mules," I said. " How do you 
 know?" 
 
 " A bishop told me," he said. 
 
 The sense of utter helplessness before the 
 closed temple of Harold's private life op- 
 pressed me. Let alone his soul, I found that 
 I did not even know how the boy was spenoV- 
 
128 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ing his time and who his associates were. 
 Fortunately, in this case it was a bishop ; but 
 it might have been some one much worse. 
 
 And why had Harold never spoken of his 
 friend the bishop until our talk of parachutes 
 and mountain climbing brought forth his per- 
 fectly matter-of-fact statement? Was it in- 
 difference on Harold's part? Was it studied 
 reticence? I thought with a pang of self- 
 accusation how I would have behaved, after 
 meeting a bishop; how I would have turned 
 the conversation at the dinner-table to the 
 declining influence of the Church; how I 
 would have found a way of comparing the 
 Woolworth Building with ecclesiastical ar- 
 chitecture ; how I might have steered a course 
 from golf to bridge and from bridge to chess ; 
 always ending with a careless allusion to 
 what the bishop said when we met. 
 
 There was, as it turned out, a simple ex- 
 planation for Harold's statement. A nota- 
 ble conclave of bishops and laymen had been 
 in session for some days in our neighbour- 
 hood, and one of the visiting dignitaries had 
 
HAROLD'S SOUL 129 
 
 addressed the school children at the opening 
 exercises one morning. I say the explana- 
 tion is simple, though it is largely my own 
 hypothesis based on Harold's words as I 
 have given them above ; but I believe my sup- 
 position to be true. With regard to the six 
 mules up a steep mountain I am not so sure ; 
 but probably it was a missionary bishop who 
 entertained the children with an account of 
 his experiences in Montana or British Colum- 
 bia. What else the bishop told them Har- 
 old could not say. He admitted, regretfully, 
 that the bishop used long words. 
 
 But I am not at all certain that other 
 bits of information from that ecclesiastical 
 speech have not lodged in Harold's memory, 
 to be brought forward on some utterly unex- 
 pected but quite appropriate occasion. In 
 the meanwhile I can only think that it must 
 be a very fine sort of bishop, indeed, who 
 could find time for an audience of school 
 children and was not afraid to use long 
 words in their presence. As I can testify, 
 the encounter thus brought about did Harold 
 
130 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 good; and I am inclined to think that it did 
 the bishop good. 
 
 We finally decided that no man could fall 
 from a height over one hundred and fifty feet 
 and reasonably expect to live. 
 
 You, mothers and fathers [this advertis- 
 ing folder petulantly insists], can you ap- 
 pease the wonder that looks out of the eyes 
 of your child? 
 
 From Harold's eyes, I am inclined to 
 think, no wondering soul looks out. The 
 world to him is quite as it should be. Every- 
 thing fits into its place. Harold does not 
 think it strange that a bishop should address 
 him any more than he would think it strange 
 to have the Kaiser walk into the class-room 
 and begin to do sums on the blackboard. 
 Why should there be anything to puzzle him ? 
 He has learned no rules of life and is, there- 
 fore, in no position to be astonished by the 
 exceptions of life. If only you are unaware 
 that two things cannot be in the same place 
 at the same time, or that the whole is greater 
 than any of its parts, the world becomes a 
 
HAROLD'S SOUL 131 
 
 very easy thing to explain. To Harold 
 everything that is, is. Everything that ap- 
 pears to be, is. Everything that he would 
 like to be, is; and nothing contradicts any- 
 thing. 
 
 It is true that Harold asks questions. But 
 I believe he asks questions not because he 
 wonders, but because he suspects that he is 
 being deprived of something that should be 
 his. It is that partly and partly it is the 
 desire to make conversation. He insists on 
 having his privacy respected, but often he 
 appears to be seized with an utter sense of 
 loneliness. All children experience this re- 
 current necessity of clinging to some one, and 
 they do so by putting questions the answers 
 to which frequently do not interest them or 
 else are already known to them. To post- 
 pone the bed-time hour a child will try to 
 make conversation as desperately as any 
 fashionable hostess with an uncle from the 
 country in her drawing-room. Children 
 rarely deceive themselves, but they are expert 
 at the game of hoodwinking and conceal- 
 
132 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ment. I think we find it difficult to under- 
 stand how passionately they desire to be let 
 alone whenever they do not need us. 
 
 And how desperately bent we are upon not 
 letting them alone! The number of ways in 
 which I am constantly being urged to' make 
 myself a nuisance to Harold is extraordinary. 
 I am assailed by advertising folders, uplift 
 articles in the magazines, Sunday specials, 
 Chautauqua lectures, pedagogical reviews, 
 and the voice of conscience in my own breast, 
 to inflict myself upon the boy, to win his con- 
 fidence, make him my comrade, guide his 
 thoughts, shape his moral development, keep 
 a diary of his pregnant utterances, and in 
 every other way that may occur to a fertile 
 mind bent on mischief, peer into him, pry into 
 him, spy on him, spring little psychological 
 traps under him a disgusting process of 
 infant vivisection which has no other excuse 
 than our own vacant curiosity. Provided 
 Harold digests his food, sleeps well, does his 
 lessons, and abstains from unclean speech, it 
 is no business of mine what Harold is doing 
 
HAROLD'S SOUL 133 
 
 with his soul. I am thankful for what he 
 consents to reveal at odd moments. I guess 
 at what I can guess and am content to wait. 
 
 And waiting, I have my reward occa- 
 sionally. Not until several weeks after I had 
 discovered that Harold had the entree into 
 ecclesiastical circles did the subject come up 
 again. The boy paused between two spoon- 
 fuls of cereal and asked me whether a bishop 
 would not find it easier to go up a mountain 
 in an aeroplane. I foolishly asked him what 
 he was driving at and he grew shy. I am 
 afraid he now thinks bishops are not proper. 
 
 But who shall say that the connection be- 
 tween high altitudes and the episcopal dig- 
 nity is not really an important one? Harold 
 is apparently occupied with the question and 
 I shall take care not to disturb him. 
 
XVI 
 
 RHETORIC 21 
 
 EVERY time I happen to turn to the Gettys- 
 burg Address I am saddened to find that, 
 after many years of practice, my own liter- 
 ary style is still strikingly inferior to that of 
 Lincoln at his best. The fact was first 
 brought home to me during my sophomore 
 year. 
 
 (Incidentally I would remark that the op- 
 portunities for consulting the Gettysburg 
 Address occur frequently in a newspaper of- 
 fice. Every little while, in the lull between 
 editions, a difference of opinion will arise as 
 to what Lincoln said at Gettysburg. Some 
 maintain that he said, " a government of the 
 people, for the people, by the people " ; some 
 declare he said, " a government by the peo- 
 ple, of the people, for the people " ; some as- 
 sert that he said, " a government by the peo- 
 ple, for the people, of the people." Obvi- 
 134 
 
RHETORIC 21 135 
 
 ously the only way out is to make a pool and 
 look up Nicolay and Hay. When we are not 
 betting on Lincoln's famous phrase, we differ 
 as to whether the first words in Caesar are 
 " Gallia omnis est divisa," or " Omnis Gallia 
 est divisa," or " Ctmnis Gallia divisa est." 
 We all remember the " partes tres.") I 
 
 In my sophomore year we used to write 
 daily themes. We were then at the begin- 
 ning of the revolt from the stilted essay to the 
 realistic form of undergraduate style. In- 
 stead of writing about what we had read in 
 De Quincey or Matthew Arnold, we were 
 asked to write about what we had' seen on 
 the Elevated or on the campus/ I presume 
 this literary method has triumphed in all the 
 colleges, just as I know that the new school 
 of college oratory has quite displaced the old. 
 Instead of arguing whether Greece had done 
 more for civilisation than Rome, sophomores 
 now debate the question, " Resolved, that the 
 issue of 4"!/2 per cent, convertible State bonds 
 is unjustified by prevailing conditions in the 
 European money market." So with our 
 
136 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 daily themes! We did not write about patri- 
 otism or Shakespeare's use of contrast. We 
 wrote about football, about the management 
 of the lunch-room, about the need of more 
 call-boys in the library. 
 
 The underlying idea was sensible enough. 
 But it was disheartening to have a daily 
 theme come back drenched in red ink to show 
 where one's prose rhythm had broken down 
 or the relative pronouns had run too thick. 
 Our instructors were good men. They did 
 not content themselves with pointing out our 
 sins against style; they would show us how 
 much more skilfully the English language 
 could be used. When I wrote : " That the 
 new improvements that have been made in 
 the new gymnasium that has just been inau- 
 gurated are all that are necessary," my in- 
 structor would pick up the Gettysburg Ad- 
 dress and read out aloud : " But in a larger 
 sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot conse- 
 crate, we cannot hallow this ground." Some- 
 times he would pick up the Bible and readout 
 aloud : 
 
RHETORIC 21 137 
 
 For now should I have lain still and been 
 quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at 
 rest, 
 
 With kings and counsellors of the earth, which 
 built desolate places for themselves. 
 
 Sometimes he would read from Keats's " Gre- 
 cian Urn," or ask me, by implication, why I 
 could not frame a concrete image like 
 " Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, 
 Silent upon a peak in Darien." 
 
 Even then I laboured under a sense of in- 
 justice. I could not help thinking that the 
 comparison would have been more fair if I 
 had had a chance to speak at Gettysburg and 
 Abraham Lincoln had had to write about the 
 new gymnasium. I thought how the red ink 
 would have splashed if I hnd ondod a ocntence 
 
 - had said " kings 
 
 and counsellors which." j Are there still 
 sophomores whom they drill in writing about 
 the prospects of the hockey team and to 
 whom they read " The Fall of the House of 
 Usher," as an example of what can be done 
 with the English language?/ And do some 
 
138 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 of them do what some of us, in desperation, 
 used to do? We cheated. We worked our- 
 selves up into ecstasies of false emotion over 
 the hockey team or pretended to see things 
 in Central Park which we never saw. I al- 
 ways think of Central Park with bitterness. 
 We were to write a description of what we 
 saw as we stood on the Belvedere looking 
 north. I wrote a faithful catalogue of what 
 I saw, and the instructor picked up " Les 
 Miserables " and read me the story of the 
 last charge over the sunken road at Water- 
 loo. I should have done what one of the 
 other men did. He never went to Central 
 Park. He stayed at home and, looking 
 straight north from the Belvedere, he saw the 
 sun setting in the west, and Mr. Carnegie's 
 new mansion to the east, and the towers of 
 St. Patrick directly behind him. He saw it 
 all so vividly, so harmoniously, that they 
 marked him A. I got C-j-. Is it any won- 
 der that I cannot even now read the Gettys- 
 burg Address without a twinge of resent- 
 ment ? % 
 
RHETORIC 21 139 
 
 And yet we were fortunate in one way. 
 In those days they read the Gettysburg Ad- 
 dress to us as a model, and in spite of our 
 resentment our sophomore hearts caught the 
 glory and the awe of it. But in those days 
 the art of text-book writing had not attained 
 its present perfection, and the Gettysburg 
 Address had not yet been edited as a classic 
 with twenty pages of introduction and I don't 
 know how many foot-notes. Am I wrong in 
 supposing that somewhere in the high schools 
 or the colleges this is what the young soul 
 finds in the Gettysburg Address ? : 
 
 Fourscore and seven years * ago our fathers 2 
 brought forth on this continent 3 a new nation, 4 
 conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposi- 
 tion 5 that all men are created equal. 6 Now we 
 are engaged in a great civil war, 7 testing 
 whether that nation, 8 or any nation so conceived 
 and so dedicated, 9 can long endure. We are met 
 on a great battlefield 10 of that war. 
 
 NOTES* 
 
 1 I.e., eighty-seven years ago. The Gettysburg 
 Address was delivered Nov. 19, 1863. Lincoln is here 
 referring to the Declaration of Independence. 
 
 2 Figuratively speaking. To take " fathers " in a 
 
140 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 literal sense would, of course, involve a physiological 
 absurdity. 
 
 3 The western continent, embracing North and 
 South America. 
 
 4 " A new nation." This is tautological, since a 
 nation just brought forth would necessarily be new, 
 
 6 " Proposition," in the sense in which Euclid em- 
 ploys the term and not as one might say now, " a 
 cloak and suit proposition." 
 
 e See the Declaration of Independence in Albert 
 Bushnell Hart's " American History Told by Con- 
 temporaries" (4 vols., Boston, 1898-1901). 
 
 7 The war between the States, 1861-65. 
 s I.e., the United States. 
 
 8 See Elliot's Debates in the several State Conven- 
 tions on the adoption of the Federal Constitution, etc. 
 (5 vols., Washington, 1840-15). 
 
 10 Gettysburg; a borough and the county seat of 
 Adams Co., Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border, 
 35 miles southwest of Harrisburg. Pop. in 1910, 
 4,030. 
 
XVII 
 
 REAL PEOPLE 
 
 AMONG the most remarkable people I have 
 never met is the family that had just moved 
 out of the apartment we were going to rent. 
 My knowledge of those strangers is based en- 
 tirely on odd bits of information casually fur- 
 nished by the renting-agent in the course of 
 a single interview. Yet they are more actual 
 and alive to me than many people with whom 
 I have lived in intimate communion for years. 
 Is it our fate ever to meet? I look forward 
 to the event and dread it. I look forward 
 with eagerness to a new sensation, and I fear 
 lest the reality fall short of the vivid image I 
 have built up with the help of the renting- 
 agent. 
 
 In the matter of picking out an apartment, 
 it is an invariable rule that I shall inspect the 
 place and decide whether I like it. This I do 
 
 after Emmeline has paid down a month's rent 
 141 
 
142 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 and selected the wall-paper. On questions of 
 such nature, Emmeline is the Balkan States 
 and I am the European Concert. She cre- 
 ates a statuus quo and I ratify. In the pres- 
 ent instance, however, I was really given a 
 free hand. Emmeline admitted she was suf- 
 fering from headache when she told the rent- 
 ing-agent that she rather liked the place. 
 Later she recognised that the rooms were 
 altogether too small. What had swayed her 
 judgment was that the bedrooms had the sun 
 in the morning and we should thus be saving 
 on our doctor's bills. In this respect expen- 
 sive apartments are like high-powered motor 
 cars and a long summer vacation on the St. 
 Lawrence. They may be all easily paid for 
 by cutting in two the doctor's annual bills 
 amounting to ninety-odd dollars. However, 
 I understood that this time Emmeline would 
 be glad to be overruled. 
 
 The European Concert had its first shock 
 when it was confronted with the size of the 
 nursery bedroom. The renting-agent called 
 my attention to the wall-paper. It had a 
 
REAL PEOPLE 143 
 
 very pretty border, showing scenes from 
 " Mother Goose " ; this at once revealed the 
 purpose for which the room was intended. 
 But I pointed out to him that if we put a 
 chest of drawers against the wall and a lit- 
 tle armchair in the corner, the crib would 
 come hard against the steam pipe and would 
 project halfway across the window. 
 
 " Oh," he said, looking up in surprise. 
 "There's a crib?" 
 
 " Naturally," I said, " we should want this 
 nursery for the baby." 
 
 This did not seem to strike him as alto- 
 gether unreasonable, but he was puzzled nev- 
 ertheless. 
 
 " You see," he explained, " the people who 
 were here before you had a music-box." 
 
 When a renting-agent discerns signs of dis- 
 appointment in a prospective tenant he imme- 
 diately calls his attention to the shower. The 
 agent's face as he ushered me into the bath- 
 room and pointed to the shower was irradi- 
 ated by a smile of ecstatic beatitude. He re- 
 minded me of Mme. Nazimova when she waits 
 
144 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 for the Master Builder to tumble from the 
 church tower. 
 
 " Does the shower work ? " I asked. 
 
 *' Why, of course it does," he said. 
 
 " That is very interesting," I said. " Most 
 of them either drip or else the hot water comes 
 down all at once. I don't suppose you have 
 to keep away to one side and thrust your fin- 
 ger forward timidly before you venture under 
 the shower? " 
 
 " Not at all," he said. " This has splendid 
 pressure. Just turn it on for yourself." 
 
 I did as I was told, and after he had finished 
 drying himself with his handkerchief he asked 
 me whether this wasn't one of the best showers 
 I had ever come across. I agreed, and he 
 then told me that the very latest ideas in mod- 
 ern bath-room construction had been utilised 
 by the architect. As for the people who had 
 just moved out, they were so delighted with 
 the shower that they spent the greater part of 
 the day in the tub, often doing their reading 
 there. 
 
 On our way towards the library and living- 
 
REAL PEOPLE '14,5 
 
 room he called my attention to the air in the 
 hall. He said that if there was any breeze 
 stirring anywhere we were sure to get it in 
 that particular apartment. This puzzled me, 
 because he had told Emmeline the same thing 
 about another apartment which she had in- 
 spected and which faces south and west, while 
 this one faces north and east. Suppose now 
 a good northeast breeze But we were now 
 in the main bedroom and he was asking me to 
 take notice of a small iron safe let into the 
 wall at the height of one's head. 
 
 " This," he said, " is extremely useful for 
 jewels and old silver. You don't find it in 
 every apartment house, I assure you." 
 
 " That is convenient," I said, and looked 
 out of the window, " and of course one could 
 keep other valuables in there, too, like bonds 
 and mortgages and such things." 
 
 " A great many people do," he said. 
 
 We passed another bedroom which was so 
 small that even the agent looked apologetic. 
 He said it was the maid's room, but that the 
 people who had just moved out had a woman 
 
146 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 come in by the day and used the chamber as a 
 store-room. He supposed we should prefer 
 to have our maid sleep in the house. 
 
 " We do," I said, " but then we might get a 
 short maid. The Finns, for example, are a 
 notoriously chunky race and attain their full 
 height at an early age. Let us look at the 
 library." 
 
 I did not like the room at all. It faced 
 north and looked out upon the rear of a tall 
 building only thirty feet away. I asked him 
 if the light was always as bleak as it was to- 
 day. 
 
 " You get all the light you want in 
 here," he said. " Lots of people, you know, 
 object to the sun. It's hard on the eyes. 
 The people who had this apartment always 
 kept the window shades down. It made the 
 room so cosy." 
 
 I shook my head. The dimensions of the 
 room were quite disappointing. It was not 
 only small, but there was little wall space, 
 because the architect had provided no less 
 than three doorways which were supposed to 
 
REAL PEOPLE 147 
 
 be covered with portieres. I presume that 
 architects find open doorways much easier to 
 plan than any other part of a room. 
 
 He was surprised at my objections. 
 There was plenty of space, he thought. As 
 libraries go it was one of the largest he had 
 seen. Here you put an armchair, and here 
 you put a small, compact writing-desk, and 
 you had plenty of floor space in the middle 
 for a small table. 
 
 " And the bookcases ? " I asked. 
 
 He looked downcast. 
 
 " You have bookcases ? " he said. 
 
 " We have six." 
 
 He was about to say something, but I an- 
 ticipated him. 
 
 " I know, of course," I said, " that the 
 people who lived here before used to keep 
 their books in the kitchen, but I hardly see 
 how we could manage that. It's too much 
 trouble, and besides I am somewhat absent- 
 minded. It would be absurd if I should walk 
 into the kitchen for a copy of * Man and 
 Superman,' and come back with half a grape- 
 
148 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 fruit on a plate. And, furthermore, I like 
 a library where a man can get up occasion- 
 ally from his writing-table and pace up and 
 down while he is clarifying his ideas. You 
 couldn't do that here." 
 
 " There is a nice, long hall," he said. 
 " You might pace up and down that." But 
 he saw I was unconvinced, and he djd not go 
 to much pains in exhibiting the dining-room, 
 merely remarking that it did look rather 
 small, but the people who last lived in the 
 apartment were accustomed to go out for 
 their meals. 
 
 You will see now why I am so intensely 
 interested in the tenants whose successors we 
 were on the point of being. With life grow- 
 ing more flat and monotonous about us, how 
 refreshing to come across a family which 
 keeps a music-box in the nursery, does its 
 reading in the bath-tub, and never eats in the 
 dining-room. Is it studied originality on 
 their part or are they born rebels? And 
 how far does their eccentricity go? Does the 
 head of the house, when setting out for his 
 
REAL PEOPLE 149 
 
 office In the morning, walk upstairs? Do 
 they walk downstairs when they wish to go to 
 bed? 
 
 I am still to meet these highly original 
 citizens of New York, but their numbers must 
 be increasing. Every year I hear of more 
 and more former tenants who prefer dark 
 rooms and libraries without shelf space. I 
 have never asked the renting-agent why, being 
 so contented with their surroundings, his ten- 
 ants should have moved out. But probably 
 it is because they have found an apartment 
 where the rooms are still smaller and the win- 
 dows have no sun at all. 
 
XVIII 
 
 DIFFERENT 
 
 CONSTANTLY I am being invited, through the 
 mails or the advertising columns, to buy 
 something because it is different. Such ap- 
 peals are wasted upon me. In the realm of 
 ideas, I am as radical as the best of them, in 
 many ways. But when it comes to shopping 
 I am afraid of change. 
 
 The advertising writer is the most unorig- 
 inal creature imaginable. He is more imita- 
 tive than a theatre manager on Broadway. 
 He is more imitative than the revolutionaries 
 of art, the Impressionist who imitates the 
 Romanticist, the Post-Impressionist who imi- 
 tates the Impressionist, the Cubist who imi- 
 tates the Post-Impressionist, the Futurist 
 who imitates the Cubist, and the Parisian 
 dressmaker who imitates the Futurist. When 
 a happy word or phrase or symbol is let loose 
 
 in the advertising world, it is caught up, and 
 150 
 
DIFFERENT 151 
 
 repeated, and chanted, and echoed, until the 
 sound and sight of it become a torture. How 
 long ago is it since every merchantable prod- 
 uct of man's ingenuity from automobiles to 
 xylophones was being dedicated to " his 
 majesty the American citizen"? How long 
 is it since every item in the magazine pages 
 was something ending in ly, " supremely " 
 good, or " potently " attractive, or " perma- 
 nently " satisfying, or in any other conceiv- 
 able phrase, adverbially so? To-day the 
 mail-order lists are crammed with commodi- 
 ties that are different. Oh, jaded American 
 appetite that refuses to accept a two-for-a- 
 quarter Troy collar unless it is different ! 
 
 Now the truth that must be apparent to 
 any man who will only think for a moment 
 and by all accounts your advertising writer is 
 always engaged in a hellish fury of cerebra- 
 tion is that there are a great many com- 
 modities whose value depends on the very 
 fact that they shall not be different, but the 
 same. If I were engaged in the business of 
 publicity, I cannot imagine myself writing, 
 
152 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 " Try our eggs they are different." I 
 should also hesitate to write, " Sample our 
 lifeboats, they are different; try them and 
 you will use no other." If I were working 
 for the gas company I should never think of 
 saying, " Come in and look at our gas metres, 
 they are different." It requires little effort 
 to draw up a list of marketable goods, serv- 
 ices, and utilities for which it would be no 
 recommendation at all to say that they are 
 different. Thus : 
 
 Railway time tables. ) 
 
 Photographs. 
 
 Grocers' scales. 
 
 Complexions. 
 
 Affidavits, and especially statements made 
 in swearing off personal property tax assess- 
 ments. 
 
 Clocks. 
 
 Individual shoes of a pair. 
 
 The multiplication table. 
 
 The Yosemite Valley. 
 
 In every instance it would manifestly be 
 absurd to try to prove that the object in 
 
DIFFERENT 153 
 
 question is anything but what we have always 
 known it to be or expected it to be. 
 
 On the other hand, there is a great class of 
 commodities which one would never think of 
 taking seriously unless we were assured that 
 they are different from what we have always 
 found them to be. If some ingenious in- 
 ventor could really put on the market a Tam- 
 many Hall that was different, or a hair tonic 
 that was different, or something different in 
 the way of 
 
 Hat plumes (guaranteed not to tickle). 
 
 Musical comedy. 
 
 Rag-time. 
 
 Domestic help. 
 
 Book-reviews. 
 
 Winter temperature at Palm Beach (as 
 compared with temperature in New York 
 city). 
 
 Remarks on the weather. 
 
 Mr. Carnegie's speeches. 
 
 Remarks on Maude Adams. 
 
 Epigrams about women. 
 
 Epigrams about love. 
 
154 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 Epigrams about money. 
 
 Epigrams. 
 
 Food prices. 
 
 Florence Barclay. 
 
 Golf drivers (guaranteed not to slice). 
 
 Brassies (guaranteed not to top). 
 
 Mid-irons (guaranteed not to cut). 
 
 Advertising. 
 
 And countless other things which every one 
 can imagine being different in a better-organ- 
 ised world than ours. 
 
 But does your advertising expert recog- 
 nise the distinction between things which must 
 under no consideration be different and 
 things which must be made different if they 
 are to find acceptance? Not in the least. 
 In season and out he sounds his poor little 
 catch-word, and frightens away as many cus- 
 tomers as he attracts. Under such circum- 
 stances one can only wonder why advertising 
 should continue to be the best-paid bra'nch of 
 American literature. Of what use are the 
 Science of Advertising, the Psychology of Ad- 
 vertising, the Dynamics of Advertising, the 
 
DIFFERENT 155 
 
 Ethics of Advertising, the Phonetics of Ad- 
 vertising, the Strategy and Tactics and 
 Small-Fire Manuals of Advertising on all 
 of which subjects I have perused countless 
 volumes if all this theoretical study will 
 not teach a man that it is appropriate to say : 
 " Try our latest Hall Caine, it is different," 
 and quite out of place to say, " Try our 
 quart measures, they are different " ? 
 
 Between the things that must never be dif- 
 ferent and the things that ought never to be 
 the same, there is a vast class of commodities 
 which may be the same or may be different 
 according to choice. Linen collars, musical 
 machines, newspapers, ignition systems, in- 
 terior decoration it is evident that some 
 people may like them the same and some peo- 
 ple may like them different. My own incli- 
 nations, as I have intimated, are toward the 
 same, but my sympathies are with those who 
 want things different. The argument ad- 
 vanced by the advertiser in behalf of his lat- 
 est three-button, long-hipped, university sack 
 with rolling collar, that it is different and 
 
156 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 that it radiates my individuality, leaves me 
 cold. I am not moved by the plea that the 
 rolling-collar effect is so different that a 
 quarter-million suits of that model have al- 
 ready been sold west of the Alleghanies. I 
 remain indifferent on being told that the 
 three-button effect would radiate my individ- 
 uality even as it is radiating the individuality 
 of ten thousand citizens of Spokane. When 
 it is a choice between wearing unindividual 
 clothes of my own or being different with a 
 hundred thousand others, I suppose I must 
 be classed as a reactionary and a fossil. 
 
XIX 
 
 ACADEMIC FREEDOM 
 
 THE approaching end of another college year 
 gives peculiar timeliness to the following ac- 
 count of a recent meeting of the Supercol- 
 legiate Committee on Entrance Examina- 
 tions. For the details of the story I am 
 indebted to the able and conscientious corre- 
 spondent of the Disassociated Press at Noth- 
 ingham. The discerning reader will have no 
 difficulty in identifying the persons men- 
 tioned. Professor Miinsterberg is, of course, 
 Professor Miinsterberg. Professor Louns- 
 bury is Professor Lounsbury. Professor 
 Hart is Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. 
 Dr. Woods Hutchinson is Dr. Woods Hutch- 
 inson. 
 
 Professor Miinsterberg: The meeting will 
 please come to order. We are now in the 
 first week of October. This fact, which the 
 
 average citizen has probably accepted with- 
 157 
 
158 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 out question, has been amply confirmed in an 
 elaborate series of laboratory tests carried 
 on by means of white and yellow cards and 
 rapidly revolving disks. Thus we are pre- 
 pared to discuss once more the highly inter- 
 esting question, why the vast majority of 
 freshmen cannot spell. Neither can they 
 write their native tongue in accordance with 
 the rules of grammar. 
 
 Professor Lounsbury: Aw, gee! Why 
 should they? Look at Chaucer, Milton, and 
 Browning. The fiercest bunch of little spell- 
 ers you ever saw. And their grammar is sim- 
 ply rotten. They didn't care a red cent for 
 the grammarians. When they saw a word or 
 a phrase they liked they went to it. If the 
 grammarians didn't agree with them it was 
 up to the grammarians. Chaucer should 
 worry. 
 
 Dr. Hutchinson: Quite right. 
 
 Professor Lounsbury : The question is this : 
 Are freshmen made for the English language 
 or is language made for freshmen? Lan- 
 guage is like a human being; change does it 
 
ACADEMIC FREEDOM 159 
 
 good. Stick to your Lindley Murray and 
 it's a cinch yc^ur little old English tongue will 
 be a dead one in fifty years. 
 
 Dr. Hutchihson: I agree with Professor 
 Lounsbury, speaking from the standpoint of 
 physiology. Constant use of a plural verb 
 with a plural subject plays the deuce with the 
 larynx. You know what the larynx is, gen- 
 tlemen. It's the rubber disk in the human 
 Victrola. Crop the pin on the rubber disk 
 and the record will grind out the same for- 
 mula, again and again. Keep it up long 
 enough and the record wears out. That's 
 the larynx under the operation of grammat- 
 ical rules. It gets the habit, and the first 
 law of health is to avoid all habits. What 
 you want to do is to shake up the larynx by 
 feeding it with new forms of expression. 
 When a man says " I done it," it imparts a 
 healthy jolt to the delicate muscles of the 
 throat, limbers up his aorta and his dia- 
 phragm, and reconciles him with his diges- 
 tion. This is the opinion of eminent physi- 
 ologists, like Drmckheimer of Leipzig. 
 
160 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 Professor Lounsbury: Whom did you say 
 the man is? 
 
 Dr. Hutchinson: Drinckheimer, professor 
 at Leipzig. He doesn't write for the maga- 
 zines. 
 
 Professor Lounsbury : Then you agree with 
 me that when a man has something to say he 
 will say it? 
 
 Professor Miinsterberg: We have an ex- 
 cellent illustration on this point in a history 
 paper submitted in the last entrance exam- 
 inations. In reply to the question, " Name 
 the first two Presidents of the United States," 
 one candidate wrote, " The first pressident 
 was Gorge Washington; his predeceassor 
 was Alexander Hamilton." Observe the ex- 
 traordinary psychological correlation be- 
 tween thought and expression in such a reply. 
 
 Professor Hart: I don't think the young 
 man was guilty of an injustice with regard 
 to Alexander Hamilton. You will recall that 
 Hamilton was one of the principal founders 
 of the system of privilege which has pro- 
 duced, in our own day, Lorimerism and the 
 
ACADEMIC FREEDOM 161 
 
 purchase of Southern delegates. If it had 
 not been for Hamilton and his crowd we 
 should not now be compelled to wage a cam- 
 paign for social justice and I should not be 
 under the necessity of writing Bull Moose 
 history for Collier's. 
 
 Dr. Hutchinson: But getting back to the 
 real point of our inquiry, whether the failure 
 to spell and write correctly is a sign of mental 
 feebleness 
 
 Professor Miinsterberg : On that point I 
 believe I can speak with authority. Psycho- 
 logical tests in the laboratory show that the 
 average freshman is as quick-witted to-day 
 as his predecessor of fifty or a hundred years 
 ago. We examined three hundred first-year 
 men from eleven colleges and universities. 
 Each man was required to peep into a dark 
 box, shaped like a camera, through an eye- 
 hole sixteen millimetres in diameter. By 
 pressing a button, light was flashed upon a 
 slip of paper inside the box, on which was 
 printed, in letters nine millimetres high, the 
 following question : " What is your favour- 
 
162 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ite breakfast food ? " The candidate was re- 
 quired to signify his answer by tapping with 
 his finger on the table, one tap for Farinetta, 
 two taps for Dried Husks, three taps for At- 
 las Crumbs, and so forth. The average time 
 for three hundred answers was six and seven- 
 tenths seconds. Thereupon the candidates 
 were asked to think over the question at their 
 leisure and to hand in a written answer sworn 
 to before a notary public. On comparing 
 the written answers with the laboratory re- 
 sults, it appeared that only thirty-seven out 
 of the three hundred had tapped the wrong 
 answer. Need I say more? 
 
 Professor Lounsbury: May I ask how the 
 written answers showed up from the point of 
 view of spelling and grammar? 
 
 Professor Miinsterberg : They were im- 
 pressively defective. 
 
 Professor Lounsbury : I'm tickled to death. 
 When you cut out bad spelling and grammar, 
 you queer the evolution of the English lan- 
 guage. There's nothing to it. 
 
 Professor Miinsterberg: But take the case 
 
ACADEMIC FREEDOM 163 
 
 of the freshman squad whom we kept in a her- 
 metically sealed room for twenty-four hours 
 at a temperature of eighty-nine degrees 
 
 Professor Lounsbury: May I ask what 
 their language was when they were released 
 at the end of twenty-four hours? 
 
 Professor Miinsterberg: Truth compels me 
 to say it was something awful. 
 
 Professor Lounsbury: But how about the 
 grammar ? 
 
 Professor Miinsterberg: There was no 
 grammar to speak of. They used' mostly in- 
 terjections.. 
 
 Dr. Hutchinson : Finest thing in the world, 
 interjections. Good for the lungs and the 
 heart. Rapid process of inhalation and ex- 
 pulsion keeps the bellows in prime order. 
 That's all a man is, gentlemen, a bellows on a 
 pair of stilts driven by a hydraulic pump. 
 If the bellows holds out under sudfden strain, 
 that's all you want. That's why I like to 
 hear people swear. It's good for the wind. 
 Next time you walk down a step too many in 
 the dark or lose your hat under a motor 
 
164 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 truck, don't hold yourself back. It's the 
 way nature is safeguarding you against 
 asthma. 
 
 Professor Miinsterberg : Then it is the con- 
 sensus of opinion here that the psychological 
 and cultural status of our college freshmen is 
 everything it ought to be? 
 
 Professor Hart: I'd rather take the opin- 
 ion of a roomful of freshmen on any subject 
 than the opinion of the United States Su- 
 preme Court. They don't know anything 
 about American history, but it's the kind of 
 history that isn't worth knowing. I prefer 
 them to know things as they ought to have 
 been rather than as they were before the Pro- 
 gressive party was born. Whatever is worth 
 preserving from the past, including the Deca- 
 logue, will be found in the Bull Moose plat- 
 form. We don't want examination papers. 
 We want social justice. 
 
 Professor Lounsbury : Between you and I, 
 the English language won't get what's com- 
 ing to it until all entrance examinations have 
 been chucked into the discard. 
 
ACADEMIC FREEDOM 165 
 
 Dr. Hutchinson: Spelling is demonstrably 
 bad for the muscles of the chest and the ab- 
 domen. 
 
 Professor Lounsbury: You've said it. 
 
XX 
 
 THE HEAVENLY MAID 
 
 As the familiar sound fell upon our ears, we 
 walked to the window, drew aside the cur- 
 tains, and shamelessly stared into the windows 
 of the apartment across the court. That 
 usually quiet home had been in evident agita- 
 tion all that afternoon. There was the noise 
 of hurrying feet. Excited voices broke out 
 now and then. Twice a woman scolded and 
 we distinctly heard a child cry. Now the 
 mystery was explained. 
 
 " The new Orpheola has come," said Em- 
 meline. " I wonder how late they will keep 
 it up the first night." 
 
 In the apartment across the way the fam- 
 ily was gathered in a reverent circle about 
 the new talking-machine, and we heard the 
 opening strains of the " Song to the Evening 
 Star." 
 
 " Have you ever thought," I said to Em- 
 166 
 
THE HEAVENLY MAID 167 
 
 meline, " how infinitely superior the music of 
 Wagner is to that of any other composer, in 
 its immunity against influenza? The Ger- 
 man Empire, you know, has a moist climate, 
 and the magician of Bayreuth recognised 
 that he must write primarily for a nation 
 that is extremely subject to cold in the head. 
 It was different with the Italian composers. 
 Bronchial troubles are virtually unknown in 
 Italy. When Verdi wrote, he failed to make 
 allowance for a sudden attack of the grippe. 
 That is why when Caruso catches cold they 
 must change the bill at the Metropolitan. 
 But if a Wagnerian tenor loses his voice, the 
 papers say the next morning, ' Herr Donner 
 sang Tristan last night with extraordinary 
 intelligence.' Sometimes Herr Donner sings 
 with extraordinary intelligence ; sometimes he 
 sings with marvellous histrionic power ; some- 
 times he sings with an earnest vigour amount- 
 ing to frenzy. Wagner, who foresaw every- 
 thing, foresaw the disastrous effect of steam- 
 heated rooms on the delicate organs of the 
 throat. So he developed a music form in 
 
168 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 which the use of the throat is not always es- 
 sential." 
 
 " I know," said Emmeline, " that you'd 
 much rather listen to the la-la, la-la-la-la-la- 
 lah from Traviata." 
 
 " I'd much rather listen to Traviata," I 
 said, losing my temper, " than strive pain- 
 fully to be electrified by the * Ho-yo-to-ho ' 
 of eight Valkyrie maidens averaging one hun- 
 dred and seventy-five pounds and leaping 
 from crag to crag at a speed of two miles 
 an hour." 
 
 When a man first acquires an Orpheola, 
 he loses interest in his business. He leaves 
 for home early and bolts his dinner. The 
 first night he sits down before the machine 
 from 6:30 to 11, and with a rapt expression 
 on his face he runs off every record in his 
 collection twice. No one but himself is per- 
 mitted to return the precious rubber disk to 
 its envelope. Later in the week the eldest 
 child, as a reward of good behaviour, may be 
 allowed to adjust the record on the revolving 
 
THE HEAVENLY MAID 169 
 
 base and to pull the starting lever, while 
 mother watches anxiously from the dining- 
 room. At intervals grandma puts her head 
 in at the door to make sure that the proper 
 needle has been inserted. The modern 
 musical cabinet does not eliminate the 
 personal factor. People can put all of their 
 individuality into the music by choosing be- 
 tween a fine needle and one with a blunt point. 
 Persons of temperament are particular about 
 the speed at which the disk revolves. When 
 a man is in high spirits he picks out a sharp 
 needle and winds the spring up tight. Pes- 
 simists do just the opposite. It is imperative 
 to keep the fine, steel points out of the baby's 
 reach because irreparable harm might thereby 
 be done to the record. 
 
 " Of course," said Emmeline, " I can see 
 why you should be so greatly attracted by 
 the Italian ting-a-ling stuff. It's the result 
 of your journalistic training. It's the most 
 superficial business there is. Everything in 
 a newspaper must be perfectly obvious at 
 
170 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 the first glance, and there's nothing like a 
 jingle to fetch the crowd. After a while a 
 man gets to be like the people he writes for," 
 
 I had been called to the telephone and Em- 
 meline had made use of the interval to build 
 up her little argument. It was unfair, but I 
 generously refrained from saying so. Be- 
 sides, I, too, had not been idle while I waited 
 for Central to restore the connection. 
 
 " I am not denying," I said, " that Wag- 
 ner gets his effects, if you give him time 
 enough. But how does he do it? By wear- 
 ing you out and knocking you down and run- 
 ning away with you. That was the way, you 
 will recall, the old Teutonic gods and heroes 
 used to make love. When a Germanic war- 
 rior was attacked with the fatal passion, he 
 would seize the well-beloved by the hair, 
 throw her over his shoulder and ride away 
 with her. It was different with Puccini's 
 countrymen. In their hands a mandolin on 
 a moonlit night under a balcony melted away 
 all opposition. After half an hour of solid 
 
THE HEAVENLY MAID 171 
 
 Wagnerian brasswork you surrender; but 
 only the way Adrianople surrendered. 
 
 " That, too, was the case with the early 
 Teutonic ladies. Their masters did not al- 
 ways woo with a club. Now and then they in- 
 terjected little bits of kindness which were 
 appreciated because they were so rare. That 
 is Wagner again. Every little while he 
 throws you a kind word, a snatch of golden 
 melody that Verdi himself might have written, 
 and, as a matter of fact, did write all the 
 time. With the master of Bayreuth these 
 little rifts in the clouds are doubly welcome. 
 They shine out like a good deed on a dark 
 night." 
 
 " How any one can listen to the last act of 
 Tristan without feeling all the sorrow of the 
 universe, I cannot understand," said Em- 
 meline. " Do you mean to say that the 
 Liebestod does not really carry you out of 
 yourself? " 
 
 " It does not," I said. " But when Gad- 
 ski in Ai'da turns to the wicked Amneris and 
 
172 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 sings * Tu sei felice,' something in me begins 
 to give way." 
 
 " It is probably your intellect," said Em- 
 meline. 
 
 One popular error with regard to talking- 
 machines is that they have solved the 
 hitherto irreconcilable conflict between music 
 on the one hand and bridge and conversation 
 on the other. At first sight it may seem that 
 the religious silence which one must maintain 
 while some one is singing it may be the 
 hostess herself is no longer compulsory. 
 You cannot hurt the feelings of a mahogany 
 cabinet three feet high. If the worst 
 happens, you can wind up the machine and 
 start all over again. But actually the situa- 
 tion is very much what it was before. I my- 
 self, on one occasion when Tetrazzini was 
 singing from Lucia, ventured to lean over to 
 my neighbour and whisper a word or two. 
 Whereupon there came across the face of my 
 host, brooding fondly over the machine, a 
 look of pain such as I never want to bring to 
 
THE HEAVENLY MAID 173 
 
 any face again. As it happened, it was the 
 man's favourite record. On the other hand, 
 people who play cards tell me that as between 
 a living tenor and Caruso on the machine 
 there is not much to choose. Both are a 
 hindrance to the correct leading of trumps. 
 
 " Besides," I said, " any number of Wag- 
 nerians will tell you that tne music dramas 
 in their unabridged form are much too long. 
 You will recall that Wagner himself said that 
 many of his scores would benefit by generous 
 cutting. A great many eminent conductors 
 have made a specialty of cutting things out 
 of Tristan. This serves a double purpose. 
 It permits the development of a class of post- 
 graduate Wagnerians who can take the whole 
 opera without flinching, and it enables peo- 
 ple to catch the 11 :45 for Montclair. Some- 
 where I have come across a story of two great 
 conductors who had charge of rival orchestras 
 in one of the principal cities of Europe. 
 One man, when he conducted the Ring, was 
 in the habit of cutting out the first half of 
 
174 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 every act. The other man played the first 
 half, but omitted the second half of every 
 act. For many years there was a bitter con- 
 troversy as to which of the two conductors 
 best brought out the real meaning of the 
 composer." 
 
 " I don't think it is a very good story," 
 said Emmeline, walking to the window and 
 closing it ; for our neighbour's machine had 
 switched without warning from the Ride of 
 the Valkyrs to Alexander's Band. " It's a 
 poor story and I am inclined to think you 
 made it up yourself." 
 
 " As for that," I said, " that is just what 
 Wagner did with his music." 
 
 When you overhear a man in the subway 
 say to his neighbour, " Mine are all twelve- 
 inch, reversible, and go equally well on low 
 or high speed," you will know that the new 
 Orpheola came home last week. Next week 
 the children will be allowed to handle the 
 records without special injunctions regard- 
 ing the proper needle. The week after that, 
 
THE HEAVENLY MAID 175 
 
 the baby will be allowed to approach quite 
 near and hear Mother Goose come out of the 
 mahogany toy. Within a month the master 
 of the house will be looking for his hat in the 
 cabinet. The intolerable air of superiority 
 and aloofness with which he has been greeting 
 you will disappear. 
 
XXI 
 
 SHEATH-GOWNS 
 
 FBOM Emmeline I learned that I had been 
 doing the fashion designers an injustice. I 
 had always imagined that styles were the 
 creation of Parisian dressmakers who worked 
 with only two ends in view novelty and 
 discomfort. But Emmeline assured me that 
 styles are a faithful record of the march of 
 civilisation. When the Manchurian War was 
 under way, everything in the shops was Rus- 
 sian. When Herr Strauss produced " Sa- 
 lome," half the world went in for the slim 
 and viperous costume. The revolution in 
 Persia worked a revolution in blouse decora- 
 tion. Later everything was Bulgarian. 
 
 " In that case," I said, " those poor fellows 
 at Adrianople have not died in vain. Under 
 a rain of shot and shell I can hear the Bul- 
 garian officers rallying their men : ' Forward, 
 
 my children ! The eyes of Fifth Avenue are 
 176 
 
SHEATH-GOWNS 177 
 
 upon you! Fix bayonets! For King, for 
 country, and for Paquin ! ' The Turks, be- 
 ing a backward millinery nation, naturally 
 had no chance." 
 
 " What you say is extremely amusing, of 
 course," remarked Emmeline. " But I seem 
 to remember an old suit of yours. It was 
 about the time of the Boer War. The coat 
 was cut like an hour glass and there was cot- 
 ton wadding in the shoulders so that you had 
 to enter a room sideways. The trousers were 
 Zouave. Yes, it must have been about the 
 time of the Boer War or the war with Spain." 
 
 " That was just when the feminist move- 
 ment was beginning to shape our ideals," I 
 retorted. 
 
 Not only do the styles symbolise the proc- 
 ess of historic evolution I distinctly re- 
 call toilets on Fifth Avenue which must have 
 commemorated the Messina earthquake and 
 the report of the New York Tenement House 
 Commission but styles actually follow an 
 evolution of their own. They do not change 
 abruptly, but melt into each other. Thus 
 
178 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 the costume which Emmeline described as 
 Bulgarian could not have been altogether 
 that. The coat was military enough, with its 
 baggy shoulders and a bold backward sweep 
 of the long skirts. But this coat was worn 
 over a gown that was unmistakably hobble, 
 revealing the persistence of the Salome in- 
 fluence. To call this outfit Bulgarian is to 
 raise the supposition that the Bulgarians 
 hopped to victory at Kirk-Kilisseh. 
 
 I pointed this out to Emmeline, and at the 
 same time took occasion to protest against 
 the extravagant lengths to which the lan- 
 guorous styles were being carried. It was 
 bad enough, I said, to see elderly matrons 
 arrayed like Oriental dancing girls. But 
 what was worse was to see young girls, mere 
 children, in scant and provocative attire. I 
 thought the law might very well take up the 
 question of a minimum dress for women under 
 the age of eighteen. 
 
 " Of course it's disgusting," said Emmeline, 
 " but it's their right." 
 
 " I know that youth has many rights," I 
 
SHEATH-GOWNS 179 
 
 said, " but I didn't know that the right to 
 make one's self a public nuisance and of- 
 fence is among them." 
 
 " What I mean," said Emnaeline, " is that 
 we have outgrown the days when young ladies 
 fainted and wives fetched their husbands' 
 slippers. We have broken the shackles of 
 mid- Victorian propriety and are working out 
 a new conception of free womanhood. Our 
 ideas of modesty are changing. You might 
 as well make up your mind to be shocked 
 quite frequently before the process is com- 
 pleted." 
 
 "Oh, I see," said I. "Enslaved within 
 the iron circle of the home, crushed by the 
 tyranny of convention, of custom, of man- 
 made laws, woman lifts up her head and de- 
 clares she will be free by inserting herself 
 into a skirt thirteen inches in diameter. 
 Where's the sense of it ? " 
 
 " It's all very simple," said Emmeline. 
 " It means that we are having an awful time 
 trying to escape from the degradation into 
 which you have forced us. We struggle for- 
 
180 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ward, and then the habits of the harem civi- 
 lisation which you have imposed on us assert 
 themselves. Do you think we women love 
 to dress? Every time we try on a pretty 
 gown we know that we are riveting on the 
 chains of our own servitude." 
 
 " But why make the chains so tight ? " I 
 said. 
 
 She now turned to face me. 
 
 " The reason for the sheath-gown is quite 
 plain," said Emmeline. " Men have always 
 shown such a decided preference for ac- 
 tresses and dancing girls that we others have 
 taken to imitating actresses and dancing 
 girls in self-defence." 
 
 " But that isn't so at all," I said. " Look 
 at your trained nurses in their simple white 
 caps and aprons. They are bewitching. It is 
 universally conceded that the most dangerous 
 thing in the world is for an unmarried man 
 to be operated on for appendicitis. That 
 was the way, you'll recall, Adam obtained his 
 wife after a surgical operation. The case 
 of the hospital nurse alone disposes of your 
 
SHEATH-GOWNS 181 
 
 entire argument about our predilection for 
 dancing girls." 
 
 " That I do not admit," said Emmeline. 
 " It is true that a man finds himself longing 
 for what is simple and wholesome whenever 
 there is something the matter with him." 
 
 " When I spoke of the immodesty of 
 present-day fashions," I said, adroitly turn- 
 ing the subject, " I am afraid I gave you the 
 wrong impression. It isn't the viciousness 
 of the thing that I object to, it's the stupid, 
 sheeplike spirit of imitation behind it. If 
 the passion for tight gowns indicated a kind 
 of spiritual development, I shouldn't mind it 
 even if it was development in the wrong direc- 
 tion. There might be an erring soul in the 
 hobble, but still a soul. If the young girl of 
 good family who strives to look like a lady of 
 the chorus did so out of sheer perversity, 
 there would be some comfort. One must 
 think and feel to be perverse. What appals 
 me is the dreadful, unquestioning innocence 
 with which the thing is done. If we males 
 are indeed responsible for what you are, then 
 
182 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 we have a real burden on our souls. We have 
 done more than degrade you; we have made 
 automata out of you. The little girl behind 
 the soda counter who paints her face and 
 hangs jet spangles from her ears will just 
 as readily comply with fashion by putting on 
 a military cape and boots, or a pony coat, or 
 calico and a sunbonnet, or an admiral's uni- 
 form, or a yashmak" 
 
 " A what ? " said Emmeline, frowning 
 slightly. 
 
 " A yashmak" I replied, meeting her gaze 
 steadily. " I use the word with confidence 
 because I have just looked it up in the dic- 
 tionary. At first I confused it with sanjak, 
 which, on examination, turns out to be a 
 district in the Balkan Peninsula bounded on 
 the east by Servia and on the north by 
 Bosnia-Herzegovina. A yashmak is the long 
 veil worn by Moslem women to conceal the 
 face and the outlines of the upper part of 
 the body." 
 
 " You seem to have prepared pretty 
 
SHEATH-GOWNS 183 
 
 thoroughly for this discussion," said Em- 
 meline. ' 
 
 " I have always considered it prudent be- 
 fore entering into debate with a woman to 
 have a few facts on my side," I said. 
 
 " As if that made any difference," she re- 
 plied scornfully. 
 
 " As to the sheeplike way in which women 
 follow the fashions of the moment," continued 
 Emmeline, " it simply isn't true." I could 
 see she was terribly in earnest now. " There 
 are tens of thousands of women who dress 
 to please themselves ; independent, coura- 
 geous, self-reliant women who face life seri- 
 ously and rationally. We are going in more 
 and more for loose and comfortable things 
 to wear." 
 
 " Not the typical woman of to-day, I as- 
 sure you." 
 
 " Of course not the typical woman," said 
 Emmeline. " Any exhibition of common- 
 sense by a woman at once makes her a freak. 
 You prefer the other kind for your ideal of 
 
184 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 the eternal womanly. Take her and welcome. 
 I suppose it is necessary for a man to have 
 something worthless to work for." 
 
XXII 
 
 WITH THE EDITOR'S REGRETS 
 
 TALK of post-office reform brings to my 
 mind a conversation I had with Williams, 
 who is a poet. It was about the time, some 
 two years ago, when a Postmaster-General 
 of the United States proposed the abolition 
 of the second-class mail privilege for maga- 
 zines. 
 
 I knew that Williams hates magazine edi- 
 tors with all the ardour of an unsuccessful 
 poet's soul. Consequently, when he sat down 
 and lighted one of my cigarettes and said that 
 the magazines in their quarrel with the post 
 office had overlooked the strongest argument 
 on their side, I suspected irony. It is Wil- 
 liams's boast that he has one of the largest 
 collections of rejected manuscripts in exist- 
 ence, the greater part being in an absolutely 
 new and unread condition. Placed end to 
 
 end, Williams once estimated, his unpublished 
 185 
 
186 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 verses would reach from Battery Park to 
 the Hispanic Museum, at Broadway and One 
 Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Street. Every 
 poem in his collection has been declined at 
 least once by every editor in the United 
 States, and many of the longer poems have 
 been declined two or three times by the same 
 editor, and for totally opposite reasons. 
 
 It is not mere brute persistence on Wil- 
 liams's part that is responsible for this un- 
 paralleled literary accumulation. As a 
 matter of fact he is easily discouraged, al- 
 though, of course, like all poets he has his 
 moments of exaltation. The trouble, he 
 complains, is that with every printed rejec- 
 tion slip there comes a word of sincere en- 
 couragement from the editor. The editors 
 are constantly telling Williams that his verse 
 is among the very best that is now being 
 produced, but that a sense of duty to their 
 readers prevents them from printing it. 
 They regret to find his poems unavailable, 
 and earnestly advise him to keep on writing. 
 
 "You will recall," said Williams, "the 
 
WITH EDITOR'S REGRETS 187 
 
 principal point made by the periodical pub- 
 lishers. Conceding that their publications, 
 as second-class mail matter, are carried at 
 a loss, they argue that the post office is more 
 than compensated by the volume of first- 
 class mail sent out in response to magazine 
 advertisements. The argument is sound, as 
 I can testify from personal experience. Not 
 long ago I came across a five-line ' ad ' in 
 agate which said, ' Are you earning less than 
 you should? Write us.' Well, the question 
 seemed to fit my case and I wrote. That 
 was two cents to the credit of the post office. 
 The post office sold another stamp when I 
 received a reply asking me to send 1 fifty cents 
 in postage for instructions on how to double 
 my income in three months. I was somewhat 
 disappointed. With my income merely 
 doubled I should still find it difficult to pay 
 my landlady, but it was better than nothing. 
 So I sent the fifty cents in stamps. You 
 will recall the half-dollar." 
 
 " Oh, don't mention it," I said. 
 
 " Well, after a day or two I received in 
 
188 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 a penny envelope a paper-bound copy of 
 * How to Succeed,' being a baccalaureate 
 address delivered by the Rev. Josiah K. Peb- 
 bles, who showed that honesty, thrift, and 
 perseverance were the secrets underlying the 
 career of Hannibal, Joan of Arc, John D. 
 Rockefeller, and Theodore Roosevelt. So 
 you see, by the time the secret had been con- 
 veyed to me the post office had sold stamps 
 to the amount of fifty-five cents. Now as- 
 sume that there are in the United States be- 
 tween forty and fifty thousand poets and 
 other literary workers who would like to 
 double their income, and it is plain that the 
 United States Government made a very hand- 
 some profit on that five-line * ad.' ' 
 
 " But that is not what I started out to 
 show," said Williams. " What the maga- 
 zines have omitted to point out is that by 
 rejecting every contribution at least once, the 
 editors are doing more for Uncle Sam's first- 
 class mail business than through their ad- 
 vertising pages. And the difference is this: 
 While there must be a limit to the number of 
 
WITH EDITOR'S REGRETS 189 
 
 people who will answer an advertisement, 
 there need be no limit to the number of times 
 a manuscript is sent back. I can't see why 
 the publishers and the Postmaster-General 
 should be flying at each other's throat, when 
 there's such a simple solution at hand. It is 
 evident that there is no postal deficit, how- 
 ever large, which cannot be wiped out by a 
 sharp increase in the average number of re- 
 jections per manuscript. Editors will only 
 have to augment by, say, fifty per cent, the 
 number of reasons why a contribution of ex- 
 ceptional merit is unavailable. My ' Echoes 
 from Parnassus ' was sent back thirty-seven 
 times before it found a publisher. It would 
 have been a simple matter to send the poem 
 back a dozen times more either absolutely or 
 with a word of hearty encouragement." 
 
 By this time I had made up my mind that 
 it was indeed irony, and I was sorry. I don't 
 mind when Williams gets quite angry and 
 lashes out ; but I hate to have a poet laugh at 
 himself. 
 
 " Not that I can help feeling sorry for 
 
190 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 the editor , chaps," he went on. " You 
 couldn't help feeling sorry, could you, for a 
 man who has been trained to recognise the 
 very best in literature, and to send it back 
 on the spot? And the more he likes it the 
 quicker he sends it back. Frequently I have 
 been on the point of writing to the man and 
 telling him that if it is really such a wrench 
 to return my poem to please not consider 
 my feelings in the matter, but to go ahead 
 and print it. What saves the editor, I 
 imagine, is that after a while he does learn 
 how to detect some real fault in a contribu- 
 tion which just enables him to send it back 
 without altogether succumbing to grief. Of 
 the fourteen men who rejected my * Echoes 
 from Parnassus,' one wrote that I reminded 
 him of Milton, but that I lacked solemnity; 
 another wrote that I reminded him of 
 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, but that I was a 
 little too serious ; another wrote that my 
 verses had the Swinburnian rush, but were 
 somewhat too fanciful. The editor who ac- 
 
WITH EDITOR'S REGRETS 191 
 
 cepted the poem wrote that he couldn't quite 
 catch the drift of it, but that he would take a 
 chance on the stuff." 
 
 Here Williams got up and strode about 
 the room and vowed that no combination of 
 editors could prevent him from continuing 
 to write poetry. " And I never refuse to 
 meet them half way," he said rather incon- 
 sequentially. " I went into Smith's office 
 yesterday with a bit of light verse and had 
 him turn it down because it had the * high- 
 brow touch.' * My boy,' he said, * we must 
 give the people what they want. For in- 
 stance, I was going up to my apartment last 
 night and the negro boy who runs the ele- 
 vator was quite rude to me; he had been 
 drinking. Now why couldn't you write a 
 series of snappy verses on the troubles of 
 the flat-dweller? This line you're on now 
 won't go at all with my readers ; they are 
 not a very intelligent class, you know.' And 
 that's another thing I can't understand: 
 Why should every editor be anxious to prove 
 
192 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 that his subscribers are a bigger set of 
 donkeys than any other editor in town can 
 claim ? " 
 
 " I was fool enough," Williams proceeded, 
 " to reject Smith's suggestion. I should 
 have accepted it. My poet's mission won't 
 feed me. If President Eliot insists it is my 
 mission to write stuff no editor will touch, 
 he doesn't know what he is talking about." 
 
 " I don't think it was President Eliot," I 
 said. 
 
 " Wasn't it? Say Plato or Carlyle, then. 
 You can't go on for ever slapping us on the 
 back and letting us starve. You have got 
 to back up your highly laudatory statements 
 by purchasing our wares or we shut up shop. 
 We don't ask for champagne and truffles, but 
 we do want a decent measure of substan- 
 tial appreciation, all of us people with a mis- 
 sion, poets, artists, prophets, women. Now 
 women, here comes Plato or Carlyle and says 
 it is a woman's mission to have at least eight 
 children." 
 
 " President Eliot said that," I interposed. 
 
WITH EDITOR'S REGRETS 193 
 
 "Oh it was President Eliot? Eight 
 children, says he, is her mission. But let me 
 tell you if you take her children and pitch 
 them into the waste basket, if you use them 
 only to fill up your factories, and slums, 
 and reformatories, woman wiU be chucking 
 that sacred mission of hers through the 
 window before President Eliot can say Jack 
 Robinson. She is doing it now and serve 
 them right. Mission ! Rot ! " 
 
 He seized a handful of my cigarettes and 
 went out without saying good-morning. 
 
XXIII 
 
 A MAD WORLD 
 
 From an old-fashioned country doctor to an 
 eminent alienist m New York city: 
 
 My dear Sir: 
 
 I cannot claim the honour of your ac- 
 quaintance. My name is quite unknown to 
 you. For some thirty years I have been 
 established in this little town, ministering 
 to a district which extends five miles in every 
 direction from my house-door. My practice, 
 varying little from year to year consists 
 largely in prescribing liniments, quinine, 
 camphorated oil, and bicarbonate of soda; 
 and regularly I am summoned, of course, 
 into the presence of the august mysteries of 
 birth and death. 
 
 The life, though grateful, ia laborious. 
 The opportunities for keeping in touch with 
 
 the march of events in the great world out- 
 194, 
 
A MAD WORLD- 195 
 
 side are limited. It has nevertheless' been 
 one of the few delights of my restricted 
 leisure to follow your career through the 
 medium of the public press. My own course, 
 as I have shown, lies far from the highly 
 specialised and fascinating field of mental 
 pathology to which you have devoted your- 
 self. But from the distance I have admired 
 the expert skill and the consummate author- 
 ity which have made you the central figure 
 in an unbroken succession of brilliant 
 criminal trials. I have admired and kept 
 silent. If I have departed from my custom 
 in the present instance, it is only because I 
 feel that your brilliant services in the recent 
 Fletcher embezzlement case ought not, in 
 justice to yourself and to our common pro- 
 fession, to be passed over in silence. 
 
 Let me recall the principal circumstances 
 of the Fletcher case. The man Fletcher was 
 indicted for appropriating the funds of the 
 trust company of which he was the head. His 
 lawyer pleaded insanity and called upon you 
 to give an account of several examinations 
 
196 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 you had made of the prisoner's mental con- 
 dition. You testified that on one occasion 
 you asked the defendant how much two plus 
 two is, and he replied four, thereby revealing 
 the extraordinary cunning with which the 
 insane assume the mask of sanity. You then 
 asked him to enumerate the days of the week 
 in their proper order. This the prisoner 
 did without the least hesitation, thereby sup- 
 plying a remarkable instance of the un- 
 natural lucidity and precision of thought 
 which, in the case of those suffering from 
 progressive insanity, immediately precede a 
 complete mental eclipse. 
 
 On the other hand you found that the 
 defendant was unable to recall the name of 
 the clergyman who had married him to his 
 first wife at San Jacinto, Texas, twenty- 
 seven years ago ; an unaccountable failure of 
 memory, which could not be passed over as an 
 accident and must be accepted as a symptom 
 of the gravest nature. You cited the pris- 
 oner's lavish expenditure on motor-cars and 
 pearl necklaces as evidence of his inability 
 
A MAD WORLD 197 
 
 to recognise the value of money; and this in 
 turn clearly indicated a congenital incapacity 
 to recognise values of any kind, whether 
 physical or moral. This contention you 
 drove home by citing the very terms of 
 the indictment, in which it was charged that 
 the prisoner had failed to distinguish be- 
 tween what was his and what was not his 
 another infallible sign of approaching mental 
 deliquescence. 
 
 You did not stop with the man Fletcher. 
 You searched his family history and found 
 (1) a great-uncle of the defendant who used 
 to maintain that Mrs. E. D. N. Southworth 
 was a greater genius than George Eliot ; () 
 a second cousin who dissipated a large 
 fortune by reckless investments in wild-cat 
 mining shares ; and (3) a nephew who was ac- 
 customed to begin his dinner with the salad 
 and finish with the soup. 
 
 At the trial, counsel for defence asked you 
 a hypothetical question. It contained be- 
 tween nine and ten thousand words arranged 
 in two hundred and fifty principal clauses, 
 
198 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 and nearly a thousand subordinate adjective 
 and adverbial clauses, with no less than 
 eighty-three parentheses and seven asterisks 
 referring to as many elaborate footnotes. 
 It would have taken a professional gram- 
 marian from three to six days to grasp the 
 proper sequence of the clauses. Yet it is 
 on record that within three seconds after the 
 lawyer had finished his question, and while he 
 was still wiping the sweat from his forehead, 
 you answered " Yes." This is all the more 
 curious because I gather from statements in 
 the press that while the question was being 
 propounded to you, you were apparently 
 engaged in jesting with your fellow-experts 
 or nodding cheerfully to friends in different 
 parts of the court-room. Needless to say 
 Fletcher was acquitted. 
 
 I have mentioned your fellow-experts. 
 That recalls to my mind another admirable 
 phase of your services in behalf of the 
 medical art. Your activity in the criminal 
 courts has freed our profession from the 
 ancient reproach that doctors can never 
 
A MAD WORLD 199 
 
 agree. As a matter of fact, whether you 
 have been retained by the prosecution or 
 the defence, I cannot think of a single in- 
 stance in which you have failed to agree with 
 every one of the half-dozen other experts on 
 the same side. More than that, I firmly be- 
 lieve that if by some unexpected intervention 
 you were suddenly transferred from the em- 
 ploy of the defence to that of the prosecu- 
 tion, or vice versa, your opinion would still 
 be in complete harmony with that of every 
 one of your new colleagues. In offering your 
 services impartially to the District Attorney 
 or to counsel for the defence you have lived 
 up to that lofty impartiality of service which 
 is the glory of our art. The physician 
 knows neither friend nor foe, neither saint 
 nor sinner. From the rich store of your ex- 
 pert knowledge you can draw that with which 
 to satisfy all men. 
 
 I find it hard to frame a single formula 
 which shall describe the sum total of your 
 achievements in the field of medicine. Per- 
 haps one might say that you have discovered 
 
200 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 the unitary principle underlying the laws of 
 health and disease, for which men have 
 searched since the beginning of time. Be- 
 hind all physical ills they have looked for 
 Evil. Behind diseases they have looked for 
 Disease. That unitary principle you have 
 found in what goes by the general name of 
 Insanity. The cynical opinion of mankind 
 long ago laid it down that all crimes may be 
 resolved into the single crime of allowing 
 one's self to be found out. If a poor man is 
 caught, it is stupidity or negligence. But 
 obviously, when a wealthy criminal is ap- 
 prehended, the only possible explanation is 
 that he is insane. 
 
 The youthful degenerate who resorts to 
 murder; the financier who steals the savings 
 of the poor ; the lobbyist who buys a Senator- 
 ship and sells a State ; the Pittsburg mil- 
 lionaire who seeks to rise above the laws of 
 bigamy, may all be explained, and acquitted, 
 in terms of mental aberration. The only 
 parallel in history that I can think of, is 
 the elder Mr. Weller's belief in the efficacy 
 
A MAD WORLD 201 
 
 of an alibi as a defence in trials for murder 
 and for breach of promise of marriage. 
 
 I congratulate you, sir. You have dis- 
 covered a principle which, like charity, covers 
 a multitude of sins. Like charity, too, your 
 discovery begins at home. For, as I have 
 shown, there is no home in this broad land 
 wherein the expert will fail to discover the 
 necessary great-aunt or third cousin en- 
 dowed with the precise degree of paranoia, 
 paresis, or infantile dementia required to 
 secure an acquittal, or, at least, a disagree- 
 ment of the jury. 
 
 Sincerely yours, 
 AN ADMIRER. 
 
XXIV 
 
 PH.D. 
 
 THE time has come when a serious attempt 
 must be made to determine Gilbert and Sul- 
 livan's permanent place in the world of crea- 
 tive art. A brief review of the musical- 
 comedy output during the last theatrical 
 season will convince any one that we are 
 sufficiently far removed from " Pinafore " 
 and "The Mikado " to insure a true perspec- 
 tive. 
 
 Happily, the material for a systematic 
 examination of the subject is accessible. It 
 is true that we are still without a definitive 
 text of the Gilbert librettos. For this we 
 must wait until Professor Rucksack, of the 
 University of Kissingen, has published the 
 results of his monumental labours. So far, 
 we have from his learned pen only the text 
 for the first half of the second act of " The 
 Mikado." This is in accordance with the 
 
PH.D. 203 
 
 best traditions of German scholarship, which 
 demand that the second half of anything shall 
 be published before the first half. In the 
 meanwhile, there are several editions of Gil- 
 bert available which, though somewhat im- 
 perfect, ought to present no difficulties to the 
 scholar. For example, in my own favourite 
 edition of " The Mikado " (Chattanooga, 
 1913), the text reads: 
 
 And he whistled an air, did he, 
 
 As the sabre tru$ 
 
 Cut cleanly through 
 His servical vertebrae! 
 
 where " servical " is evidently a misprint for 
 " cervical." So, too, the trained eye will at 
 once discern that in the following passage 
 from the Peers' chorus in " lolanthe " : 
 
 'Twould fill with joy 
 
 And madness stark 
 The hoi polloi 
 
 (A Greek rebark), 
 
 the sense is greatly improved by reading 
 " remark " for " rebark," unless we argue 
 that the chorus had a slight cold in the head, 
 
204 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 an assumption which nothing in the text 
 would justify us in bringing forward, and 
 which, indeed, would be contradicted by the 
 highly emphasised summer stylfe in which the 
 chorus is apparelled. Thus forewarned, 
 .then, we are ready to enter upon a detailed 
 examination of the intensely animated men 
 and women in whom Sir William S. Gilbert 
 has embodied his ultima ratio, his dernier cri, 
 and his Weltanschauung. 
 
 In Ko-Ko, the author has given us a Man, 
 with none of the sentimentalities of August 
 Strindberg, with nothing of the limited, vege- 
 tarian outlook upon life of Bernard Shaw, 
 with nothing of the over-refinement of Mrs. 
 Whartori. Ko-Ko is atingle with all the 
 passion and faults of humanity. He is both 
 matter and spirit. He comes close to us in 
 his rare flashes of insight and in his moments 
 of poignant imbecility. The .human being 
 is not lost in the Lord High Executioner. 
 He is alive straight through to his entrails 
 and liver, as Jack London might say. He is 
 infinite, even as life is infinite. He is, by 
 
PH.D. 205 
 
 turns, affable, as with Pitti-Sing; cynically 
 disdainful, as with Pooh-Bah; paternal, as 
 with Nanki-Poo. 
 
 In the presence of Yum- Yum he is that 
 most appealing figure, a strong man in love 
 torn between desire and duty. The firmness 
 with which he rejects the suggestion that he 
 decapitate himself, arguing that in the 
 nature of things such an operation was 
 bound to be injurious to his professional 
 reputation, reveals a character of almost 
 Roman austerity. There is something of the 
 Roman, too or shall we say something of 
 the German ? in the thoroughness with 
 which he would enter on his career. He 
 would prepare himself for his functions as 
 Lord High Executioner by beginning on a 
 guinea pig and working his way through the 
 animal kingdom till he came to a second 
 trombone. This is the old standard of con- 
 scientiousness of which our modern world 
 knows so little. 
 
 And yet a very modern man withal, this 
 Ko-Ko. I cannot help thinking that Mr. 
 
206 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 Chesterton would have loved him, and would 
 have had no difficulty in proving that his 
 name should be pronounced not Ko-Ko, but 
 the second syllable before the first. He is 
 modern in his extraordinary adaptability to 
 time and circumstance. Starting life as a 
 tailor, he adapts himself to the august func- 
 tions of Lord High Executioner. He adapts 
 himself to Yum- Yum. He adapts himself to 
 Katisha. No sooner is he released from 
 prison to become Lord High Executioner 
 than he has ready his convenient little list 
 of people who never would be missed. Of 
 his powers of persuasion we need not speak 
 at great length. His wooing of Katisha is a 
 triumph of romantic eloquence. It carries 
 everything before it, as in that superb climax 
 when Katisha inquires whether it is all true 
 about the unfortunate little torn-tit on a tree 
 by the river, and Ko-Ko replies : " I knew 
 the bird intimately." He is modern through 
 and through, our Ko-Ko. He is at one with 
 Henri Bergson in asserting that existence is 
 not stationary but in constant flux, and that 
 
PH.D. 207 
 
 the universe takes on meaning only from our 
 moods : 
 
 The flowers that bloom in the spring, 
 
 Tra la, 
 Have nothing to do with the case. 
 
 Far less subtle a character is the Lord 
 High Chancellor in " lolanthe," although, 
 within the well-defined liminations of his type, 
 he is as real as Ko-Ko. Like Ko-Ko he has 
 risen from humble beginnings. But whereas 
 our Japanese hero attains fortune by trust- 
 ing himself boldly and joyfully to life, let- 
 ting the currents carry him whither they will, 
 like Byron, like Peer Gynt, and like Captain 
 Hobson, the Lord High Chancellor's rise is 
 the result of painful concentration and stead- 
 fast plodding. Ko-Ko is at various times 
 the statesman, the poet, the lover, the man 
 of the world (as when he is tripped up by 
 the Mikado's umbrella-carrier). The Lord 
 High Chancellor is always the lawyer. In 
 response to Strephon's impassioned cry that 
 all Nature j oins with him in pleading his love, 
 that dry legal soul can only remark that an 
 
208 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 affidavit from a thunderstorm or a few words 
 on oath from a heavy shower would meet 
 with all the attention they deserve. 
 
 Plainly, we have here a man who has won 
 his way to the highest place in his profes- 
 sion by humdrum methods ; the same methods 
 which Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., employed 
 when, by writing in a hand of remarkable 
 roundness and fluency, he became the ruler 
 of the Queen's navee; the same methods 
 brought into play by Major-General Stan- 
 ley, of the British army and Penzance, when 
 he qualified himself for his high position by 
 memorising a great many cheerful facts about 
 the square of the hypothenuse. 
 
 There is matter enough for an entire 
 volume on Gilbert's self-made men Ko- 
 Ko, the Lord High Chancellor, Major-Gen- 
 eral Stanley, and the lawyer in " Trial by 
 Jury," who laid the foundation of his fortunes 
 by marrying a rich attorney's elderly ugly 
 daughter. I throw out the suggestion in the 
 hope that it will be some day taken up as the 
 subject of a Ph.D. thesis in the University of 
 
PH.D. 209 
 
 Alaska. That is only one hint of the un- 
 worked treasures of research that await the 
 student in these librettos. How valuable 
 would be a really comprehensive monograph 
 on the royal attendants in Gilbert, including 
 a comparison of the Mikado's umbrella-car- 
 rier with the Lord High Chancellor's train- 
 bearer ! 
 
 As for Gilbert and Sullivan's women, I 
 find that even if I were not so near to the 
 end of my chapter, I could not enter upon a 
 discussion of the subject. The field is too 
 vast. I must content myself with merely 
 pointing out that Gilbert's ideas on women 
 were painfully Victorian. It is true that 
 the eternal chase of the male by the female 
 was no secret to him. In Katisha's pursuit 
 of Nanki-Poo we have a striking anticipation 
 of Anne's pursuit of John Tanner in " Man 
 and Superman." But on the whole, Gilbert 
 describes his women of the upper classes 
 as simpering and sentimental Josephine, 
 Yum- Yum, Mabel, lolanthe and his women 
 of the working classes as ignorant and in- 
 
210 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 capable. What an extraordinary example 
 of ineptitude is afforded by Little Butter- 
 cup, who, in her capacity as baby-farmer, so 
 disastrously mixes up Ralph Rackstraw 
 with Captain Corcoran. Or by Nurse Ruth 
 of Penzance, who fails to carry out orders 
 and, instead of apprenticing her young 
 charge to a pilot, apprentices him to a pirate. 
 Miss Ida Tarbell could not have framed a 
 severer indictment of inefficiency in the home. 
 
XXV 
 
 TWO AND TWO 
 
 HARDING said that if he were ever called 
 upon to deliver the commencement oration at 
 his alma mater, he knew what he would do. 
 
 " Of course you know what you would do," 
 I said. " So do I. So does every one. You 
 would rise to your feet and tell the graduating 
 class that after four years of sheltered com- 
 munion with the noblest thought of the ages 
 they were about to plunge into the mael- 
 strom of life. If you didn't say maelstrom 
 you would say turmoil or arena. You will 
 tell them that never did the world stand in 
 such crying need of devoted and unselfish 
 service. You will say that we are living in 
 an age of change, and the waves of unrest 
 are beating about the standards of the old 
 faith. You will follow this up with several 
 other mixed metaphors expressive of the gen- 
 eral truth that it is for the Class of '14 tot 
 
212 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 say whether this world shall be made a better 
 place to live in or shall be allowed to go to 
 the demnition bow wows. You will conclude 
 with a fervent appeal to the members of the 
 graduating class never to cease cherishing 
 the flame of the ideal. You will then sit 
 down and the President will confer the degree 
 of LL.D. on one of the high officials of the 
 Powder Trust." 
 
 But Harding was so much in earnest that 
 he forgot to receive my remarks with the 
 bitter sneer which is the portion of any one 
 unfortunate enough to disagree with him. 
 
 " The commencement address I expect to 
 deliver," he said, " will precisely avoid every 
 peculiarity you have mentioned^ It is the 
 fatal mistake of every commencement orator 
 that he attempts to deal with principles. 
 He knows that by the middle of June the 
 senior class has forgotten most of the things 
 in, the curriculum. His error consists in 
 supposing that this is as it should be; that 
 Euclid and the rules of logic were made to 
 be forgotten, and that the only thing the 
 
TWO AND TWO 213 
 
 college man must carry out Into the world 
 is an Attitude to Life and a Purpose. Which 
 is all rot. There is no necessity for preach- 
 ing ideals to a graduating class. The ideals 
 that a man ought to cling to in life are the 
 same that a decent young man will have 
 lived up to in college. The dangers and 
 temptations he will confront are very much 
 like those he has had to fight on the campus. 
 The undergraduate of to-day is not a babe 
 or a baa-lamb." 
 
 He paused and seemed to be weighing the 
 significance of what he had said. Apparently 
 he was pleased. He nodded a vigorous ap- 
 proval of his own views on the subject, and 
 proceeded : 
 
 " It is not the temptations of the world the 
 college man must be on the lookout against, 
 but its stupidities, its irrelevancies, its gen- 
 eral besotted ignorance. He is less in peril 
 of the flesh and the devil than of the scream- 
 ing, unintelligent newspaper headline, whether 
 it leads off an interview with a vaudeville 
 star or with a histrionic college professor. 
 
214. /NPOST-IMPRESSIONS 
 JQ) <o\ 
 
 What he needs to be reminded of is not prin- 
 ciples, but a few elementary facts. My own 
 commencement address would consist of noth- 
 ing more or less than a brief review of the 
 four years' work in class algebra, geom- 
 etry, history, physics, chemistry, psychology, 
 everything." 
 
 " How extraordinarily simple ! " I said. 
 " The wonder is no one has ever thought of 
 this before." 
 
 " I admit," he said, " that it may be rather 
 difficult to compress all that matter in fifteen 
 hundred words, but it can be done. It can 
 be done in less than that. My peroration, 
 for instance, would go somewhat as follows 
 that is, if you care to listen?" 
 
 " It will do no harm to listen," I said. 
 
 " I would end in some such way : ' Mem- 
 bers of the graduating class, as you leave 
 the shades of akna mater for the career of 
 life, the one thing above all others that you 
 must carry with you is a clear and ready 
 knowledge of the multiplication table. 
 Wherever your destiny may lead you, to the 
 
TWO AND TWO 215 
 
 halls of Congress, to the Stock Exchange, to 
 the counting room, the hospital ward, or the 
 editorial desk, let not your mind wander 
 from the following fundamental truths. 
 Two times two is four. A straight line is 
 the shortest distance between two points. 
 Rome fell in the year 476, but it was founded 
 in the year 753 B. C., and so took exactly 
 1,229 years to fall. The northern frontier of 
 Spain coincides with the southern frontier 
 of France. The Ten Commandments were 
 formulated at least 2,500 years ago. Japan 
 is sixty times as far away from San Fran- 
 cisco as it is from the mainland of Asia. 
 Virginius killed his daughter rather than let 
 her live in shame. The subject of illicit love 
 was treated with conspicuous ability by 
 Euripides. The legal rate of interest in 
 most of the States of the Union is six per 
 cent. The instinct for self-preservation is 
 one of the elementary laws of evolution. 
 Hamlet is a work of genius. Victor Hugo is 
 the author of " Les Miserables." I thank 
 you.' " 
 
216 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 " Thus equipped, any young man ought to 
 become President in time," I said. 
 
 " Thus equipped," retorted Harding, " any 
 young man ought to make his way through 
 life as a rational being, and not as a sheep. 
 And that is the main purpose of a college 
 education, or of any process of education. 
 No amount of moral enthusiasm will safe- 
 guard a man against the statement that the 
 panic of 1893 was caused by the Democratic 
 tariff bill; but the knowledge that the tariff 
 bill was passed in 1894 may be of use. It 
 saves a rational being from talking like a 
 fool. Idealism will not keep a man from in- 
 vesting in get-rich-quick corporation stock ; 
 but knowledge of the fact that the common 
 sense and experience of mankind have agreed 
 upon six per cent, as a fair return on capital 
 will keep him from going after 520 per cent. 
 Mind you, it is not the fact that he will lose 
 his money which concerns me. It is the fact 
 that there should be a mentality capable of 
 believing in 520 per cent. The dignity of the 
 human mind is at stake. Or take this matter 
 
TWO AND TWO 217 
 
 of the boundary line between France and 
 Spain." 
 
 " If you are sure it is related to the sub- 
 ject in hand," I said. 
 
 " It is, intimately," he replied. " I am, 
 as you know, exceedingly fond of books of 
 travel. I read them as eagerly as I do all the 
 cheap fiction that deal with brave adventures 
 in foreign lands. Now a very common 
 trait in books of both kinds is the author's 
 fondness for pointing out the differences be- 
 tween the people of the southern part of a 
 particular country and the people living in 
 the northern part. You are familiar with the 
 distinction. The inhabitants of the south are 
 hot-headed, amorous, given to mandolin play- 
 ing, and lacking in political genius. The 
 people of the north are phlegmatic, practical, 
 averse to love-making, unimaginative, readers 
 of the Bible, and tenacious of their rights. I 
 don't recall who first called attention to the 
 fact. Perhaps it was Macaulay. Perhaps 
 it was Herodotus. The idea is sound enough. 
 
 " But observe what the writers have made 
 
218 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 out of this simple truth. It has escaped 
 them that anything is north or south only 
 by comparison with something else. In the 
 minds of our parrot authors the south has 
 simply become associated with one set of 
 stock phrases and the north with another. 
 Here is where my Franco-Spanish frontier 
 comes in. We learn that the people of south- 
 ern Spain are gay and fickle whereas the 
 people of northern Spain are sturdy and 
 sober-minded. But cross over into France 
 and the people of southern France are once 
 more gay and fickle, in spite of the fact that 
 they live further north than the sober-minded 
 inhabitants of northern Spain ; and the peo- 
 ple of northern France are calm and self- 
 reliant. Moving still further toward the 
 Pole, into Belgium, we find that the Belgians 
 of the south are a frivolous lot, but the Bel- 
 gians of the north are eminently desirable 
 citizens. From what I have said you will no 
 longer be surprised to hear that the inhabit- 
 ants of southern Sweden are a harum-scarum 
 populace, whereas in the north of Sweden 
 
TWO AND TWO 219 
 
 every one attends to his own business. As a 
 result of my long course in travel literature I 
 am convinced that the southern Eskimos are 
 not to be mentioned in the same breath, for 
 hardihood and manly self-control, with the 
 sturdy inhabitants of northern Congo. Peo- 
 ple go on writing this terrific nonsense and 
 people go on reading it. A brief review in 
 geography would put a stop to the nefarious 
 practice. Have I made myself clear? " 
 
 " The question is whether people are in- 
 terested in the countries you -have men- 
 tioned," I said. 
 
 Even then Harding was patient with me. 
 
 >" That is what I would try to do in my 
 commencement oration arm those young 
 minds against the catch-words and imbecili- 
 ties of the great world. Altruism, the pas- 
 sion for service, the passion for progress, are 
 all very well in their way. But first of all 
 comes the duty of every man to defend the in- 
 tegrity of his own mind and the multiplica- 
 tion table." 
 
XXVI 
 
 BRICK AND MORTAR 
 
 IT is a pleasure to put before my readers the 
 first completely unauthorised interview with 
 Professor Henri Bergson on the spiritual 
 significance of American architecture. We 
 were speaking of Mr. Guy Lowell's original 
 design for New York's new County Court 
 house. 
 
 M. Bergson smiled pragmatically. 
 
 " A round court house, you say ? Sug- 
 gestive of the Colosseum, with a touch of 
 the Tower of Babel, and the merest soupfon 
 of Barnum and Bailey? Come then, why 
 not? To me it is eminently just that your 
 architecture should typify the different racial 
 strains that have entered into the making of 
 the American people. When one observes in 
 the fa9ade of your magnificent public build- 
 ings the characteristic marks of the Chinese, 
 the Red Indian, the Turco-Tartar, the Pro- 
 
 ven9al, the Lombard Renaissance, the Es- 
 220 
 
BRICK AND MORTAR 221 
 
 kimo, and the Late Patagonian, one catches 
 for the first time the full meaning of your 
 so complex civilisation." 
 
 The distinguished philosopher turned in 
 his seat, struck a match on a marble bust of 
 Immanu'el Kant just behind him, and lit his 
 cigar. He gazed thoughtfully out of the 
 window. Before him stretched the enchant- 
 ing panorama of Paris so familiar to Amer- 
 ican eyes Notre Dame, the Gare de St. 
 Lazare, the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel 
 Tower, the cypresses of Pere Lachaise, the 
 tomb of Napoleon, and the offices of the 
 American Express Company. 
 
 " Yes," he said, " one envies the advan- 
 tages of your multi-millionaires. The kings 
 and princes of former times, when they built 
 themselves a home, had to be content with a 
 single school of architecture. Your rich men 
 on Fifth Avenue may have two styles, three, 
 four what say I ? a dozen ! And on 
 their country estates, where there is a ga- 
 rage, a conservatory, stables, kennels, the op- 
 portunities are unlimited." 
 
222 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 " But we have pretty well exhausted all the 
 known styles," I said. " What about the fu- 
 ture? " 
 
 " Have no fear," he replied. " The ar- 
 chaeologists are continually digging up new 
 monuments of primitive architecture. By 
 the time you need a new City Hall excava- 
 tions will be very far advanced in Peru and 
 Ceylon. 
 
 " The one secret of great architecture," M. 
 Bergson went on, " is that it shall contain 
 a soul, that it shall be the expression of an 
 idea. A splendid courage accompanied by 
 a high degree of disorder is what I regard 
 as the American Idea. Hence the perfect 
 propriety of a fifty-story Venetian tower 
 overlooking a Byzantine temple devoted to 
 the Presbyterian form of worship. Too 
 many of my countrymen are tempted to scoff 
 at your skyscrapers. But I maintain that a 
 skyscraper perfectly expresses the spirit of 
 a people which has created Pittsburg, the 
 Panama Canal, and Mr. Hammerstein's chain 
 of opera houses. Take your loftiest struc- 
 
BRICK AND MORTAR 223 
 
 tures in New York and think what they stand 
 for." 
 
 I thought in accordance with instructions, 
 and recognised that the three tallest struc- 
 tures in New York symbolised, respectively, 
 the triumph of the five and ten cent store, 
 the sewing machine, and industrial insurance 
 at ten cents a week. 
 
 " In your skyscrapers," he went on, " there 
 speaks out the soul of American idealism." 
 
 I recalled what a drug the skyscrapers are 
 on the real estate market, how they yield an 
 average of two per cent, on the cost, and I 
 decided that our tall buildings are indeed the 
 expression of uncompromising idealism. As 
 an investment there was little to be said for 
 them. 
 
 " I repeat," said M. Bergson, " your sky- 
 scrapers stand for an idea, but they also ex- 
 press beauty. Not only do they reveal the 
 restless energy of a people whjch waits five 
 minutes to take the elevator from the tenth 
 floor to the twelfth, but they also embody the 
 most modern conception of fine taste. I 
 
224 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 think of them as displaying the perfection of 
 the hobble-skirt in architecture tall, slim, 
 expensive, and never failing to catch the eye." 
 
 We were interrupted by a trim-looking 
 maid who brought in a telegram. My host 
 tore open the envelope, glanced at the mes- 
 sage, and handed it to me with a smile. It 
 was from a Chicago vaudeville manager who 
 offered M. Bergson five thousand dollars a 
 week for a series of twenty-minute talks on 
 the influence of Creative Evolution on the 
 Cubist movement to be illustrated with mo- 
 tion pictures. I handed the telegram to M. 
 Bergson, who dropped it into the waste bas- 
 ket. 
 
 " People," he said, " have fallen into the 
 habit of asserting that beauty in architecture 
 is not to be separated from utility. To be 
 beautiful a building must at once reveal the 
 use to which it is devoted. But this need not 
 mean that a certain architectural type must 
 be devoted to a certain purpose. The essen- 
 tial thing is uniformity. The same form 
 should be devoted to the same purpose. 
 
BRICK AND MORTAR 225 
 
 Then there would be no trouble in learning 
 the peculiar architectural language of a city. 
 When I was in New York I experienced no 
 difficulty whatsoever. When I saw a Corin- 
 thian temple I knew it was a church. When 
 I saw a Roman basilica I knew it was a bank. 
 When I saw a Renaissance palace I knew it 
 was a public bath house. When I saw an 
 Assyrian palace I knew there was a cabaret 
 tea inside. When I saw a barracks I knew 
 it was a college laboratory. When I saw a 
 fortress I knew it was an aquarium. The 
 soul of the city spoke out very clearly to me." 
 
 He thought for a moment. 
 
 " But yes," he said. " When I think of 
 New York and its architecture I am more 
 than ever convinced that there is no such a 
 thing as predestination, that your American 
 architect is emphatically a free agent." 
 
 " This seems so very true," I murmured. 
 
 " Recently," he went on, " when I was the 
 guest of your most hospitable countrymen 
 there was a sharp controversy regarding the 
 appropriateness of the architect's design for 
 
226 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 a memorial to be erected to your immortal 
 Lincoln in the national capital. There were 
 critics who professed to be shocked by the in- 
 congruity of placing a statue of Lincoln, 
 the frontiersman, the circuit-rider of your 
 raw Middle West, the teller of most amusing 
 anecdotes, amusing, but somewhat Gothic, 
 shall I say ? putting a statue of this typi- 
 cal American inside a temple of pure Grecian 
 design. Such critics, in my opinion, were in 
 error. They made the same mistake of con- 
 centrating on the specific use, instead of 
 searching after the broad meaning. Lincoln 
 was an American. His monument should be 
 American in spirit. And I contend that it 
 is the American spirit to put a statesman in 
 frock coat and trousers inside a Greek tem- 
 ple. For that matter, what structural form 
 is there which one might call typical of your 
 country, outside of your skyscrapers ? " 
 
 " There is the log cabin," I said, " but that 
 would hardly bear reproduction in marble. 
 And there is the baseball stadium, but some- 
 how that sounds rather inappropriate." 
 
BRICK AND MORTAR 227 
 
 " So I should earnestly advise you," con- 
 tinued M. Bergson, " not to waste time in 
 studying what your architectural types 
 ought to be, but to build as the fancy seizes 
 you. In the course of time the right fancy 
 may seize you. If anything, avoid striving 
 for perfection. Continue to mix your styles. 
 It is not essential to cling to the original 
 plans once you have started. Change your 
 plans as you go along. Avoid the spick and 
 span. If your foundations begin to sag a 
 little before the roof is completed, so much 
 the better. If the right wing of your build- 
 ing is out of line with the left wing, let it go 
 at that. If your interior staircases blind the 
 windows, if your halls run into a cul-de-sac, 
 instead of leading somewhere, let them." 
 
 " But that is precisely the way we build 
 our State Capitols," I said. 
 
 " Then you are to be congratulated on 
 having solved the problem of a national 
 style," said M. Bergson. 
 
XXVII 
 
 INCOHERENT 
 
 A TOPSY-TURVY chapter of no particular 
 meaning and of little consequence ; whether 
 pointing to some divine, far-off event, the 
 reader must determine for himself. 
 
 He came into the office and fixed me with 
 his glittering eye across the desk. Under or- 
 dinary circumstances I should have found his 
 manner of speech rather odd. But it was 
 the last week of the Cubist Exhibition on Lex- 
 ington Avenue, and a certain lack of coher- 
 ence seemed natural. He said: 
 
 " Is there a soul in things we choose to de- 
 scribe as inanimate? Of course there is. 
 Can we assign moral attributes to what peo- 
 ple usually regard as dead nature? Of 
 course we can. Why don't we do something 
 then? Take the abandoned farm. Doesn't 
 the term at once call up a picture of shocking 
 moral degradation? We are surrounded by 
 
INCOHERENT 229 
 
 abandoned farms, and do nothing to reclaim 
 them morally. But I have hope. That is 
 the fine thing about the spirit of the present 
 day. It abhors sentimentality. It is hon- 
 est. It recognises that before we can do 
 away with evil we must acknowledge that it 
 exists. Look at the wild olive ! Look at the 
 vicious circle ! Look at Bad Nauheim ! " 
 
 " Are you sure it's me you wished to see ? " 
 I asked. " Because there's a man in the of- 
 fice whose name sounds very much the same 
 and the boys are apt to confuse us. He is 
 in the third room to your right." 
 
 " It doesn't matter," he said. " The main 
 thing is that the present uplift does not go 
 half far enough. Just consider the semi- 
 detached family house. Can anything be 
 more depressing? There are happy fami- 
 lies ; of them we need not speak. There are 
 unhappy families ; but there at least you find 
 the dignity of tragedy, of fierce hatreds, of 
 clamour, of hot blood running riot in the ex- 
 ultation of excess Swinburne, you know, 
 Dolores, Faustina, Matisse, and all that. 
 
230 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 But a semi-detached family, a home of chilly 
 rancours and hidden sneers, too indifferent 
 for love, too cowardly for hate, a stagnant 
 pool of misery can you blame me? " 
 
 " I do not," I said. " Far be it from me 
 to censure the natural antipathy for real es- 
 tate agents which surges up " 
 
 "Thank you," he said. "That is all I 
 wish to know." He rose, but turned back at 
 the door. " Of course," he said, " there is 
 the other side of the picture. Not all nature 
 is degenerate. There are upright pianos. 
 There are well-balanced sentences. There 
 are reinforced-concrete engineers. I thank 
 you for your courtesy." And he went out. 
 
 I had no scruples in directing my visitor 
 to the third floor from mine on the right, be- 
 cause that room is occupied by the anti-suf- 
 fragist member of the staff. Between edi- 
 tions he reads the foreign exchanges with a 
 fixed sneer and polishes up his little anti- 
 feminist aphorisms. These he recites to me 
 with a venomous hatred which Charlotte Per- 
 kins Gilman would have no trouble in tracing 
 
INCOHERENT 231 
 
 back to the polygamous cave man. He came 
 in now and sat down in the chair just vacated 
 by my somewhat eccentric visitor. 
 
 " Mrs. Pankhurst," he said, " is completely 
 justified in asserting that the leaders may 
 perish, but the good fight will go on. There 
 are plenty of frenzied Englishwomen to carry 
 the torch. The practice of arson, you will ob- 
 serve, comes natural to woman as the historic 
 guardian of the domestic fire. We have 
 great difficulty in preventing our cook from 
 pouring kerosene into the kitchen range. In- 
 stinct, you see." 
 
 " But look at the other side of the ques- 
 tion," I said. 
 
 " That doesn't concern me in the least," he 
 replied. " Of course you will say there is the 
 hunger strike. But what does that prove? 
 Simply that another ancient custom of the 
 submerged classes has become an amusement 
 of the well-to-do. We are all copying the 
 underworld nowadays. We have borrowed 
 their delightfully straightforword mode of 
 speech. We have learned their dances. We 
 
232 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 are imitating their manners. Now we are 
 acquiring their capacity for going without 
 food. Not that I think the hunger-strike 
 is altogether a futile invention. Practised 
 on a large scale it will undeniably exercise a 
 beneficent influence on the status of woman. 
 Modern fashions in women's garments have 
 already reduced the expenditure on dress ma- 
 terial to an insignificant minimum. When the 
 wives of the middle and upper classes have 
 learned to be as abstemious with food as 
 they are with clothes, it is plain that the eco- 
 nomic independence of women will be close 
 at hand." 
 
 " You are assuming that the sheath-gown 
 is less expensive than the crinoline," I man- 
 aged to interject. 
 
 " I consider your remarks utterly irrele- 
 vant to my argument," he said. " Mind you, 
 I don't deny that forcible feeding is a dis- 
 gusting business as it is carried on at pres- 
 ent. But that is because it is being misdi- 
 rected. If the British Government were to 
 apply forcible feeding in Whitechapel and 
 
INCOHERENT 233 
 
 among the human wreckage that litters the 
 Thames Embankment, I am confident that the 
 problem of social unrest would be speedily 
 disposed of." 
 
 He, too, turned back at the door. 
 
 " Mark my word," he said, " it won't be 
 long before the manhood of England asserts 
 itself, and then look out for trouble! You 
 know, even the earth turns when you step 
 upon it." 
 
 But sometimes you find yourself wondering 
 whether it is really (1) the solid earth we 
 tread to-day, or whether it is (2) on clouds 
 we step, or whether (3) we walk the earth 
 with our heads in the clouds, or whether (4) 
 we are standing on our heads on earth with 
 our feet in the clouds. It isn't an age of 
 transition, because that means progress in 
 one direction. It isn't revolution, because 
 revolution is an extremely clear-cut process 
 with heads falling and the sewers running red 
 with blood, whereas the swollen channels to- 
 day run heavy with talk chiefly. It isn't a 
 transmutation of values, because we have no 
 
234 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 single accepted standard of exchange. It 
 isn't a shifting of viewpoints, because it is 
 much more than that. 
 
 It is a shifting of the optical laws, of the 
 entire body of physical laws. Pictures are 
 painted to be heard, music is written to be 
 seen, passion is depicted in odours, dancing 
 aims to make the bystander lick his chops. 
 Mathematics has become an impressionist art, 
 and love, birth, and death are treated arith- 
 metically. Grown men and women clamour 
 for the widest individual freedom, and chil- 
 dren, if you will listen to the Princeton pro- 
 fessor, should render compulsory service to 
 the State. We are in full revolt; in revolt 
 toward State Socialism, toward Nietzsche, 
 toward Christian idealism, toward the pagan- 
 ism of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre, 
 toward university settlements, toward the 
 cabaret. Are we in a fog? Are we in the 
 clouds striving toward the light? Well, I 
 haven't the least doubt that the mist will roll 
 away and leave us in man's natural position, 
 
INCOHERENT 235 
 
 his feet planted solidly on earth, his face 
 lifted to the sun. But for the moment it's 
 puzzling. 
 
XXVIII 
 
 REALISM 
 (AFTER A-N-U> B-N-ETT) 
 
 IN the dining-room of her little apartment, 
 from the windows of which one might catch a 
 glimpse of the Place de la Revolution on a 
 clear day, Madame Lafarge was laying the 
 table for supper. She had folded the table- 
 cloth in two. With outstretched arms she 
 held the four ends of the beautifully laun- 
 dered piece of napery between the thumb and 
 middle-finger of either hand. Suddenly she 
 released two of the corners of the white cloth, 
 transferring her grip with practised deftness 
 to the two other corners, and whipped the 
 flapping sheet across the table with a confi- 
 dent gesture that emphasised the vigour of 
 her ample bosom. The further end of the 
 cloth wrinkled. Perfect mistress of herself, 
 Madame Lafarge walked around the table and 
 
REALISM 237 
 
 patted the offending creases into an unblem- 
 ished surface. She was extremely proud of 
 her finger-nails, upon which she spent fifteen 
 minutes twice a day. 
 
 From the china-closet at one end of the 
 room, Madame Lafarge brought forth two 
 plates, which she placed on the table at either 
 end of a perfect diameter. This diameter she 
 bisected with four salt and pepper casters 
 of cut-glass topped with silver elaborately 
 chased in the bourgeois style. While arrang- 
 ing the spoons she happened to look at the 
 clock and noticed that it was a quarter past 
 five. M. Lafarge would be leaving his shop 
 behind the Palais Royal in half an hour. 
 He would stop at the tobacconist's for his 
 semi-weekly bag of fine-cut Maryland and 
 would probably call at the cobbler's for 
 Madame's second best shoes which she was 
 having resoled for the third time ; they would 
 last out the winter. That would bring her 
 husband home within an hour. In another 
 half hour it would be time to put the cutlets 
 on the fire. As she walked into the kitchen 
 
238 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 she wondered whether there was quite enough 
 flour in the sauce. A heavy sauce made M. 
 Lafarge toss about in bed. 
 
 Outside, on the Place, they were guillotin- 
 ing Marie Antoinette. . . . 
 
XXIX 
 
 ART 
 
 (WHEN EMMY DESTINN SANG IN THE LION 
 CAGE) 
 
 FIRST LION: I'm nervous. Aren't you? 
 
 Second Lion: Not in the least. 
 
 First Lion: Then why do you keep your 
 tail between your legs? 
 
 Second Lion: I always do that when I'm 
 thinking. 
 
 First Lion : What I want to know is 4 what 
 do they want to go and put her in the cage 
 for? The place is crowded as it is and there 
 isn't enough raw beef to go around. 
 
 Second Lion: Maybe she is a new kind 
 of beef. 
 
 First Lion: I wouldn't touch it for the 
 world Now what are you doing? Are 
 you afraid? 
 
 Second Lion: Who's afraid? 
 
 First Lion : What made you back into me 
 
 239 
 
240 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 like that and growl when she waved her up- 
 per limbs and stepped forward? 
 
 Second Lion: Purely reflex action. Do 
 you think she's hungry? 
 
 First Lion: For heaven's sake, don't say 
 that. What makes you think so? 
 
 Second Lion: She has her mouth wide 
 open and she emits prolonged howls. I wish 
 she wouldn't move forward so abruptly. 
 
 First Lion : And I wish you wouldn't back 
 into me like that without warning. 
 
 Second Lion: Perhaps she howls because 
 she's afraid. 
 
 First Lion: Whom would she be afraid 
 of? 
 
 Second Lion: The man outside who is 
 turning the handle of the picture-machine. 
 
 First Lion : He has a red face. 
 
 Second Lion: He must be juicy. I could 
 fetch him in two leaps if I were feeling just 
 right. 
 
 First Lion : There you go again. You'll 
 be backing me against the bars before you 
 know it. 
 
ART 24-1 
 
 Second Lion : Can't one stretch when one 
 feels bored? 
 
 First Lion: The red-faced man must be 
 the new keeper. 
 
 Second Lion: Probably, and she is howl- 
 ing for something to eat. I wonder how long 
 this will last. 
 
 First Lion : I wonder. This is worse than 
 the circus with nothing between you and a 
 crowd. What is it now? 
 
 Second Lion : She's come nearer again and 
 she is stretching out her upper limbs in our 
 direction. Suppose she's hungry and the 
 red-faced man refuses to let her have any- 
 thing. 
 
 First Lion: For heaven's sake, don't 
 speak like that. 
 
XXX 
 
 THE PACE OF LIFE 
 
 (AS KECORDED BY THE FILM DEAMA AND 
 TIMED BY A DOLLAR WATCH) 
 
 FROM love at first sight to end of successful 
 courtship, $1/2 minutes. 
 
 Breakfast, 45 seconds. 
 
 Ascent of the Jungfrau, 5 minutes. 
 
 A riot, 1 minute, 45 seconds. 
 
 A wedding, 1^ minutes. 
 
 A conflagration, 55 seconds. 
 
 A night of restless tossing on a bed of 
 pain, 35 seconds. 
 
 From discovery of wife's faithlessness to 
 attempt at suicide, 50 seconds. 
 
 Reconciliation between life-long enemies, 1 
 minute. 
 
 Trust monopolist converted to endow a 
 hospital and reorganise business on a profit- 
 sharing basis, 11/2 minutes. 
 
 A piano recital, 30 seconds. 
 
THE PACE OF LIFE 243 
 
 A battle in Mexico, l^ minutes. 
 
 A major abdominal operation, 19 seconds. 
 
 Establishing identity of long-lost heir, 6 
 seconds. 
 
 Buy your hats at O'Grady's they're dif- 
 ferent, 2 minutes. 
 
 Getting Central on the telephone, instan- 
 taneous. 
 
 Central gives the right connection, 2 sec- 
 onds. (Incidentally it may be remarked 
 that the film drama can never hope to repro- 
 duce the most powerful comic device of the 
 legitimate stage. This consists in saying to 
 Central, " Yes, I want two-four-six-thr-r-r- 
 e-e," the most notable advance in dramatic 
 art since the invention of the inflated blad- 
 der.) 
 
 Restoration of lost memory and discovery 
 of hiding-place of lost documents, 10 seconds. 
 
 Orator sways hostile audience, 15 seconds. 
 
 Detailed plan for robbing Metropolitan 
 Museum formulated by six conspirators, 15 
 seconds. 
 
 Twenty years pass, 2 seconds, 
 
XXXI 
 
 MARCUS AURELIUS, 1914- 
 
 LET me exaggerate! For in exaggeration 
 there is life and the punch that makes for 
 progress. Whereas no man can manifestly 
 qualify as a live wire who sees things as they 
 are. 
 
 Let me exaggerate the number of millions 
 of bacteria to the cubic centimetro in j^>f 
 morning milk ; and the hosts of virulent bacilli 
 that make their encampment on the unlaun- 
 dered dollar-bill; and the anti-social micro- 
 organisms that beset the common drinking- 
 cup. 
 
 Let me exaggerate the virtue of assidu- 
 ously and courageously swatting the com- 
 mon housefly. 
 
 Let me exaggerate the grey and monoto- 
 nous life of the poor, forgetting the children 
 who dance to the sound of the hurdy-gurdy, 
 
 and the mothers who smile over their babies 
 244 
 
MARCUS AURELIUS, 1914 245 
 
 in tenement cradles, and the lovers in the 
 parks, and the May parties, and the millions 
 who patronise the moving-picture theatres, 
 and the millions in Coney Island. 
 
 Let me exaggerate the grinding, crushing, 
 withering speed of modern industry, forget- 
 ting the hundreds of thousands who throng 
 the baseball parks and the additional millions 
 who study the score boards on Park Row. 
 
 Let me exaggerate the number of children 
 who go breakfastless to school, since nothing 
 less than 25,000 gets into the newspaper head- 
 lines; and the wickedness of regularly or- 
 dained clergymen who marry people without 
 asking for a physician's certificate ; and the 
 peril of helping an old lady up the Subway 
 steps lest she turn out to be a recruiter of 
 white slaves. 
 
 Let me exaggerate the blessings of an age 
 when babies shall be born without adenoids 
 and tonsils, and shall develop just as auto- 
 matically into clear-eyed little Boy Scouts 
 and Camp-fire Girls. 
 
 Let me exaggerate! Teach me that out- 
 
246 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 look upon life which the highbrow pragma- 
 lists describe as the will to believe, and the 
 low-brow describes as pipe dreams ! Save me 
 from those twin devils, the Sense of Humour 
 and the Sense of Proportion ; for in common 
 sense is stagnation and death, but progress 
 lies in exaggeration ! 
 
IN seven different ways has the world been 
 on the point of being regenerated since the 
 Spanish- American War. For the complete- 
 ness with which the world has been recon- 
 structed consult the current files of the news- 
 papers. 
 
 The world was to be made over by the bi- 
 cycle. The strap-hanger was to abandon his 
 strap and ride joyfully down the Broadway 
 cable-slot, snapping his fingers at traction 
 magnates and imbibing ozone. The factory- 
 hand was to abandon his city flat and live in 
 the open country, going to and from his work 
 through the green lanes at fifteen miles an 
 hour, with his lunch on the handle bars. The 
 old were to grow young again and the young 
 were to dream close to the heart of Nature. 
 The doctors were to perish of starvation. 
 But where is the bicycle to-day? 
 247 
 
248 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 The world was to be made over by jiu-jitsu. 
 Elderly gentlemen were to regain the waist- 
 line of their youth by ten minutes' attention 
 every morning to the secrets of the Samurai. 
 Slim young women, when attacked by heavy 
 ruffians, were to seize their assailants by the 
 wrist and hurl them over the right shoulder. 
 The police were to discard their revolvers and 
 their night sticks, and suppress rioters by 
 mere muscular contraction. The doctors, as 
 before, were to grow extinct through the 
 rapid process of starvation. But where is 
 jiu-jitsu to-day? 
 
 The world was to be regenerated by dena- 
 tured alcohol. Congress had merely to re- 
 move the internal revenue tax and a new mo- 
 tive power would be let loose, far transcend- 
 ing the total available horsepower of our coal 
 mines. Denatured alcohol was to drive the 
 farmer's machines, propel our war automo- 
 biles, run our factories, and reduce the cost of 
 living to a ridiculous minimum. But where is 
 denatured alcohol to-day? 
 
 The world was to be redeemed by the 
 
BY THE TURN OF A HAND 249 
 
 bungalow. The landlord was to disappear 
 and in his place would come a race of free- 
 men bowing the head to no man and raising 
 their own vegetables. Kitchen drudgery was 
 to be eliminated by the simple device of 
 abolishing the kitchen and calling it a kitch- 
 enette. With no more stairs to climb, rheu- 
 matism would pass into history. So would 
 the doctors. The bungalow is still with us, 
 and alas, so are the doctors. 
 
 The world was to be regenerated by sour 
 milk; by the simple life; by sleeping in the 
 open air. But where now are Prof. Metchni- 
 koff and Pastor Wagner? And the pictures 
 of ' rose-embowered sleeping porches in the 
 garden magazines have been supplanted by 
 pictures of colonial farmhouses transformed 
 into charming interiors by two coats of white- 
 wash and a thin-paper edition of the classics. 
 
 Does this show that we must give up all 
 hope of seeing a new world around us before 
 1915? By no means. We still have Eugen- 
 ics. 
 
THE tired business man leaves his home in 
 the country just in time to catch the next 
 train. By ten o'clock, at the latest, he is 
 in his office, having ridden up to the thir- 
 teenth floor in an express elevator and so 
 gained a distinct advantage over his London 
 competitors who are in the habit of walking 
 up to their offices on the third floor. He 
 finds his mail opened and sorted on his desk. 
 He glances over the most important letters, 
 puts aside those requiring immediate atten- 
 tion, and has his shoes shined. At eleven 
 o'clock he calls up on the telephone and, in 
 the course of fifteen minutes' conversation, 
 transacts a great deal of business which has 
 to be confirmed by letter. His father would 
 merely have written the letter. 
 
 Ignoring the primary rule of health which 
 
 forbids the mingling of work and recreation, 
 250 
 
THE QUARRY SLAVE 251 
 
 he makes a business appointment for lunch, 
 and between one o'clock and half-past three 
 he puts through a deal on which his father 
 would have spent at least half an hour 
 during his busiest hours. Returning to his 
 office he dictates several letters which he dic- 
 tated the day before and into which a num- 
 ber of vital errors have been introduced in 
 the course of transcription. This necessi- 
 tates repeated reference to a card catalogue, 
 an operation which takes some time because 
 the young man in charge has been brought 
 up on the phonetic system and experiences 
 some difficulty in determining the proper 
 place of the letter G in the alphabet. From 
 3:30 to 4:30 the business man is interviewed 
 by an agent who demonstrates the merits of 
 a new labour-saving letter file. Donning his 
 overcoat hastily he runs to make an express 
 which takes eight minutes to reach Grand 
 Central Station, whereas the local trains 
 sometimes take as much as eleven minutes. 
 
 Later, exhausted by his efforts of the day, 
 he just manages to purchase two seats on the 
 
252 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 aisle from a speculator, and staggers to his 
 chair at 8 :30 as the curtain rises on the first 
 act of " The Girl and the Eskimo." 
 
XXXIV 
 
 MONOTONY OF THE POLES 
 
 (AT A FIVE O'CLOCK TEA) 
 
 THE LADY: It's so good of you to come. 
 It must be wonderful to have been at the 
 Pole. Do you know, when the news first 
 reached us, I was so excited I insisted on call- 
 ing up all my friends on the telephone and 
 asking them if they had heard. It must have 
 been a wonderful trip. Won't you sit down 
 and tell us all about it? 
 
 The Explorer : Thank you. We left our 
 winter camp in latitude 8& degrees 7 minutes 
 on October 4, with five men, four sledges, 
 and thirty-two dogs. The long wait was 
 spent in laying in stocks of seal-meat for the 
 dogs, constructing sledges, breaking the dogs 
 to harness, making meteorological observa- 
 tions, bathing, sleeping, and attending to the 
 
 dogs. In the cold of the Polar night, work 
 253 
 
254 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 moves on rather slowly, but I always enjoyed 
 the restful half-hour I devoted to winding 
 up my watch. On August 24 we caught the 
 first sign of spring. 
 
 The Lady: Of course. 
 
 The Explorer: But it was not till Octo- 
 ber 24 that the sun rose and the Polar day 
 began. 
 
 The Lady: How very interesting! 
 
 The Explorer: We had been getting im- 
 patient. We were afraid the dogs would 
 grow too fat. We were glad when the edge 
 of the sun's disk showed above the horizon. 
 
 The Lady: It must have been like the 
 first day of creation; it must have been like 
 the radiant illumination of a great love. 
 
 The Explorer: It was indeed. We im- 
 mediately harnessed the dogs and set out. 
 The sledges had been loaded several days be- 
 fore. The dogs were in excellent physical 
 condition. The ice was smooth. The tem- 
 perature was minus 23 degrees Centigrade. 
 What this is when expressed in terms of Fah- 
 renheit, madam, you will of course readily as^ 
 
MONOTONY OF THE POLES 255 
 
 certain for yourself by multiplying by 9, di- 
 viding by 5, and subtracting 32. 
 
 The Lady : It is all too wonderful ! 
 
 The Explorer: On our first day's march 
 we covered forty-three kilometres, the kilo- 
 metre being equal, as you are aware, to 
 .62121 of a mile. Part of the way we rode 
 upon the sledges. Then the ice grew rough, 
 and we took to our skis. We camped in 83 
 degrees 29 minutes, and built an igloo, which 
 you will recall is a hut made of ice-blocks 
 and snow. First we fed the dogs. The 
 daily ration for the dogs was one and a half 
 kilogrammes of seal-meat, the kilogramme, I 
 need not tell you, being equal to 2.2046 
 pounds. Then we turned in. 
 
 The Lady: Your first night in the un- 
 known ! 
 
 The Explorer: As you say, madam. The 
 next day we camped in 83 degrees 53 min- 
 utes, fed the dogs as usual, and built an igloo. 
 The day after, we camped in 84 degrees 29 
 minutes and built another igloo, after feed- 
 ing the dogs. Nptjiing happened for the 
 
256 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 next ten days. The dogs were in good con- 
 dition. The sledges held well. We made an 
 average daily march of 36 kilometres. But 
 on the eleventh day, at the conclusion of a 
 fairly good march, one of the dogs in sledge 
 number 2 we called him Skraal at- 
 tacked and bit a dog we called Ragnar. We 
 parted them with great difficulty. The two 
 days that followed were uneventful, but on the 
 third day Ragnar attacked and bit Skraal. 
 We had to club them apart. On the fif- 
 teenth day out Ragnar and Skraal attacked 
 and bit a third dog named Skalder, but he 
 eventually recovered. That was in latitude 
 85 degrees 37 minutes, at an altitude of 3,700 
 feet, and the temperature was minus 7 de- 
 grees Centigrade. It occurred just after we 
 had finished building an igloo and were pre- 
 paring to feed the dogs. 
 
 The Lady: And always you were draw- 
 ing nearer the goal ! 
 
 The Explorer: Naturally, madam. All 
 this time we were busy laying down depots of 
 food for the dogs and the men. Because 
 
MONOTONY OF THE POLES 257 
 
 once we reached the goal we must, of course, 
 get back as fast as we could. We built a 
 depot at every degree of latitude, or, roughly 
 speaking, every 100 kilometres. Our depot 
 in latitude 87 degrees 25 minutes was situ- 
 ated amidst very picturesque surroundings. 
 
 The Lady: In that wonderful landscape! 
 
 The Explorer: Yes, the spot had some 
 very extraordinary ice-formations. Setting 
 out from that point we marched 37 kilome- 
 tres over rough ice, fed the dogs, and built an 
 igloo. The next day we marched 70 kilo- 
 metres over smooth ice, and, having attended 
 to the dogs, built another igloo. The next 
 day we marched 50 kilometres over ice that 
 was partly rough and partly smooth, and 
 had a good night's rest, after putting up an 
 igloo and caring for the dogs. The next 
 day the ice was very soft, and the dogs hung 
 back and complained. However, we man- 
 aged to cover 27 kilometres that day, reach- 
 ing 88 degrees 14 minutes. There we camped 
 and 
 
 The Lady : And built another igloo ! 
 
258 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 The Explorer : No, madam, a food depot. 
 It was on the following day that I first had 
 reason to feel anxious for my men. Skaar- 
 mund, my chief assistant, froze his ears. 
 That was in latitude 88 degrees 36 minutes, 
 and the temperature was minus 40 degrees 
 Centigrade. After being vigorously rubbed 
 for several minutes, he was all right again. 
 Almost immediately Knudsen complained of 
 headache and we had to give him some phe- 
 nacetine. Half an hour later Lanstrup fell 
 down a crevice in the ice. 
 
 The Lady: Horrors! 
 
 The Explorer: Fortunately the crevice 
 was only two feet deep, and after we had 
 applied peroxide and vaseline, Lanstrup was 
 as well as ever. Owing to the high altitude 
 we all experienced some difficulty in breath- 
 ing. It was very much like being stalled on 
 a crowded train in your Subway. It was 
 our ambition to reach the Pole on the fifth 
 (day after, because that was our national holi- 
 day. But we found the going too rough. 
 JHowever, we celebrated the day by giving 
 
MONOTONY OF THE POLES 259 
 
 an extra half-kilogramme of seal-meat to the 
 dogs and a whole cup of coffee to the men. 
 Skaarmund had some cigarettes hidden about 
 his person and we smoked and took an extra 
 hour's rest. Two days later, we were at the 
 Pole. 
 
 The Lady : Where no man's foot had trod 
 before! Alone amidst that infinite stretch 
 of virgin snow ! 
 
 The Explorer: Quite so, madam. Imme- 
 diately after taking observations and noting 
 the temperature and the velocity of the wind, 
 we built an igloo and picketed the dogs. 
 We remained there for three days, taking 
 additional observations, repairing the sledges, 
 and resting up the dogs. On the third day 
 after we raised the flag over the Pole, we set 
 out on our return journey. 
 
 The Lady : What thoughts must have been 
 yours! You were coming back with the 
 prize of the centuries, to find the world at 
 your feet. 
 
 The Explorer: Exactly, madam. Not 
 of the dogs had failed us. Having said 
 
260 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 farewell to the flag waving proudly at the 
 apex of the globe, we marched fifty-two kilo- 
 metres. At the end of the march we built 
 an igloo and fed the dogs. At the end of the 
 next day's march we killed two dogs : we gave 
 one to the other dogs, and the other we ate 
 ourselves. It tasted not unlike fresh veal. 
 The following morning we had hardly com- 
 menced our march when Malstrom cut his 
 foot on a sharp piece of ice which penetrated 
 his boot. We washed his foot out with witch 
 hazel and made him ride for a mile or two 
 on a sledge. The pain thereupon disap- 
 peared. At exactly 89 degrees we built an 
 igloo and slept for ten hours in one stretch. 
 Rising, we killed a dog for breakfast, took 
 our observations, and set out. Malstrom's 
 foot gave him no trouble. That day we 
 camped at 88 degrees 23 minutes, built an- 
 other igloo, and killed another dog. Our ap- 
 petites were very active. On the way to the 
 Pole we had allowed ourselves two and one- 
 half kilos of food per day. Now we were 
 consuming over four kilos a day. 
 
MONOTONY OF THE POLES 261 
 
 The Lady: Fancy eating four kilometres 
 a day. 
 
 The Explorer : No, madam, kilogrammes. 
 But at the same time we were travelling at a 
 much faster pace; one day our record was 
 ninety. 
 
 The Lady : That was a great deal, wasn't 
 it, ninety kilogrammes a day? 
 
 The Explorer: No, madam, kilometres. 
 And in this manner we arrived safely at our 
 winter camp. Five days later we were on 
 board our ship, on the way to civilisation. 
 
 The Lady: How happy you must have 
 been! 
 
 The Explorer: We were. But perhaps 
 madam may be interested in some of the pho- 
 tographs illustrating incidents of our jour- 
 ney to the Pole? 
 
 The Lady: How can you ask! 
 
 The Explorer : This picture, you will see, 
 shows our permanent camp, situated in the 
 midst of a snow plain stretching to the hori- 
 zon in every direction. This is a picture of 
 the South Pole, similarly situated, you will 
 
262 POST-IMPRESSIONS 
 
 observe, in the midst of a snow plain stretch- 
 ing as far as the eye can see. This is the 
 sledge upon which I travelled to the Pota 
 The next picture shows the same sledge 
 viewed from the rear and a little to one side, 
 and this is still the same sledge as seen at a 
 distance of 200 feet to the left and from a 
 slight elevation. The next picture shows the 
 sledge with its load, and the one after that 
 shows the load itself resting close to the walls 
 of an igloo which is just going up. In this 
 picture you see the igloo completed and with 
 the dogs lying in front. The next picture 
 shows the same group of dogs with two of 
 the leaders missing. The next two pictures 
 show the sledge as it was before the accident 
 and after. The remaining pictures deal with 
 similar subjects. 
 
 The Lady: This has been so delightful! 
 Do you know, your English pronunciation is 
 wonderful for a foreigner! 
 
 THE END 
 
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