The Philistine: a periodical for peculiar persons (Vol. III, No. 1)

What you call a Discerning Person has told me that The Philistine is read by all the really thoughtful people in America. This surely is not a large class, as I hear you print only twenty thousand copies a month. Now I do not exactly admire your brown paper cover, but I do like your wholesome spirit, and although you have a touch of Yankee flippancy, yet I will help you all I can in clearing the ground, that we may sow a crop worth harvesting. And before I begin my little preachment let me say I like the word Roycroft. “Roy” means king, and “croft” means a home or rest—hence Roycroft means the King’s Rest. But best of all Master Roycroft was really the first man in England to do artistic printing.

I am also told that the wives of the rich men in the States are the most ignorant among your women; the reason being that it takes all their time to look after their households; and none of your servants staying in one place longer than three weeks, that your Woman’s Clubs are given up to discussing the servant girl problem. That is, each woman relates her woes to ease her nerves and fight off hysteria till a more convenient season. And this class of care-laden people is largely increasing with you, and yet you continue to sing Yankee Doodle and talk large about twisting the tail of an honest lion. Very well, I pardon you, knowing how childishly ignorant you are, and if I now say some things that I have said before you will pardon me.

Observe the two opposite kinds of labor. The first, just mentioned by me, lavishly supported by Capital, and producing Nothing. The second, tramping from place to place, asking for bread, and you giving it a stone pile—and thirty days.

Observe further. These two kinds of labor, producing no useful result, are demoralizing. All such labor is.

And the first condition of education, the thing General Coxey and all of his cohorts are crying out for, is being put to wholesome and useful work. And it is nearly the last condition of it, too; you need very little more; but, as things go, there will yet be difficulty in getting that. As things have hitherto gone, the difficulty has been to get the reverse of that.

During the last eight hundred years, the upper classes of Europe have been one large Picnic Party. Most of them have been religious also; and in sitting down, by companies, upon the green grass, in parks, gardens, and the like, have considered themselves commanded into that position by Divine authority, and fed with bread from Heaven: of which they considered it proper to bestow the fragments in support, and the tithes in tuition, of the poor.

But, without even such small cost, they might have taught the poor many beneficial things. In some places they have taught them manners, which is already much. They might have cheaply taught them merriment also—dancing and singing, for instance. The young English ladies who sit nightly to be instructed themselves, at some cost, in melodies illustrative of the consumption of Camille, and the decline of La Traviata, and the damnation of Don Juan, might have taught every girl peasant in England to join in costless choirs of innocent song. Here and there, perhaps, a gentleman might have been found able to teach his peasantry some science and art. Science and fine art don’t pay; but they cost little. Tithes—not of the income of the country, but of the income, say, of its brewers—nay, probably the sum devoted annually by England to provide drugs for the adulteration of its own beer—would have founded choice little museums, and perfect libraries, in every village. And if here and there an English churchman had been found (such as Dean Stanley) willing to explain to peasants the sculpture of his and their own cathedral, and to read its black letter inscriptions for them; and, on warm Sundays, when they were too sleepy to attend to anything more proper—to tell them a story about some of the people who had built it, or lay buried in it—we perhaps might have been quite as religious as we are, and yet need not now have been offering prizes for competition in art schools, nor lecturing with tender sentiment on the inimitableness of the works of Fra Angelico.

These things the great Picnic Party might have taught without cost, and with amusement to themselves. One thing, at least, they were bound to teach, whether it amused them or not—how, day by day, the daily bread they expected their village children to pray to God for, might be earned in accordance with the laws of God. This they might have taught, not only without cost, but with gain.

Of all attainable liberties, then, be sure the first to strive for is leave to be useful. Independence you had better cease to talk of (you Americans talk too much about it anyway), for you are dependent on every act of what has been dust for a thousand years, so also, does the course of a thousand years to come, depend upon the little perishing strength that is in you. Now what is your American Picnic Party going to do with its leisure? On that your fate as a Nation hangs.

Understand this: Virtue does not consist in doing what will be presently paid, or even paid at all, to you, the virtuous person. It may so chance; or may not. It will be paid, some day; but the vital condition of it, as virtue, is that it shall be content in its own deed, and desirous rather that the pay of it, if any, should be for others; just as it is also the vital condition of vice to be content in its own deed, and desirous that the pay thereof, if any, should be to others.

You have, it seems, now set your little hearts much on Education. You will have education for all men and women now, and for all boys and girls that are to be. Nothing, indeed, can be more desirable, if only we determine also what kind of education they are to have. It is taken for granted that any education must be good; that the more of it we get, the better; that bad education only means little education; and that the worst thing we have to fear is getting none. Alas, that is not at all so. Getting no education is by no means the worst thing that can happen to us. One of the pleasantest friends I ever had in my life was a Savoyard guide, who could only read with difficulty, and write, scarcely intelligibly, and by great effort. He knew no language but his own—no science, except as much practical agriculture as served him to till his fields. But he was, without exception, one of the happiest persons, and, on the whole, one of the best I have ever known; and after lunch, he would often as we walked up some quiet valley in the afternoon light, give me a little lecture on philosophy; and after I had fatigued and provoked him with less cheerful views of the world than his own, he would fall back to my servant behind me, and console himself with a shrug of the shoulders, and a whispered “The poor child, he doesn’t know how to live.”

No, my friends, believe me, it is not the going without education at all that we have most to dread. The real thing to be feared is getting a bad one. There are all sorts—good, and very good; bad, and very bad. The children of rich people often get the worst education that is to be had for money; the children of the poor often get the best for nothing. And you have really these two things now to decide for yourselves before you can take one quite safe practical step in the matter, namely, first: What a good education is; and, secondly, who is likely to give it you.

What it is? “Everybody knows that,” I suppose you would most of you answer. “Of course—to be taught to read, and write, and cast accounts; and to learn geography, and geology, and astronomy, and chemistry, and German, and French, and Italian, and Latin, and Greek, and the aboriginal Aryan language.”

Well, when you have learned all that, what would you do next? “Next? Why then we should be perfectly happy, and make as much money as ever we liked, and we would turn out our toes before any company.” I am not sure myself, and I don’t think you can be, of any one of these three things. At least, as to making you very happy, I know something, myself, of nearly all these matters—not much, but still quite as much as most men under the ordinary chances of life, with a fair education, are likely to get together—and I assure you the knowledge does not make me happy at all. When I was a boy I used to like seeing the sunrise. I didn’t know then, there were any spots on the sun; now I do, and am always frightened lest any more should come. When I was a boy, I used to care about pretty stones. I got some Bristol diamonds at Bristol and some dog-tooth spar in Derbyshire; my whole collection had cost, perhaps, three half-crowns, and was worth considerably less; and I knew nothing whatever, rightly, about any single stone in it—could not even spell their names; but words cannot tell the joy they used to give me. Now, I have a collection of minerals worth, perhaps, three thousand pounds; and I know more about some of them than most other people. But I am not a whit happier, either for my knowledge, or possessions, for other geologists dispute my theories, to my grievous indignation and discontentment; and I am miserable about all my best specimens, because there are better in the British Museum.

And as to your wonderful inventions, why talk at a distance, when you have nothing to say? Or go fast from this place to that, with nothing to do at either? These are powers certainly! Much more, power of increased Production, if you, indeed, had got it, would be something to boast of.

Now just cast your Cathode ray this way and observe this fact: A man and a woman, with their children, properly trained, are able easily to cultivate as much ground as will feed them; to build as much wall and roof as will lodge them, and to spin and weave as much cloth as will clothe them. They can all be perfectly happy and healthy in doing this. Supposing that they invent machinery which will build, plough, thresh, cook, and weave, and that they have none of these things any more to do, but may read, or play croquet, or cricket, all day long, I believe myself that they will neither be so good nor so happy as without the machines.

But I waive my belief in this matter for the time. I will assume that they become more refined and moral persons, and that idleness is in future to be the mother of all good. But observe, I repeat, the power of your machine is only in enabling them to be idle. It will not enable them to live better than they did before, nor to live in greater numbers. Get your heads quite clear on this matter. Out of so much ground, only so much living is to be got, with or without machinery. You may set a million of steam-ploughs to work on an acre, if you like—out of that acre only a given number of grains of corn will grow, scratch or score it as you will. So that the question is not at all whether, by having more machines, more of you can live. No machine will increase the possibilities of life. It only increases the possibilities of idleness. Suppose, for instance, you could get the oxen on your plough driven by a goblin, who would ask for no pay, not even his beer,—well, your furrow will take no more seeds than if you had held the stilts yourself. But, instead of holding them, you sit, I presume, on a bank beside the field, under an eglantine—watch the goblin at his work, and read poetry. Meantime, your wife in the house has also got a goblin to weave and wash for her; and she is lying on the sofa, revelling in Stephen Crane’s lines.

Now, as I said, I don’t believe you would be happier so, but I am willing to believe it; only, since you are already such brave machinists, show me at least one or two places where you are happier. Let me see one small example of approach to this seraphic condition. I can show you examples, millions of them, of happy people made happy by their own industry. Farm after farm I can show you in Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tyrol, and such other places, where men and women are perfectly happy and good, without any iron servants. Show me, therefore, some Kansas or Ohio family happier than these. Or bring me—for I am not inconvincible by any kind of evidence—bring me the testimony of an Illinois family or two to their increased felicity. Or if you cannot do so much as that, can you convince even themselves of it? They are perhaps happy, if only they knew how happy they were. Virgil thought so, long ago, of simple rustics; but at present your steam-propelled rustics are crying out that they are anything else than happy, and that they regard their boasted progress “in the light of a monstrous Sham.”

There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one knows how to live till he has got them.

These are, Pure Air, Water and Earth.

There are three Immaterial things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one knows how to live till he has got them also.

These are, Admiration, Hope and Love.

Admiration—the power of discerning and taking delight in what is beautiful in visible Form, and lovely in human Character; and, necessarily, striving to produce what is beautiful in form, and to become what is lovely in character.

Hope—the recognition, by true Foresight, of better things to be reached hereafter, whether by ourselves or others; necessarily issuing in the straightforward and undisappointable effort to advance, according to our proper power, the gaining of them.

Love, both of family and neighbor, faithful, and satisfied.

These are the six chiefly useful things to be got by Political Economy—the great “savoir mourir” is doing with them.

The first three, I said, are Pure Air, Water, and Earth.

Heaven gives you the main elements of these. You can destroy them at your pleasure, or increase, almost without limit, the available quantities of them.

You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any extent. You might easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of you. Some of you Jingo Americans at present want to vitiate it in every direction;—chiefly with corpses, and animal and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff into noxious gas. But everywhere, and all day long, you are vitiating it with foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you call towns, Buffalo, Pittsburg, Chicago and the like (thank God I’ve been in none of them), are little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease.

On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the trees which cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere—is literally infinite. You might make every breath of air you draw, food.

Secondly, your power over the rain and rain-waters of the earth is infinite. You can bring rain where you will, by planting wisely and tending carefully—drought, where you will, by ravage of woods and neglect of the soil. You might have the rivers as pure as the crystal of the rock; beautiful in falls, in lakes, in living pools—so full of fish that you might take them out with your hands. Or you may do always as you have done now, turn your rivers into a common sewer, so that you cannot as much as baptize a Yankee baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain; and even that falls dirty.

Then for the third, Earth—meant to be nourishing for you, and blossoming—you have used your scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive and deathful things, to make it grow cotton and tobacco, and grain for malt and whiskey, giving nothing back to the earth that she may be blossoming and life-giving. Yes, you have turned the Mother-Earth, Demeter, into the Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone—with the voice of your brother’s blood crying out of it, in one wild cry round all its murderous sphere.

That is what you have done for the three Material Useful Things.

Then for the three Immaterial Useful Things. For admiration, you have learned contempt and conceit. There is no lovely thing ever yet done by man that you care for, or can understand; but you are persuaded you are able to do much finer things yourselves. You gather, and exhibit together, as if equally instructive, what is infinitely bad, with what is infinitely good. You do not know which is which: most Americans instinctively prefer the bad, and do more of it. You instinctively hate the Good, and destroy it.

Then, secondly, for Hope. You have not so much spirit of it in you as to begin any plan which will not pay for ten years; nor so much intelligence of it in you (either politicians or workmen) as to be able to form one clear idea of what you would like your country to become.

Then, thirdly, for Love. You were ordered by the Founder of your religion to love your neighbor as yourselves. But you have framed an entire Science of Political Economy, founded on rivalry and strife, which is what you have stated to be the constant instinct of man—the desire to overreach his neighbor.

And you have driven your women so that they ask no more for Love, nor for fellowship with you; but stand against you, and ask for “justice.”

Are there any of you who are tired of all this?

Well then try to make some small piece of ground beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no untended or unthought-of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick; none idle, but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant obedience to known law, and appointed persons; no equality upon it, but recognition of every good that we can find. We will have plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in our fields. We will have some music and some poetry; the children shall learn to dance it and sing—perhaps some of the old people, in time, may also. We will have some art, moreover pictures and hand-made books; we will at least try if, like the Greeks, we can’t make pottery. The Greeks used to paint pictures of gods on their pots; we, probably, cannot do as much, but we may put some pictures of flowers—butterflies, and frogs, if nothing better. Little by little, some higher art and imagination may manifest themselves among us; and feeble rays of science may dawn for us. Botany, though too dull to dispute the existence of flowers; and history, though too simple to question the nativity of men; nay—even perhaps an uncalculating and uncovetous wisdom, as of rude Magi, presenting, at such nativity, gifts of gold and frankincense.

Clavigera.

Cumberland, April 6, 1896.

“My wife? She is dead!” said the man.

“God help you to bear it,” were the answering words of the woman.

“And you would have me do my duty?”

“You could do naught else. There are other things than love, my friend; there is honor, and we must abide by that—and the inevitable.”

“I am the resurrection and the life saith the Lord; he that believeth in me though he were dead yet shall he live: and whosoever believeth in me, shall never die.”

The last friend had paid his final tribute to the departed. All had gone save the husband, his little daughter, the mother—and a woman simply clad in black. Her face was pale, marked by delicate traceries of mental suffering—a suffering so intense that the whole contour was radiant with martyrdom and the inner spiritual beauty of her woman’s soul. Her eyes, earth brown and blazing with the hidden sunlight of her year’s sad spring, were fixed in mute appeal upon the still, white face within its house of immortality.

It was the husband now, who, taking her gently by the hand, lead her to the carriage.

Was it “kismet” that, by some grim coincidence, placed these two human, saddened souls in the same carriage—alone!

The way was long, and the roads as yet unsoftened by the Spring’s nestling bloom. For a while neither spoke, and then the woman’s voice vibrated through the silence like a breath of air light as the apple blossoms caroling in May, when leaf and bud unite in song to praise their creator.

“Dear, you and I are soon to say good bye; by some strange fateful turn of Life’s orbit, we must say it here. You were always generous and loyal to her—you always will be. She has forgiven you, but bids me lead my life alone. The voice of circumstance says to us what we interpret it to say. It is in the needs of a high nature wherein doth lie nobility and honor. We loved; it was so to be, but we did not sin; therein lies the truest and purest love. You”——

The carriage stopped before the open grave, and as the woman watched the damp earth fall—kneeling, she dropped a single passion flower upon the coffin’s lid, and through her mist of tears beheld the cross; then murmuring “In His Name,” she entered the carriage—alone!

Faith Bigelow Savage.

The report that Miss Jeannette Gilder has been engaged as Editor of the Philistine is entirely unfounded. No such arrangement has been thought of.

It’s getting so that ’tis harder to find a gentleman than a genius.

“What did you do when the contralto flew into a passion and berated you for choosing your own hymns?” asked the Fledgling of the Wise Pastor. “What did I do? why, I did nothing—simply sat there and watched her grow old.”

Florence Turner fires at me A Deduction and A Query, thus:

Heaven bless me! how do I know? But still I have no doubt but that he chews—probably “Tin Tag.”

Verily, in the midst of life we are in debt.

The loyalty of men to their Alma Mater is ever charming, but the loyalty of a youth to his prospective Mother-in-Law is sublime. In the past two weeks every mail has brought me letters from Harvard men protesting against a certain preachment that appeared in the May Philistine entitled, “By Rule of Three.” For the most part the literary style of these missives corroborates the strictures made as to English as she is writ at Harvard. But the crowning feature of the paper fusilade is a foolscap proposition signed by four sophomores wherein they offer to put the author of “By Rule of Three” under the pump if he will name a day and hour when he dare walk across Harvard Yard. The author, I believe, is not a Baptist, but even if he were, and if the rite referred to should be performed (in lieu of argument), why, Barrett Wendell would still be an Anglomaniac and the facts about English at Harvard would remain unchanged!

Mr. S. E. Kiser, that good honest Wit, writes me after this wise:

How far can a woman go to win in love’s race? A step backward is often good policy.

Beg pardon—but who is this Richard Arden Davies that The London Bookman is chewing about?

That good savage and excellent Wm. T. Hornaday is about to fall into line and start a magazinelet, patterned after the Chip-Munk brood. It will be called The Dyak and the cover will be cut decolette.

Way & Williams are sending out A Mountain Woman. We used to have only two kinds of women, the good and the bad, but now we have many. The book is as good as The Essays of Elia, and that is high praise.

The poor writers we have always with us—if we take the daily paper.

No one knows the vanity of riches save he who has been rich; therefore I would have every man rich, and I would give every youth a College education that he might know the insignificance of it.

A Good Philistine is known by his never saying:

• “As it were.”
• “So to speak.”
• “Red letter day.”
• “Seldom if ever.”
• “Macedonian cry.”
• “All along the line.”
• “Signs of the times.”
• “Peace to his ashes.”
• “The blush of shame.”
• “The deadly upas tree.”
• “We are pained to learn.”
• “The devouring element.”
• “Will not soon be forgotten.”
• “Our loss is his eternal gain.”
• “None knew him but to love.”
• “They are left to mourn his loss.”
• “The right man in the right place.”
• “If I may be allowed the expression.”

To recognize the accidentally impolitic from the essentially wrong is a step always first taken by a Philistine. The Chosen People damn him for his pains, after which they adopt his view and swear on their beards that they always held it.

Who are the bores? Oh, you make me weary—the others, the others, the others!

Mr. Wallace, of Chicago, publisher of Wallace’s Stud-Book, disputes the statement that the Windy City is losing her literary prestige.

Clangingharp says the sanest sentiment ever expressed by any of the Vanderbilt family was when the Commodore remarked, “The Public be damned!”

“Be not righteous overmuch,” said the Preacher. Of course such advice to the average mortal is quite needless—the matter may safely be left in his hands. Still, good things can be overdone: industry for instance. There is a sort of pismire activity that makes for bankruptcy. I once knew a man who used to get up at four o’clock in the morning to hammer and saw (those very early risers always hammer and saw), yet I believe the administrator found hardly enough to pay forty cents on the dollar. The reason was that the man pounded too much early in the morning and not enough in the middle of the day; and the sleek-headed men who sleep o’ nights overmatched his petty busyness and got the trade.

Nothing is so pleasant as to air our worldly wisdom in epigramatic nuggets. To sit quiet and listen to another do it—well that is another matter!

It is called A School for Saints, and the perpetrator is John Oliver Hobbes. I have sent my name to Mrs. Cragie, entering as a Freshman.

Quarterly. Illustrated.

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Fifty Cents a Number. Two Dollars a Year. Single Copies (back numbers) 50 Cents in Stamps. Illustrated Sample Page Free.

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Price, 25 Cents in Stamps, Sent Free to New Subscribers to Modern Art.

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Have you seen the Roycroft Quarterly? The May issue is a “Stephen Crane Number.” 25c. a copy or one dollar a year.

The Roycroft Printing Shop,
East Aurora,
New York.

THE ROYCROFT PRINTING SHOP at this time desires to announce a sister book to the Song of Songs: which is Solomon’s. It is the Journal of Koheleth: being a Reprint of the Book of Ecclesiastes with an Essay by Mr. Elbert Hubbard. The same Romanesque types are used that served so faithfully and well in the Songs, but the initials, colophon and rubricated borders are special designs. After seven hundred and twelve copies are printed the types will be distributed and the title page, colophon and borders destroyed.

IN PREPARATION of the text Mr. Hubbard has had the scholarly assistance of his friend, Dr. Frederic W. Sanders, of Columbia University. The worthy pressman has also been helpfully counseled by several Eminent Bibliophiles.

Bound in buckram and antique boards. The seven hundred copies that are printed on Holland hand-made paper are offered at two dollars each, but the twelve copies on Japan Vellum at five dollars are all sold. Every book will be numbered and signed by Mr. Hubbard.

The Roycroft Printing Shop,
East Aurora, N. Y.