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The Philistine:
A Periodical of Protest.
“A harmless necessary cat.”—Shylock.
Printed Every Little While for The Society of The Philistines and Published by Them Monthly. Subscription, One Dollar Yearly; Single Copies, 10 Cents.
Number 3.
August, 1895.
Edited by H. P. Taber.
| JEREMIADS: |
| A Word About Art, |
| Ouida |
| The Confessional in Letters, |
| Elbert Hubbard |
| The Social Spotter, |
| William McIntosh |
| OTHER THINGS: |
| The Dream, |
| William Morris |
| Verses, |
| Stephen Crane |
| For Honor, |
| Jean Wright |
| The Story of the Little Sister, |
| H. P. T. |
| Notes. |
The Philistine is published monthly at $1 a year, 10 cents a single copy. Subscriptions may be left with newsdealers or sent direct to the publishers.
Business communications should be addressed to The Philistine. East Aurora, New York. Matter intended for publication may be sent to the same address or to Box 6, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Entered at the Postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as mail matter of the second class.
COPYRIGHT, 1895.
How can we have great art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of some sort is the life-blood of art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to excite veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture both lost their greatness. When the Madonna and her Son lost that mystery and divinity, which for the simple minds of the early painters they possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we carve a Venus now, she is but a frivolous woman; when we paint a Jesus now, it is but a little suckling, or a sorrowful prisoner.
We want a great inspiration. We ought to find it in the things that are really beautiful, but we are not sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does dominate us is a passion for nature: for the sea, for the sky, for the mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day. Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this, we shall reach greatness once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it, so is its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius and as a great Juvenal; and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes: but they do not make a Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make a Raffaelle or a Flaxman.
Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful in the sight of the multitude—the perpetual adoration of that loveliness, material and moral, which men in the haste and greed of their lives are everlastingly forgetting: unless it be that, it is empty and useless as a child’s reed-pipe when the reed is snapt and the child’s breath spent.
It must have been such a good life—a painter’s in those days: those early days of art. Fancy the gladness of it then—modern painters can know nothing of it.
When all the delicate delights of distance were only half perceived; when the treatment of light and shadow was barely dreamed of; when aerial perspective was just breaking on the mind in all its wonder and power; when it was still regarded as a marvellous boldness to draw from the natural form in a natural fashion—in those early days only fancy the delights of a painter!
Something fresh to be won at each step; something new to be penetrated at each moment; something beautiful and rash to be ventured on with each touch of colour—the painter in those days had all the breathless pleasure of an explorer; without leaving his birthplace he knew the joys of Columbus.
And one can fancy nothing better than a life such as Spinello led for nigh a century up on the hill here, painting because he loved it, till death took him. Of all lives, perhaps, that this world has ever seen, the lives of painters, I say, in those days were the most perfect.
In quiet places such as Arezzo and Volterra, and Modena and Urbino, and Cortona and Perugia, there would grow up a gentle lad who from infancy most loved to stand and gaze at the missal paintings in his mother’s house, and the coena in the monk’s refectory, and when he had fulfilled some twelve or fifteen years, his people would give in to his wish and send him to some bottega to learn the management of colours.
Then he would grow to be a man; and his town would be proud of him, and find him the choicest of all work in its churches and its convents, so that all his days were filled without his ever wandering out of reach of his native vesper bells.
He would make his dwelling in the heart of his birthplace, close under its cathedral, with the tender sadness of the olive hills stretching above and around in the basiliche or the monasteries his labor would daily lie; he would have a docile band of hopeful boyish pupils with innocent eyes of wonder for all he did or said; he would paint his wife’s face for the Madonna’s, and his little son’s for the child Angel’s; he would go out into the fields and gather the olive bow, and the feathery corn, and the golden fruits, and paint them tenderly on ground of gold or blue, in symbol of those heavenly things of which the bells were forever telling all those who chose to hear; he would sit in the lustrous nights in the shade of his own vines and pity those who were not as he was; now and then horsemen would come spurring in across the hills and bring news with them of battles fought, of cities lost and won; and he would listen with the rest in the market-place, and go home through the moonlight thinking that it was well to create the holy things before which the fiercest rider and the rudest free-lance would drop the point of the sword and make the sign of the cross.
It must have been a good life—good to its close in the cathedral crypt—and so common too; there were scores of such lived out in these little towns of Italy, half monastery and half fortress, that were scattered over hill and plain, by sea and river, on marsh and mountain, from the daydawn of Cimabue to the after-glow of the Carracci.
And their work lives after them; the little towns are all grey and still and half peopled now; the iris grows on the ramparts, the canes wave in the moats, the shadows sleep in the silent market-place, the great convents shelter half a dozen monks, the dim majestic churches are damp and desolate, and have the scent of the sepulchre.
But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the Madonna and the child smiles in the Angel, and the olive and the wheat are fadeless on their ground of gold and blue; and by the tomb in the crypt the sacristan will shade his lantern and murmur with a sacred tenderness:
“Here he sleeps.”
Ouida.
By a turn of chance a father and son were thrown together in one of the Western frontier posts, the father as colonel in command, the son as a second lieutenant in one of the four companies quartered there. When the order came which had brought them together after the three years which had gone by since the boy left West Point, it brought great, but silent, happiness to the stern and gloomy old soldier, and a light-hearted pleasure to the young man; once more he would be with “dear old dad,” and besides, life must be rather exciting out there, and altogether worth a man’s while. And so he packed his traps in double-quick time, as a soldier must, and was off in twenty-four hours. The meeting between the two was a strange one. Effusive and very gay on the part of the young man, who made no effort to conceal his delight; stiff, even cold, on the part of the old man, whose very heart quivered with joy; and on whose stern and bronzed face a light came which the boy did not even see.
The colonel was not a popular man, hard and cold, rigid in the performance of his own duty, and with little sympathy for failure on the part of his men, he was respected, and, in a certain sense, admired, but not loved; sternly just according to his own light, but narrow and intolerant. With two passions—the exaggerated, hide-bound honor of a soldier who believes his profession to be the only one; the honor of a strictly honest and very proud man, jealous of the slightest stain upon his unimpeachable integrity. The other passion a carefully hidden but almost idolatrous love for his son. There had been one other passion, but she died.
Within a month after his coming, the young lieutenant was the most popular man at the post. He sang, he danced, he rode, and he played cards; he also drank rather more than was necessary.
Within two months it all palled upon him. Deadly ennui took possession of him. The great sunlit barren plains stretched out interminable. There were no Indians even to break the monotony. The iron routine of one day followed upon another with what seemed to him a stupid, trivial and meaningless regularity. So he stopped singing and dancing, and went on playing cards and drinking. Another thing that annoyed him was his father’s suppressed but uncompromising disapproval. Inward the colonel’s soul writhed that his boy should blemish his record as a soldier in this way; he did not doubt his courage should the time come for proving it, but in the meantime to show himself a weak and foolish man was almost unbearable. He could not understand the boy, and he said nothing, which was perhaps unfortunate.
Three weeks went by and the young lieutenant was deep in debt to the captain of another company. A sneering, black faced fellow, who had risen from the ranks; gaining his promotions during the last fifteen years for acts of dare-devil bravery. He was not a pleasant man to owe to; particularly if one was not too sure of being able to pay up when the notes fell due. Another month, and things were no better. It was in the early part of September, and the flat plains stretched out parched and arid, the sun beat down pitilessly on the treeless little post, and the money to the captain had to be paid to-morrow. It was certainly a disagreeable situation. But they played hard and drank hard, and the young lieutenant almost forgot that to-morrow was coming.
But about one o’clock in the morning there was a row, and before many hours the whole post knew what was the matter. It does not take long for news to travel among a few hundred people, particularly so interesting and exciting a bit as this. For this gay young fellow, this dashing young soldier, this son of the stern old martinet of a colonel, had been caught cheating at cards, and was disgraced forever.
The news got round and finally reached the colonel. It was a brave man who told him. He waited an hour, and then putting a pistol in his holster, he went across to his son’s quarters. There was no answer to his knock, so he opened the door and went in. The boy was sitting by the table, with his head buried in his arms. He did not look up when his father spoke, “My son, there is but one thing for you to do. You know what it is,” and he laid the pistol on the table. There was no reply; and the colonel stood silent, straight and stern, but his face was gray, and his iron mouth was drawn. Presently the boy raised his head and looked straight into his father’s eyes. For the first time in his life he understood. “Yes, father,” he said. The colonel stood a moment, and then went out and shut the door. When he was half way across the parade ground he heard a pistol shot, but he did not go back.
Jean Wright.
In the year 1848 Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, Mass., made a lecturing tour through England. Among the towns he visited was Coventry, where he was entertained at the residence of Mr. Charles Bray. In the family of Mr. Bray lived a young woman by the name of Mary Ann Evans, and although this Miss Evans was not handsome, either in face or figure, she made a decided impression on Mr. Emerson.
A little excursion was arranged to Stratford, an antiquated town of some note in the same county. On this trip Mr. Emerson and Miss Evans paired off very naturally, and Miss Evans of Coventry was so bold as to set Mr. Emerson of Concord straight on several matters relating to Mr. Shakespeare, formerly of Stratford.
“What is your favorite book?” said Mr. Emerson to Miss Evans, somewhat abruptly.
“Rousseau’s Confessions,” said the young woman instantly.
“And so it is mine,” answered Mr. Emerson.
All of which is related by Moncure D. Conway in a volume entitled Emerson at Home and Abroad.
A copy of Conway’s book was sent to Walt Whitman, and when he read the passage to which I have just referred he remarked, “And so it is mine.”
Emerson and Whitman are probably the two strongest names in American letters, and George Eliot stands first among women writers of all time; and as they in common with many Lesser Wits stand side by side and salute Jean Jacques Rousseau, it may be worth our while to take just a glance at M. Rousseau’s book in order, if we can, to know why it appeals to people of worth.
The first thing about the volume that attracts is the title. There is something charmingly alluring and sweetly seductive in a confession. Mr. Henry James has said: “The sweetest experience that can come to a man on his pilgrimage through this vale of tears is to have a lovely woman ‘confess’ to him; and it is said that while neither argument, threat, plea of justification, nor gold can fully placate a woman who believes she has been wronged by a man, yet she speedily produces, not only a branch, but a whole olive tree when he comes humbly home and confesses.”
Now here is a man about to ’fess to the world, and we take up the volume, glance around to see if any one is looking, and begin at the first paragraph to read:
“I purpose an undertaking that never had an example and the execution of which will never have an imitation. I would exhibit myself to all men as I am—a man....
“Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I will come, with this book in my hand, and present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I will boldly proclaim: Thus have I acted, thus have I thought, such was I. With equal frankness have I disclosed the good and the evil. I have omitted nothing bad, added nothing good. I have exhibited myself, despisable and vile when so; virtuous, generous, sublime when so. I have unveiled my interior being as Thou, Eternal One, hast seen it.” Now where is the man or woman who could stop there, even though the cows were in the corn?
And as we read further we find things that are “unfit for publication” and confessions of sensations that are so universal to healthy men that they are irrelevant, and straightway we arise and lock the door so as to finish the chapter undisturbed. For as superfluous things are the things we cannot do without, so is the irrelevant in literature the necessary.
Having finished this chapter, oblivious to calls that dinner is waiting, we begin the next; and finding items so interesting that they are disgusting, and others so indecent that they are entertaining, we forget the dinner that is getting cold and read on.
And the reason we read on is not because we love the indecent, or because we crave the disgusting, although I believe Burke hints at the contrary, but simply because the writing down of these unbecoming things convinces us that the man is honest and that the confession is genuine. In short we come to the conclusion that any man who deliberately puts himself in such a bad light—caring not a fig either for our approbation or our censure—is no sham.
And there you have it! We want honesty in literature.
The great orator always shows a dash of contempt for the opinions of his audience, and the great writer is he who loses self consciousness and writes himself down as he is, for at the last analysis all literature is a confession.
The Ishmaelites who purvey culture by the ton, and issue magazines that burden the mails—study very carefully the public palate. They know full well that a “confession” is salacious: it is an exposure. A confession implies something that is peculiar, private and distinctly different from what we are used to. It is a removing the veil, a making plain things that are thought and performed in secret.
And so we see articles on “The Women Who Have Influenced Me,” “The Books that Have Made Me,” “My Literary Passions,” etc. But like the circus bills, these titles call for animals that the big tent never shows; and this perhaps is well, for otherwise ’twould fright the ladies.
Yes, I frankly admit that these “confessions” suit the constituency of The Ladies’ Home Journal better than the truth; and although its editor be a Jew, the fact that the writers of his confessions practice careful concealment of the truth that they have hands, senses, eyes, ears, organs, dimensions, passions, is a wise commercial stroke. You can prick them and they do not bleed, tickle them and they do not laugh, poison them and they do not die; simply because they are only puppets parading as certain virtues, and these virtues the own particular brand in which the subscribers delight.
That excellent publication, The Forum, increased its circulation by many thousand when it ran a series of confessions of great men wherein these great men made sham pretense of laying their lives bare before the public gaze. Nothing was told that did not redound to the credit of the confessor. The “Formative Influences” of sin, error and blunders were carefully concealed or calmly waived. The lack of good faith was as apparent in these articles as the rouge on the cheek of a courtesan: the color is genuine and the woman not dead, that’s all.
And the loss lies in this: These writers—mostly able men—sell their souls for a price, and produce a literature that lives the length of life of a moth, whereas they might write for immortality. Instead of inspiring the great, they act as clowns to entertain the rabble.
Of course I know that Rousseau’s Confessions, Amiel’s Journal and Marie Bashkirtseff’s Diary have all been declared carefully worked out artifices. And admitting all the wonderful things that scheming man can perform, I still maintain that there are a few things that life and nature will continue to work out in the old, old way. I appeal to those who have tried both plans, whether it is not easier to tell the truth than to concoct a lie. And I assiduously maintain that if the case is to be tried by a jury of great men, that the shocking facts will serve the end far better than sugared half-truth.
When Richard Le Gallienne tells us of the birth of his baby and for weeks before how White Soul was sure she should die; and Marie Bashkirtseff makes painstaking note of the size of her hips and the development of her bust; and poor Amiel bewails the fate of eating breakfast facing an empty chair; and Rousseau explains the delicate sensations and smells that swept over him on opening his wardrobe and finding smocks and petticoats hanging in careless negligence amid his man’s clothes; and all those other pathetic, foolish, charming, irrelevant bits of prattle, one is convinced of the author’s honesty. No thorough-going literary man, hot for success, would leave such stuff in; he would as soon think of using a flesh brush on the public street; these are his own private affairs—his good sense would have forbade.
A good lie for its own sake is ever pleasing to honest men, but a patched up record never. And when such small men as Samuel Pepys and James Boswell can write immortal books, the moral for the rest of us is that a little honesty is not a dangerous thing.
And so I swing back to the place of beginning and say that while even a sham confession may be interesting to hoi polloi, yet to secure an endorsement from such minds as that of Emerson, George Eliot and Walt Whitman the confession must be genuine.
Elbert Hubbard.
“Why don’t the young folks marry?” continues, in the intervals of other jeremiad problems, to puzzle the good people who call themselves publicists, having a brevet authority to set everything right in the world. It is assumed that if the young people would only marry up to the full proportion, most of the ills that afflict an over-civilized and over-sensitized society would cure themselves. The young people would have something else to do besides “dabbling in the fount of fictive tears” and inventing new wants. The old ones would suffice, when multiplied in kind after the usual fashion.
It is an old story that young men are afraid of the cost of marriage. The girls are less simple than their mothers and complexity in matters of taste means expense. A clever verse writer has told of the hardships of a pair who wooed on a bicycle built for two and afterwards tried to live on a salary built for one. It is funny in the telling but tragic in the living. It is a trying business to keep up to concert pitch in these days.
The complexity of social expression is not the only dragon in the way. We have adopted from abroad something French. It came via England, but France is its origin. It is the Chaperone. She is usually harmless personally, but she means a great deal. She stands for a state of society where marriage is always a failure. Ask Emile Zola if you don’t believe it. “Modern Marriage” has the specifications. We have good women and manly men in America. The grisette isn’t an institution with us. Neither is the man who supports her until he is rich enough to make a French marriage. We have him and we have her, but neither is universal. The mariage de convenance and the institution which precedes it in France are not general with us. The chaperone is part of the system with them. The chaperone implies the others. She is a standing notice that young man and young woman are not to be trusted together. In some of our cities it is such very good “good form” to send a guardian with young people that a woman of over twenty-five has been known to cancel an engagement to attend a company which she had anxiously wanted to enjoy and for which she had made great preparation, because a married sister could not accompany her. She would not go without a chaperone. It was not “good form.”
O ye gods, Good Form! What was good form, and who promulgated its laws, when the father and mother of us all, better than any of us, walked with the Creator of the universe in the garden in the cool of the day? But “evil came into the world” and changed it. Yes, the evil of “good form,” the embodied self-consciousness which chains all the virtues and makes the decencies compulsory and puts on them the brand of the police blotter.
In the name of all that is good why should we watch the young people? The middle-aged need it more. Youth is chivalrous. Middle age is commonplace. It is not youth that
Chaperon the married victims of the French system. Put the spotter on the track of the woman who was taught she couldn’t trust herself when she was young and the man was complacently branded a roue when his heart was fresh and warm.
It is time for a new declaration of independence, and the youth of our land should make it. Let Young America say this: “The woman I cannot honorably woo, whose care at a social gathering is denied me without a policeman and a spy, may find another knight.” Let the maidens of our day, better cultured than their mothers, broader in their training, surer of their social footing, stronger in their poise and presence of mind, bar out the man who comes into their presence under a ban.
How long would the hollow mockery of “good form” endure such a strike? As many minutes as it should take to show its utter falsehood and the cruel slander it implies. Until the young people so assert themselves the imitated bars sinister of the most corrupt social heraldry of Europe will be ours—worn with an affectation of pride in the dishonor they blazon. Till then men will be equalized down, not up; and the talk of “emancipated woman” will be an insult. When it is done there will be more marriages of the kind to be desired—the union of true men and self-respecting women.
William McIntosh.
When I first knew her she was a very little girl in a white dress—starched very stiff—and she might have reminded me of Molly in the diverting story of Sir Charles Danvers.
I was devoted to her sister and I remember her galumphing into the room at a most inopportune time, and staring for a moment with eyes very wide open. Then she ran away and I heard her outside giggling quietly all by herself.
When the big sister went away for the summer I went out to the house to tell her good-by. The great trunk stood in the hall waiting for Charlie Miller’s man. Seated on top of this was the little sister with two round bottles held close to her eyes. She said she was playing theater, and that the bottles made a lovely opera glass.
I asked her what the play was and she said about a pretty lady who was pursued by lions and dragons and things. Then there was a man—a big, nice man—who came with guns and swords and spears and killed all the dragons and lions and then he married the pretty lady.
This was her imagination.
Then I went away—I forget where—and was gone many years. I came back to be best man at the wedding of my cousin Anthony. I found that the little sister was to be the maid of honor, and at the various functions before the wedding I saw much of her.
After the ceremony we walked down the aisle together, and as she took my arm her hand trembled. When we reached the entrance I turned and looked square into her glorious eyes. They told me many things that I was glad to know.
Now—after a year—I am trying to live up to the ideal man she imagined me to be.
And that’s what makes it hard.
H. P. T.
Many of the newspapers which have noticed The Philistine have expressed their inability to find East Aurora on the map. All the map makers are hereby authorized to print a large red ring around the name of the home of The Philistine hereafter, but for the benefit of those who pine for immediate knowledge, I clip the following from Bradstreet’s:
East Aurora, Erie Co., pop. 2000, 1880. Bank 1, newspapers 2, Am. Ex., W. N. Y. & P. R. R., 17 miles fr. Buffalo. Headquarters Cloverfield combination of cheese factories. Home of Mambrino King.* Product: ginger.
* Mambrino King is a horse.
THE BLUFF.
DRAWING BY PLUG HAZEN-PLUG.
If I had seen it announcing a special feature in the
World or Herald for a coming Sunday, I would not
have been surprised, but to find the following paragraph
in the editorial columns of The Land of Sunshine
fills me with wonder:
Up to date The Land of Sunshine is the only periodical in the world whose cover is embellished with drawings by the Almighty.
It would be interesting to know what the Recording Angel thinks of Mr. Lummis’s coupling of the High Court of Heaven and Aubrey Beardsley. Now if Mr. Lummis could only get his editorials from the same source——
When Shem Rock, Ham Garland and Japhet Bumball
conspired to spring on an unsuspecting world
that three-cornered story entitled The Land of the
Straddle Bug, they bought two whole bushels of
hyphens. In one chapter, by actual count, forty-seven
compound words are used. They have even
hyphenated such words as dod-rot, dodd-mead, slap-jack,
goll-darn, do-tell and gee-whiz. Ham’s own
pet “yeh” is used in the story sixty-four times,
which does not include four plain “you’s” and three
“ye’s,” where the Only Original Lynx-eyed Proof-reader
nodded.
It is published that the Post contemplated a change
in the appearance and make-up of the paper, but
gave up the scheme lest it shock the readers of Mr.
Godkin’s Evening Grandmother. What would shock
the readers more would be the appearance of life
somewhere about the sheet. I would respectfully
call the attention of the editors of the Post to the fate
which befell the Assyrians. It is written in Isaiah
XXXVII—36: Then the angel of the Lord went
forth and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred
and four score and five thousand; and when
they arose in the morning: behold, they were all
dead corpses.
The Philistine’s plea is for the widest liberty to
individual genius. Perhaps no living man has presented
this plea so strongly in his life and work as
William Morris. The poem herein printed is a taste
of this strong man’s quality. It is taken from that
dainty bundle of beautiful things entitled, Love
Lyrics.
In that very charming article by Mr. Zangwill in
the last Chap Book, mention is made of the utter
impossibility of stating a truth so that the majority
will remember or recognize it when they see it again—so
shallow is human wit. In The Philistine for
July I made bold to insert an extract from the Bible.
No credit was given, however, and the matter was
re-paragraphed. And now, behold, a Chicago paper
arises and calls the quotation rot; several other publications
refute the scriptural statements and a weekly
that is very wise in its day and generation refers to
my irreverence in writing in Bible style.
In the Popular Science Monthly for July a Dr.
Oppenheimer announces the interesting discovery
why children lie. It has been supposed that they lie,
as a general thing, because they want something, but
it appears that it is because they have something, in
the French sense. It isn’t inherent viciousness but
disease. The doctor says:
The children usually are suffering from disorders of mind or body, or both, which radically interfere with the transmission of conceptions and perceptions from the internal to the external processes of expression, so that they really are unable to be more exact than they seem.
This seems to explain several things about our good friends Landon and Townsend—G. A.
The London Athenæum says “Stephen Crane is the
coming Boozy Prophet of America; his lines send
the cold chills streaking up one’s spine, and we are
in error if his genius does not yet sweep all other
literary fads from the board.”
All of which strikes me as a boozier bit of cymbalism than any of Mr. Crane’s verses.
On the authority of the New York Sun, afternoon
teas are growing more and more realistic. That
arbiter of etiquette says:
The formality of bidding adieu to the hostess at an afternoon tea is now dispensed with; the omission is considered with favor and in good taste. No after calls are made in acknowledgement of a tea.
The little trifle of ceremony that stood for courtesy is about all cast aside. The program now is—Greet, Eat and Git.
I observe that Mr. Andrew Lang is to write some
verses to be read at a dinner of the Omar Club in
London “on some future occasion.” I shall watch
for these with much interest, remembering, meanwhile,
these verses recently read before that remarkable
organization:
It is noted that Mr. W. Irving Way of Chicago was present at the last Omar club dinner. He should give us some notable reminiscences of the feast.
Speaking of Way, I hear that he has gone into the publishing business in Chicago. As a critic of the mechanical construction of books he is supreme, but I wonder will his publishing be that of literature or wool from the wild west.
“You have us down one dollar for dog tax. I’d
have you know we keep no dog,” said the man to
the tax gatherer.
“I understand,” answered the publican, “but you subscribe to the Albany Argus!”
Buffalo, N. Y., has a Young Ladies’ Magazine. It
has a beautiful picture of a skirt dance on the cover
of its prospectus, which is ever so much more interesting
than Mr. Bok’s Bermuda lily gatherer seven feet
tall.
Now that Robert Louis Stevenson’s will has been
published in full text as a feature story, perhaps Mr.
So So McClure may desist. The will is almost as
thrilling as a market report. Its publication explains
in part, however, how the cheap magazine movement
is founded. Next we shall see the weather and a
Congressional debate among the contents of the
cheap-books.
Prizes are offered in Judge Tourgee’s Basin to
preachers, women and “colored writers,” for short
stories. The Judge is bound to keep solid with the
three sexes as he understands them.
It is matter of record in McClure’s that Edmund
Goose’s poem on Samoa, which it prints, “reached
Robert Louis Stevenson three days before his death.”
There is a horrible suggestion in the little nonpareil
footnote that the poem may have hastened that sad
event. It’s bad enough.
Ham Garland has gone up the coulee to his farm
near La Crosse and is writing another novel. He is
daily in receipt of letters and telegrams from people
in all parts of the country asking him to pull the
coulee up after him.
In a recent number of the Chip-Munk it is said the
intelligent compositor set it Charles G——d— Roberts;
and the Only Original Lynx-Eyed being on a journey
the whole edition was printed. It was one of those
very aggravating mistakes that will occasionally occur
even in printerys which print things on the finest
paper.
I greet with exceeding joy the name of a new
writer of stories which appeal to me as being above
the plane of universal grayness which we have viewed
for many months, and for this reason I am glad to
see A Very Remarkable Girl in the quarterly issued
by Town Topics. The author of this story is Mr. L.
H. Bickford of Denver, and the editor of Town
Topics says that he has heretofore been unacquainted
with Mr. Bickford’s work. For many years I have
watched the development of this young author, and
if I am not much mistaken he will yet be heard from
in no uncertain way. I do not believe that the public
has any business with the private life of writers,
but it may be said that Mr. Bickford is twenty-six,
and was born in Leadville, Colorado. For a half
hour’s entertainment, reading aloud in a hammock,
I know of nothing better than A Very Remarkable
Girl. It is suggestive of the signs of the times.
Good form has determined that special attentions
at a time of bereavement are to be recognized by sending
engraved cards. Some people used to send letters
of thanks for sympathy, but of course cards are
more impressive. A coupon scheme has been suggested,
the thanks to be attached to a ticket to the
funeral.
And furthermore be it known that the marginal
notes opposite articles in The Philistine are never
supplied by the authors thereof.
A man in Paris sends me the following delicious
bit clipped from the Paris edition of the New York
Herald of April 1:
New York, March 31.—The Herald’s leading editorial to-day says that many surprises await us in heaven.
I regret not seeing this editorial of March 31. I imagine, however, that it related to Reginald de Koven and his surprise—when he gets there—at finding he cannot write all the choir music.
But then—is Egotism Art?
MEDITATIONS IN MOTLEY.
By WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE
“Meditations in Motley” reveals a new American essayist, honest and whimsical, with a good deal of decorative plain speaking. An occasional carelessness of style is redeemed by unfailing insight.—I. Zangwill in The Pall Mall Magazine for April, 1895.
A series of well written essays, remarkable on the whole for observation, refinement of feeling and literary sense. The book may be taken as a wholesome protest against the utilitarian efforts of the Time-Spirit, and as a plea for the rights and liberties of the imagination. We congratulate Mr. Harte on the success of his book.—Public Opinion, London, England.
Mr. Harte is not always so good in the piece as in the pattern, but he is often a pleasant companion, and I have met with no volume of essays from America since Miss Agnes Repplier’s so good as his “Meditations in Motley.”—Richard Le Gallienne, in the London Review.
PRICE, CLOTH $1.25.
For sale by all Booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price by The Philistine.
LITTLE JOURNEYS
To the Homes of Good Men and Great.
A series of literary studies published in monthly numbers, tastefully printed on hand-made paper, with attractive title-page.
By ELBERT HUBBARD
The publishers announce that Little Journeys will be issued monthly and that each number will treat of recent visits made by Mr. Elbert Hubbard to the homes and haunts of various eminent persons. The subjects for the first twelve numbers have been arranged as follows:
LITTLE JOURNEYS:
Published Monthly, 50 cents a year.
Single copies, 5 cents, postage paid.
Published by G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS,
27 and 39 West 23d Street, New York.
24 Bedford Street, Strand, London.