Chapter VI: Science (2)

"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 concerned in the question of lower tariff duties. 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 paying 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 85 per cent. on bunion plasters, 10 per cent. on animals' claws, and 85 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.

"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?"

"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 appeal 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 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 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 satisfied 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. Alcoholic spirits should be totally excluded. She wanted a pretty heavy duty on raincoats 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 natural sphere is the home. Lodge dues, club dues, and the practice of reading newspapers 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 impression is that plays dealing with the social evil and eugenics were among them.

By this time it will be apparent that Emmeline's views on tariff legislation were somewhat 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 nation 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 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 Emmeline, "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."

"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 before, we went to a lecture on the Social Implications of the Tango. I enjoyed them both immensely. Of course, after a long day in the office, I am rather tired in the evening. If I dozed off on either occasion it must have been just for a moment. I followed 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 are too many men prematurely bald. There are too many women prematurely wrinkled--and fat. We are nothing but a shambling, 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 always 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 interrupted 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 succumb to the ravages of time without making a fight for it. There is really nothing beautiful 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 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 going 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, fugitive 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 experience my sympathies were with the tired business man. It is good for the tired business man that his wife shall be alive to the things that count; but two nights in succession 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. Sometimes 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 hypocrisy. All art, all literature, is of significance only as it emphasises sex. If the Bible has impressed itself on the imagination of humanity 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 aqueducts. Only the most benighted ignorance will permit our prudish sentiments on the subject 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 pondered.

"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 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 concluding 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 distinction of class, of age, and of education, and produces a world in which everybody is engaged in doing the same thing as everybody else."

"Oh, I see," I said. "You are now speaking of the tango."

"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 difficult for me. Nevertheless I do agree with you. What I am thinking of now is something 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 conclusion. 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 sidestep facts, when we can dip over inconsistencies, when we can hug boldly an apparent 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 particular 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, unsystematised 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 do not insist 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 himself, 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 parachutes and balloons and the loftier mountain tops. We dwelt for some time upon the difficulties and dangers of mountaineering.

"Once there was a man," said Harold, "who used to drive six mules up a mountain."

"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 oppressed me. Let alone his soul, I found that I did not even know how the boy was spending 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 perfectly matter-of-fact statement? Was it indifference 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 architecture; 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 explanation for Harold's statement. A notable conclave of bishops and laymen had been in session for some days in our neighbourhood, and one of the visiting dignitaries had addressed the school children at the opening exercises one morning. I say the explanation is simple, though it is largely my own hypothesis based on Harold's words as I have given them above; but I believe my supposition 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 Columbia. What else the bishop told them Harold 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 unexpected 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 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 advertising folder petulantly insists], can you appease 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. Everything 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, therefore, 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 very easy thing to explain. To Harold everything that is, is. Everything that appears to be, is. Everything that he would like to be, is; and nothing contradicts anything.

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 recurrent 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 postpone 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 concealment. I think we find it difficult to understand 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 confidence, 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 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--occasionally. Not until several weeks after I had discovered that Harold had the entrée into ecclesiastical circles did the subject come up again. The boy paused between two spoonfuls 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 between high altitudes and the episcopal dignity 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 Gettysburg Address I am saddened to find that, after many years of practice, my own literary 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 opportunities for consulting the Gettysburg Address occur frequently in a newspaper office. 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 people, of the people, for the people"; some assert that he said, "a government by the people, for the people, of the people." Obviously 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 Cæsar are "Gallia omnis est divisa," or "Omnis Gallia est divisa," or "Omnis Gallia divisa est." We all remember the "partes tres.")

In my sophomore year we used to write daily themes. We were then at the beginning of the revolt from the stilted essay to the realistic form of undergraduate style. Instead 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 4-1/2 per cent. convertible State bonds is unjustified by prevailing conditions in the European money market." So with our daily themes. We did not write about patriotism 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 inaugurated are all that are necessary," my instructor would pick up the Gettysburg Address and read out aloud: "But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground." Sometimes he would pick up the Bible and read out aloud:

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 "Grecian 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 injustice. 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 had ended a sentence with a comma like Job, or had said "kings and counsellors which." 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 of them do what some of us, in desperation, used to do? We cheated. We worked ourselves up into ecstasies of false emotion over the hockey team or pretended to see things in Central Park which we never saw. I always 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 Misérables" and read me the story of the last charge over the sunken road at Waterloo. 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+. Is it any wonder that I cannot even now read the Gettysburg Address without a twinge of resentment?

And yet we were fortunate in one way. In those days they read the Gettysburg Address 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[1] ago our fathers[2] brought forth on
this continent[3] a new nation,[4] conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition[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 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.

[5] "Proposition," in the sense in which Euclid employs the term and not as one might say now, "a cloak and suit proposition."

[6] See the Declaration of Independence in Albert Bushnell Hart's "American History Told by Contemporaries" (4 vols., Boston, 1898-1901).

[7] The war between the States, 1861-65.

[8] I.e., the United States.

[9] See Elliot's Debates in the several State Conventions on the adoption of the Federal Constitution, etc. (5 vols., Washington, 1840-45).

[10] Gettysburg; a borough and the county seat of Adams Co., Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border, 85 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 entirely on odd bits of information casually furnished 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 and selected the wall-paper. On questions of such nature, Emmeline is the Balkan States and I am the European Concert. She creates a _status quo_ and I ratify. In the present instance, however, I was really given a free hand. Emmeline admitted she was suffering from headache when she told the renting-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 expensive 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 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 little 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 altogether unreasonable, but he was puzzled nevertheless.

"You see," he explained, "the people who were here before you had a music-box."

When a renting-agent discerns signs of disappointment in a prospective tenant he immediately calls his attention to the shower. The agent's face as he ushered me into the bath-room and pointed to the shower was irradiated by a smile of ecstatic beatitude. He reminded me of Mme. Nazimova when she waits 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 finger 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 modern 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-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 inspected 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 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 be covered with portières. 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 anticipated 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 grapefruit on a plate. And, furthermore, I like a library where a man can get up occasionally 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 did 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 growing 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 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 tenants should have moved out. But probably it is because they have found an apartment where the rooms are still smaller and the windows 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 appeals 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 unoriginal creature imaginable. He is more imitative 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 imitates the Impressionist, the Cubist who imitates 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 repeated, and chanted, and echoed, until the sound and sight of it become a torture. How long ago is it since every merchantable product 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 "permanently" satisfying, or in any other conceivable phrase, adverbially so? To-day the mail-order lists are crammed with commodities 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 cerebration--is that there are a great many commodities 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, "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, services, 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 assessments.
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 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 inventor could really put on the market a Tammany 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.
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-organised world than ours.

But does your advertising expert recognise 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 customers as he attracts. Under such circumstances one can only wonder why advertising should continue to be the best-paid branch of American literature. Of what use are the Science of Advertising, the Psychology of Advertising, the Dynamics of Advertising, the Ethics of Advertising, the Phonetics of Advertising, 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 different 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, interior decoration--it is evident that some people may like them the same and some people may like them different. My own inclinations, as I have intimated, are toward the same, but my sympathies are with those who want things different. The argument advanced by the advertiser in behalf of his latest three-button, long-hipped, university sack with rolling collar, that it is different and 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 already been sold west of the Alleghanies. I remain indifferent on being told that the three-button effect would radiate my individuality 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 account of a recent meeting of the Supercollegiate Committee on Entrance Examinations. For the details of the story I am indebted to the able and conscientious correspondent of the Disassociated Press at Nottingham. The discerning reader will have no difficulty in identifying the persons mentioned. Professor Münsterberg is, of course, Professor Münsterberg. Professor Lounsbury is Professor Lounsbury. Professor Hart is Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Dr. Woods Hutchinson is Dr. Woods Hutchinson.

Professor Münsterberg: 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 without 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 prepared to discuss once more the highly interesting 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 spellers you ever saw. And their grammar is simply 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? Language is like a human being; change does it good. Stick to your Lindley Murray and it's a cinch your little old English tongue will be a dead one in fifty years.

Dr. Hutchinson: 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, gentlemen. It's the rubber disk in the human Victrola. Drop the pin on the rubber disk and the record will grind out the same formula, again and again. Keep it up long enough and the record wears out. That's the larynx under the operation of grammatical 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 diaphragm, and reconciles him with his digestion. This is the opinion of eminent physiologists, like Drinckheimer of Leipzig.

Professor Lounsbury: Whom did you say the man is?

Dr. Hutchinson: Drinckheimer, professor at Leipzig. He doesn't write for the magazines.

Professor Lounsbury: Then you agree with me that when a man has something to say he will say it?

Professor Münsterberg: We have an excellent illustration on this point in a history paper submitted in the last entrance examinations. 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 extraordinary psychological correlation between 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 produced, in our own day, Lorimerism and the purchase of Southern delegates. If it had not been for Hamilton and his crowd we should not now be compelled to wage a campaign 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 Münsterberg: On that point I believe I can speak with authority. Psychological 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 favourite breakfast food?" The candidate was required to signify his answer by tapping with his finger on the table, one tap for Farinetta, two taps for Dried Husks, three taps for Atlas 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 results, 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 Münsterberg: They were impressively defective.

Professor Lounsbury: I'm tickled to death. When you cut out bad spelling and grammar, you queer the evolution of the English language. There's nothing to it.

Professor Münsterberg: But take the case of the freshman squad whom we kept in a hermetically 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 Münsterberg: Truth compels me to say it was something awful.

Professor Lounsbury: But how about the grammar?

Professor Münsterberg: There was no grammar to speak of. They used mostly interjections.

Dr. Hutchinson: Finest thing in the world, interjections. Good for the lungs and the heart. Rapid process of inhalation and expulsion 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 sudden 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 truck, don't hold yourself back. It's the way nature is safeguarding you against asthma.

Professor Münsterberg: Then it is the consensus 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 opinion of a roomful of freshmen on any subject than the opinion of the United States Supreme 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 Progressive party was born. Whatever is worth preserving from the past, including the Decalogue, will be found in the Bull Moose platform. We don't want examination papers. We want social justice.

Professor Lounsbury: Between you and I, the English language won't get what's coming to it until all entrance examinations have been chucked into the discard.

Dr. Hutchinson: Spelling is demonstrably bad for the muscles of the chest and the abdomen.

Professor Lounsbury: You've said it.

XX

THE HEAVENLY MAID