Chapter VI: Science (3)

As the familiar sound fell upon our ears, we walked to the window, drew aside the curtains, and shamelessly stared into the windows of the apartment across the court. That usually quiet home had been in evident agitation all that afternoon. There was the noise of hurrying feet. Excited voices broke out now and then. Twice a woman scolded and we distinctly heard a child cry. Now the mystery was explained.

"The new Orpheola has come," said Emmeline. "I wonder how late they will keep it up the first night."

In the apartment across the way the family was gathered in a reverent circle about the new talking-machine, and we heard the opening strains of the "Song to the Evening Star."

* * * * *

"Have you ever thought," I said to Emmeline, "how infinitely superior the music of Wagner is to that of any other composer, in its immunity against influenza? The German Empire, you know, has a moist climate, and the magician of Bayreuth recognised that he must write primarily for a nation that is extremely subject to cold in the head. It was different with the Italian composers. Bronchial troubles are virtually unknown in Italy. When Verdi wrote, he failed to make allowance for a sudden attack of the grippe. That is why when Caruso catches cold they must change the bill at the Metropolitan. But if a Wagnerian tenor loses his voice, the papers say the next morning, 'Herr Donner sang Tristan last night with extraordinary intelligence.' Sometimes Herr Donner sings with extraordinary intelligence; sometimes he sings with marvellous histrionic power; sometimes he sings with an earnest vigour amounting to frenzy. Wagner, who foresaw everything, foresaw the disastrous effect of steam-heated rooms on the delicate organs of the throat. So he developed a music form in which the use of the throat is not always essential."

"I know," said Emmeline, "that you'd much rather listen to the la-la, la-la-la-la-la-lah from Traviata."

"I'd much rather listen to Traviata," I said, losing my temper, "than strive painfully to be electrified by the 'Ho-yo-to-ho' of eight Valkyrie maidens averaging one hundred and seventy-five pounds and leaping from crag to crag at a speed of two miles an hour."

* * * * *

When a man first acquires an Orpheola, he loses interest in his business. He leaves for home early and bolts his dinner. The first night he sits down before the machine from 6:30 to 11, and with a rapt expression on his face he runs off every record in his collection twice. No one but himself is permitted to return the precious rubber disk to its envelope. Later in the week the eldest child, as a reward of good behaviour, may be allowed to adjust the record on the revolving base and to pull the starting lever, while mother watches anxiously from the dining-room. At intervals grandma puts her head in at the door to make sure that the proper needle has been inserted. The modern musical cabinet does not eliminate the personal factor. People can put all of their individuality into the music by choosing between a fine needle and one with a blunt point. Persons of temperament are particular about the speed at which the disk revolves. When a man is in high spirits he picks out a sharp needle and winds the spring up tight. Pessimists do just the opposite. It is imperative to keep the fine, steel points out of the baby's reach because irreparable harm might thereby be done to the record.

* * * * *

"Of course," said Emmeline, "I can see why you should be so greatly attracted by the Italian ting-a-ling stuff. It's the result of your journalistic training. It's the most superficial business there is. Everything in a newspaper must be perfectly obvious at the first glance, and there's nothing like a jingle to fetch the crowd. After a while a man gets to be like the people he writes for."

I had been called to the telephone and Emmeline had made use of the interval to build up her little argument. It was unfair, but I generously refrained from saying so. Besides, I, too, had not been idle while I waited for Central to restore the connection.

"I am not denying," I said, "that Wagner gets his effects, if you give him time enough. But how does he do it? By wearing you out and knocking you down and running away with you. That was the way, you will recall, the old Teutonic gods and heroes used to make love. When a Germanic warrior was attacked with the fatal passion, he would seize the well-beloved by the hair, throw her over his shoulder and ride away with her. It was different with Puccini's countrymen. In their hands a mandolin on a moonlit night under a balcony melted away all opposition. After half an hour of solid Wagnerian brasswork you surrender; but only the way Adrianople surrendered.

"That, too, was the case with the early Teutonic ladies. Their masters did not always woo with a club. Now and then they interjected little bits of kindness which were appreciated because they were so rare. That is Wagner again. Every little while he throws you a kind word, a snatch of golden melody that Verdi himself might have written, and, as a matter of fact, did write all the time. With the master of Bayreuth these little rifts in the clouds are doubly welcome. They shine out like a good deed on a dark night."

"How any one can listen to the last act of Tristan without feeling all the sorrow of the universe, I cannot understand," said Emmeline. "Do you mean to say that the Liebestod does not really carry you out of yourself?"

"It does not," I said. "But when Gadski in Aïda turns to the wicked Amneris and sings 'Tu sei felice,' something in me begins to give way."

"It is probably your intellect," said Emmeline.

* * * * *

One popular error with regard to talking-machines is that they have solved the hitherto irreconcilable conflict between music on the one hand and bridge and conversation on the other. At first sight it may seem that the religious silence which one must maintain while some one is singing--it may be the hostess herself--is no longer compulsory. You cannot hurt the feelings of a mahogany cabinet three feet high. If the worst happens, you can wind up the machine and start all over again. But actually the situation is very much what it was before. I myself, on one occasion when Tetrazzini was singing from Lucia, ventured to lean over to my neighbour and whisper a word or two. Whereupon there came across the face of my host, brooding fondly over the machine, a look of pain such as I never want to bring to any face again. As it happened, it was the man's favourite record. On the other hand, people who play cards tell me that as between a living tenor and Caruso on the machine there is not much to choose. Both are a hindrance to the correct leading of trumps.

* * * * *

"Besides," I said, "any number of Wagnerians will tell you that the music dramas in their unabridged form are much too long. You will recall that Wagner himself said that many of his scores would benefit by generous cutting. A great many eminent conductors have made a specialty of cutting things out of Tristan. This serves a double purpose. It permits the development of a class of post-graduate Wagnerians who can take the whole opera without flinching, and it enables people to catch the 11:45 for Montclair. Somewhere I have come across a story of two great conductors who had charge of rival orchestras in one of the principal cities of Europe. One man, when he conducted the Ring, was in the habit of cutting out the first half of every act. The other man played the first half, but omitted the second half of every act. For many years there was a bitter controversy as to which of the two conductors best brought out the real meaning of the composer."

"I don't think it is a very good story," said Emmeline, walking to the window and closing it; for our neighbour's machine had switched without warning from the Ride of the Valkyrs to Alexander's Band. "It's a poor story and I am inclined to think you made it up yourself."

"As for that," I said, "that is just what Wagner did with his music."

* * * * *

When you overhear a man in the subway say to his neighbour, "Mine are all twelve-inch, reversible, and go equally well on low or high speed," you will know that the new Orpheola came home last week. Next week the children will be allowed to handle the records without special injunctions regarding the proper needle. The week after that, the baby will be allowed to approach quite near and hear Mother Goose come out of the mahogany toy. Within a month the master of the house will be looking for his hat in the cabinet. The intolerable air of superiority and aloofness with which he has been greeting you will disappear.

XXI

SHEATH-GOWNS

From Emmeline I learned that I had been doing the fashion designers an injustice. I had always imagined that styles were the creation of Parisian dressmakers who worked with only two ends in view--novelty and discomfort. But Emmeline assured me that styles are a faithful record of the march of civilisation. When the Manchurian War was under way, everything in the shops was Russian. When Herr Strauss produced "Salome," half the world went in for the slim and viperous costume. The revolution in Persia worked a revolution in blouse decoration. Later everything was Bulgarian.

"In that case," I said, "those poor fellows at Adrianople have not died in vain. Under a rain of shot and shell I can hear the Bulgarian officers rallying their men: 'Forward, my children! The eyes of Fifth Avenue are upon you! Fix bayonets! For King, for country, and for Paquin!' The Turks, being a backward millinery nation, naturally had no chance."

"What you say is extremely amusing, of course," remarked Emmeline. "But I seem to remember an old suit of yours. It was about the time of the Boer War. The coat was cut like an hour glass and there was cotton wadding in the shoulders so that you had to enter a room sideways. The trousers were Zouave. Yes, it must have been about the time of the Boer War or the war with Spain."

"That was just when the feminist movement was beginning to shape our ideals," I retorted.

Not only do the styles symbolise the process of historic evolution--I distinctly recall toilets on Fifth Avenue which must have commemorated the Messina earthquake and the report of the New York Tenement House Commission--but styles actually follow an evolution of their own. They do not change abruptly, but melt into each other. Thus the costume which Emmeline described as Bulgarian could not have been altogether that. The coat was military enough, with its baggy shoulders and a bold backward sweep of the long skirts. But this coat was worn over a gown that was unmistakably hobble, revealing the persistence of the Salome influence. To call this outfit Bulgarian is to raise the supposition that the Bulgarians hopped to victory at Kirk-Kilisseh.

I pointed this out to Emmeline, and at the same time took occasion to protest against the extravagant lengths to which the languorous styles were being carried. It was bad enough, I said, to see elderly matrons arrayed like Oriental dancing girls. But what was worse was to see young girls, mere children, in scant and provocative attire. I thought the law might very well take up the question of a minimum dress for women under the age of eighteen.

"Of course it's disgusting," said Emmeline, "but it's their right."

"I know that youth has many rights," I said, "but I didn't know that the right to make one's self a public nuisance and offence is among them."

"What I mean," said Emmeline, "is that we have outgrown the days when young ladies fainted and wives fetched their husbands' slippers. We have broken the shackles of mid-Victorian propriety and are working out a new conception of free womanhood. Our ideas of modesty are changing. You might as well make up your mind to be shocked quite frequently before the process is completed."

"Oh, I see," said I. "Enslaved within the iron circle of the home, crushed by the tyranny of convention, of custom, of man-made laws, woman lifts up her head and declares she will be free by inserting herself into a skirt thirteen inches in diameter. Where's the sense of it?"

"It's all very simple," said Emmeline. "It means that we are having an awful time trying to escape from the degradation into which you have forced us. We struggle forward, and then the habits of the harem civilisation which you have imposed on us assert themselves. Do you think we women love to dress? Every time we try on a pretty gown we know that we are riveting on the chains of our own servitude."

"But why make the chains so tight?" I said.

She now turned to face me.

"The reason for the sheath-gown is quite plain," said Emmeline. "Men have always shown such a decided preference for actresses and dancing girls that we others have taken to imitating actresses and dancing girls in self-defence."

"But that isn't so at all," I said. "Look at your trained nurses in their simple white caps and aprons. They are bewitching. It is universally conceded that the most dangerous thing in the world is for an unmarried man to be operated on for appendicitis. That was the way, you'll recall, Adam obtained his wife--after a surgical operation. The case of the hospital nurse alone disposes of your entire argument about our predilection for dancing girls."

"That I do not admit," said Emmeline. "It is true that a man finds himself longing for what is simple and wholesome whenever there is something the matter with him."

"When I spoke of the immodesty of present-day fashions," I said, adroitly turning the subject, "I am afraid I gave you the wrong impression. It isn't the viciousness of the thing that I object to, it's the stupid, sheeplike spirit of imitation behind it. If the passion for tight gowns indicated a kind of spiritual development, I shouldn't mind it even if it was development in the wrong direction. There might be an erring soul in the hobble, but still a soul. If the young girl of good family who strives to look like a lady of the chorus did so out of sheer perversity, there would be some comfort. One must think and feel to be perverse. What appals me is the dreadful, unquestioning innocence with which the thing is done. If we males are indeed responsible for what you are, then we have a real burden on our souls. We have done more than degrade you; we have made automata out of you. The little girl behind the soda counter who paints her face and hangs jet spangles from her ears will just as readily comply with fashion by putting on a military cape and boots, or a pony coat, or calico and a sunbonnet, or an admiral's uniform, or a _yashmak_."

"A what?" said Emmeline, frowning slightly.

"A _yashmak_," I replied, meeting her gaze steadily. "I use the word with confidence because I have just looked it up in the dictionary. At first I confused it with _sanjak_, which, on examination, turns out to be a district in the Balkan Peninsula bounded on the east by Servia and on the north by Bosnia-Herzegovina. A _yashmak_ is the long veil worn by Moslem women to conceal the face and the outlines of the upper part of the body."

"You seem to have prepared pretty thoroughly for this discussion," said Emmeline.

"I have always considered it prudent before entering into debate with a woman to have a few facts on my side," I said.

"As if that made any difference," she replied scornfully.

"As to the sheeplike way in which women follow the fashions of the moment," continued Emmeline, "it simply isn't true." I could see she was terribly in earnest now. "There are tens of thousands of women who dress to please themselves; independent, courageous, self-reliant women who face life seriously and rationally. We are going in more and more for loose and comfortable things to wear."

"Not the typical woman of to-day, I assure you."

"Of course not the typical woman," said Emmeline. "Any Exhibition of common-sense by a woman at once makes her a freak. You prefer the other kind for your ideal of the eternal womanly. Take her and welcome. I suppose it is necessary for a man to have something worthless to work for."

XXII

WITH THE EDITOR'S REGRETS

Talk of post-office-reform brings to my mind a conversation I had with Williams, who is a poet. It was about the time, some two years ago, when a Postmaster-General of the United States proposed the abolition of the second-class mail privilege for magazines.

I knew that Williams hates magazine editors with all the ardour of an unsuccessful poet's soul. Consequently, when he sat down and lighted one of my cigarettes and said that the magazines in their quarrel with the post office had overlooked the strongest argument on their side, I suspected irony. It is Williams's boast that he has one of the largest collections of rejected manuscripts in existence, the greater part being in an absolutely new and unread condition. Placed end to end, Williams once estimated, his unpublished verses would reach from Battery Park to the Hispanic Museum, at Broadway and One Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Street. Every poem in his collection has been declined at least once by every editor in the United States, and many of the longer poems have been declined two or three times by the same editor, and for totally opposite reasons.

It is not mere brute persistence on Williams's part that is responsible for this unparalleled literary accumulation. As a matter of fact he is easily discouraged, although, of course, like all poets he has his moments of exaltation. The trouble, he complains, is that with every printed rejection slip there comes a word of sincere encouragement from the editor. The editors are constantly telling Williams that his verse is among the very best that is now being produced, but that a sense of duty to their readers prevents them from printing it. They regret to find his poems unavailable, and earnestly advise him to keep on writing.

"You will recall," said Williams, "the principal point made by the periodical publishers. Conceding that their publications, as second-class mail matter, are carried at a loss, they argue that the post office is more than compensated by the volume of first-class mail sent out in response to magazine advertisements. The argument is sound, as I can testify from personal experience. Not long ago I came across a five-line 'ad' in agate which said, 'Are you earning less than you should? Write us.' Well, the question seemed to fit my case and I wrote. That was two cents to the credit of the post office. The post office sold another stamp when I received a reply asking me to send fifty cents in postage for instructions on how to double my income in three months. I was somewhat disappointed. With my income merely doubled I should still find it difficult to pay my landlady, but it was better than nothing. So I sent the fifty cents in stamps. You will recall the half-dollar."

"Oh, don't mention it," I said.

"Well, after a day or two I received in a penny envelope a paper-bound copy of 'How to Succeed,' being a baccalaureate address delivered by the Rev. Josiah K. Pebbles, who showed that honesty, thrift, and perseverance were the secrets underlying the career of Hannibal, Joan of Arc, John D. Rockefeller, and Theodore Roosevelt. So you see, by the time the secret had been conveyed to me the post office had sold stamps to the amount of fifty-five cents. Now assume that there are in the United States between forty and fifty thousand poets and other literary workers who would like to double their income, and it is plain that the United States Government made a very handsome profit on that five-line 'ad.'"

"But that is not what I started out to show," said Williams. "What the magazines have omitted to point out is that by rejecting every contribution at least once, the editors are doing more for Uncle Sam's first-class mail business than through their advertising pages. And the difference is this: While there must be a limit to the number of people who will answer an advertisement, there need be no limit to the number of times a manuscript is sent back. I can't see why the publishers and the Postmaster-General should be flying at each other's throat, when there's such a simple solution at hand. It is evident that there is no postal deficit, however large, which cannot be wiped out by a sharp increase in the average number of rejections per manuscript. Editors will only have to augment by, say, fifty per cent. the number of reasons why a contribution of exceptional merit is unavailable. My 'Echoes from Parnassus' was sent back thirty-seven times before it found a publisher. It would have been a simple matter to send the poem back a dozen times more either absolutely or with a word of hearty encouragement."

By this time I had made up my mind that it was indeed irony, and I was sorry. I don't mind when Williams gets quite angry and lashes out; but I hate to have a poet laugh at himself.

"Not that I can help feeling sorry for the editor chaps," he went on. "You couldn't help feeling sorry, could you, for a man who has been trained to recognise the very best in literature, and to send it back on the spot? And the more he likes it the quicker he sends it back. Frequently I have been on the point of writing to the man and telling him that if it is really such a wrench to return my poem to please not consider my feelings in the matter, but to go ahead and print it. What saves the editor, I imagine, is that after a while he does learn how to detect some real fault in a contribution which just enables him to send it back without altogether succumbing to grief. Of the fourteen men who rejected my 'Echoes from Parnassus,' one wrote that I reminded him of Milton, but that I lacked solemnity; another wrote that I reminded him of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, but that I was a little too serious; another wrote that my verses had the Swinburnian rush, but were somewhat too fanciful. The editor who accepted the poem wrote that he couldn't quite catch the drift of it, but that he would take a chance on the stuff."

Here Williams got up and strode about the room and vowed that no combination of editors could prevent him from continuing to write poetry. "And I never refuse to meet them half way," he said rather inconsequentially. "I went into Smith's office yesterday with a bit of light verse and had him turn it down because it had the 'highbrow touch.' 'My boy,' he said, 'we must give the people what they want. For instance, I was going up to my apartment last night and the negro boy who runs the elevator was quite rude to me; he had been drinking. Now why couldn't you write a series of snappy verses on the troubles of the flat-dweller? This line you're on now won't go at all with my readers; they are not a very intelligent class, you know.' And that's another thing I can't understand: Why should every editor be anxious to prove that his subscribers are a bigger set of donkeys than any other editor in town can claim?"

"I was fool enough," Williams proceeded, "to reject Smith's suggestion. I should have accepted it. My poet's mission won't feed me. If President Eliot insists it is my mission to write stuff no editor will touch, he doesn't know what he is talking about."

"I don't think it was President Eliot," I said.

"Wasn't it? Say Plato or Carlyle, then. You can't go on for ever slapping us on the back and letting us starve. You have got to back up your highly laudatory statements by purchasing our wares or we shut up shop. We don't ask for champagne and truffles, but we do want a decent measure of substantial appreciation, all of us people with a mission, poets, artists, prophets, women. Now women, here comes Plato or Carlyle and says it is a woman's mission to have at least eight children."

"President Eliot said that," I interposed.

"Oh it _was_ President Eliot? Eight children, says he, is her mission. But let me tell you if you take her children and pitch them into the waste basket, if you use them only to fill up your factories, and slums, and reformatories, woman will be chucking that sacred mission of hers through the window before President Eliot can say Jack Robinson. She is doing it now and serve them right. Mission! Rot!"

He seized a handful of my cigarettes and went out without saying good-morning.

XXIII

A MAD WORLD

_From an old-fashioned country doctor to an eminent alienist in New York city:_

My dear Sir:

I cannot claim the honour of your acquaintance. My name is quite unknown to you. For some thirty years I have been established in this little town, ministering to a district which extends five miles in every direction from my house-door. My practice, varying little from year to year consists largely in prescribing liniments, quinine, camphorated oil, and bicarbonate of soda; and regularly I am summoned, of course, into the presence of the august mysteries of birth and death.

The life, though grateful, is laborious. The opportunities for keeping in touch with the march of events in the great world outside are limited. It has nevertheless been one of the few delights of my restricted leisure to follow your career through the medium of the public press. My own course, as I have shown, lies far from the highly specialised and fascinating field of mental pathology to which you have devoted yourself. But from the distance I have admired the expert skill and the consummate authority which have made you the central figure in an unbroken succession of brilliant criminal trials. I have admired and kept silent. If I have departed from my custom in the present instance, it is only because I feel that your brilliant services in the recent Fletcher embezzlement case ought not, in justice to yourself and to our common profession, to be passed over in silence.

Let me recall the principal circumstances of the Fletcher case. The man Fletcher was indicted for appropriating the funds of the trust company of which he was the head. His lawyer pleaded insanity and called upon you to give an account of several examinations you had made of the prisoner's mental condition. You testified that on one occasion you asked the defendant how much two plus two is, and he replied four, thereby revealing the extraordinary cunning with which the insane assume the mask of sanity. You then asked him to enumerate the days of the week in their proper order. This the prisoner did without the least hesitation, thereby supplying a remarkable instance of the unnatural lucidity and precision of thought which, in the case of those suffering from progressive insanity, immediately precede a complete mental eclipse.

On the other hand you found that the defendant was unable to recall the name of the clergyman who had married him to his first wife at San Jacinto, Texas, twenty-seven years ago; an unaccountable failure of memory, which could not be passed over as an accident and must be accepted as a symptom of the gravest nature. You cited the prisoner's lavish expenditure on motor-cars and pearl necklaces as evidence of his inability to recognise the value of money; and this in turn clearly indicated a congenital incapacity to recognise values of any kind, whether physical or moral. This contention you drove home by citing the very terms of the indictment, in which it was charged that the prisoner had failed to distinguish between what was his and what was not his--another infallible sign of approaching mental deliquescence.

You did not stop with the man Fletcher. You searched his family history and found (1) a great-uncle of the defendant who used to maintain that Mrs. E. D. N. Southworth was a greater genius than George Eliot; (2) a second cousin who dissipated a large fortune by reckless investments in wild-cat mining shares; and (3) a nephew who was accustomed to begin his dinner with the salad and finish with the soup.

At the trial, counsel for defence asked you a hypothetical question. It contained between nine and ten thousand words arranged in two hundred and fifty principal clauses, and nearly a thousand subordinate adjective and adverbial clauses, with no less than eighty-three parentheses and seven asterisks referring to as many elaborate foot-notes. It would have taken a professional grammarian from three to six days to grasp the proper sequence of the clauses. Yet it is on record that within three seconds after the lawyer had finished his question, and while he was still wiping the sweat from his forehead, you answered "Yes." This is all the more curious because I gather from statements in the press that while the question was being propounded to you, you were apparently engaged in jesting with your fellow-experts or nodding cheerfully to friends in different parts of the court-room. Needless to say Fletcher was acquitted.

I have mentioned your fellow-experts. That recalls to my mind another admirable phase of your services in behalf of the medical art. Your activity in the criminal courts has freed our profession from the ancient reproach that doctors can never agree. As a matter of fact, whether you have been retained by the prosecution or the defence, I cannot think of a single instance in which you have failed to agree with every one of the half-dozen other experts on the same side. More than that, I firmly believe that if by some unexpected intervention you were suddenly transferred from the employ of the defence to that of the prosecution, or _vice versa_, your opinion would still be in complete harmony with that of every one of your new colleagues. In offering your services impartially to the District Attorney or to counsel for the defence you have lived up to that lofty impartiality of service which is the glory of our art. The physician knows neither friend nor foe, neither saint nor sinner. From the rich store of your expert knowledge you can draw that with which to satisfy all men.

I find it hard to frame a single formula which shall describe the sum total of your achievements in the field of medicine. Perhaps one might say that you have discovered the unitary principle underlying the laws of health and disease, for which men have searched since the beginning of time. Behind all physical ills they have looked for Evil. Behind diseases they have looked for Disease. That unitary principle you have found in what goes by the general name of Insanity. The cynical opinion of mankind long ago laid it down that all crimes may be resolved into the single crime of allowing one's self to be found out. If a poor man is caught, it is stupidity or negligence. But obviously, when a wealthy criminal is apprehended, the only possible explanation is that he is insane.

The youthful degenerate who resorts to murder; the financier who steals the savings of the poor; the lobbyist who buys a Senator-ship and sells a State; the Pittsburg millionaire who seeks to rise above the laws of bigamy, may all be explained, and acquitted, in terms of mental aberration. The only parallel in history that I can think of, is the elder Mr. Weller's belief in the efficacy of an alibi as a defence in trials for murder and for breach of promise of marriage.

I congratulate you, sir. You have discovered a principle which, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. Like charity, too, your discovery begins at home. For, as I have shown, there is no home in this broad land wherein the expert will fail to discover the necessary great-aunt or third cousin endowed with the precise degree of paranoia, paresis, or infantile dementia required to secure an acquittal, or, at least, a disagreement of the jury.

Sincerely yours,
AN ADMIRER.

XXIV

Ph.D.

The time has come when a serious attempt must be made to determine Gilbert and Sullivan's permanent place in the world of creative art. A brief review of the musical-comedy output during the last theatrical season will convince any one that we are sufficiently far removed from "Pinafore" and "The Mikado" to insure a true perspective.

Happily, the material for a systematic examination of the subject is accessible. It is true that we are still without a definitive text of the Gilbert librettos. For this we must wait until Professor Rücksack, of the University of Kissingen, has published the results of his monumental labours. So far, we have from his learned pen only the text for the first half of the second act of "The Mikado." This is in accordance with the best traditions of German scholarship, which demand that the second half of anything shall be published before the first half. In the meanwhile, there are several editions of Gilbert available which, though somewhat imperfect, ought to present no difficulties to the scholar. For example, in my own favourite edition of "The Mikado" (Chattanooga, 1913), the text reads:

And he whistled an air, did he,
As the sabre true
Cut cleanly through
His servical vertebrae!

where "servical" is evidently a misprint for "cervical." So, too, the trained eye will at once discern that in the following passage from the Peers' chorus in "Iolanthe":

'Twould fill with joy
And madness stark
The hoi polloi
(A Greek rebark),

the sense is greatly improved by reading "remark" for "rebark," unless we argue that the chorus had a slight cold in the head, an assumption which nothing in the text would justify us in bringing forward, and which, indeed, would be contradicted by the highly emphasised summer style in which the chorus is apparelled. Thus forewarned, then, we are ready to enter upon a detailed examination of the intensely animated men and women in whom Sir William S. Gilbert has embodied his _ultima ratio_, his _dernier cri_, and his _Weltanschaung_.

In Ko-Ko, the author has given us a Man, with none of the sentimentalities of August Strindberg, with nothing of the limited, vegetarian outlook upon life of Bernard Shaw, with nothing of the over-refinement of Mrs. Wharton. Ko-Ko is atingle with all the passion and faults of humanity. He is both matter and spirit. He comes close to us in his rare flashes of insight and in his moments of poignant imbecility. The human being is not lost in the Lord High Executioner. He is alive straight through to his entrails and liver, as Jack London might say. He is infinite, even as life is infinite. He is, by turns, affable, as with Pitti-Sing; cynically disdainful, as with Pooh-Bah; paternal, as with Nanki-Poo.

In the presence of Yum-Yum he is that most appealing figure, a strong man in love torn between desire and duty. The firmness with which he rejects the suggestion that he decapitate himself, arguing that in the nature of things such an operation was bound to be injurious to his professional reputation, reveals a character of almost Roman austerity. There is something of the Roman, too--or shall we say something of the German?--in the thoroughness with which he would enter on his career. He would prepare himself for his functions as Lord High Executioner by beginning on a guinea pig and working his way through the animal kingdom till he came to a second trombone. This is the old standard of conscientiousness of which our modern world knows so little.

And yet a very modern man withal, this Ko-Ko. I cannot help thinking that Mr. Chesterton would have loved him, and would have had no difficulty in proving that his name should be pronounced not Ko-Ko, but the second syllable before the first. He is modern in his extraordinary adaptability to time and circumstance. Starting life as a tailor, he adapts himself to the august functions of Lord High Executioner. He adapts himself to Yum-Yum. He adapts himself to Katisha. No sooner is he released from prison to become Lord High Executioner than he has ready his convenient little list of people who never would be missed. Of his powers of persuasion we need not speak at great length. His wooing of Katisha is a triumph of romantic eloquence. It carries everything before it, as in that superb climax when Katisha inquires whether it is all true about the unfortunate little tom-tit on a tree by the river, and Ko-Ko replies: "I knew the bird intimately." He is modern through and through, our Ko-Ko. He is at one with Henri Bergson in asserting that existence is not stationary but in constant flux, and that the universe takes on meaning only from our moods:

The flowers that bloom in the spring,
Tra la,
Have nothing to do with the case.

Far less subtle a character is the Lord High Chancellor in "Iolanthe," although, within the well-defined liminations of his type, he is as real as Ko-Ko. Like Ko-Ko he has risen from humble beginnings. But whereas our Japanese hero attains fortune by trusting himself boldly and joyfully to life, letting the currents carry him whither they will, like Byron, like Peer Gynt, and like Captain Hobson, the Lord High Chancellor's rise is the result of painful concentration and steadfast plodding. Ko-Ko is at various times the statesman, the poet, the lover, the man of the world (as when he is tripped up by the Mikado's umbrella-carrier). The Lord High Chancellor is always the lawyer. In response to Strephon's impassioned cry that all Nature joins with him in pleading his love, that dry legal soul can only remark that an affidavit from a thunderstorm or a few words on oath from a heavy shower would meet with all the attention they deserve.

Plainly, we have here a man who has won his way to the highest place in his profession by humdrum methods; the same methods which Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., employed when, by writing in a hand of remarkable roundness and fluency, he became the ruler of the Queen's navee; the same methods brought into play by Major-General Stanley, of the British army and Penzance, when he qualified himself for his high position by memorising a great many cheerful facts about the square of the hypothenuse.

There is matter enough for an entire volume on Gilbert's self-made men--Ko-Ko, the Lord High Chancellor, Major-General Stanley, and the lawyer in "Trial by Jury," who laid the foundation of his fortunes by marrying a rich attorney's elderly ugly daughter. I throw out the suggestion in the hope that it will be some day taken up as the subject of a Ph.D. thesis in the University of Alaska. That is only one hint of the unworked treasures of research that await the student in these librettos. How valuable would be a really comprehensive monograph on the royal attendants in Gilbert, including a comparison of the Mikado's umbrella-carrier with the Lord High Chancellor's train-bearer!

As for Gilbert and Sullivan's women, I find that even if I were not so near to the end of my chapter, I could not enter upon a discussion of the subject. The field is too vast. I must content myself with merely pointing out that Gilbert's ideas on women were painfully Victorian. It is true that the eternal chase of the male by the female was no secret to him. In Katisha's pursuit of Nanki-Poo we have a striking anticipation of Anne's pursuit of John Tanner in "Man and Superman." But on the whole, Gilbert describes his women of the upper classes as simpering and sentimental--Josephine, Yum-Yum, Mabel, Iolanthe--and his women of the working classes as ignorant and incapable. What an extraordinary example of ineptitude is afforded by Little Buttercup, who, in her capacity as baby-farmer, so disastrously mixes up Ralph Rackstraw with Captain Corcoran. Or by Nurse Ruth of Penzance, who fails to carry out orders and, instead of apprenticing her young charge to a pilot, apprentices him to a pirate. Miss Ida Tarbell could not have framed a severer indictment of inefficiency in the home.

XXV

TWO AND TWO

Harding said that if he were ever called upon to deliver the commencement oration at his alma mater, he knew what he would do.

"Of course you know what you would do," I said. "So do I. So does every one. You would rise to your feet and tell the graduating class that after four years of sheltered communion with the noblest thought of the ages they were about to plunge into the maelstrom of life. If you didn't say maelstrom you would say turmoil or arena. You will tell them that never did the world stand in such crying need of devoted and unselfish service. You will say that we are living in an age of change, and the waves of unrest are beating about the standards of the old faith. You will follow this up with several other mixed metaphors expressive of the general truth that it is for the Class of '14 to say whether this world shall be made a better place to live in or shall be allowed to go to the demnition bow wows. You will conclude with a fervent appeal to the members of the graduating class never to cease cherishing the flame of the ideal. You will then sit down and the President will confer the degree of LL.D. on one of the high officials of the Powder Trust."

But Harding was so much in earnest that he forgot to receive my remarks with the bitter sneer which is the portion of any one unfortunate enough to disagree with him.

"The commencement address I expect to deliver," he said, "will precisely avoid every peculiarity you have mentioned. It is the fatal mistake of every commencement orator that he attempts to deal with principles. He knows that by the middle of June the senior class has forgotten most of the things in the curriculum. His error consists in supposing that this is as it should be; that Euclid and the rules of logic were made to be forgotten, and that the only thing the college man must carry out into the world is an Attitude to Life and a Purpose. Which is all rot. There is no necessity for preaching ideals to a graduating class. The ideals that a man ought to cling to in life are the same that a decent young man will have lived up to in college. The dangers and temptations he will confront are very much like those he has had to fight on the campus. The undergraduate of to-day is not a babe or a baa-lamb."

He paused and seemed to be weighing the significance of what he had said. Apparently he was pleased. He nodded a vigorous approval of his own views on the subject, and proceeded:

"It is not the temptations of the world the college man must be on the lookout against, but its stupidities, its irrelevancies, its general besotted ignorance. He is less in peril of the flesh and the devil than of the screaming, unintelligent newspaper headline, whether it leads off an interview with a vaudeville star or with a histrionic college professor. What he needs to be reminded of is not principles, but a few elementary facts. My own commencement address would consist of nothing more or less than a brief review of the four years' work in class--algebra, geometry, history, physics, chemistry, psychology, everything."

"How extraordinarily simple!" I said. "The wonder is no one has ever thought of this before."

"I admit," he said, "that it may be rather difficult to compress all that matter in fifteen hundred words, but it can be done. It can be done in less than that. My peroration, for instance, would go somewhat as follows--that is, if you care to listen?"

"It will do no harm to listen," I said.

"I would end in some such way: 'Members of the graduating class, as you leave the shades of alma mater for the career of life, the one thing above all others that you must carry with you is a clear and ready knowledge of the multiplication table. Wherever your destiny may lead you, to the Halls of Congress, to the Stock Exchange, to the counting room, the hospital ward, or the editorial desk, let not your mind wander from the following fundamental truths. Two times two is four. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Rome fell in the year 476, but it was founded in the year 753 B. C., and so took exactly 1,229 years to fall. The northern frontier of Spain coincides with the southern frontier of France. The Ten Commandments were formulated at least 2,500 years ago. Japan is sixty times as far away from San Francisco as it is from the mainland of Asia. Virginius killed his daughter rather than let her live in shame. The subject of illicit love was treated with conspicuous ability by Euripides. The legal rate of interest in most of the States of the Union is six per cent. The instinct for self-preservation is one of the elementary laws of evolution. Hamlet is a work of genius. Victor Hugo is the author of "Les Misérables." I thank you.'"

"Thus equipped, any young man ought to become President in time," I said.

"Thus equipped," retorted Harding, "any young man ought to make his way through life as a rational being, and not as a sheep. And that is the main purpose of a college education, or of any process of education. No amount of moral enthusiasm will safeguard a man against the statement that the panic of 1893 was caused by the Democratic tariff bill; but the knowledge that the tariff bill was passed in 1894 may be of use. It saves a rational being from talking like a fool. Idealism will not keep a man from investing in get-rich-quick corporation stock; but knowledge of the fact that the common sense and experience of mankind have agreed upon six per cent. as a fair return on capital will keep him from going after 520 per cent. Mind you, it is not the fact that he will lose his money which concerns me. It is the fact that there should be a mentality capable of believing in 520 per cent. The dignity of the human mind is at stake. Or take this matter of the boundary line between France and Spain."

"If you are sure it is related to the subject in hand," I said.

"It is, intimately," he replied. "I am, as you know, exceedingly fond of books of travel. I read them as eagerly as I do all the cheap fiction that deal with brave adventures in foreign lands. Now a very common trait in books of both kinds is the author's fondness for pointing out the differences between the people of the southern part of a particular country and the people living in the northern part. You are familiar with the distinction. The inhabitants of the south are hot-headed, amorous, given to mandolin playing, and lacking in political genius. The people of the north are phlegmatic, practical, averse to love-making, unimaginative, readers of the Bible, and tenacious of their rights. I don't recall who first called attention to the fact. Perhaps it was Macaulay. Perhaps it was Herodotus. The idea is sound enough.

"But observe what the writers have made out of this simple truth. It has escaped them that anything is north or south only by comparison with something else. In the minds of our parrot authors the south has simply become associated with one set of stock phrases and the north with another. Here is where my Franco-Spanish frontier comes in. We learn that the people of southern Spain are gay and fickle whereas the people of northern Spain are sturdy and sober-minded. But cross over into France and the people of southern France are once more gay and fickle, in spite of the fact that they live further north than the sober-minded inhabitants of northern Spain; and the people of northern France are calm and self-reliant. Moving still further toward the Pole, into Belgium, we find that the Belgians of the south are a frivolous lot, but the Belgians of the north are eminently desirable citizens. From what I have said you will no longer be surprised to hear that the inhabitants of southern Sweden are a harum-scarum populace, whereas in the north of Sweden every one attends to his own business. As a result of my long course in travel literature I am convinced that the southern Eskimos are not to be mentioned in the same breath, for hardihood and manly self-control, with the sturdy inhabitants of northern Congo. People go on writing this terrific nonsense and people go on reading it. A brief review in geography would put a stop to the nefarious practice. Have I made myself clear?"

"The question is whether people are interested in the countries you have mentioned," I said.

Even then Harding was patient with me.

"That is what I would try to do in my commencement oration--arm those young minds against the catch-words and imbecilities of the great world. Altruism, the passion for service, the passion for progress, are all very well in their way. But first of all comes the duty of every man to defend the integrity of his own mind and the multiplication table."

XXVI

BRICK AND MORTAR

It is a pleasure to put before my readers the first completely unauthorised interview with Professor Henri Bergson on the spiritual significance of American architecture. We were speaking of Mr. Guy Lowell's original design for New York's new County Court house.

M. Bergson smiled pragmatically.

"A round court house, you say? Suggestive of the Colosseum, with a touch of the Tower of Babel, and the merest _soupçon_ of Barnum and Bailey? Come then, why not? To me it is eminently just that your architecture should typify the different racial strains that have entered into the making of the American people. When one observes in the façade of your magnificent public buildings the characteristic marks of the Chinese, the Red Indian, the Turco-Tartar, the Provençal, the Lombard Renaissance, the Eskimo, and the Late Patagonian, one catches for the first time the full meaning of your so complex civilisation."

The distinguished philosopher turned in his seat, struck a match on a marble bust of Immanuel Kant just behind him, and lit his cigar. He gazed thoughtfully out of the window. Before him stretched the enchanting panorama of Paris so familiar to American eyes--Notre Dame, the Gare de St. Lazare, the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower, the cypresses of Père Lachaise, the tomb of Napoleon, and the offices of the American Express Company.

"Yes," he said, "one envies the advantages of your multi-millionaires. The kings and princes of former times, when they built themselves a home, had to be content with a single school of architecture. Your rich men on Fifth Avenue may have two styles, three, four--what say I?--a dozen! And on their country estates, where there is a garage, a conservatory, stables, kennels, the opportunities are unlimited."

"But we have pretty well exhausted all the known styles," I said. "What about the future?"

"Have no fear," he replied. "The archæologists are continually digging up new monuments of primitive architecture. By the time you need a new City Hall excavations will be very far advanced in Peru and Ceylon.

"The one secret of great architecture," M. Bergson went on, "is that it shall contain a soul, that it shall be the expression of an idea. A splendid courage accompanied by a high degree of disorder is what I regard as the American Idea. Hence the perfect propriety of a fifty-story Venetian tower overlooking a Byzantine temple devoted to the Presbyterian form of worship. Too many of my countrymen are tempted to scoff at your skyscrapers. But I maintain that a skyscraper perfectly expresses the spirit of a people which has created Pittsburg, the Panama Canal, and Mr. Hammerstein's chain of opera houses. Take your loftiest structures in New York and think what they stand for."

I thought in accordance with instructions, and recognised that the three tallest structures in New York symbolised, respectively, the triumph of the five and ten cent store, the sewing machine, and industrial insurance at ten cents a week.

"In your skyscrapers," he went on, "there speaks out the soul of American idealism."