Chapter IV

Ladies of “health culture” clubs are sharply concerned about the length of the skirts they wear. The purpose of their organizations, indeed, is to protect them against their habit of wearing the skirts too long. It has apparently not occurred to them that here, too, nobody is compelling them to continue a disagreeable practice, and that with a pair of scissors any woman can accomplish for herself all that she wants the clubs to do for her. If the long skirt no longer please, why not drop it? Nothing is easier. No concert of action definitely agreed on was required to bring it in; none is required to oust it. The enterprising gentleman who, having laid hold of the tail of a bear, called lustily for somebody to help him let go, acted from an intelligible motive, but I submit that if a woman stop following a disagreeable fashion it will not turn and rend her.

No more hideous garment than the skirt is knowable or thinkable. In its every aspect it discloses an inherent and irremediable impulchritude. It is devoid of even the imaginary beauty of utility, for it is not only needless but obstruent, impeditive, oppugnant. Promoting the sense of restraint, it enslaves the character. Had one been asked to invent a garment that should make its wearer servile in spirit one would have consulted the foremost living oppressor and designed the skirt. That reasonless habiliment ought long ago to have been flung into Nature’s vacant lot and found everlasting peace along with gone-before cats, late-lamented dogs, unsouled tin cans and other appurtenances and proofs of mortality. There is not a valid reason in the world why a skirt of any length, shape or material should ever have been worn; and one of the strongest evidences of women’s unfitness for a part in the larger affairs of the race is their obstinacy in clinging to the skirt—or rather in permitting it to cling to them. So long as women garb their bodies and their legs foolwise they may profitably save that part of their breath now wasted in becoloneling themselves and reducing Tyrant Man to the ranks.

Doubtless the skirt figures as one count in the long indictment against the Oppressor Sex, as once bracelets and bangles did—it being pointed out with acerbity that these are vestigial remnants of chains and shackles. The same “claim” has been made for the eviscerating corset—I forget upon what grounds. Of course men have had nothing to do with the corset, excepting, in season and out of season, to implore women not to wear it. The skirt we have merely tolerated, or from lack of thought assented to. But if we were the sons of darkness which in deference to the lady colonels we feel that we ought to confess ourselves, and if we had been minded to enslave our bitter halves, we could hardly have done better than to have “invented and gone round advising” the skirt. Any constant restraint of the body reacts upon the mind. To hamper the limbs is to subdue the spirit. Other things equal—which they could not be—a naked nation would be harder to conquer than one accustomed to clothing. The costume of the modern “civilized” man is bad enough in this way, but that of his female is a standing challenge to the fool-killer. Considering the use and purpose of the human leg, it seems almost incredible that this hampering garment could have been imposed upon women by anything less imperative than a divine commandment.

One reads a deal about the “immodesty” of the skirtless costume, not, I think, because any one believes it immodest, but because its opponents find in that theme an assured immunity from prosecution in making an indecent exposure of their minds. This talk of immodesty is simply one manifestation of public immorality—the immorality of an age in which it is considered right and reputable for women and girls, in company with men, to witness the capering of actresses and dancers who in the name of art strip themselves to the ultimate inch—whose every motion in their saltatory rites is nicely calculated to display as much of the person as the law allows! Why else do they whirl and spin till their make-believe skirts are horizontal? Why else do they spring into the air and come down like a collapsed parachute? These motions have nothing of grace; in point of art they are distinctly disagreeable. Their sole purpose is indelicate suggestion. Every male spectator knows this; every female as well; yet we lie to ourselves and to one another in justification—lie knowing that no one is thereby deceived as to the nature of the performance and our motives in attending it. We call it art, and if that flimsy fiction were insufficient would doubtless call it duty. The only person that affects no illusion in the matter is the exhibiting hussy herself. She at least is free of the sin of hypocrisy—save when condemning “bloomers” in the public press.

As censors of morals the ladies of the ballet are perhaps half-a-trifle insincere; I like better the simple good faith of the austere society dame who to a large and admiring audience of semi-nude men displays her daughter’s charms of person at the bathing beach, with an occasional undress parade of her own ample endowments. She is in deadly earnest, the good old girl—she is entirely persuaded of the wickedness of the “bloomers.” Why, it would hardly be more indelicate (she says) to wear her bathing habit in the street or drawing-room! If she were not altogether destitute of reason she would deprive herself of that illustration, for a costume is no more indelicate in one public place than in another. One of the congenital ear-marks of the Philistine understanding is inability to distinguish inappropriateness from immodesty—bad taste from faulty morals. The blush that would crimson the cheek of a woman shopping in evening dress (and women who wear evening dress sometimes retain the blush-habit; such are the wonders of heredity!) would indubitably have its origin in a keen sense of exposure. It would make a cat laugh, but it would be an honest blush and eminently natural. The phenomenon requiring an explanation is the no-blush when she is caught in the same costume at a ball or a dinner.

In nations that cover the body for another purpose than decoration and protection from the weather, disputes as to how much of it, and in what circumstances, should be covered are inevitable and uncomposable. Alike in nature and in art, the question of the nude will be always demanding adjustment and be never adjusted. This wrangle we have always with us as a penalty for the prudery of concealment, creating and suggesting the prurience of exposure.

Offended Nature hides her lash
In the purple-black of a dyed mustache,

and the lash lurks in every fold of the clothing of her choice. In ancient Greece the disgraceful squabble was unknown; it did not occur to the great-hearted, broad-brained and wholesome people of that blessed land that any of the handiwork of the gods was ignoble. Nor are the modern Japanese vexed with “the question of the nude”; save where their admirable civilization has suffered the polluting touch of ours they have not learned the infamy of sex. Among the blessings in store for them are their conversion to decorous lubricity and instruction in the nice conduct of a clouded mind.

I am not myself prepared to utter judgment in all these matters. I do not know the precise degree of propriety in a lady’s “full dress” at dinner, nor exactly how suggestive it is at breakfast. I can not say with accuracy when and where and why a costume is immodest that is modest in a mixed crowd at the sea beach. But this I know, despite all the ingenious fictions, subtleties and sophistries wherewith naked Nonsense is accustomed to drape herself as with a skeletonized fig-leaf: that no man nor any woman addicted to play-going, society entertainments and surf-bathing has the right to censure any costume that is tolerated by the police. As to the “bloomers,” they have not a suggestion of indelicacy, and of the person who professes to see it in them I, for one, am fatigued and indisposed; and I confidently affirm the advantage to the commonwealth of binding him to his own back and removing the organ that he is an idiot with.

I have the vanity to think it already known to me why our women wear the skirt—just as it is known to me why the women of certain African tribes load themselves with enormous metal neck-rings and the male of their variety attaches a cow-tail to his barren rear. But what these impedimental adornments are for, the wearers can no more explain than the Caucasian female (assisted by her “man of equal mind”) can expound the purpose of her skirt, nor even be made to understand that its utility is actually challenged. But what would one have? Wisdom comes of mental freedom; are we to look for that in victims and advocates of physical restraint? Can we reasonably expect large intellectual strides in those who voluntarily hamper their legs? Is it to be believed that an unremittent sense of hindrance will not affect the mind and character? With woman’s inconsiderable reasoning power the skirt, the corset and the finery have had as much to do as anything. If she wants emancipation from the imaginary tyranny of Man the Monster, let her show herself worthy of it by overthrowing the actual despotism maintained by herself. Let her unbind her body and liberate her legs; then we shall know if she has a mind that can be taught to stand alone and march without the suasion of a bayonet.

1895.

BREACHES OF PROMISE

There should be no such thing as an action for a breach of promise of marriage. An action for promise of marriage would be in some ways preferable, for where damages ensue it is the promise that has caused them. Doubtless the hurt heart of one who is abandoned by her lover, especially after providing the trousseau and kindly apprising all her rivals, is justly entitled to sympathetic commiseration, but the pain is one that the law can not undertake to heal. In theory at least it concerns itself with actual privation of such pecuniary advantages as would have accrued to the plaintiff from marriage with the defendant, and such other losses as can be denoted by the figures of arithmetic. If the defendant were liable for the pain he inflicted by breaking his promise he might justly demand compensation for the joy that he gave in making it. Where the courtship had been long there might be a considerable balance in his favor. Nor is it altogether clear that he ought not to be allowed to file a counter-claim based upon the profit of getting rid of him.

But is the loss of a merely promised advantage a loss that ought to be a matter of legal inquiry and repair? In the promise to pay money, and in papers transferring property from one person to another, it is requisite that a “consideration” be expressed: the person claiming value from another must show that value was given. What is the consideration in the case of a marriage-promise? What computable value has the defendant in a breach of promise case received that the plaintiff could, or if she could would care to, estimate in dollars and cents? Would she undertake to submit an itemized bill? As a rule, the promiser of marriage receives nothing for which the performance of his promise would be an “equivalent” in the commercial sense. True, he obtains by his promise certain privileges which (it is said) he deems precious; but all the accepted authorities on this subject declare that in the exercise of these he imparts no small satisfaction to the person bestowing them.

Accurately speaking, then, a promise of marriage is a promise without consideration; and whatever merely sentimental injuries result from its infraction might justly be squared by a merely sentimental reparation. Perhaps it would be enough if the injured plaintiff in a breach of promise suit were awarded the illusory advantage but acceptable gratification of wigging the defendant’s attorney.

It may be said that the defendant’s equivalent for his promise was the lady’s tender of such services as wives perform for husbands—among which the peasant-born humorist of the period loves to enumerate such mysterious functions as “building the fire” and assisting to search for the soap in the bath-tub. But it must not be overlooked that this tender is itself only a promise whereof the performance fails, along with that of the one for which it is given in exchange: the fire remains unbuilded and the soap is lost. One unfulfilled promise is no better than another. Nay, it is not so good.

But if we are to have suits for breach of promise of marriage it can at least be so ordered that there shall be no question of proof. An act of the legislature is enough for that. Let there be a law that marriage engagements to be valid shall be in writing. This would work no hardship to anybody, and would be a pleasing contrast to the law which does _not_ require any authenticating formality for the marriage itself. If a man really wish and mean to marry he will not be unwilling to say so over his hand and seal, and have the declaration duly attested. The lack of such evidence as this should be a bar to any action. It is admitted that this rigorous requirement would be pretty hard on such ladies as rich bachelors and widowers have the hardihood to be civil to, and that it would deprive the intelligent juror of such delight as he derives from giving away another man’s property without loss to himself. Its advantage would be found in its tendency to prevent the courts of law from being loaded up with the class of cases under consideration, to the exclusion of much other business. The number of wealthy men increases yearly with the country’s prosperity, and they grow more and more unmarried. Under the present system they are easy prey, but the operation of despoiling them is tedious; wherefore worthy assassins are compelled to wait an unconscionably long time for acquittal. The reform that I venture to suggest would disembarrass the courts of the ambitious “ladifrend” and the scheming domestic, and give the murderers a chance. As a matter of expediency, I think a man should be permitted to change his mind as to whom he will marry, as frequently as it may please him to do so; almost any change in the mind of a man in love must be in the direction of improvement.

THE TURKO-GRECIAN WAR

The Turks are not the ferocious fanatics that our respect for the commandment against bearing false witness does not forbid us to affirm. They are a good-natured, rather indolent people, among whom all races and religions find security in good behavior, and, in so far as differences of social and religious customs will allow, fraternity. They are a trifle corrupt, but from neither an American legislator nor his constituents is censure of political profligacy in other lands than ours an edifying utterance. In Mohammedan countries even slavery is a light affliction. As to “savagery,” “butchery” and the rest of it, let the ten thousand Americans murdered with impunity by their own countrymen last year open their white lips and testify. And let the ten thousand who are to be murdered this year reserve judgment on the right of the American character to mount the pulpit and deal damnation round on heads that wear the fez.

Like the Bulgarian “massacres” of a few years ago, which so pained the blameless soul of Christendom and drew from holy Mr. Gladstone that Christianly charitable term, “the unspeakable Turk,” the Armenian “massacres” are mostly moonshine—as massacres. It should never be forgotten that our accounts of these deplorable events come almost altogether from Christian missionaries—narrow, bigoted zealots, who doubtless stand well in the other world, but in this world are untrustworthy historians of the troubles which their impenitent meddlesomeness incites. They are swift and willing witnesses, and their interest lies in the direction of exaggeration. Not much of moderation and disinterestedness can under any circumstances be expected of persons who make it the business of their lives to go abroad to crack theological nuts upon the heads of others and eat the kernels themselves. A man of sane heart and right reason will no more interfere with the spiritual affairs of others than with their temporal. This much any one may know who has the sense to learn: that the troubles in Armenia are not religious persecutions, but political disturbances, and that next to Mohammedan Kurds the most incorrigible scamps in Asia are Armenian Christians.

Among military men the superior character of Turkish soldiers is a familiar consideration. The war minister or general who should order or conduct a campaign against them without conceding to their terrible fighting qualities a particular attention in reckoning the chances of success would show a lamentable ignorance of his business. For that veritable folly the Greeks recently paid through the nose. With a childish trust in an enthusiasm that hardly outlasted the smoke of the first gun, they threw their undisciplined crowds against superior numbers of these formidable fighters in a quarrel in which their only hope of national existence if beaten lay in the magnanimity of the Powers whose protection they disclaimed. It is by the sufferance and grace of these Powers that the name of Greece remains on the map of Europe.

All this sentiment about the debt that civilization owes to Greece is foolish: the Greece to which civilization is indebted for its glorious heritage of art, philosophy and literature is dead these many ages—a memory and a name. The debtor is without a creditor, the claimant without a claim. Greece would herself be justly liable for her share of the debt if there were anybody to whom to pay it. As to the claims of “our common religion” (that is, the right to our assistance in violating our common religion’s fundamental and most precious precepts) it should be sufficient to say that if the modern Greek is a Christian Christ was not. If Christ were among the Athenians to-day they would part his raiment among them before crucifixion and cast lots for his vesture with loaded dice.

From the first the cause of the Greeks was hopeless. They were a feeble nation making unjust war against a strong one. They were a merely warlike people attacking a military people—the worst soldiers in Europe, without commanders, challenging the best soldiers in the world led by two able strategists. Without resources, without credit, without allies, and relying upon miracles, they flung themselves upon an enemy favored by united Europe. It was the act not of heroes, but of madmen. Had they been content to accept the autonomy of Crete their action in occupying that island would have commanded at least the respect of every poker-player in the world. Demanding all, they naturally got nothing. True, they had the moral support of that part of Christendom addicted to the flourish of tongues, and were particularly rich in resolutions of American sympathy, some of them beautifully engrossed on parchment.

One of the most amusing rascalities of that war was the attempt to invest it with a religious character. This smug villainy was especially manifest in the “resolutions” and the telegrams of press correspondents, from whom we heard very little about the Turks and the Greeks, but a great deal about the “Moslems” and the “Christians.” Even the soldierly superiority of the Turks in valor and discipline was perverted to their disparagement. We were told of their “mad, fanatical charges,” which by way of variety were called also “irresistible rushes of crazy zealots”; and one splendorous historiographer described the victorious battalions as “drunken with Armenian blood”! How to distinguish between an assault that is fanatical and one that is merely courageous—that is a secret that neither the saintly scribe nor the sober Greek lingered to learn. In a general way the gallant charge is made by troops of our own race and religion, the fanatical rush by those of another and inferior faith.

Hardly less brilliant were the accounts of “Moslem” cruelty, particularly to prisoners, under whom their captors kindled discomforting fires—a needless labor, for it would have been greatly easier to make the fire on unoccupied ground and superpose the prisoner afterward. The customary rites of parting the heads of women and eviscerating babes were not neglected: all the requirements of invasion received careful attention—as they did in Cuba, as they once did in France, as they previously did in the Southern States of our Union, and before that in the revolted colonies of Great Britain. Edhem Pasha was a strict constructionist of the popular law; as a conscientious invader operating among an inhospitable populace, he thoughtfully gave himself the trouble to be a “butcher”—as Cornwallis was in the Colonies, as Grant was in the South, as Von Moltke was in France, and as Weyler was in Cuba. If it were not for picturesque narratives of tortured prisoners, multisected women, children ingeniously bayoneted and old men fearfully and wonderfully defaced by the hand of an artist, the literature of conquest would lack the salt that keeps it sweet in the memory and the spice that gives it glow.

Of course it is all nonsense: cruelties are not practiced in modern wars between civilized nations. (It is true that the Turks, or some of them, are so uncivilized as to have a number of Turkesses each, but that is not visibly bad for them, and appears to be condemned on the ground that it is somehow bad for us.) Indubitably Turkey’s doom as a European Power was long ago pronounced in the Russian language, but she dies with a dignity befitting her glorious history. Foot to foot and sword to sword she struggles with the hosts assailing her, now on this side, and now on that. Against attack by her powerful neighbors and insurrection of her heterogeneous provinces, she has manifested a courage, a vitality, a fertility of resource, a continuity and tenacity of purpose which in a Christian nation would command our respect and engage our enthusiasm. Unfortunately for them, her people worship God in a way that is different from our way, and with a sincerity which in us would be zeal if we had it, but which in them is fanaticism. Therefore they are hateful. Therefore they are unspeakable. Therefore we lie about them and, because of the respectability of the witnesses, believe our own lies. Truth is not in us, nor the sense of its need; charity nor the memory of its primacy among virtues.

1897.

CATS OF CHEYENNE

The city of Cheyenne, Wyoming, recently experienced a peculiar and singularly sharp affliction in the insanity of all its cats. Cheyenne cats had theretofore been regarded as the most level-headed and least mercurial of their species. Nothing in their aspect nor demeanor had been observed to justify a suspicion that they suffered from uncommonness of mind; then they developed symptoms of such pronounced intellectual independence that even the local physicians, inured to all phases and degrees of eccentricity in the human contingent of Cheyenne’s population, were unable to ignore the melancholy significance of the phenomena—the cats of Cheyenne were indubitably as mad as hatters.

To him who has duly considered the cat’s place in the scheme of modern civilization, the actual calamity will suggest possibilities of the most dismal and gruesome sort. In imagination he will see (and hear) the mental epidemic spreading by contagion until it affects the cats of the whole world, and perhaps those of Denver. The musical outlook is discouraging: the orchestration of a feline lunatic in one of its deuced intervals can be nothing less than appalling! Fancy a maniacal male of the species, beneath his favorite window of the dormitory of a hospital for nervous insomnia, securely casemented in an empty crate and courting rather than avoiding the assaults of the wild bootjacquerie above, while twanging his disordered fiddle-strings for the production of

a long unmeasured tone
To mortal minstrelsy unknown,

and then executing such variants of his theme as no rational cat has ever been able or willing to compose!

The cause of the outbreak was no less remarkable than the outbreak itself: the cats of Cheyenne incurred mental confusion from being supercharged with electricity. For a period of seven weeks the wind blew across the delightful region of which that city is the capital, at a calculated average velocity of thirty miles an hour. “The ground in consequence,” according to a resident scientist, “has become extremely dry, and the friction of the wind in passing over it has produced an enormous quantity of electricity, and every one is more or less charged.” So seriously indeed were some of the newer residents affected that they have had to leave Cheyenne and go to California for relief; and of those remaining it is related that even now when they shake hands there is a distinct and painful shock to him who is the less electrified. The performance of this social rite has therefore fallen into “innocuous desuetude,” men conscious of being imperfectly charged eying every approaching friend with natural suspicion, and preferring to pain him with a distant bow rather than incur the thunderbolt of a more familiar greeting. It is not apprehended that our most sacred American custom is menaced with anything more than local and temporary suspension, but it is feared that the American cat is on the eve of stupendous intellectual and musical changes that will make the name of Cheyenne memorable forever.

THANKSGIVING DAY

There be those whose memories though vexed with a rake would yield no matter for gratitude. With a waistcoat fitted to the occasion, it is easy enough to eat one’s allowance of turkey and hide away one’s dishonest share of the wine; if this be returning thanks, why, then, gratitude is considerably easier, and vastly more agreeable, than “falling off a log,” and may be acquired in one easy lesson. But if more than this be required—if to be grateful is more than merely to be gluttonous, your true philosopher (he of the austere brow upon which logic has stamped its eternal impress, and from whose heart sentiment has been banished along with other vestigial vices) will think twice and again before leveling his serviceable shins in humble observance of the day.

For here is the nut of reason that he is compelled to crack for the kernel of emotion appropriate to the rite. Unless the blessings that we think we enjoy are favors of the Omnipotent, to be grateful is to be absurd. If they are, then, also, the evils with which we are indubitably afflicted have the same origin. Grant this, as you must, and you make an offset of the ill against the good, or are driven either to the untenable position that we should be grateful for both, or the no more defensible one that all evils are blessings in disguise.

Truth is, my fine fellow of the distensible weskit, your annual gratitude is a sorry pretense, a veritable sham, a cloak, dear man, to cover your unhandsome gluttony; and when by chance you actually do take to your knees on one day in the year it is for physical relief and readier digestion of your bird. Nevertheless, there is truly a subtle but significant relation between the stuffing of the flesh and the gratitude of the spirit, as you shall see.

I have ever held and taught the identity of Stomach and Soul—one entity considered under two aspects. Gratitude I believe to be a kind of imponderable ether evolved, mainly, from the action of the gastric fluid upon rich provend and comforting tope. Like other gases it ascends, and so passes out at mouth, audible, intelligible, gracious. This beautiful theory has been tested by convincing experiment in the manner scientific, as here related.

_Experiment I._ A quantity of grass was put into a leathern bottle and a gill of the gastric fluid of a sheep introduced. In ten minutes the neck of the bottle emitted a contented bleat.

_Experiment II._ A pound of beef was substituted for the grass and the fluid of a dog for that of the sheep. The result was a cheerful bark, accompanied by agitation of the bottom of the bottle, as if an attempt were making to wag it.

_Experiment III._ The bottle was charged with a handful of chopped turkey, a glass of old port, and four ounces of human gastric fluid obtained from a coroner. At first nothing escaped from the neck but a deep sigh of satisfaction, followed by a grunt like that of a banqueting pig. The proportion of turkey being increased and the gas confined, the bottle was greatly distended, appearing to suffer a slight uneasiness. The restriction being removed, the experimenter had the happiness to hear, distinctly articulated, the words: “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow—praise Him all bottles here below!”

Against such demonstration as this all theological interpretation of the phenomena of gratitude is of no avail.

1869.

THE HOUR AND THE MAN

Contrary to popular belief, “the hour” does not always bring “the man.” It did not bring him for France in 1870. In our civil war it brought him for the Confederacy, but a chance bullet took him off. Every defeat of a cause discredits anew the superstition about “the hour and the man.” When the hour strikes, the man may be already present and not hear. The “mute, inglorious Milton,” dying with all his music in him, is no more real a character than the mute, inglorious Cæsar trudging along in the ranks, unsuspected by his comrades and unaware of himself. Even if conscious of his own consummate genius, and impressing a sense of it upon others, it is by no means certain that he will come to the control. An intrigue, the selfish jealousy of some little soul in authority, the caprice of a woman behind the throne, an unfortunate peculiarity of manner in himself, a stumbling horse, a random bullet—any one of ten thousand accidents may deprive his country of the stupendous advantage of his directing hand.

It was once the fashion among the school of thinkers of which that truly great man, John Stuart Mill, was the head almost altogether to ignore the “personal equation” in matters of “great pith and moment.” They recognized the trend of tendencies—great currents of energy which apparently had an existence and control quite independent of, and apart from, human agency. In their view, individual men, so far from guiding the course of events, were borne along by them like leaves by the wind. They taught, by implication if not directly, that the Europe of their day would have been pretty much the same without, for example, the Napoleon of the day before. The conception of a single dominating mind bending other minds to its will and working stupendous changes, even by its caprices, these philosophers considered altogether too primitive and crude for the world’s manhood, and most of us who were young in their day assisted in discrediting their theory by reverently accepting it. We have recovered now; nobody to-day thinks after that fashion of thought, excepting Tolstoi. The importance of the individual will, consciously striving for the attainment of definitive ends, yet subject to all the caprices of chance and accident, is restored in the minds of men to its own reign of reason.

Considering the matter only in the limited view of its relation to military success, we all see, or suppose ourselves to see, that if Marlborough had died of measles when he was John Churchill; if Frederick had burst a blood vessel in one of his blind rages before he became the Great; if Carnot had fallen down a cellar stairway when he was a boy; if Napoleon had been knocked over at the bridge of Arcola, or Von Moltke had deserted to the French and been given command of the column that was headed for Berlin, the historian of to-day would have had a Europe to deal with which it is impossible now even to conceive. Suppose that “the hour” had not brought John Sobieski to confront the victorious Turk a couple of centuries ago. Europe might now be Mohammedan and the word Russia destitute of meaning. Considerations of this character may advantageously be permitted to teach us humility in the matter of prophecy, and particularly with reference to military undertakings, than the result of which nothing is more beset with accident and dependent upon the unknowable and incalculable.

MORTUARY ELECTROPLATING

To the proposition that electroplating the dead is the best way to dispose of them there is this considerable objection—it does not dispose of them. The plan is not without its advantages, some of which are obvious enough to mention. Nothing, for example, can be more satisfactory to a husband engaged in dying than the reflection that as a nickel-plated statue of himself he may still adorn the conjugal fireside and become an object of peculiar interest and sympathy to his successor. There are few remains, indeed, to whom this would not seem a softer billet than “to lie in cold obstruction” in a cemetery, from which, after all, one is usually routed out in a few years to accommodate a corner grocery or a boarding-house.

The light cost of ornamenting our public buildings with distinguished men themselves, as compared with the present enormous expense of obtaining statues of them, will commend the régime of electroplating to every frugal taxpayer and make him hail its dawn with a peculiar joy. In order to make the most of this advantage it is to be hoped that any public-spirited “prominent citizen” feeling his sands of life about run out, would consent to be posed by an artist in some striking and heroic attitude, ready for the _rigor mortis_ to fix him in it for the plater. It would be but a trifling sacrifice for a great writer to pass the last ten minutes of his life cross-legged in a chair, with a pen in one hand and a thumb and forefinger of the other spanning a space on his dome of thought. A distinguished statesman would not find it so very inconvenient to breathe his last standing in the characteristic attitude of his profession, his left thumb supported in the opening of a waistcoat thoughtfully constructed to button the wrong way, and his right hand holding a scroll. In dying grandly on the acclivity of a rearing horse, a famous warrior could at the same time lay his countrymen under an added obligation and assist them fitly to discharge it.

The process of electroplation (if one may venture to anticipate a word that is inevitable) does not, unluckily, permit us to retain the deceased “in his habit as he lived,” textile fabrics not being susceptible to the magic of its method; but the figures of eminent decedents exposed in public places to fire the ambition of American youth could be provided with real tailor-made suits, either in the fashion of their time and Congressional district or in that of ancient Rome, as might be preferred by the public taste for the time being, and the tailors’ bills would probably, in some instances, be almost as interesting, if not nearly so startling, as that item in an early English Passion-play account, in which the management is charged five shillings and sixpence for “a cote for Godd.”

To that entire class of decedents whom we may call eminent-public-services men, the objection that electroplating the dead does not permanently dispose of them has no practical application. Of them we do not wish to dispose; we want to retain them for embellishment of our parks, the façades of our public buildings and the walls of our art galleries. But in its relation to “vulgar deaths unknown to fame” the objection is indeed fatal. If this mortal is going to put on immortality in so strictly literal a sense—if the dead are to be still with us in a tangible and visible reality, the fact will be embarrassing, no doubt. Under a régime in which a dead man will take up as much room as a living one, it is evident that the dead in general will take up a deal more than the living, and the disproportion will increase at an alarming rate.

Science assures us that but for death—including decay—the world would now be so overcrowded that there would be “standing room only,” even for scientists. Electroplating proposes to enjoin decay. Is it advisable? Is it wise? Is it fair to posterity? Shall we impose ourselves upon those who “inherit us,” without providing for the expense of our warehousing? It can hardly be expected that even the most “well-preserved old gentleman” will be an object of veneration and affection to his great-great-great-grandchild, even if he is so fortunate as to be authentic—unless, indeed, he happen to be plated with gold. In that case, though, he would be hardly likely to descend intact to so remote a generation. An unusually comely electroplatee of the opposing sex might be a joy forever as a work of art, and the task of polishing her be a labor of love for many centuries; but the common ruck of hard-shell ancestors, although bearing inscriptions attesting their possession of the loftiest virtues in their day and generation, would inspire an insufficiently tender emotion to pay for their lodging.

The time when our beautiful, but not altogether wholesome, cemeteries shall be no more, and in the place of them countless myriads of battered and rusted images shall be corded up like firewood all over the smiling land is a time which we may be thankful that we shall not live to see, and which our love of display should not make us selfishly assist in expediting. It is a glittering temptation, but in fair play to posterity (which has never done anything to embarrass us) it ought to be put resolutely aside.

THE AGE ROMANTIC

Who would not like to have been an Athenian of the time of Pericles? Yet who would have liked to be one? The Periclesian Athenian whom we would all like to have been—provided that we could be also Rooseveltian Americans—took little thought, doubtless, of “the glory that was Greece.” He considered himself singularly unfortunate to live in so prosaic an age. Ah, if he could only have been born an Assyrian in the golden prime of good King Assurbanipal, before the invention of such hideous commonplaces as mathematics, oratory, navigation (with its flaring pharos on every headland), its bad poets, its Pan and the peplum!

A picturesque period is always remote in time; a picturesque land, in distance. It is of the essence of the picturesque that it be unfamiliar. Look at the suave Mexican _caballero_ with his silvered _sombrero_, his silken sash, embroidered jacket fearfully and wonderfully bebraided, his ornate footgear. How he shines in the light of his uncommon identity!—how dull we look, how odious in the comparison! Can it be possible that this glorious creation envies us the engaging simplicity of our habiliments and the charm of our unstudied incivility? And does he execute a rapture over the title “Mister” and the soft, musical vocables of the name “John Henry Smith”?

Who would care to lose his life in ascending White Mountain by a new trail? But Mont Blanc—that is different.

Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains;
They crowned him long ago,

but be sure it was no Frenchman that did the crowning—not with such a name as that! And if the exigencies of the literary situation had compelled Coleridge to think of him in the vernacular he would never have stood in the valley of Chamouni asking him who sank his sunless pillars deep in earth. “White Mountain” is well enough in its way if one think only of its color; but there is the disquieting possibility that it was named in honor of its discoverer (Ezekiel White, of Podunk) like the eminences that “stand dressed in living green” down in New Hampshire.

Call Capri “Goat Island” and you class it with an abomination of that name in the harbor of San Francisco. To the Neapolitan looking

Across the charmed bay
Whose blue waves keep, with Capri’s sunny fountains,
Perpetual holiday

it is just Goat Island, and it is nothing more. The sunny fountains and the famous sea-caverns do not interest him. They are possibly fine, but indubitably familiar.

All this has perhaps something to do with contentment; it may go a short way toward making us willing to be alive. We hear much from the writer-folk about the horrors of this commercial age, the dull monotony of modern life, the depressing daily contact with the things we loathe, to wit, railways, steamships, telephones, electric street-cars and other prosaic things which, when we are not boasting of them, we are reviling. We shudder to think of the railway from Joppa to Jerusalem (if there is one) and sigh for the good old days of the camel—even as we sigh for those of the stage-coach, whereby the traveler met with many romantic adventures in lonely roads and at wayside inns. Well, as to all that, it is still possible to renounce one’s purse to a “road agent” between Squaw Gulch and Ginger Gap if one wish to, and “hold-ups” are not altogether unknown to those who in default of the stage-coach are compelled to travel by express trains.

Is any spectacle really more interesting than a railway train in motion? Why, even the stolidest laborer in the field, or the most _blasé_ switchman off duty, takes a moment off to stare at it. By night, with its dazzling headlight, its engine eating fire and breathing steam and smoke, its flashes of red light upon the trees as its furnace doors are opened and closed, its long line of gleaming windows, the roar and clang of its progress—not in the world is anything more fascinating, more artistic nor, but for its familiarity, more picturesque.

It is so all round: the Atlantic liner is a nobler sight than the clipper ship of our fathers, as that was a nobler sight than the carvel of _their_ fathers, and that than the Roman trireme—each in its turn lamented by solemn protagonists of “the days that are no more” and might advantageously never have been. How the intellectual successors of these lugubrious persons will envy their dead predecessors in the days that are to come! As they go careering through the sky in their airships they will blow apart the clouds with sighs of regret for the golden age of the express train, the trolley car and the automobile. While penetrating the ocean between the German port of Liverpool and the Japanese port of New York they will read with avid interest quaint old chronicles relating to steam-driven vessels that floated on the surface and had many a merry bout with wind and wave. Immersed in waters all aglow with artificial light and color, passing in silence and security above charming landscapes of the sea, and among

The wide-faced, infamous monsters of the deep,

they will deplore their hard lot in living in so prosaic an age, “even as you and I.”

The truth of it all is that we of to-day are favored beyond the power of speech to express in having been born in so fascinating and romantic a period. Not in literature, not in art, but in those things that touch the interest and hold the attention of all classes alike, the last century was as superior to all those that went before as a bird of paradise is superior in beauty and interest to a slug of the field. Science and invention have made our world a spectacular extravaganza, a dream of delight to the senses and the mind. Man has employment for all his eyes and all his ears. Yet always he throws a longing look backward to the barbarism to which eventually he will return.

1902.

THE WAR EVERLASTING