Chapter II

How long shall we perpetuate untruth
And teach that Art does not exist today?
That only idols crumbling with decay
Are meet as shrines for eager, suppliant youth?
How long shall we bow down to foreign gods
And worship them with lips, but not with heart?
We are ashamed to recognize our art,
We sneer and call our native writers clods.
But from the prairies of the grander West--
Free from the ancient gyves that bind and gall--
Are men and women rising to the call,
Intent on only what is new and best.
The East is dead and buried in the Past,
The West alone can do what work will last!

JOHN NORTHERN HILLIARD.

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK.

There are lots of things I should like to say in this place about some of my esteemed contemporaries, but, though not by any means diffident in the expression of my critical opinions, I daren’t unburden my deepest thoughts about the performances of some villains I have in mind. It is not that all the things I _think_ are not strictly within the bounds of severe veracity, but truth is so unpopular in this world,--and especially in the literary world.

Ex-President Harrison has given damning evidence against himself. He has publicly declared himself an utterly impossible person for re-nomination by writing platitudes to the order of “The Ladies Home Journal” genius. We can enjoy a president who goes off “at half-cock” on some questions, and we can respect one who goes fishing while the whole country is anxious about a great national policy, but a president who writes for “The Ladies Home Journal” is beyond our sense of humor or pathos. That is the unforgivable sin--to make one’s self supremely ridiculous.

Alfred Austin, the new poet laureate, is reported to be sitting up night after night, reading his predecessor in the office, carefully, critically straining and comparing the text with his own. He is striving to discover in what this “doosid” difference consists.

It really does strike a person of some sense of humor, and some tenderness for all human creatures, that at this moment the late Earl of Dunraven and the newly appointed poet laureate are the two most pathetic figures in the English-speaking world.

A notable departure in good bookmaking is Percival Pollard’s “Cape of Storms,” a novel in paper covers, with a cover design in colors by Will H. Bradley, and a title page by John Sloan, which is printed in a limited edition and sold at a popular price. This is a new thing in America. Perhaps, however, we are going to adopt the French fashion of paper covered literature. It will give all our authors a wider circulation. Pollard’s story is good, racy reading, which means clever writing.

What modern love has lost in sentimentality and romance it has gained in companionship, depth of feeling and intimacy. The latest phase of courtship is this: When a young man is in love he no longer sends his heart’s delight a silly sentimental poem, he sends her a symbolical Poster. Posters hold some hint of the vagaries and fantasies of the human heart, as sentimental poetry does not.

The triumph of modern love is that both sexes are now allowed to be _human_, and so the old disparity between carnal humanity and cold and frigid divinity, has been abridged. The Poster has helped in the promotion of art feeling in the community. It is also an educational factor in the problem of establishing an equality of common sense between the sexes, that shall not destroy the witchery of woman and the eternal attraction of the sexes.

A lady journalist, who has a decided taste for the belle-lettres, and considerable faculty of her own in the art of making life picturesque, has just apprised me of a very novel scheme of hers in the way of book making.

She once had, as is the custom of so many ladies, an ordinary and inoffensive autograph album. Asking a certain Impressionistic poet for his autograph one day, she received her book back with a few lines, in which the poet thanked Heaven he had had a birthday, so that he had looked upon her beauty and _lived_, in the deeper sense than mere living. This date disappeared from the album.

But the incident gave my quick-witted young lady an idea. She bought a dainty book of manuscript leaves bound in Russia leather. It is now worth its price in gold, for she has, by flattery and cajolery, and the fine art of being beautiful, got it filled with sketches from the pens of some of the leading authors of the day. And the character of the volume is more unique since the theme of all these fine wits is the same. The sketches are all prose pastels, inspired by the young lady’s own personality.

After reading Ian Maclaren’s “Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush,” I feel like following the precedent of the illustrious Horace Greeley and giving some advice to ambitious wayfarers. The Drumtochty folk are so uniformly generous, self sacrificing, unselfish, humane and philanthropic, that I should advise all young men of unsettled prospects not to turn their gaze westward, but to cross the seas and settle in Drumtochty. Intellectual enterprises of the most ambitious and revolutionary character, I observe, are practically encouraged and prosper there as in no other place on earth that I ever heard of. Are you a young and poor boy consumed with a desire to fit yourself for a scholar’s life and easy fortunes? Then start for Drumtochty without further ado. The blameless farmer folk there have only to be approached by the Dominie and they will immediately start you in life and pay all your expenses to a professorial chair. Are you literary? There never was such another community with the same keen scent for true imagination and poetry. Oh, it is an ideal hamlet, truly, for the intellectuals! There are more philanthropists huddled together there in one small parish than in the rest of Great Britain and the whole United States. I think even the FLY LEAF would bring in great returns in such a community.

An old lady in a hill-top town in New Hampshire has written to her local newspaper warning the youth against my corrupting influence and machinations--and so I am evidently in imminent nearness to the popularity that attends all corrupters of morals.

This good lady does not charge me with any actual breaches of morality, but she detects an irreverence in my temperament and mind that might lead me to the commission of all the crimes that moral folk find so much joy in contemplating. There is, she avers, a flippancy in my view of some established things that might lead to any perversion of youth. She is sure I am immoral and should be suppressed, although she can discover no more heinous offence in me than a certain callousness in regard to the feelings of witless respectables and old fogies. She objects to the use of that term of opprobrium, and considers it _indecent_.

If it could only be proved so--why, hooray! If this rumor of our immorality can only be carried far and wide enough, it is clear our fortunes are made. This is the secret of success in contemporary literature. All the novelists of the day are worrying out this problem: How to present some new phase of morality that shall contain the broadest suggestions of immorality.

THE LONDON ACADEMY

The Leading Critical Literary Journal of London, in a long review of
“MEDITATIONS IN MOTLEY,” by WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE, says, among other
things:

“When any book of good criticism comes it should be welcomed and made known for the benefit of the persons who care for such works. The book under notice is one of these. It is, so far as I know, the first from the author’s pen; but his writings are well known, and those who read his present book will, with some eagerness, await its successor. For it is a book in which wit and bright, if often satirical, humor are made the vehicle for no flimsy affectations, but for genuine thought. Mr. Ruskin has affirmed that the virtue of originality is not newness, but genuineness.

“In this true sense Mr. Harte’s book is original. Here is his own thought on several topics, pleasantly displayed, and no mere echo or second-hand production of the ideas of others. If Mr. Harte continues to act up to this sentiment, [a long quotation from the book under consideration] as he does in the present book, he may not achieve the triumph of twentieth editions, but he will be a power for good--as every true man of letters is, and must be in the world. If it were practicable I should be much disposed to let the author recommend himself by giving copious quotations from these essays. At his best--that is, in his most characteristic and seemingly unconscious passages--he reminds one of Montaigne: the charming inconsequence, the egotism free from arrogance.”

PRICE IN HANDSOME CLOTH, $1.25.

_For sale by all Booksellers, or sent Postpaid on receipt of Price by the Publishers_,

The Arena Publishing Co.,

Copley Square, Boston, Mass.

Economists and Politicians

Talk and write of the waste of society and the waste of health and the waste of luxury and poverty. But they never remark upon the equally disastrous and wanton

WASTE OF WIT

Which has for so long been the result of old-fogyism and timorous commercialism in periodical Literature. If Statistics could be compiled of the fine wits and humorists and writers of individual talents and power whose brains and productions are spoiled or altogether suppressed under the old regime of the Popular Literature for the weak minded they would be appalling. There is a ruthless waste of good wit in America, in behalf of good dullness.

THE FLY LEAF aims to stem this tide of wasted wit. There are ever so many clever writers in America, though they are seldom heard of. These Younger Spirits are the backbone of THE FLY LEAF, which will present the Best and most Individual Literature of the Day--as much as can be squeezed into a Bibelot.

It is not quantity but quality we seek to provide. THE FLY LEAF interests all cultivated independent minds, which can recognize “a good thing” at sight. It appeals to Thoughtful and Bookish People, and it will never pander to the Mob that buys its Literature by weight.

Every issue is the most amusing and Unexpected little Bundle of Surprises. It is the only Periodical in America that has Wit to waste. Others have more Cash but no Wit.

THE FLY LEAF,

269 St. Botolph Street, Boston, Mass.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.