Behind the Beyond and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge Part 20

Or let me take another example from the so-called Catalogue of the Ships that fills up nearly an entire book of Homer. This famous pa.s.sage names all the ships, one by one, and names the chiefs who sailed on them, and names the particular town or hill or valley that they came from. It has been much admired. It has that same majesty of style that has been brought to an even loftier pitch in the New York Business Directory and the City Telephone Book. It runs along, as I recall it, something like this,--

"And first, indeed, oh yes, was the ship of Homistogetes the Spartan, long and swift, having both its masts covered with cowhide and two rows of oars. And he, Homistogetes, was born of Hermogenes and Ophthalmia and was at home in Syncope beside the fast flowing Paresis. And after him came the ship of Preposterus the Eurasian, son of Oasis and Hyteria," ...

and so on endlessly.

Instead of this I subst.i.tute, with the permission of the New York Central Railway, the official catalogue of their locomotives taken almost word for word from the list compiled by their superintendent of works. I admit that he wrote in hot weather. Part of it runs:--

Out in the yard and steaming in the sun Stands locomotive engine number forty-one; Seated beside the windows of the cab Are Pat McGaw and Peter James McNab.

Pat comes from Troy and Peter from Cohoes, And when they pull the throttle off she goes; And as she vanishes there comes to view Steam locomotive engine number forty-two.

Observe her mighty wheels, her easy roll, With William J. Macarthy in control.

They say her engineer some time ago Lived on a farm outside of Buffalo Whereas his fireman, Henry Edward Foy, Attended School in Springfield, Illinois.

Thus does the race of man decay or rot-- Some men can hold their jobs and some can not.

Please observe that if Homer had actually written that last line it would have been quoted for a thousand years as one of the deepest sayings ever said. Orators would have rounded out their speeches with the majestic phrase, quoted in sonorous and unintelligible Greek verse, "some men can hold their jobs and some can not": essayists would have begun their most scholarly dissertations with the words,--"It has been finely said by Homer that (in Greek) 'some men can hold their jobs'": and the clergy in mid-pathos of a funeral sermon would have raised their eyes aloft and echoed "Some men can not"!

This is what I should like to do. I'd like to take a large stone and write on it in very plain writing,--

"The cla.s.sics are only primitive literature. They belong in the same cla.s.s as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine,"--and then throw it through the windows of a University and hide behind a fence to see the professors buzz!!

[Ill.u.s.tration]