Pieces Of Hate; And Other Enthusiasms Part 9

We have always wondered just what it is which frightens the after dinner speaker. He is protected by tradition, the Christian religion and the game laws. And yet he trembles. Perhaps he knows that he is going to be terrible, but it is common knowledge that after dinner speakers seldom reform. The life gets them. It was thought, once upon a time, that the practice was in some way connected with alcoholic stimulation, but this has since been disproved. After dinner speaking is a separate vice.

Total abstainers from every other evil practice are not immune.

The chief fault is that an irrationally inverted formula has come into being. The after dinner speaker almost invariably begins with his apology. He is generally becomingly frank when he first gets to his feet. There is always a confident prophecy that the audience is not going to be very much interested in what he has to say and the admission that he is pretty sure to do the job badly. Unfortunately, no speaker ever succeeds in deterring himself by these forebodings of disaster. He never fails to go on and prove the truth of his own estimate of inefficiency.

Many men profess to find the greatest difficulty in getting to their feet. Perhaps this is sincere, but the task does not seem to be one-sixteenth as hard as sitting down again. People whose vision is perfect in every other respect suffer from a curious astigmatism which prevents them from recognizing a stopping point when they come to it. We suggest to some ingenious inventor that he devise a combination of time clock and trip hammer by which a dull, blunt instrument shall be liberated at the end of five minutes so that it may fall with great force, killing the after dinner speaker and amusing the spectators. The mechanical difficulties might be great, but the machine would be even more useful if it could be attuned in some way so that the hammer should fall, if necessary, before the expiration of the five minutes, the instant the speaker said, "That reminds me of the story about the two Irishmen."

Funny stories are endurable, in moderation, if only the teller is perfectly frank in introducing them for their own sake and not pretending that they have any conceivable relationship to the endowment fund of Wellesley College, or the present condition of the silk business in America. To such length has hypocrisy gone, that there is now at large and dining out, a gentleman who makes a practice of kicking the leg of the table and then remarking, "Doesn't that sound like a cannon?--Speaking of cannon, that reminds me----"

Another young man of our own acquaintance has been using the same anecdote for all sorts of occasions for the last four years. His story concerns an American soldier who drove a four-mule team past the first line trench in the darkness and started rumbling along an old road that led across no-man's-land. He had gone a few yards when a doughboy jumped up out of a listening post and began to signal to him. "What's the matter?" shouted the driver.

"Shush! Shush!" hissed the outpost with great terror and intensity.

"You're driving right toward the German lines. For Heaven's sake go back and don't speak above a whisper."

"Whisper, h.e.l.l!" roared the driver. "I've got to turn four mules around."

It may be that there actually was such an outpost and such a driver, but neither had any intention of acting as a perpetual symbol and yet we know positively that this particular story has been introduced as an argument for buying another Liberty Bond of the fourth issue; as a justification for the vehemence of the American novelists of the younger generation; and as a reason for the tendency to overstatement in the dramatic and literary criticism of New York newspapers. We are also under the impression that it was used in a debate concerning the propriety of a motion picture censorship in New York state.

Indeed the speaker whom we have in mind never failed to use the mule story, no matter what the nature of the occasion, unless he subst.i.tuted the one about the man who wanted to go to Seville. He was a farmer, this man, and he lived some few miles away from Seville in a little ramshackle farm house. It had been his ambition of a lifetime to go to Seville and upon one particular morning he came out of the house carrying a suitcase.

"Where are you going?" asked his wife.

"To Seville," replied the farmer.

His wife was a very pious woman and she added by way of correction, "You mean, G.o.d willing."

"No," objected the farmer, dogmatically, "I mean I'm going to Seville."

Now Heaven was angered by this impiety and the dogmatic farmer was immediately transformed into a frog. Before the very eyes of his wife he lost his mortal form and hopped with a great splash into the big pond behind the house. To that pond the good woman went every day for a year and prayed that her husband should be restored to his natural form. On the first morning of the second year the big frog began to grow bigger and bigger and suddenly he was no longer a frog but a man. Out of the pond he leaped and ran straightaway into the house. He came out carrying a suitcase.

"Where are you going?" exclaimed the startled wife.

"To Seville," said the farmer.

"You mean," his wife implored in abject terror, "G.o.d willing."

"No," answered the farmer, "to Seville or back to the frog pond!"

The young man of whom we are writing first heard the story from Major General Robert Lee Bullard in a training school in Lyons. The doughty warrior told it in reply to the question, "What is this offensive spirit of which you've been telling us?" But with a sea change the story took up many other and varied roles. It served as the climax of an eloquent speech in favor of the release of political prisoners; it began an address urging greater originality upon the dramatists of America and it was conscripted at a luncheon to Hughie Jennings to explain the speaker's interpretation of the fundamental reason for the victory of the New York Giants over the Yankees in the world's series of last season.

Speaking of baseball, a great football coach once said that he could develop a championship eleven any time at all out of good material and seven simple plays well learned. Likewise, an after-dinner speaker can manage tolerably well with a limited supply of stories, if only they are elastic enough in interpretation and he covers a sufficiently wide range of territory in his dining rambles.

It is our experience that the most inveterate story tellers among public speakers are ministers. Unfortunately, the average clergyman has a tendency to select tales a little rowdy in an effort to set himself down among his listeners as a fellow member in good standing of the fraternity of Adam. Still more unfortunately the ministerial speaker often attempts to modify and deodorize the anecdote a little and, on top of that, gets it just a little wrong. No matter who the narrator may be, nothing is quite so ghastly as the improper story when told to an audience of more than ten or eleven listeners. Even more than a poetic drama a purple story needs a group, small and select. Any one interested in preserving impropriety might very well endow a chain of thimble theaters with a maximum seating capacity of ten. Some such step is needed or the off color yarn will disappear entirely from American life.

It was nurtured upon big mirrors and bra.s.s rails and, these being lacking, there is no proper atmosphere in which it may suitably be reared. Most certainly the anecdote of doubtful character does not belong to large banquets even of visiting Elks. Literature of this sort is fragile. It represents what the Freudians call an escape, and the most brazen of us is a little shamefaced about taking off his inhibitions in front of a hundred people, mostly strangers.

There must be something wrong with after-dinner speaking because it is notoriously the lowest form of American oratory. It if were not for Chauncey M. Depew whole generations in this country would have been born and lived and died without once having any memory worth preserving after the demita.s.se. The trouble, we think, is that dinner guests are much too friendly. It is the custom that the man at the speakers' table may not be heckled. He is privileged and privilege has made him dull. According to our observation there is never anything of interest said with the laying of cornerstones or the dedication of new high school buildings.

On the other hand, we have frequently been amused and excited by tilts at political conventions and ma.s.s meetings.

William Jennings Bryan is among the prize bores of the world when he gets up to do his canned material about _The Prince of Peace_, but no sensitive soul can fail to admire this same Commoner if he has ever had the privilege of hearing him talk down political foes upon the floor of a convention. All the labored tricks of oratory are forgotten then. Give Mr. Bryan some one at whom he may with propriety shake a finger and he becomes direct, vivid and moving.

Colonel Theodore Roosevelt was a speaker of somewhat the same type. He did not talk well unless there was some living and present person for him to speak against. Upon one occasion we heard him make a particularly dreary discourse, and incidentally a political one, until he came to a point where a group in the audience took exception to some statement and attempted to howl him down. It was like the touch of a whip on the flanks of a stake horse. Roosevelt returned to the statement and said it over again, only this time he said it much more dogmatically and twice as well. Before that speech was done he had climbed to the top of a table and was putting all his back and shoulders into every word. Even his plat.i.tudes seemed to be knockout blows. He was inspiring. He was magnificent.

The after-dinner speaker needs this same stimulus of emotion. He ought to have something into which he can get his teeth. Every well conducted banquet should include a special committee to heckle the guests of honor. Even a dreary person might be aroused to fervor if his opening sentence was met with a mocking roar of, "Is that so!" Loud cries of "Make him sit down" would undoubtedly serve to make the speaker forget his entire stock of anecdotes about Pat and Mike. There would be no calm in which he could be reminded of anything except that certain desperadoes were not willing to listen, and that, by the Old Harry, he was going to give it to them so hot and heavy that they would have to.

The scheme may sound a little cruel, but we ought to face the fact that a time has come when we must choose between cutting off the heads of our after-dinner speakers or slapping them in the face. We believe that they deserve to have a chance to show us whether or not they have a right to live.

XXV

THE YOUNG PESSIMISTS

Bert Williams used to tell a story about a man on a lonely road at night who suddenly saw a ghost come out of the forest and begin to follow him.

The man walked faster and the ghost increased his pace. Then the man broke into a run with the ghost right on his heels. Mile after mile, faster and faster, they went until at last the man dropped at the side of the road exhausted. The ghost perched beside him on a large rock and boomed, "That was quite a run we had." "Yes" gasped the man, "and as soon as I get my breath we're going to have another one."

Our young American pessimists see man at the moment he drops beside the road, and without further investigation decide that it is all up with him. To be sure, they may not be very far wrong in the ultimate fate of man, but at least they antic.i.p.ate his end. They do not stick with him until the finish; and this second-wind flight, however useless, is something so characteristic of life that it belongs in the record. I have at least a sneaking suspicion that now and again there happens along a runner so staunch and courageous that he keeps up the fight until c.o.c.k-crow and thus escapes all the apparitions which would overthrow him. Of course, it is a long shot and the young pessimists are much too logical to wait for such miraculous chances. As a matter of fact, they don't call themselves pessimists, but prefer to be known as rationalists, realists, or some such name which carries with it the hint of wisdom.

And they are wise up to the very point of believing only the things they have seen. However, I am not sure they are quite so wise when they go a notch beyond this and a.s.sert roundly that everything which they have seen is true. For my own part I don't believe that white rabbits are actually born in high hats. The truth is quicker than the eye, but it is hardly possible to make any person with fresh young sight believe that.

Question the validity of some character in a play or book by a young rationalist and he will invariably reply, "Why she lived right in our town," and he will upon request supply name, address, and telephone number to confound the doubters.

"Let the captious be sure they know their Emmas as well as I do before they tell me how she would act," wrote Eugene O'Neill when somebody objected that the heroine of "Diff'rent" was not true. This, of course, shifts the scope of the inquiry to the question, "How well does O'Neill know his Emmas?" Indeed, how well does any bitter-end rationalist know anybody? Once upon a time we lived in a simple age in which when a man said, "I'm going to kick you downstairs because I don't like you," and then did it, there was not a shadow of doubt in the mind of the person at the foot of the stairs that he had come upon an enemy. All that is changed now. During the war, for instance, George Sylvester Viereck wrote a book to prove that every time Roosevelt said, "Viereck is an undesirable citizen," or words to that effect, he was simply dissembling an admiration so great that it was shot through and through with ambivalent outbursts of hatred. Mr. Viereck may not have proved his case, but he did, at least, put his relations into debatable ground by shifting from Philip conscious to Philip subconscious.

In the new world of the psychoa.n.a.lysts there is confusion for the rationalist even though he is dealing with something so inferentially logical as a science. For here, with all its tangible symbols, is a science which deals with things which cannot be seen or heard or touched. And much of all the truth in the world lies in just such dim dominions. The pessimist is very apt to be stopped at the border. For years he has reproached the optimist with the charge that he lived by dreams rather than realities. Now, wise men have come forward to say that the key to all the most important things in life lies in dreams. Of course, the poets have known that for years, but n.o.body paid any attention to them because they only felt it and offered no papers to the medical journals.

It would be unfair to suggest that no dreamer is a pessimist. The most prolific period of pessimism comes at twenty-one, or thereabouts, when the first attempt is made to translate dreams into reality, an attempt by a person not over-skillful in either language. Often it is made in college where a new freedom inspires a somewhat sudden and wholesale attempt to put every vision to the test. Along about this time the young man finds that the romanticists have lied to him about love and he bounces all the way back to Strindberg. Maybe he gets drunk for the first time and learns that every English author from Shakespeare to d.i.c.kens has vastly overrated it for literary effect. He follows the formulae of Falstaff and instead of achieving a roaring joviality he goes to sleep. Personally tobacco sent me into a deep pessimism when I first took it up in a serious way. Huck's corncob pipe had always seemed to me one of the most persuasive symbols of true enjoyment. It seemed to me that life could hold nothing more ideal than to float down the Mississippi blowing rings. After six months of experimenting I was ready to believe that maybe the Mississippi wasn't so much either. Romance seemed pretty doubtful stuff. Around this time, also, the young man generally discovers, in compulsory chapel, that the average minister is a dull preacher; and of course that knocks all the theories of the immortality of the soul right on the head. He may even have come to college with a thirst for knowledge and a faith in its exciting quality, only to have these emotions ooze away during the second month of introductory lectures on anthropology.

Accordingly, it is not surprising to find F. Scott Fitzgerald's Amory Blaine looking at the towers of Princeton and musing:

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all G.o.ds dead, all wars fought; all faiths in man shaken....

n.o.body wrote as well as that in Copeland's course at Harvard but there was a pretty general agreement that life--or rather Life--was a sham and a delusion. This was expressed in poems lamenting the fact that the oceans and the mountains were going to go on and that the writer wouldn't.

Generally he didn't give the oceans or the mountains very long either.

All the short stories were about murder and madness. We cut our patterns into very definite conclusions because we were pessimists and sure of ourselves. It was the most logical of philosophies and disposed of all loose ends. One of my pieces (to polish off a theme on the futility of human wishes) was about a man who went stark raving, and Copeland sat in his chair and groaned and moaned, which was his subst.i.tute for making little marks in red ink. He had been reading Sheridan's "The Critic" to the cla.s.s with the scene in which the two faithless Spanish lovers and the two nieces and the two uncles all try to kill each other at the same time, and are thus thrown into the most terrific stalemate until the author's ingenious contrivance of a beefeater who cries, "Drop your weapons in the Queen's name." At any rate when I had finished the little man ceased groaning and shook his head about my story of the man who went mad. "Broun," he said, "try to solve your problems without recourse to death, madness--or any other beefeater in the Queen's name."

And it seems to me that the young pessimists, generally speaking, have allowed themselves to be bound in a formula as tight as that which ever afflicted any Pollyanna. It isn't the somberness with which they imbue life which arouses our protest, so much as the regularity. They paint life not only as a fake fight in which only one result is possible, but they make it again and again the selfsame fight.

XXVI

GLa.s.s SLIPPERS BY THE GROSS

When Cinderella sat in the ashes she should have consoled herself with the thought of the motion-picture rights. No young woman of our time has had her adventures so ceaselessly celebrated in film and drama. Of course, she generally goes by some other name. It might be "Miss Lulu Bett," for instance.