Post Impressions Part 13

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-cla.s.s 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 Placed end to end, Williams once estimated, his unpublished verses would reach from Battery Park to the Hispanic Museum, at Broadway and One Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Street.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 acc.u.mulation. 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 princ.i.p.al point made by the periodical publishers. Conceding that their publications, as second-cla.s.s mail matter, are carried at a loss, they argue that the post office is more than compensated by the volume of first-cla.s.s mail sent out in response to magazine advertis.e.m.e.nts. 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 a.s.sume 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-cla.s.s 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt, there need be no limit to the number of times a ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script. 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 Parna.s.sus' 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 succ.u.mbing to grief. Of the fourteen men who rejected my 'Echoes from Parna.s.sus,' 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed over in silence.

Let me recall the princ.i.p.al circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sed 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 princ.i.p.al 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 mult.i.tude 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 Rucksack, 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.sion 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.