Project Gutenberg's The Fly Leaf, No. 2, Vol. 1, January 1896, by Various

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Title: The Fly Leaf, No. 2, Vol. 1, January 1896

Author: Various

Editor: Walter Blackburn Harte

Release Date: June 19, 2020 [EBook #62430]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Philip Hale, the well-known and brilliant Boston literary and musical critic writes as follows:

“Walter Blackburn Harte is beyond doubt and peradventure the leading essayist in Boston today. For Boston perhaps you had better read ‘the United States.’ His matter is original and brave, his style is clear, polished when effect is to be gained thereby, blunt when the blow of the bludgeon should fall, and at times delightfully whimsical, rambling, paradoxical, fantastical. But read for yourself, Miss Eustacia; and Harte’s ‘Meditations in Motley’ will remain one of your favorite books. And now Mr. Harte is the editor of The Fly Leaf. The first number is out, and let us earnestly call your attention to it.”

A vigorous writer and thoroughly animated by the idea that the field of letters in this country should bloom with the genius of its youth. If The Fly Leaf doesn’t achieve a great success it will not be for lack of talent and energy on the part of its director.—The Boston Traveller.

A new and wholly up to date brochure, The Fly Leaf, has just appeared under the conductorship of Walter Blackburn Harte, one of the brightest young men in American literature.—The Boston Home Journal.

Promises to be something of a novelty in periodical literature, for it is filled with piquant comments on current fads and fashions, and contains some spicy and whimsical essays in miniature, written in a vivid impressionistic manner.—The Boston Transcript.

These are a few press notices. But all the young men and women in every city and town in the United States are discussing The Fly Leaf and spreading its fame.

No. 2. January, 1896. Vol. 1.

It may be accepted as an axiom that the strong are always audacious, and so when we hear of any man in literature who is shocking and rumpling all the susceptibilities of nice, quiet, drowsy people we may be sure that his capital crime is independence of thought and opinion. He is looking at life for himself, instead of through[2] the refracted lenses of old class habit or antiquated religious dogma. And it is a thousand to one he has the criminal audacity to be young; for the vision of youth is clearer and more sure, and more pitying than the old green or crimson goggles of selfish age, that would paint the world as popes and kings and classes and governments, with rewards and honors to give, would have it. All men whose life and work make for the uplifting of human conditions and thought are set in the way of truth before reaching thirty. If a man is timorous before thirty, he will be an unmitigable coward, perhaps knave, for the rest of his days. And today the only profession which demands any active spirit of heroism is the calling of literature, that has become the Deus ex machina of all modern civilized life.

Every truly ambitious writer, or for that matter, every manly writer, be he a genius or a mediocrity, has certain large ideal aims to serve in all his literature. It is not enough for a manly man to simply evoke applause. A nude nymph from the gutter of Paris dancing a can-can on a cafe table, also lives by popular suffrage, and wins such popular approbation as is never given to literature—the incoherent cries in which the whole body emits its tingling void of aching, sensuous delight, the deep, whole-hearted greed of the flaming instincts and soul of the race.

[3]There are a thousand arts and tricks that gain applause and good pay, and have the world’s countenance (and ours, for we are not such rigid moralists as to try to upset nature); but it is the business of the artist to gain respect, not for himself as an individual, for in that capacity we can allow much to temptation, but for his precious art, which is the voice of all the dumb ones of our kind. Surely, if there is any thing that Almighty God could forbear in tenderness to destroy, of all man’s sad attempts to win a home in this inhospitable world, it is the written pages that hold the highest aspirations of the human soul—some pages that we, in our overweening pride in the glory of our fellows, think hold a beauty and breadth that must partake of Divinity itself. But the wind of deathless Time is rushing even now, and we know that nothing can escape its touch.

It is the final business of literature to quicken the spirit of humanity and stir those noblest impulses that make us despise the mere grovelling life of those who have not learned the irony of things. We hide ourselves like guilty creatures among our dusty, dusty possessions, afraid to waste time for living and thought, and so the days and nights that should be ours pass and we enjoy them not. Only a few poets possess the days and nights, and even they know the sweetness of life mostly in sorrow.

[4]All literature is trivial that lacks this large relevance to human life, and so, in looking over the bulk of contemporary American literature, it is to be feared that neither charity nor policy can make it out to be very important. It is destitute of any of the spirit of genius, and it is for the most part merely a travesty of the small talk of the surface life of so-called “good society.” It nowhere touches upon the reality of human passion, existent under every mask of custom and artificial seeming of refinement, and its inspiration is evident in every hasty line—money and advertising.

To be quite candid, could any other country boast such an utterly mediocre, uninspired group of literary artisans as is represented by the Scratchback Club of New York, which in its membership really furnishes all that passes for contemporary “American” literature in our periodicals? They show the intellectual and imaginative poverty of a people merely pushing and ingenious. They reveal the shallowness of the prevailing idea that mere education furnishes those deep forces of personality which have made all true literature, and all true cultivation, with or without education. There is none of the audacity of real spontaneous thought in these men and women’s work; it is all written to order, as mechanically as an auctioneer’s catalogue.

[5]But it is well to have a definite aim in literature, and the pens concerned in the production of the Fly Leaf are at least inspired by a sense of the fluidity of this excellent medium of prose, and though they may fail in the haste of periodical writing to achieve the perfect ends of art, at least they will not wantonly strive to debase the public judgment and taste by pandering to the narrow minds of ignorant prudes, after the fashion of the popular periodical literature of the day.

The Fly Leaf has a definite aim and purpose in being, and that is, to get more latitude in literature written in English, and to make the work of the real writers of our end of the century better known to the great democracy of readers. These are the younger men and not the old, fogy carpenters, brought up to write moral tracts under Dr. J. G. Holland at the close of the fifties. The Fly Leaf looks to the younger generation to enable it to make its aims a force in our intellectual and literary life here in America.

There is a revolt and a quickening sense of changes and forces in the air. The work of any individual writer or worker can effect little or nothing. But the earnest enthusiasm of a little band of men and women, inspired with a belief in the impartiality of the good God and the perpetual renewal of imagination and thought and[6] genius in every branch of the race, can set such an enthusiasm for better things and higher ideals in not merely the substance but the spirit of all our art endeavor as shall bring in a harvest of real, robust literature from every quarter of this country—largely from the most unsuspected quarters. It is this scattered interest in a nobler ideal than obtains in our contemporary periodical literature that the Fly Leaf will attempt to focus. At present nearly all the writers with any individual style and force and robustness and largeness of aim are shut out of American periodical literature, because such qualities in literature are deemed too shocking nowadays.

The Fly Leaf believes there are still readers who appreciate boldness, original conceptions, audacity of treatment, and the varied play of fancy over the whole and not merely a part of human existence. These are the qualities that gave us our standard English literature, and in the early days inspired our greatest writers in America. They must be the impulse and inspiration of today, if Americans are not content to be represented in literature by snobbish boys trying to write like “ladies,” and women who write without effort like the deuce knows what.

When we say we appeal to the younger people it must not be thought that we appeal to the children—although since they are so far more[7] critical than their grandparents, we shall not dare to forget them altogether. We mean that we desire to enlist the interests and sympathies of our own generation—say those born sometime in the sixties and since. Our grandparents may be very good folk and quite smart in getting around today, but they were largely brought up on almanacs, and their literary tastes are narrow and eccentric without being picturesque. They belong to ancient times without holding the antique novelties of the really far away ancient times, which were really more in touch with the intellectual bustle and eager curiosity of our day than those gray years of smug Anglo-Saxon absorption in a civilization of mere bread and beer that lie immediately behind us, and still cast the chill shadow of their prurient morality over all our literature. Even some of the direct parents of this generation are a little threadbare in their craniums. They have read domestic literature all their lives and of course are incapable of thought. The stirring gray matter is found in the heads of those born not much further back, say, than ’49, the year of gold. Let us resolve to make this fin de siecle the golden age of American literature. And if there are, as I suspect there are, some belated grandparents still on earth, animated with the spirit and ideals of Milton and the Martyrs, young at[8] heart in their enthusiasm for the truth, for the art that touches and ennobles life, and for freedom of thought and expression, these are of us also, and will gladly find in the Fly Leaf, in its burst of youth, the ideals that have always permeated robust and honest literature—especially in the old days when a man might swing or burn for an audacious pamphlet. With such old fogies we have no bone of contention. But the old fogies in petticoats, the gingerbread writers, we shall probably toss up in a blanket nine times as high as the moon—when we are not so pressed for space and time.

It was at the place afterwards called Solenhofen. The weather was miserable, as Jurassic weather usually was. The rain beat steadily down, and carbon dioxide was still upon the earth.

The Archaeopteryx was feeling pretty gloomy, for at that morning’s meeting of the Amalgamated Association of Enaliosaurians he had been blackballed. He was looked down upon by the Pterodactyl and the Ichthyosaurus deigned not to notice him. Cast out by the Reptilia, and Aves not being thought of, he became a wanderer upon the face of the earth. “Alas!” sighed the poor Archaeopteryx, “this world is no place for me.” And he laid him down and died; and became imbedded in the rock.

And ages afterward a featherless biped, called man, dug him up, and marvelled at him, crying, “Lo, the original Avis and fountain-head of all our feathered flocks!” And they placed him with great reverence in a case, and his name became a by-word in the land. But the Archaeopteryx knew it not. And the descendant for whom he had suffered and died strutted proudly about the barn-yard, crowing lustily cock-a-doodle-do!

S. P. Carrick, Jr.

A PARABLE ON THE POWER OF BEAUTY.

The audience at a parlor lecture in a Beacon Street drawing room is apt to be rather intense and rapt in its attention, and discreet in its enthusiasm, with the emphasis of discernment which subdued, well-bred applause confers. At Mrs. Reginald Beveridge Vincent’s this is always[11] particularly noticeable, for Mrs. Vincent is one of the social law givers of the “smart” set, and her rooms on these occasions are thronged with all sorts of ambitious social strugglers, who pay insidious homage to their hostess in their admiration of the idols for whom she stands sponsor. There are all sorts of people here, and among them many of the great army of the small celebrities, who are somewhat more distinguished than prosperous, and who would fain pass from the appreciation of imaginative literature to the serious consideration of dining. The fact is, the socially nebulous, who rebel against their birth’s invidious bar and strive to get out of the obscurity of the mass of humanity, are really the backbone of the enthusiasm for letters in fashionable society. These rather dubious folk, with no redeeming big bank account, are spurred by ambition to attach themselves to some sort of superiority—the superiority not always inherently residing in them; and so literature becomes their easy spoil. They constitute the one stable element in all literary gatherings out of Grub Street; and even Mrs. Vincent, with all her social prestige, could not dispense with them. And so they come, and dream of passing the rubicon, and so on to more important functions. There are many who are considered good enough[12] and worthy to sit at a feast of reason and a flow of soul, who would never be deemed eligible for the holier function of stuffing with baked meats and wines. These literary afternoons, it may be noted, for the benefit of the ambitious, serve an incidental purpose as a sort of preliminary investigation into the character, standing and desirability of new acquaintances. Many are called to the feast of literature—but few are chosen to break bread at dinner. But the success of parlor lectures, at the most dispiriting hour of the afternoon in winter when the city streets are sunless and melancholy and depressing, depends almost entirely upon the lure of social hopes, that influence the more or less obscure to give up the comfort of their mediocre leisure to swell the triumph of those who secure the glory of the passing show of life. The woman who wants to shine as a patron of the fine arts must not neglect these mixed social elements, or her rooms will be empty. Exemplary activity in church politics and an interest in letters, are the humble beginnings, the corduroy roads, as it were, of many who ultimately shine with more certain lustre as leaders of the german. Therefore, every wise blue stocking is affable and accessible to the crowd of dubious persons whose admirations may be depended upon—unless hope burns stronger in some other quarter. One[13] thing is certain: the grand dames of the upper social heavens are not to be depended upon when literature or philosophy is the only attraction offered, even when a grand dame is herself holding the reception. There are so many petty jealousies, and so many rival courts; and, moreover, the grand dames have so many questions of social diplomacy to occupy them—men, for instance (nice, eligible men are scarce); consequently they do not often come under the spell of the literary impressario, who gains a precarious subsistence in the lap of luxury; and, besides, the afternoon is the meridian of the shopping fever.

The large drawing room was crowded on this particular afternoon, and Mrs. Vincent was in high feather, for she had secured the new poet of the season, Mr. Blanco Winterbourne, to give his lecture on “Ideals of Beauty in Modern Life.” This was in itself a victory. Winterbourne was a brand new poet, who had dropped straight from the skies and been immediately accepted in London, so that he had all the freshness and glamour of a debutante, and his reputation being still in the making in the inner circles of society, the gold dust was still upon his wings, unbrushed and untarnished by the chill after-thoughts of envious Grub Street criticism.

Everybody sat in an attitude of rare rapture,[14] and every time the lecturer uttered some especially well sounding and uplifting sentiment, and paused a moment for the rapid click of eyes, some fine idealist in the group would fix the hostess’s wandering glance with a gleam of appreciation. This was intended to isolate him in her memory as a man of discernment and culture worthy of remembrance in the Elysian domain of dining. There is indeed something almost pathetic in this intense concentration of mind, this painful anxiety of appreciation, which is so evidently the tribute to the hostess and not to the new genius himself. Only so much rapture goes to the lecturer as appearances demand. The glory of the occasion belongs to the patron; for skill and talent are largely a matter of labor and discipline, whereas the recognition of excellence is the quick flash of pure intellect, genius! But the audience is charitable enough, and the most terrible ordeal for the lecturer, fresh from Parnassus or Grub Street, is the pervasive and distracting rustling and swishing of silken skirts—a sound that is the most tangible symbol of women’s potent whims in the sensuous consciousness of man.

There was one exception to the general air of complete absorption and satisfaction, and this was a queer, oval cynical face, half in the light of the waning day, and half in the shadow of[15] the curtains. It belonged to a young man, who leaned half forward in a rigid, high-backed chair, and alternately glanced curiously from face to face in the audience, and then turned completely about and looked out across the bare tree-tops of the Common. A look of weariness, and even of contempt, crept about his eyes and mouth, as certain high-flown phrases reached his ears.

Here is a bit of rapid rhetoric that evoked the applause of the company, and made him only curl his lip. “The dominion of beauty obtains forever in the human heart, and so long as this is so, no class nor humanity at large can be utterly bad; for the discernment of beauty involves the recognition of moral feeling. All permanent beauty is essentially moral and is sure of ready acceptance, especially among women, in whom the religious instinct is strongest. Modern life can never annihilate this innate and instinctive perception of intellectual nobility and pure beauty. Nay, since the form is the body of the soul, the finest type of pure physical beauty will always rightly command our admiration. It breaks through all creeds and castes, and holds the race in unity of feeling and thought.”

The lecture closed in a culminating clapping of hands, and the guests all moved forward to congratulate the lecturer and the patron. The[16] young man turned and studied the different groups with an amused smile.

A lady, who had been watching the young man’s mocking comment on the scene in the changing expression of his eyes and pursed lips, suddenly arose from a divan in the angle of the room, and crossed over to where he sat in the afternoon twilight.

She stopped him from arising with a gesture, and sank down into a seat beside him.

“You do not seem particularly pleased with Mr. Blanco Winterbourne’s lecture?”

“Well, it doesn’t interest me, because you see I come into contact with life as it really is. I have heard all this cant about the beauty of purity and character before so many times, but when I see beauty of character in life I find it always taken advantage of. And as for the dignity of physical beauty, I need scarcely tell one of your sex the difference between a beauty in rags and a beauty in silks.”

“Oh, but I protest, that although the world is gross, and the half of us are mere Mammon worshippers, there is an instinct of delight, and irresistible attraction for us, especially for we women, in sheer beauty without any trappings of finery.”

“Ah, indeed; that sounds like the magnanimity of humanity, universally asserted by popular[17] moralists. But your sex is really the least amenable, as I could easily prove to you.”

“Then prove it.”

“I will, if you can put on your hat and coat and come at once.”

“Well, I’m in a blaze of curiosity for the adventure.”

As they crossed Beacon Street a beggar boy stepped up to them, and in piping tones of want asked the lady for alms. She glanced for a moment into his face with a blank look of negation on her own, and with a sort of comprehensive intake of his dirt and rags she gathered her skirts about her and passed through the turnpike and down the steps to the Common. But her companion lingered behind, and presently joined her, half dragging the boy by his tattered sleeve.

“Come here, Miss Lorillard, and look at the boy. I want to know if this isn’t beauty?”

She turned and looked into the boy’s face, as her companion held it up to the light between his two hands. The extraordinary and perfect beauty of his features seized upon her in a sort of wonderment. Where had she ever seen such a face before?—And her memory swept through the galleries of Europe. In none of them. How was it she had not noticed it at first? The dirt?[18] It was incomparable—it seemed superhuman in its sweetness and beauty, its appeal, and its glow of divinity. God’s hand was plainly set in that face.

“This is the boy,” said the young man, laconically, watching her expression. “Come along.”

And linking his arm in that of the ragged youngster, the trio sauntered along with the fashionable throng coming out of the matinees.

“Get out of my way, you ugly little sweep,” said one woman, elbowing the boy off the pavement; and the men pushed him hither and thither. The fashionable women looked right through the ragged urchin and his evidently dubious companions, as if they were glass, and their gaze seemed to bite like frost. Not one woman remarked the surpassing loveliness of the boy’s perfect face.

At the corner of the Common the young man sent the boy about his business.

“Who is he, and what does all this mean?”

“That is Adonis—the one-time victor of Venus. He fell upon evil days when clothes made the king, and rags the knave.”

Walter Blackburn Harte.

I sometimes think life is but a see-saw board, with hope at one end and despair at the other. First hope goes up, and despair goes down, and then it reverses. There seems to be no break in the steady rise and fall. We live on, clinging to the belief that hope will outbalance despair, but it does not, and men come and men go, and life still teeters away.

Joseph Andrews Cone.

They were coming out of the matinee, and there was something in the way he took her arm and swung her out of the crush, that the experienced eye of the married man or married woman could at once detect as the assurance of the husband, accustomed to being adored, and quietly and covertly conscious of other feminine eyes in the crowd.

He turned up her fur collar and they walked along in silence. She was scrutinizing each face in the slowly moving throng. He was picking his way, falling in her wake to give room to the opposing stream, and occasionally to glance behind and strengthen some impression of a silhouette, that awoke a momentary pang, and then faded into the blur of faces, the rustle of silks and the subtle perfume of a well dressed crowd of women.

Once he turned half round sharply, as a tall, handsome woman swept by, creaking and rustling like a great galleon in a swell of wind and rolling sea. His wife brought back his eyes with a glance of interrogation.

“Pretty little green hat, that,” he said. “I think it would just suit you.”

“Ah yes,” answered she. “Strange you never notice hats in the milliners’ windows.”

Jonathan Penn.

It is altogether fitting and proper, as Abraham Lincoln would say if he were not dead, that that there should be an immediate definition of the “New God.” It is not easy to define the New Woman—not easy to define the New Man, nor to formulate New Ideas, but, in these days, when the passion for money getting over-shadows everything else in life, and colors our religion and philosophy, with the cheap cynicism of poor cheated greed, it is easy to define the New God. In the first place, He is everything that the Old God was not; and that is saying everything that the Modern Dives wishes said—and for which he pays his preacher. The successful modern preacher has to be a man of great intellectual parts, and some knowledge of affairs. He must be a man of the world, for it is the function of a new prophet in a successful metropolitan church to preach the New God. And this is most effectively done while occupying the Old Pulpit. An adroit and conservative judicial spirit has entirely renovated and made respectable the gift of prophecy in the Christian church. So we see the churches filled with the social charity of sweet and silken equality, and all things are kept as sweet and peaceful as possible in this atmosphere that once reeked[22] with sulphurous fumes for the wicked. But the sweet savor of camphor and smelling salts has stifled the sulphur,—and all other disagreeable odors in God’s House.

The churches of today are mostly mausoleums in which rest the crumbling remains of the ancient God. But an intellectual age still delights in the glamor of impressive ritual, and his name and attributes are enshrined in Creed, Decalogue and Hymn. But the old Law is serenely disobeyed, with the assurance that the New God is much too good or much too distant to perplex himself with the peccadillos of good society. As a certain French countess said in the court of Louis XV., “The good God would surely think twice before damning people of quality”—and undoubtedly the New God is more liberal and refined than the old one.

The New God, like the cynic man of the world, takes the world as he finds it. He is a being of an infinite indifference to syndicates (sin-di-cates!), deals (in which lurks the de’il!), coal oil monopolies (whence come endowments that throttle free speech on social questions), sugar trusts (that capture Congress), and the ways of a man with a maid—or, what is quite as wonderful—the ways of a new maid with an old man.

The New God is a dilettante in religion, who[23] winks (when bribed with a good service in a fine church) and looks the other way when broad-cloth and satin sow unto the flesh.

It is to be suspected that the New Girl in her way is better than the New God. If the New Man becomes any worse, he ought to—well, it would be impolitic to say what he ought to do. But between the New God and the cynics of Mammon this world does not seem to promise the millennium or Utopia just yet a while.

L. Lemmah.

If we are to come into our inheritance as an artistic people, let us hear less of Art with a big A. Let us turn from the oracle of the Personally Conducted and make bonfires of our Baedeckers.

The “Old Masters” were plain men, for the most part, with the virtues and vices of their time, and would kill a man or paint a Madonna with equal skill and enthusiasm. Art was to them only one form of a manifold activity, not a problem to be solved nor a fetish to be worshipped. Cellini made salt cellars and bragged about them long before he cast his Perseus. Michaelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling because the Pope commanded him, and not because he was divinely inspired to do it. Raphael and[24] Rubens ran picture factories which turned out paintings of a certain brand, like so many barrels of flour. Shakespeare patched together threadbare scenes and situations for special occasions, as managers now prepare a Christmas pantomime; and Balzac wrote the “Comedie Humaine” to pay his debts.

Literature is not a thing of limited editions, nor painting of spring exhibitions. While you are seeking the coming novelist between rich covers he may be doing a daily “story” for some sensational morning paper; and the new Raphael you think of as hid away in some sequestered north-lit studio may be designing labels for boxes in a lithograph factory.

Respect, therefore, the poster, though it is obtrusive, and despise not the Japanese print, though it be cheap. Admit that there is more merit in the pen and ink picture of which are printed a million copies, than in the etching on your library walls, of which there are only ten.

Believe that the baths and aqueducts of Rome, however marvellous, are puerile as feats of engineering compared with a city floated on Lake Michigan mud; and learn that while you drowse over your “standard authors” of today the work of him who will be the standard author of tomorrow may be appearing in these despised pages.

Claude Fayette Bragdon.

Let the world wag as it may, the wits must live by waggery.

The optimists who are so comfortably situated that they can support optimism without any severe strain upon their imaginations, say, “What is, is right.” But they fail to tackle the corollary proposition, “What isn’t, isn’t.”

I received a book the other day from one of the leading publishers for review, and for three days and nights I have labored with it. It is one of those dull and dreary affairs, without even the single redeeming grace of conscious striving egotism, and it is written by one of the most prominent members of the New York Scratchback Club, a man whose name is in everybody’s mouth in the country. I wrote a scorching review of the book, in my happiest vein of gory glee; but upon reflection I shall not print it. This author is too infernally stupid to deserve so good an “ad.”

The poets are not the only sufferers in these sober strenuous days, in which the beautiful distractions of idleness are not properly understood or appreciated. Full many a wag is born to waste his wit upon the desert air—or the thick skull of an anthropoid on the “night desk.”

It has been suggested by an undiscouraged[26] friend of humanity that, at the close of the Age of Consent discussion, a committee should be organized among the society women who live in the highly fashionable locality in Boston that is honored with the presence of Mrs. Helen H. Gardener, to raise necessary funds to defray the cost of giving the sources of this lady’s literary inspiration a good Spring cleaning. He urges, and with some apparent show of reason, that after her arduous labors as the historian of the Age of Consent movement, Mrs. Gardener cannot wait until spring, and her consent should be sought at an early date. Mrs. Gardener is well known as a sort of social tornado in fiction, though I believe she claims to belong to the Red Cross or Sanitary school of writers. She is, anyhow, the head and front of the inodorous infliction called the Age of Consent agitation, and the author of that delightfully aromatic literary confection—you should read it held off in a pair of tongs—“Is this your son, my Lord?” We can say with empressement, no, thank God! This particular kind of pathological fiction is only possible to a certain haunted, morbid feminine imagination.

Hall Caine tells young authors that when they are tempted to describe a scene of more than usual delicacy to refrain from it, if it is not absolutely[27] necessary to the story. What about writing your story around a delicate situation, as Shakespeare did in “The Rape of Lucrece”? A delicate situation, delicately expressed, requires more talent than an indelicate one indelicately described.

A great many readers of the powerful poem called “The Wail of the Hack Writer” in this issue, picturing a mood of revulsion and despair common enough among all writers who have to earn a livelihood by the pen, will be surprised in coming upon the name of the author, Sam Walter Foss. This is an interesting phase of personality. This poem reveals a new and serious personality in a writer already known to a wider circle of readers than few of us can ever hope to reach. For years the name of Sam Walter Foss has been synonymous with the most bubbling humor and spontaneous, genial fun. One could guess this man took life smiling from the laugh in all his work, and his optimistic, large belief in his fellows. And the superficial reader, caught with these merry jingles and this good-natured philosophy, might naturally think that Mr. Foss was a man who took all life as a joke, who hated serious books, and never saw the sad side of life. The optimism of the man is in his work, but it is not a narrow optimism, and all[28] this light fun is born of a deep and serious interest in the human drama being played out today. The man himself is a serious man in all his ideas and interests in life, and there is a serious undercurrent of purpose in all his fun making.

Yvette Guilbert, the famous Paris chanteuse, who is now singing at the Olympia in New York, is said to give in her repertoire some humorous songs with more point in them than our English speaking audiences are accustomed to. As two thirds of her English speaking audiences will not be able to thoroughly understand her, even those who can read and speak French being unable to follow it closely when sung, it must be interesting to watch the faces of her audiences. While Mlle. Guilbert is singing her sweet ditties of love-lorn maiden’s hopes and trials, it is ten to one the greater part of her audience will be imagining all sorts of wicked, depraved things are being publicly sown in the hearts of our innocent people. London has pronounced her songs shocking. We can scarcely expect Mlle. Guilbert will be much better understood on this side, for the Anglo-Saxon has rarely the temperament to catch the play of Gallic humor. So half the audience will sit and dream in abandonment of the wicked things wicked people[29] are reported to do; and those who are so fortunate as to have wicked thoughts of their own will think them, and Mlle. Guilbert will have to bear all their blushes.

The Fly Leaf appeals to the Young Man and Young Woman’s sense of humor. It is time some of us youngsters were allowed to belong to some generation, and if we do not assert our right to be now, we shall experience some difficulty in squeezing into the ranks of the generations unborn. The old fogies fail to see the reasonableness of this. If the younger generation also fails to perceive our right to exist, it will bring our gray hairs in sorrow to the grave—for we are but belated boys, after all. This is a world in which it takes one a long while to grow up, when one is poor—especially in Grub Street.

When I get so poor that I cannot afford to buy any more clothes, I intend to dress in Fly Leaves, as I believe this badge of honorable endeavor will save me somewhat from the scoffs of the mob, in a community that holds letters in the high esteem they are held in Boston. Then when I am dead and gone ten cities will contend for the honor of my birth. I never tell where I was born. It is unwise; for people will never forgive the impertinence of your being born among them.

[30]All these personal notes are relevant in up-to-date journalism, because this is an age of confidences; and not to let the public know all about one’s private life is to argue one’s self unknown. I may begin on my autobiography in earnest, in a little while. I have “Passions” in great number and variety.

To J. W. S.: No, my dear friend, I sympathize with your ambition, but you cannot bribe the Editor of the Fly Leaf with any such consideration as a year’s subscription to print your Ode. We have not yet been tempted, as some of our popular contemporaries are every month, with an offer to purchase an edition of fifty thousand and dine the editor; but conscious virtue inclines us to repudiate your one dollar and get the full credit of it with posterity.

A young lady writes to me from a western city and encloses her photograph, which shows her to be a blooming, chubby-cheeked beauty of eighteen summers. She says, in her letter, she is studying very hard and sitting up night after night until daybreak, reading all the great authors of our era: E. P. Roe, Edward W. Bok, Richard Harding Davis and Dr. J. G. Holland, with the intention of adopting literature as a career. These are all truly “great masters,” and their selection shows an unerring judgment[31] in one contemplating a career in American contemporary literature. I made the mistake of choosing certain obscure Elizabethans and seventeenth century Englishmen as my masters; and so have never got out of Grub Street. A woman can scarcely offend against the canons of morality if she models her ideals of fictitious propriety after the examples of these litterateurs who have made simpering the grace and distinction of our epoch. It was unkind of fate to deny these great minds the innocency of petticoats, but they have remained wonderfully unspotted from the world. They have reduced all morality to etiquette. But I am afraid my young lady will spoil her beauty with all this strain to rid her mind of original predilections after the manner of these “masters,” and she may develop that shocking severity of countenance, which is so appallingly rife among our female moralists in any illustrated book catalogue. All women are beautiful, of course; but those who try to look like seers in their photographs usually look as if life were a perpetual washing day with them. It seems that scribbling often fatally undermines geniality in the female temperament, and indeed most women write novels because they lack a sense of humor. This severe superciliousness of our female celebrities, I hold, is a warning to the New Woman to cultivate flippant[32] male society as much as possible. I warn my correspondent not to grow a face that appals young love and stops clocks.

The Arena should not hide its light under a bushel. It should put out a sign, “Worlds reformed while you wait!”

The actress who finds herself too fat to be cast for the heroine (heroines are always slender) and has to thin down upon a diet of nothing but beef tea and hot water with a squeeze of lemon in it for three months, buys fame almost as dearly as do the poets. Ambition seems to have a trick of cheating the stomach; but asceticism and mortification of the flesh on the stage have strangely enough made their belated appearance with the advent of The Woman who Did.

The great trouble with human nature is that it is everywhere. If it were only confined like a mad dog and rampaged solely in one country or continent, we could take ideal views of life. And we could be patriots without being scoundrels.

To the sentimental: Please do not forget that it was Dr. Johnson and not the writer who said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

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.

Some wicked nurses lull crying, starving children by putting the rubber bulb of an empty nursing bottle into their mouths. This fills the babe with evil wind and destroys its judgment, character, digestion and intellect. The old fashioned popular periodicals do the same thing for inquiring and curious minds, seeking nourishment and amusement. They give them a bottle of windy pap, called nice, pure domestic literature, and the result is the same as with the poor baby—only aggravated.

The Fly Leaf is a robust, masculine, periodical for grown-up, common sense young men and women. It takes the point of view of the young man of today in literature and life. It is new, but sane. Its audacity is integrity of opinion and not mere eccentricity. It advocates greater freedom in American literature, and it discusses the aims and tendencies of the new movement and new writers.

The Fly Leaf is young, but not such a cherub that it lacks wisdom teeth, and those who appreciate waggery are laughing over its little ironies. It is certain the new babe can live by its wits very well in a community which appreciates wit as keenly as does the great American public.

THE FLY LEAF,
269 St. Botolph Street, Boston, Mass.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fly Leaf, No. 2, Vol. 1, January
1896, by Various

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