The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Philistine: a periodical of protest (Vol. I, No. 5), by Various.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Philistine: a periodical of protest (Vol. I, No. 5, October 1895), by Various

Produced by: hekula03 and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

It was the custom of the Roman Prætor Urbanus when entering upon his duties to post up in plain view of the public a brief exposition of the principles which were to guide him in passing judgment during his year of office. It seems fit that the Philistine should likewise issue its own EDICTVM PERPETVVM setting forth the scope and ultimate purpose of such literary criticisms as may appear from time to time in its pages.

It is offenders only who are to be deemed worthy of Reviews in these columns and as the worst possible offence of which they can be guilty, since it includes all specific or lesser faults, is the bare fact of their existence in type, it will be our aim to hold up to the merited scorn of an outraged world the responsible progenitors of such unblessed offspring, the Publisher, and his partner in sin, the Author of the book.

In thus reversing that order in criminality which[138] has hitherto obtained in the assizes of criticism we are moved by the consideration among others: the writing of any book, good or bad, is a matter of concern to its author alone so long as it remains in manuscript. Its merits or demerits have alike no existence to the public; however shameless its morals, feeble its plot or intolerable its dullness these are all equally powerless for mischief so long as it has not been put into type and launched upon a much suffering, helpless world. Then its career of evil begins. For this the Publisher is solely responsible; he and he alone is able to remedy the abuses which have long been calling out to heaven for suppression, by setting up some sort of standard as to the minimum of those defects which shall bar any manuscript whatever from his favorable consideration. What this minimum ought to be we shall take pleasure in enlightening him from time to time in these pages.

It may be urged that the weapon of scorn has been used and abused time out of mind; we reply that the objector is in error in one essential. The dart is an old one indeed, but its point has been blunted, not in the fattening tissues of this chief offender but on the scantily clad bones of his weaker accomplice, the much-abused author. In issuing an illegitimate book the Author is the victim of the sweetest and most pathetic fallacy known to men: he believes his work is[139] good; while the publisher knows better. One is animated by love and nature, the other has only a lust for dollars. In such offenses as we are discussing, no less than in certain others needing no more explicit designation, it is not the deed itself but its exposure which calls forth the protests of a PHILISTINE public. Those Little Sisters in Sin, A Superfluous Woman and Bessie Costrell might have faded to oblivion in their swaddling clothes had no publisher been found to expose them to daylight.

It will be understood therefore that our column of Reviews exists, not to aid struggling authors or enterprising publishers to launch their craft upon the already crowded ocean of Literature, but as the Pillory where manifest culprits are exposed to the jibes of the crowd, to the end that others who are meditating like deeds may be warned by such penalty to desist. Nor need the idle stocks ever yawn in emptiness so long as upon his right hand and his left a man beholds such a richness of backs itching for the lash.

And since we have promised that instruction shall go hand in hand with castigation we will not close until we have pointed out for the future guidance of those who may wish to avoid one at least of the many by-paths of reprobation, that in any novel we regard the existence of page Four Hundred of[140] readable type as confession on the part of both Publisher and Author that neither of them has yet learned the foremost and greatest of the arts of their trade—the art to blot.

A TRINITY OF OFFENDERS.

1. We are but too familiar, all of us, with the devices of the quack-medicine advertiser, his trick of getting us to read his puff in spite of ourselves. It is an old yet still successful dodge. The first sentence in a column of the morning paper promises a little ten minute romance. As we proceed our interest quickens. We inadvertently glance to the end to learn whether[141] the hero is destined to the rope or the heroine reserved for the altar. There stands forth the mark of the Beast, “Butcher’s Bilious Bouncer, sure cure for the Liver, price ten cents.” According as nature has allied us to Democritus or to Archilochus we laugh or swear at our gullibility while we turn to some other item, but if fair-minded men we do not swear at the editor, for we know that he lives by letting for hire his numberless columns with no restriction on his advertisers save that their matter does not exclude his paper from the United States Mail.

It is far different, however, when trusting in an author’s name or at least in the imprint of a publisher of high standing, a man takes up a book which he has bought in the expectation of finding it a readable or at all events a genuine novel, but soon discovers it to be a string of sausages, whose thin membrane of such romance as it does afford exists merely to encase a solid stuffing of railroad advertisements, “scenic route” business and such secondhand truck. Yet of such is the Land of the Sun. Before reading it myself I tendered it to a friend in answer to his request for the latest novel. A few days after, he returned it saying, “It opens more like an advertisement of the Bullseye Parlor Car Company.”

Now it so happens that the people who made the book are also publishers of guide-books and among[142] these of a guide-book to Mexico, eo nomine, it had been fitter and more worthy their own high standing had they not stooped to palm off such a farrago upon a man whose thoughts at the time were not how to get to Mexico nor what could be seen if he went there, but simply the means of beguiling an evening, lolling at ease in his smoking jacket.

As to the lady who was once equal to writing The Land of the Sky, one feels sorrow at her fall, and cannot help wondering if sin of this sort yields her either profit or pleasure.

2. If a reader were asked to single out some one publisher whose name should be guarantee that in buying a book one would get fair equivalent for his money, not in paper and ink alone, but in the stuff of its ideas, he would not often go amiss were he to name Macmillans. It is with double pain therefore that he resents being led astray into paying Two Dollars for such a trifling effusion as Love in Idleness. He is hurt not only by the one and one-half dollars lost in excess of any just valuation of the book, but also and perhaps by a less reparable loss of the confidence long deserved by the class of Macmillan publications. In short he feels that both publisher and writer have conspired to cinch him and the rest of the reading public, and here, too, the heavier share of the reproach must fall upon the man. If Mr. Marion[143] Crawford, pluming himself upon such past achievements as Mr. Isaacs, chooses to value the weakling of his decadence at such extravagant figures that it must be listed at Two Dollars if it is to appear in decent type, there is surely no need that his accomplice be Macmillan. Doubtless there be publishers whose horns would be exalted were Crawford’s name to shine upon their title pages, but Macmillan is not of such cattle; he stands among the very topmost already, wherefore he should be above impostures.

The book is freely illustrated, but the pictures have nothing to do with the persons and incidents of the story.

3. As the editor of the Only Real Sure-Enough Chip-Munk so truthfully points out in his every issue, man is an imitative animal. But whether it is equally true that there are hundreds and hundreds of imitation chip-munks, all made like those calico cats that do duty as bric-a-brac, I cannot say. Yet the undisputed statement, made in such a solemn way, that man is imitative, must stand.

On ascending a certain beautiful little bay along the coast of Maine, the traveller is confronted by the startling legend, painted on the face of a great palisade: This is Belfast, the Home of Gringo’s Vermifuge—One Hundred Doses for One Dollar.

And to-day at Franklin, Ohio, as the train stops at the water tank one sees in the pasture opposite, an immense bill board, and on the board in gigantic letters are the words: This is Franklin, the Home of Jingo’s Advice to Authors—One Hundred Places to sell Manuscript, One Dollar.

That a place is needed to sell manuscript I will admit—in fact I am looking for such a place, but I only require one place, not a hundred. So I am suspicious of Mr. Jingo: I think that he offers just ninety-nine times more than is meet, and so I turn to Mr. Arthur Lewis of Albany, who has in the press a book with a title suspiciously like the Ohio publication. It is called Advice to Literary Aspirants—One Hundred Ways to Become Famous for One Dollar. Advance sheets of this work show that the author has expended considerable care on it. He marshals statistics to show that only one out of 97,621 of the men who write books ever secure even a tuppence worth of fame. In fact he proves that fame and good writing have no more to do with each other than Art and Truth, Virtue and Profession, Marriage and Constancy. He therefore concludes that the Literary Aspirant should secure his Fame first and launch his Literature afterward, and in this way take the tide at its flood and move on to fortune. To this end the gifted author gives one hundred ways of securing[145] fame. He starts with Homicide and runs through to Arson and Bridge Jumping, giving incidentally fourteen different kinds of Scandal and how to bring it about.

In my own mind I have always made a distinction between illustrious men, famous men and notorious men, but Mr. Lewis avers that in our day and generation such fine shades are all obliterated by the bright iridescence of the standard dollar. An author, he says, succeeds only as his books sell, and if his name is on the lips of rumor, women especially will besiege the stores and demand his tomes.

Now we must admit that the fine sophistry that Mr. Lewis brings to bear is interesting, but is it Art? Further than this, does it fill a vacuum in the great economic cosmos of Letters? I do not think that it does, and therefore do not hesitate to flatly give it as my opinion that while the author is sincere, the publishers are moved by no other motive than to secure the money of ambitious young men and women, having first victimized Mr. Lewis for the cost of plates and the first edition. That the work, like all skillful sophistry, is inspiring to the young, there is no doubt, but the final effect of the book on society I believe will be damaging, and therefore I cannot conscientiously recommend it.

Our valued co-worker in the vineyard, the Rev. George H. Hepworth, has begun to cast his Sunday Herald sermons in the first person singular and affix his distinguished name thereto. If this will make these sermons no better it will at least make them no worse.

As long-time admirers of these admirable Sabbath sermocinations The Philistine welcomes this innovation. And we think we know the wherefore of it. The Rev. Mr. Hepworth’s name attached to an article denunciatory of sin will have a tendency to strike terror into the heart of Beelzebub, and it was for this reason, no doubt, that Mr. Bennett directed Brother Hepworth to take the field in person.

Unquestionably this will add a new and livelier interest to the church. Each combatant knows exactly whom he is fighting. It is now Hepworth against Satan with a fair field and no favor. We have no hesitancy in saying that so far as Mr. Hepworth is concerned there will be no Valkyrie business. Moreover there is no desire to shirk responsibility. What he has to say he will say fearlessly over his own signature, and if those against whom these ecclesiastical thunderbolts are launched do not like them they know what they can do. Wot t’ell!

If The Philistine disturbs placid self-complacency anywhere, as one or two of its critics intimate, it is sorry, for there is no such happiness attainable anywhere this side of Nirvana as its serene contemplation of the charms of self which Narcissus and some more modern fakirs exemplify; and the magazine of to-day is its gospel. But so good a Philistine as Horace Greeley is my authority for believing that the still pool in which self-love sees the reflection it feeds upon is a breeder of death, not life, and effervescence is the sworn foe of the morbid. Not the things we do that we ought not to do, but the things left undone that we ought to do are the primary count leading up to the confession that “there is no health in us.” The other follows. Stagnation and the miasma of self-consciousness co-exist and are not to be separated. Wherefore, fellow-egoists, let us get a gait on.

I like the broad flourish with which some imaginative writers connect widely separated events in a stroke of the pen and omit all that lies between as[149] mere incident. It seems to me a proof of the theory put forward by my good friend Elbert Hubbard that genius is a feminine element of character—in man or woman. For example, I find this statement in the latest of the Little Journeys: “Moses was sent adrift, but the tide carried him into power.” I didn’t know just what that meant till I recalled the discovery of the bulrush cradle. A less intuitive writer wouldn’t have bridged eighty years in that summary way. He might have hinted at Moses’s police court record—told how he killed an Egyptian for calling him a son of a Populist or something and skun out for half a lifetime and yet became a Prince of Egypt and spent forty years or so at court before he took the road with the forefathers of Brickmaker Tourgee. But to connect the condensed milk baby in the market basket on the Nile with the law-giver of Israel in one movement, as the music people say, is a pretty long span and suggests the liberty David Copperfield takes with his own biography in the best book but one written by the subject of the latest Little Journey. “I was born:” he says—and all else is irrelevant. I take it that Mr. Hubbard agrees with John Boyle O’Reilly that “the world was made when a man was born.” The feminine element of genius which Mr. Hubbard tells us makes poets is manifest in that formula. If the author of the Journeys will[150] permit, I would suggest that the same mother instinct that crops out there is manifested in the grasp of a life in the compass of a sentence which puzzled me at the first. To be born and to die is the record of existence, to which all else is tributary; and the pangs of birth and death thrill all the poet-strains. Only the tragedy that sweeps along the strings lives to echo in human hearts. It is the deathless minor chord that distinguishes the melody of true poetry from the dancing cadences of rhyme in all literature. The undertone is the soul of all song, in verse or in the unmeasured periods of epic prose.

Mention of Moses recalls the perhaps unique fact that a priest of the most austere of churches rolled off a tongue, musical with brogue, in his newspaper sanctum—for he is a priest of the pen too—this romantic version of the basket story which I have never seen anywhere but in his paper—then in the process of make-up:

I observe that the editor of the Arena is about to make a contract with the Michigan Wheel Company[151] of Lansing, Michigan, for large quantities of its product to give as prizes to new contributors only, the old ones being already well supplied.

I have sent for this book, as it is my intention to write one hundred manuscripts, and I desire to keep track of them until published and paid for. I have therefore ordered the book bound in cast iron.

In a recent number of Modern Art protest is filed against the editor of the Chip-Munk continuing to ask that startling question “Do You Keep a Dog?” In God’s name, what right have the Chicago Decadents to thus pry into our private affairs? Is it not bad enough when the Chip-Munk advises us to drink Guzzle’s beer and use Culby’s soap without being interrogated as to what we “keep?”

Among the revivals which occur now and then in everything is a discussion of an old “science” of reading characters by the hair. I don’t know much about it, but from what I have heard I believe a pair of old she-bears set back the theory for a few centuries when they chewed up the small boys that poked fun at Elijah. The old man would be rated as having no character, according to these “readers,” for he had no hair, but Providence and the early Ursulines vindicated him.

A new woman who has been reading God’s Fool laid it down at the last chapter with a long sigh. “What do you think of it,” I asked. “It is dramatic,” she said, “terribly dramatic at the end,” and then added, after a pause, “I wonder what the reading of the next generation will be like. We have reached a force and directness of narration that seems to me to be pretty near the limit of possibility. What will we have next?” “What do you think?” I asked. “I think,” she said, “we will have a reaction. We will take in more and give out less. We are near one of the great periods of what has been called revelation in the past. Our literature is shallow but perfect, relatively, in expression. Our art is the same throughout. Our politics are personal. Our religion is liberal, and loose in the joints. Our social life is insincere and imitative. Our lives have[153] nothing in them to stir the deeps. There will be a reaction. The finesse of expression will be set aside for the tremendous earnestness that accompanies great events and prints their lessons on receptive minds. A break-up in Europe it may be, or some other social convulsion, that will change the tide. We are pretty near at the top of the flood now.” That’s the new woman’s view. I wonder how near she’s right?

Three hundred and twenty-seven thousand of my friends have individually sent to me a recent number of my Philadelphia contemporary, Footlights, in which it refers to The Philistine variously as a crow, a dicky bird and “a birdie of the jackass breed.” I am glad to be catalogued in this ornithological manner, and my friends may accept the listing as they please. As for myself, I’d rather be a good honest wild ass of the desert with long fuzzy ears than a poor imitation bird-of-paradise—stuffed by one hundred and seventeen geniuses.

A matter of architecture has been involved in the social problem which the Arena has ever with it—like a stutter or a beer breath. According to an alleged novel recently published by the Arena Company and called Edith, a Story of Chinatown, a feature of the tabooed district of Los Angeles, California, is a bay window projection on the houses devoted to[154] vice, wherein beauty spreads lures for the eyes of passers-by. The heroine of this lovely romance is one of these persons, sinned against in the prologue and sinning in the present, but discovered by a miraculous New York reporter on a vacation and returned to her broken-hearted parents and a good life. A benediction, with a remote hint of the Lohengrin march, ends the story. The Arena gives two pages to a review of the book, which is very kind of the publisher, and tells us therein that a description of Alameda street and of Dupont street, San Francisco, which is worse, is its purpose. The Arena can be depended on for a full stock of “terrible examples.”

The Literary Digest is falling into line admirably. Recently it printed a translation from some French source from which I clip the following:

All this sounds much as though it had been written by the keeper of The Literary Shop, but I don’t believe it was. Supposing, however, such an exhibit were held at Atlanta with the Fair now in progress. Imagine Mr. Gilder and James Knapp Reeve, Mr. Le Gallienne and Laura Jean Libbey, Count Tolstoi and Mrs. Mary Jane Holmes, each in his or her own coop like a Leghorn chicken! Imagine Colonel S. S. McClure (Limited) with his Menagerie of Trained Thoroughbreds, each one of them exhibiting by his emaciation the horrible results of syndicate writing! Imagine Cy Warman pawing madly at the bars of his cage trying to tell Sweet Marie about the secret in his heart! Then imagine Little Tin God of Philadelphia,[156] cuddled up in his basket, writing his masterpiece, How to Feed a Sick Kitten! To them then would enter Major John Boyd Thacher, the pride and joy of the Albany Democracy, and judge equally both the just and the unjust. It’s a great idea.

One of my correspondents tells me that “the editor of the Lark uses execrable perfume on his note paper.” This item is for the future reference of Mr. Burgess when he writes about his literary passions.

Several solemn newspapers have taken seriously to the extent of half a column or so the proposal of a San Francisco publishing house to “bring out good literature in a cheap form,” which sounds much like the advance agent talk of most publishing houses. It isn’t a joke, to be sure, but a good deal depends on what is meant by “good literature.” Thundering in the prologue is not a novelty, but there may be a storm coming for all that.

I note that the brilliant Bok has gone to writing proverbs. Here is one culled at random from “A Handful of Laconics,” printed under his honored signature in his September output:

It is my wish to call the particular attention of my[157] readers to this nugget. From a literary and philosophic standpoint literature contains nothing like it. Examine Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger or Solomon, and you will not find its fellow. Read it again, and read it slowly: “It-is-singular-yet-a-fact-that-what-we-are-most-loath-to-believe-possessed-by-others-is-what-we-are-incapable-of-ourselves.” This is undoubtedly the finest thing in the language and a reward of one million dollars will be paid to any Philistine who will furnish the solution. There is no bar against reading it backwards. It reads a little better backwards than forwards, but I do not think that is it.

I desire to record a discovery. I found a magazine the other day with the advertising pages uncut.

I doubt if Bliss Carman has had a more enthusiastic admirer than I. When his Vagabondia appeared I sent a copy to Her, which was the greatest compliment I could pay the book. In the magazines, notably in Town Topics, he has printed verses that were well worth preserving as some of the best of the decade. In the great mass, however, which he has published, there have been lines which nobody on earth could understand. They were worse than Stephen Crane’s, for he at least has a vague idea somewhere, though he rarely does us the favor to[158] express it in a seemly manner. Now I want to protest, not only against Mr. Carman, but against Life, which gave us The Whale and the Sprat which Mr. Carman wrote recently. Here are two of the stanzas:

How Mr. Metcalfe ever allowed such drivel to get into his columns I cannot understand. Possibly while he was in Japan the compositor set the stuff in the waste basket instead of that on the copy hook.

Vogue asserts that “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” is the ninth commandment. On information and belief, no doubt.

Because Mr. Rockefeller sneers at Mr. Pullman for giving but a paltry hundred thousand for a church at Albion, Orleans County, New York, Mr. Pullman retorts that Rockefeller is only a malmsey-nosed varlet anyway, whose grease his axles are not worthy to unloose. I am not quite ready to take George M. into the Philistinic fold, but he is surely coming my way.

I rejoice to find a thoughtful article by Richard Burton on the “Renascence of Old English Expression” in the current Forum—and not so much for what is in the article in detail as for its recognition of the main fact that there is something besides Bunthornism in the harking back to the simple dignity of early English. Our author, it will be noted, has little use for the overflowing maimed vowels of Normanesque “Renaissance.” Plain Latin renascence is good enough in a plea for the Saxon. But it is odd if so simple a thing as a rising from death into new life has no Saxon equivalent. Why not “re birth!”

Since the Mule-Spinners at Cohoes and Fall River went out on a strike I understand that subscriptions to The Writer have fallen off one-third.

Neith Boyce is a poet who never beats the brush piles of thought without starting good game. She writes good honest verse and she also writes “Book Notes and News” and other things for the New Cycle. The New Cycle, by the way, is not published by the Pope Manufacturing Company as one might suppose, but it is a monthly magazine “devoted to Education, Social Economics, Literature and Art.” I once edited a magazine devoted to Education, but the subject proved too large for the brainful syndicate that employed me; I have also written a book on[160] Art; and once, having nothing to do, I lectured for a space on Social Economics, but God help me! I never in a small monthly magazine attempted to tell all about Education, Social Economics, Literature and Art.

But the New Cycle is interesting, and if its various departments were as well cared for as its Book Notes and News it would be a greater success than it is. Neith Boyce has an unfailing insight and her touch is as light and as sure as my own; and moreover there is a tang to her wit that all bookish Philistines might well cultivate. In classic lore I have always looked up to Miss Boyce as the Court of last Appeal, but is it not possible that Minerva sometimes nods? Read this:

It may be so, but I did not know that Pluto had whiskers. And how does Miss Boyce dispose of the legend concerning the smooth face and giddy ways of old Mr. Pluto when he took to wife the young and blooming Persephone? Charon wears a Vandyke as[161] we well know; while Mephisto is usually represented as clean-shaved or at best a moustache and goatee; but hereafter I’ll never think of Pluto without calling up in mind Mr. Peffer of Kansas. Go to, Fair Lady! think you because barber shops are closed in York State on Sundays that they are shut in Hades all the week? Next!

A lecturer on Egypt, telling the natives of Buffalo, N. Y., about the marvels in stone built on that strip of mud, illustrated the proportions of the Nile Valley by saying “It it eleven hundred miles long in Egypt proper and seven miles wide for most of its length. If the city of Buffalo were laid crosswise in the valley, it would bisect the kingdom.” And a Rochester man who had strayed into the fold was mean enough to add: “And if Buffalo was there, that’s the way it would lie—cross-ways.” That’s the way they talk in Rochester.

I quote this paragraph from Alice and respectfully refer it to the editor of Mlle New York with the hope that he can see the point as plainly as he sees most things:

On his way to Montreal Mr. Hall Caine stopped off one day at East Aurora. The Pink Tea given in his honor at the office of The Philistine was largely attended by the farmers from both up the creek and down the creek. In fact, as my old friend Billy McGlory used to say, “Ye cudden’t see de street fer dust.”

The Boston Commonwealth (what satire there is in that name!) is a nice paper, but its editor has not smiled for forty years; and all of his little writers carry so much culture that they are round-shouldered, flat-chested, bow-legged and near-sighted. They belong to the large class that invariably miss the point of things and use dignity for a mask to hide their lack of a sense of fun. The Commonwealth accuses us of being envious of the Chip-Munk; of being violently prejudiced against Mr. Cudahy’s book, and of speaking irreverently of Boston. Go to thou old granny Commonwealth, why sit you like your grandsire carved in alabaster and creep into the jaundice by being peevish?

The Book-Peddler is doing great service in promotion of what passes for literature in the paper and ink stores. I cannot but think what a similar publication devoted to literature, not trade, could do to save the valuable time of the reading public. Since[163] Solomon’s time a good many things have changed, but in one there is no improvement. “Of the making of many books there is no end,” and that is a heap sadder than the lamentation of Maud Muller and His Honor.

Concerning Mr. Grant Allen’s book and the manner in which its title has been made the basis of several others more or less reminiscent, my most valued correspondent writes me that the novelists are missing much by not calling a story The Woman Who Is Simply Dying To. In my well known philanthropic way I throw out this suggestion hoping that somebody may make many dollars by the adoption of the title for a decadent tale.

The Vanastorbilts are really under great obligations to Mrs. Rorer’s Household News for the simple daily menus for poor folks which are a feature. There’s nothing so cheap as good living—in a magazine. When bread sticks and banana chutney and peaches and rice and cantaloupe can be mowed away by a poor man before the seven o’clock whistle blows no hard worker ought to lack muscle for his daily toil. We have printed assurance of Mrs. Bellow that “These menus have been arranged on a scientific plan, are thoroughly hygienic, and contain all that is necessary for proper living.” It is luck after[164] all that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the hygienic mouth aforesaid.

Messrs. Lo & Behold, publishers of works on moral pathology, Boston, are making great efforts to club the Arena. I understand they propose offering season tickets to museums of morbid anatomy as prizes.

I note a somewhat guarded statement by Dr. Swan M. Burnett denying that he and his wife have separated or are undergoing that mutually humiliating process. All there is of it, he says, is that her work keeps her abroad and his keeps him in Washington. The doctor’s friends say, however, that the doctor and the writist live apart and have done so for years and that he is tired of being referred to as Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s husband. I think more likely he objects to being identified at the banks and elsewhere as the father of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

The Pell Mell Gazette of last Saturday contains a cablegram from Mr. Hall Caine, dated at East Aurora, N. Y., wherein the author of The Manxman reports that the prospect for next year’s crop of ginger is very promising.

I suppose it’s all right for the publisher of Munsey’s to tell how he made that magazine jump from 20,000 to half a million copies a month by shutting out middlemen[165] and reaching the hungering and thirsting public direct. That’s his cue. If the publisher didn’t blow his horn who would? I opine, however, that the fish would sell without it, and that the editor of Munsey’s could tell them something a good deal more interesting in the same space. What does the great public, with its multitude of aims and desires, care how such an effect was accomplished? All that could safely remain within the veil. It would be more to the point if the editor or publisher of Mr. Bok’s collection of wax works would tell by what miracle he got a circulation. It is easy in the other case, regardless of the smart publisher. The time passed long ago when a horse being led to water could be forced to drink. The public must have wanted Munsey’s when it was shut out by the middleman or they wouldn’t have compelled the dealers to send for it, and that implies that there’s something in it besides self-consciousness and the publisher’s tactical brilliancy. But how on earth came the embodied ego and its sisters and cousins and aunts to get a hearing anywhere? Is Ruth Ashmore, alias Bab, at the bottom of it?

A certain gentleman of my acquaintance, having heard until he is sick of it that it takes nine Taylors to make a man, continues to boldly assert that it takes two Chatfields to make a Taylor.

When the Philistine was started six months ago I had no idea that it would now have half a million subscribers.

I am reminded by a Boston newspaper of the continued existence of a belief that criticism of books and other things more or less remotely connected with literature is largely a matter of prejudice and that the imprints on title pages determine the authors’ fate. Yet the same article goes on to quote the Chip-Munk firm as proof that merit will win sometimes in spite of such drawbacks. It seems to me the instance proves too much.

And here, just at the last, I want to set down what I have just read in a delightful book written by Katherine Cheever Meredith—Johanna Staats—because it seems to fit one’s mood at this time of year. This is it:

It was one of those November days when the wind swoops down the mountain sides, bringing an avalanche of leaves—disked oak leaves—and then leaving them for a moment in the valley basin, gathers them in her mighty hands and tosses them again almost to the mountain tops.

Chris found a sympathy in the dizzy, whirling, swirling leaves. His hopes had withered so, and now a girl’s changeful hand had been as reckless with him as was the wind with these: like wrath in death and envy afterwards.

Poor Chris’s spiritual kingdom was suffering the nature of an insurrection, for though he loved her he was too proud to tell her she had misjudged him. The dissipation of his hopes now was tinged with regret, just as the wanton winds seem to us ruthless as we remember when these leaves were planes and green, not disked and brown.

Mockingly came the dance of leaves around his feet—each like a thing alive—to beckon him here, there, to elude him, to laugh at him.

“It’s too hard to bear!” groaned Chris, between his teeth. “How could she believe it! How could she!”

A flurry of hurrying, scurrying leaves swept past him, a company of mocking, dancing leaves; from right and left they came, and scarce ten steps before him they met and swirled up—up into a monstrous wraith with beckoning hands. Chris’s conflict took form. “I’ll do it! I’ll do it! I’ll show her! She’ll regret this day!” and he threw back his head and with flashing eyes started forward with resolute steps.

A lost leaf wavered, dipped, paused, then with a timid wafture touched his crisp curls.

“Oh no,” said Chris, “I may be wrong—I’ll tell her so;” and holding the lost leaf very gently between his two hands he walked swiftly back.

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