Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

cause cannot be advanced by injustice to others, whether working-men or capitalists, or by flying in the face of human nature.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE
BANANA PEEL

R. HENEY, the distinguished San Francisco attorney, recently criticized severely the lack of patriotism of a man whom he overheard saying that he "would like to leave this country and move to England, where 'Keep off the Grass' means keep off the grass,"-a sig

nificance, he said, that does not attach to

the phrase in America. We sympathize with Mr. Heney: the discontented American ought to remain here and fight for the grass,—even against Mr. Heney's willing ness to destroy Hetch Hetchy Valley. But we regret that Mr. Heney did not also say that the man had hit the target exactly that the fundamental difficulty we have is to obtain respect for law as a principle. Nor is this an academic question. In all our cities it is one of great practical importance. Take, for instance, the unrestrained littering of the streets with paper and banana peels. To object to this, while, every day burglaries and murders are being committed, seems to many an undue anxiety about the anise and cummin of good government. They do not see the value of enforcing public cleanliness not only for itself but as a discipline in obedience to law.

topic became necessary, he would take the document out of the pigeonhole of his desk and say, "Yes, I 've been thinking that over," and he actually thought he had been thinking. But he was no better qualified then to give his decision than at the moindulged himself in a timid habit of mind. ment it was first called for. He had simply

It is refreshing to see how promptly the House of Representatives has carried out its proposed program of legislation, and whatever may be done by the Senate, there is no reason it should not be done as

promptly. It is not to the interest of anyshould pass in an inertia of neglect of pubbody that days and weeks and months lic business. Institutions are only men, due to the determination of a few memand that any legislation is accomplished is body of legislators at work in the prompt bers. It is of course surprising to see a and orderly methods of a board of railway

does not behoove a coördinate branch to or bank directors, but when this occurs, it "plead surprise," as the lawyers say. The questions at issue have not been sprung upon anybody. Both representatives and senators have been considering them for years. Elaborate committee hearings are not for the purpose of satisfying the legislator so much as satisfying the public, and permitting those concerned to "blow off

steam."

The lawmaker, if he is wide-awake and a man of affairs, has been considering the leading questions in many ways,-in reading, in conversation, in investigation,

But what is the effect, present and remote, upon the newly arrived immigrant mote, upon the newly arrived immigrant- and while he must keep himself opento say nothing of the more settled popu-minded to the last, he should have large lation-of seeing that laws are not made sources of judgment on all current topics.

to be enforced?

PUTTING THINGS THROUGH

Sometimes dilatory tactics for the defeat of an obnoxious measure are allowable, and, moreover, with regard to unobnoxious measures there is safety in a multiE once heard of a man of business tude of counselors. What we are speak

IN CONGRESS

Whose maid principle was never to ing of is the pigeonholing of measures for

trust the judgment of the moment. Procrastination was to him the chief of virtues. To-morrow's opinion was always better than to-day's. Present to him a letter or a memorandum on a matter of importance, and he would say, "Yes, I'll give it careful consideration," and straightway would put aside the document, actually believing that something had been accomplished by the process of filing it. When the necessity of dealing with the

sheer lack of willingness to make prompt decisions, such as one has a right to expect from mature minds. What is certain is that the postponement of many questions till the very close of a session has given us not well-considered, but really hasty legislation. If Raw Haste be half-sister to Delay, then Delay may be assumed to be half-brother to Raw Haste.

Within little more than six weeks of the extra session the House of Representatives

has passed five measures of importance: The Canadian Reciprocity Resolution, the Free List Bill, the Publicity of Campaign Expenses Bill, the Bill to submit the Constitutional Amendment for the Direct Election of Senators, and the resolution to admit New Mexico and Arizona as States of the Union. Whatever may be the judgments of the Senate on these measures, the country has a right to expect that they will be made with no unnecessary delay.

In no administration since the Civil War has there been so nearly a continuous session of Congress as in Mr. Taft's. This is a source of enormous expenditure, and we believe the country would welcome shorter periods of legislative work, and these can be brought about only by more businesslike methods.

The watchword of our commercial world to-day is Efficiency; before long it must become that of our law-makers.

THE THREEFOLD POWER OF THACKERAY

THE

HE centenary of Thackeray, which occurs July 12, has attracted comparatively little attention-nothing like the popular interest already aroused by the centenary of his great contemporary, Dickens, still half a year away. This is natural, and in harmony with the kind of popularity attained by each of these men of genius. We may find a parallel in the United States, where the centenary of Longfellow was celebrated everywhere, while the hundredth birthday of Hawthorne passed almost unobserved. To be sure, Hawthorne had the bad luck to be born on the fourth of July.

It is rather curious how often great writers appear in pairs, and are forced by the reading public into the false position of rivals. This is true not only of Thackeray and Dickens, but of Richardson and Fielding, Goethe and Schiller, Tennyson and Browning, Hardy and Meredith, Longfellow and Whittier, Hauptmann and Sudermann, Björnson and Ibsen, Turgenieff and Tolstoi. There is, however, an advantage to such double stars in our intellectual firmament in the stimulus given to general discussion and analysis of their respective claims to immortality.

Although Thackeray's achievements

with pen and pencil were many and various, the five pillars in Thackeray's hall of fame are "Vanity Fair," fame are "Vanity Fair," "Pendennis," "Henry Esmond," "The Newcomes," and "The Virginians"; and they seem built of indestructible material-material that laughs at the capricious winds and storms of public applause and public scorn, that defies even those more dangerous foes, the boring moth of neglect and the corrupting rust of years. The supply of this building material seems exceedingly limited, though it is diligently sought for by all literary architects except those who cater for a short summer season, and whose reputation is like breath on a mirror. Of the dozen names, from DeFoe to De Morgan, that have made English fiction illustrious, he would be a bold critic that should place any above Thackeray. For he excelled in both the great divisions of the novel-realism and romanticism. In "Pendennis" and "Vanity Fair" he gave us permanent and truthful pictures of English life and English character; in "Esmond" he wrote. what is probably the greatest historical romance in our tongue. In the last analysis, the highest distinction of Thackeray is not found in his "fable," or in his style, or in his thought, but in the persons of his imagination into whom he has breathed the breath of life. These people, immense in variety, are all real people, and they are real because they exhibit the marvel and the curse of humanity, the astonishing mixture of good and evil. To know them intimately is to know life.

Besides the divine power of creation which inspired Thackeray, he enjoyed to a high degree the less rare faculty of criticism-the criticism of men and the criticism of books. This was developed early in his life by his skill and practice with the crayon, for he was a born artist in caricature. A large amount of his thirteen solid volumes consists of critical work, sometimes in the shape of formal literary essays, sometimes in the more charming manner of firelight conversation, reminiscence, and speculation. His lectures, which delighted American audiences on two memorable journeys, naturally exhibit some of the range of his reading and the extent of his sympathies. But the real charm of these disquisitions on Swift, Sterne, and the four Georges, lies almost wholly in the revelation of their maker's

personality. It was the author of "Vanity Fair" that filled the halls in New York, Boston, Savannah, and St. Louis; but as the crowd passed into the night, they carried away to their homes the memory of a big, lovable man. He closed the first series in New York by saying, "I may quarrel with Mr. Dickens's art a thousand and a thousand times, I delight and wonder at his genius; I recognize in itI speak with awe and reverence-a commission from that Divine Beneficence whose blessed task we know it will one day be to wipe every tear from every eye. Thankfully I take my share of the feast of love and kindness which this gentle, and generous, and charitable soul has contributed to the happiness of the world."

Thackeray was not only a great creative artist and a notable critic; he was a tremendous moral force. He was not content with finding sermons in stones; he thrust them into all his books. He was always on the side of the angels, and

struck redoubtable blows at sin, whether it appeared in uniform or in disguise. He cheerfully sacrifices the canons of art to drive home a moral idea. Never was a man more ineptly called a cynic; for his nature was the exact opposite: he was an arch-sentimentalist. His life was filled with

. . . little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.

Some one has said that the function of religion is to add zest to life. Perhaps there never lived a man who got more fun out of good deeds. In 1853, a writer in "Putnam's Magazine" said that the popular notion of Thackeray before his arrival was that of a scoffer and sneerer; but that, after he was known, he convinced all of his intellectual integrity; "there is no man more humble, none more simple." Whatever in the future may be thought of his work, no matter how high his genius may be rated, it is now abundantly clear that his character was as great as his mind.

OPEN LETTERS

ON A CERTAIN KIND OF TABLE-TALK

Being a Remonstrance Offered by Miss Agatha Reynolds to her Unoffending Friend Mrs. Felix Mackenzie

No, Sara dear, I am not going to dine with you, nor with any one else, until I am robustly capable of dining. I know that you are ready to soften the brilliant iniquities of your table to meet my limitations, and I know that you are able to surround me with fellow-sufferers;

[graphic]

but a dinner-party is one thing, and a clinic is another, and the combination does n't suit my taste. You see, I was brought up in an age which talked a great deal about food until it was eaten, and about drink until it was drunk, but which preserved a decent silence as to what happened afterward. Our personal

relations with our nourishment was held to be a topic unfit for polite conversation. The nearest approach to it I can remember was when dear old Dick Chisholm (who died of gout like a gentleman thirty years ago) gave me the menu of a supper he had eaten at Wallace Rendle's two weeks before. "Now, that was n't a heaven-defying supper, was it?" he asked, with his queer, twisted smile, made up of fun and pain. "Yet I have n't crawled into the sunshine since."

But in these well-informed days my neigh

bors at table seem to know just what effect each and every article of food will have upon each and every part of their anatomy, and they enlighten me concerning their most intimate processes of digestion. Their organs, specially their organs which happen to be out of order, are discussed with the unseemly freedom of a patent-medicine advertisement. Last week I lunched with Amy Middleton. Alice Alison opened the ball by asking Mrs. Tom Butcher if Dr. Phillips allowed her to eat grape-fruit. You see, we made an early start. Mrs. Butcher might have said yes or no, and closed the subject; instead of which she plunged rapturously into her diet, and her chalky deposits, and other things too disagreeable to mention. That started Miss Sedgewick (you know her -Tom Sedgewick's aunt, and fearfully stout), and she told us about three separate dietaries which had been made out for her in a year, one by her Philadelphia doctor, one by her doctor in Carlsbad, and one by a Viennese gout specialist, and which apparently did not have a single item in common. I thought that rather funny, but the humor of the situation was marred by Miss Sedgewick's pathetic endeavor to recall which of the three doctors had said she might eat potatoes. She was still struggling over that point when Katharine Kenyon swept the ground from under her faltering feet by announcing that a wonderful new man in New York-somebody who treated gout and rheumatism, and nothing else had told her she might eat anything she pleased, provided that she touched no stimulant. Alcohol in any form was fuel to the flame, and it arrested, instead of hastening, as we used to think, the process of absorption. Katharine rather wanted to explain to us just what the process of absorption meant, and had gotten as far as the solvent action of her gastric juice

when Mrs. Butcher, who felt that her chalky deposits had been slighted, said she did not care what any New York doctor said; she knew that uncooked food was bad for gout. Why, if she ate an apple, which was the least acid of fruits, she was sure to feel it in her fingers the next day. Whereupon Amy, thinking perhaps that it was her duty as hostess to fall in with the humor of her guests, suddenly remarked that apples were the most indigestible things the earth produced. If she ate the smallest piece of one, it went nowhere at all, at least nowhere that it should have gone. It hung, like Mohammed's coffin, in space, and she felt the pressure for hours.

Now, Sara, I give you my word of honor that I am not exaggerating. And I do think such conversations odious. Have we outgrown the false shame we used to feel at being ill at all, only to wallow unreservedly in our symptoms? Sometimes the wallowing is really comic. I mean when people who do it are quick-witted enough to see the comedy. The other afternoon I asked my niece to hand a cup of tea to an elderly visitor, and the child said reproachfully: "Oh, Aunt Agatha, don't interrupt me! I have just found somebody new to whom I can tell my diet." This is the blessed gaiety of youth which gilds even the doctor's pill; but if the rising generation begins dieting at nineteen, I shall be glad to be spared the conversations of the future. Meanwhile I'll sip my gruel at home, and confide my ailments to my physician, whose duty it is, and whose pleasure it ought to be, to hear them. I am like the old grumbler in "Robert Elsmere" who said, “In my youth, people talked about Ruskin; now they talk about drains."

Your affectionate friend,
Agatha Reynolds.

TO A SENIOR IN A QUANDARY

Being a Sympathetic Consideration of a Common and Depressing Experience

[blocks in formation]

your senior year than you were as a sophomore. I doubt if two thirds of your class, or of any other university class, have made up their minds. The tendencies of college at the present time are not calculated to awaken in a man a distinct desire to go into this or that profession, and one must have a very decided bent early in the course to lead him to shape his work and studies to a definite purpose. So far from taking a conceited view of his position as a graduate, the average man is usually hamstrung by humility, and has his moments of desperate wandering by the canal, considering whether, after all, it has not been a

LXXXII-57

terrible mistake, this going to college. He finds himself, in Emerson's words,

Amid the Muses. . . deaf and dumb;
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.

But I think you should not consider your time thrown away by reason of the fact that after four years you are no nearer to what is conventionally required of a man of twenty-two. You may well be without a decided leaning toward the law or literature or medicine or even finance without being on that account any the less a cultivated man, since you have a mind capable of adjustment to any work it may have to do. Don't make a mistake: a college education -presuming you have n't forgot to get one -will make you fitter for any sort of work.

It is n't perhaps the fault of the university that you find yourself in this situation, --though it might well give fuller consideration to the subject,-and 'the fact that you are not in robust health makes it all the more desirable that you should have the assistance of your friends in working out something practical at this time. How sympathetically and how wisely your father would have dealt with your dilemma! I remember how he loved and helped young people. He was very different from a woman I knew who, during Jack Llewellyn's apprentice-time, when he was hard at work at his writing and needed all the encouragement of family and friends, kept saying, "Why does n't he take a salaried position and earn a living?" I hope she has forgotten this, now that Jack has made his "hit" and more than a competence.

Well, I have a suggestion for you. No, it is n't that you should "take to ink." When you 've something to say, you'll have plenty of opportunity to be heard. And even if you were ready for the literary life, you could pursue that with the smallest material equipment-only pen, ink, and paper. Unless you have to, don't rush into that crowd. Usually the weeks about commencement-time are busy ones for the editors and publishers of this country by reason of the large number of applications which they re

ceive from recently graduated young men, a very small proportion of whom could be provided for in these lines of business, even if every position were made vacant for them.

My suggestion may prove more practicable than at first appears. It is this: You have formed very strong friendships in college, as I judge from the fact of your election to two societies and from the number of fine fellows whom I have met at your mother's house during vacations. Should you find among these friends two or three others who are in a similar quandary, would it not be worth while for you to consider the organization of a joint-stock company for the purpose of helping one another to a firmer foothold in life? In other things besides hunting burglars, two or three timidities may make a total of boldness. Could you not undertake something together, not exactly as purse-companions, but as partners? For example, could you not raise enough money to buy or lease land in the Northwest for a fruit ranch? Whatever might be your individual weakness or strength, it would be supplemented or utilized by some quality in your comrades. And your pride and your mutual obligations would spur you to your best. If the experiment should not prove a great success during the first year, you would all have had at least a twelvemonth of vigorous outdoor life, a touch of reality and experience in dealing with various kinds of men, a better knowledge of the resources of your country, and the time and opportunity to work out something else for yourselves. This last may seem to you rather poor consolation, but sometimes the pause before the active work of life is as important as an interval in music.

I've spoken of the fruit ranch, almost at random; no doubt you could hit upon something else. The point is, to give reality to comradeship. What is the value of all the four years of college intimacies-to the cultivation of which so much of scholarship is sacrificed-if in such an emergency it cannot be drawn upon to advantage you all? Affectionately yours,

Walter Cripplegate.

[graphic]
« AnkstesnisTęsti »