The Philistine: a periodical for curious persons (Vol. II, No. 6, May 1896)

FOR CURIOUS PERSONS (VOL. II, NO. 6, MAY 1896) ***

The Philistine A Periodical for Curious Persons.

_Affliction may one day smile again, and till then, sit thee down, sorrow._—LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST.

[Illustration: Vol. II. No. 6.]

Printed Every Little While for The Society of The Philistines and Published by Them Monthly. Subscription, One Dollar Yearly Single Copies, 10 Cents. May, 1896.

THE PHILISTINE.

CONTENTS FOR MAY.

Ananké, a poem, Eugene R. White The compensation of the martyrs.

By Rule of Three, Elbert Hubbard A preachment by a Prizeman, showing the futility of certain things and the usefulness of others.

A Sonnet of Hope, John Jerome Rooney

Shakspeare’s Borrowings, Walter Blackburn Harte

Life’s Voyage: a Mood, William B. Faville

If Love were All, Elizabeth C. Cardozo

An Hour with Cæsar Augustus, G. W. Stevens The inside of Roman Politics obtained from sources only just unearthed in recent excavations.

Side Talks with the Philistines. A chronicle of opinion conducted by the East Aurora School of Philosophy.

_Entered at the Postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as mail matter of the second class._

_COPYRIGHT, 1896, by B. C. Hubbard._

Only a very few copies of that noble book, The Song of Songs: which is Solomon’s, remain unsold. The price for these is now Five Dollars Each. The Vellum Copies can no longer be supplied by us at any price.

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THE CONSERVATOR

Printed Monthly in Philadelphia.

HORACE L. TRAUBEL, Editor.

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All communications intended for the Editor should be addressed to HORACE L. TRAUBEL, CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY.

The attention of persons interested in Walt Whitman is directed to _The Conservator_, in which, along with the presentation of other views, affecting freedom, democracy, ethics, solidarity, there appear special studies treating of the significance of Walt Whitman’s appearance in history, written in part by men whose personal relations to Whitman, often whose genius, give their utterances great importance and offer special reasons why readers of books and lovers of man cannot afford to ignore or neglect their contributions.

Grouped here following are some names of recent writers aiding in this synthesis.

John Burroughs, Richard Maurice Bucke, Oscar Lovell Triggs, Hamlin Garland, Daniel G. Brinton, Thomas B. Harned, Kelley Miller, Isaac Hull Platt, Miss Charlotte Porter, Miss Helen A. Clarke, Miss Helena Born, Edward Payson Jackson, Edgar Fawcett, Laurens Maynard, Francis Howard Williams, William Sloane Kennedy, John Herbert Clifford, Wayland Hyatt Smith, Horace L. Traubel.

_The Bibelot._

MDCCCXCVI

Those authors and subjects that many readers are glad to come at in a brief way, (and who may be thereby quickened to direct their studies anew to the sometimes surface hidden beauties of literature,) will continue to find ample presentation in _The Bibelot_ for 1896.

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_MEDITATIONS IN MOTLEY._

By WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE

Meditations in Motley reveals a new American essayist, honest and whimsical, with a good deal of decorative plain speaking. An occasional carelessness of style is redeemed by unfailing insight.—I. Zangwill in _The Pall Mall Magazine_ for April, 1895.

Philip Hale, the well-known and brilliant literary and musical critic, writes: “Walter Blackburn Harte is beyond doubt and peradventure, the leading essayist in Boston to-day. 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 should fall, and at times delightfully whimsical, rambling, paradoxical, fantastical.”

Mr. Harte is not always so good in the piece as in the pattern, but he is a pleasant companion, and I have met with no volume of essays from America since Miss Agnes Repplier’s so good as his Meditations in Motley.—RICHARD LE GALLIENNE, in the London _Review_.

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After a brief but brilliant career of Five Issues The Fly Leaf has been incorporated with The Philistine. Each number issued was published in a Limited Edition and very few now remain. No. 1 costs 50 cents, and Nos. 2, 3 and 4 are sold at 25 cents. A few copies of the Complete Set bound in antique boards are offered at $1.50. The bound volume makes a library book of unique value, which will interest all students of the contemporary literary movement in America.

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THE PHILISTINE.

NO. 6. May, 1896. VOL. 2.

ANANKÉ.

A vagrant thought by cowled convention racked; Dubbed Heretic because its orbit was not known, Now canonized and crowned in Reason’s throne, And martyrdom receives its subtle recompense.

EUGENE R. WHITE.

BY RULE OF THREE.

Some years ago at College I read, on compulsion, a book on Rhetoric. Reasons were to me then as plenty as blackberries, and I recollect that on examination my answers given to this, that, and the other were so glib and trite, and my thesis so amusing, that I carried off a Prize.

But during the struggle for prizes that have a value as collateral, the Prize and the Rhetoric were forgotten. Yet Fate decreed it so, and one day last week I met a Harvard youth, whose ambition was Literature, and he was in the grinding turmoil of a Volume. He was studying on compulsion, with intent to work off a Condition, and the book he was reading with such violence was the Rhetoric of my College days. With a flush of pride it came to me that I was a Prizeman, and I offered, out of the goodness of my heart, to tutor the youth, so that after five lessons of an hour each he could grind the Condition to powder.

To prove my fitness, the young man put me through a slight quiz, and alas! all of the beautiful truths and facts of the Rhetoric had slipped me, save this alone: “The three requisites in correct writing are Clearness, Force, and Elegance.”

Every address that Professor Adams Sherman Hill, who wrote the Rhetoric, ever gave began with this formula. Mr. Barrett Wendell, Heir-Apparent to his ideas and Chair, does the same; and the Shock-headed Youth, who occupies the same relation to the professorship that the infant Duke of York does to the throne of England, always settles himself in his seat with his elbows on the table, coughs gently, and prefaces his lecture by saying to the admiring Freshmen: “Gentlemen, the three requisites in correct writing are Clearness, Force, and Elegance.” Professor Hill has in one book, by actual count, twenty-seven different propositions that he divides into three parts. I have forgotten them all save the one just named. This statement I never can forget. I hold it with a deathless grasp that defies the seasons and sorrows of time: for there are things burned so deep into one’s soul that the brand can never be removed; and should reason abdicate, I’ll gibber through the grates of my padded cell at each pitying passer-by, “The three requisites in correct writing are Clearness, Force, and Elegance.”

For years I have repeated this fetching formula on every possible occasion; and up to this date I have managed to drown the rising voice of conscience by the specious plea that a double standard of truth is justifiable in the present condition of society. In morals I have been a bimetalist.

But after reading _On Compromise_, by John Morley, I am convinced that this juggling with the Eternal Verities is what has kept the race in darkness these many cycles; and I now admit the truth which I have long withheld, that Professor Hill’s three Requisites are gross humbuggery. I boldly state that Professor Hill does not know what the “Requisites” are; and I am sure that I do not. In fact I am looking for them anxiously; and should I ever find them, I’ll do as Shakespeare did—keep them to myself. I say further that inasmuch as Professor Hill does not know them, the Heir-Apparent and the Shock-headed Youth in the rush-line for the Chair cannot possibly be expected to know: so none of us know.

Not only is Professor Hill’s formula rank error, but it is in direct opposition to truth. I bundle his crass creed with Dr. Hall’s Universal Self-Treatment, Professor Loisette’s Scheme of Mnemonics, and the Brown-Sequard Recipe for Perpetual Youth.

Professor Hill, with the help of his students, has compiled three books on Rhetoric; Mr. Barrett Wendell has published two. Students at Harvard are expected to buy these books. There are three thousand students at Harvard. These various books are practically one, for they all teach that “a parenthetical remark must be enclosed in parentheses, dashes or commas,” and that “every sentence should have at least one verb.” These things are explained to men who have had ten years of solid schooling in order to fit them for College. Professor Hill recommends Harvard students to buy “that well written work on Composition by Mr. Barrett Wendell,” and Mr. Wendell modestly says, on page 8, line 18, of his biggest well written work: “Professor Hill’s books are the most sensible treatment of the art of composition that I have yet found in print.” The last three chapters in Mr. Wendell’s well written work bear the following startling titles, respectively: _Clearness_, _Force_, and _Elegance_. Harvard Freshmen know Trigonometry, Physics and “one language beside English,” and various other things, but it is left for Professor Hill to sell them a book which explains that “a sentence may end either with a period, interrogation point or an exclamation mark!” Do you say that the public school system is to blame for such a condition? My answer is that if Harvard required her students to know the simple rules of Rhetoric before being admitted to the University, it would be done.

Mr. Hill fills the Boylston Professorship of Literature and Oratory at Harvard University, but with all the many thousand students who have been under his care he has probably never given impulse to a single orator, nor materially assisted one man with literary ambition. The reason is that he is teaching things that should have been known to his pupils years before. There is a time to teach things as well as a way. Instead of arousing animation Professor Hill reduces it. So sympathy is made a weakling and imagination rendered wingless. I have examined many compositions written by Harvard students, and they average up about like the epistles of little girls who write letters to Santa Claus. The students are all right—fine intelligent young fellows—but the conditions under which they work are such that they are robbed of all spontaneity when they attempt to express themselves. Of course I know that a few Harvard men have succeeded in Oratory and Literature, for there are those so strong that even Cambridge cannot kill their personality, nor a Professor reduce to neutral salts their native vim.

The rules of Rhetoric should be taught to adolescence; then when the boy goes to college he has tools with which to work. “When did you learn your letters?” I asked a six-year-old youngster yesterday. “I allus know’d ’em,” was the reply. And the answer was wise, for the kindergarten methods teach the child to read, and he never knows when or how he acquired the knowledge. As a healthy man does not know he has a stomach, so he should write without knowing a single so-called rule. And as the Froebel methods are fast making their way in all departments of learning, I expect this will soon be so. But the colleges lag behind, and Harvard (very busy fighting “Co-Ed—”) still tries to make statues by clapping the material on the outside.

Professor Hill knows the futility of his methods, for in his last work he puts in several disclaimers to the effect that he “does not undertake to supply men with ideas.” That confession of weakness is pitiful. Professor Hill should surround his students with an atmosphere that makes thought possible. By liberating the imagination of his pupils ideas would come to them. But as fire will not burn without oxygen, so thought cannot exist in the presence of Mr. Barrett Wendell. Both he and his Superior are strong in way of supplying cold storage—that’s all.

In lecturing on Literature and Oratory these men sit at a desk. And often, becoming weary, they sprawl over the table like a devil-fish seeking its prey. This, I believe, is the usual Cambridge method. But there is one exception to this rule at Harvard, and that is Professor Kittredge, who being nervous and cannot sit still, paces the platform and shoots the lecture over his shoulder. When a student is called on to recite, Professor Kittredge often opens a box of withering sarcasm that acts like chlorine gas on the poor fellow who is trying to recite. But it makes the rest of the class grin like deaths-heads. Harvard knows no general plan for cultivating the imagination, inciting animation, or furthering ambition. All is suppression, fear; and this repression often finds vent in rowdyism outside of Harvard Yard. The seven youths who under Professor Hill mark the themes hunt only for errors and lapses. The tendency of this negation is intellectual torpor and spiritual death.

If any one should ask Mr. Barrett Wendell what he thought of the Herbartian idea of developing the God within, the Assistant Professor would first calmly light a cigarette, and after blowing the smoke through his nose, would fix on his presumptious interlocutor an Antarctic stare that would freeze him stiff.

II.

And let me say right here that toward Harvard’s teachers I bear no malice. In showing Professor Hill’s books to be puerile and profitless, and in depositing the Heir-Apparent in the ragbag of oblivion, I have no sinister motive. And if from this time forward their names are a byword and a hissing, it is only because the Institution which they serve has stood in the way of Eternal Truth. These professors of rhetoric prospecting on the mountain side, thinking they had found the Final Word, builded tabernacles and rested—all forgetful of the avalanche.

“Clearness” is never found in literature of the first class. Clearness, according to the Professor, means a simplicity that makes the meaning plain to all others. But this is only pabulum for the sophomore intellect; and outside of Bryant & Stratton’s it has no legitimate place. The great writer is only clear to himself or those as great as he.

The masterpieces of Art are all cloud-capped. Few men indeed ever reach the summit: we watch them as they ascend and we lose them in the mists as they climb: sometimes they never come back to us, and even if they do, having been on the Mount of Transfiguration, they are no longer ours.

In all great literature there is this large, airy impersonal independence. The Mountain does not go to you: you may famish out there on the arid plain and your bones whiten amid the alkali in the glistening sun, but the majestic Mountain looks on imperturbable. The valleys are there, with the rich verdure, and the running brooks where the trout frolic, and the cool springs where wild game gathers, but what cares the Mountain for you! Ecclesiastes offers no premiums to readers, Shakespeare makes no appeal to club raisers, Emerson puts forth no hot endeavor for a million subscribers: all these can do without you.

Rich lodes run through this Mountain, and we continually delve and toil for treasure. And in spite of the pain and isolation and the privation that is incident, and the dangerous crevices that lie in wait, we secure a reward for our labor. Still we do not find the fabled “pockets” that we seek—it is always something else. From Columbus searching for a Northwest Passage to the rustic swain who follows with such fidelity the wake of a petticoat, all are the sport of Fate. We achieve, but die in ignorance of the extent to which we have benefitted the Race. And like the man who rode the hobby all his life, and whose friends discovered after he was dead that it was a real horse and had carried the man many long miles, so are we carried on steeds that are guided by an Unseen Hand.

All sublime Art is symbolistic. What is the message the great violinist brings you? Ah, you cannot impart it! Each must hear it for himself. The note that is “clear” to all is not Art. When Charles Lamb pointed to the row of ledgers in the office of the East India Company and said, “These are my works,” he was only joking; for he afterward explained that ledgers, indices, catalogues, directories, almanacs, reports, and briefs are not literature at all. These things inspire no poems; they give no glow.