The Philistine: a periodical of protest (Vol. I, No. 2, July 1895)

OF PROTEST (VOL. I, NO. 2, JULY 1895) ***

The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest.

“_Those Philistines who engender animosity, stir up trouble and then smile._”—_John Calvin._

[Illustration]

Printed Every Little While for The Society of The Philistines and Published by Them Monthly. Subscription, One Dollar Yearly; Single Copies, 10 Cents. Number 2. July, 1895.

The Bibelot

A Reprint of Poetry and Prose for Book Lovers, chosen in part from scarce editions and sources not generally known....

Printed for Thomas B. Mosher and Publish’d by him at 37 Exchange Street, Portland, Maine

Price 5 cents 50 cents a year

THE BIBELOT is issued monthly, beautifully printed on white laid paper, uncut, old style blue wrapper, in size a small quarto (5×6), 24 to 32 pages of text, and will be sent postpaid on receipt of subscription. Remit (preferably) by N. Y. Draft, or P. O. Money Order.

Numbers now ready.

January—Lyrics from William Blake. February—Ballades from Villon. March—Mediæval Student Songs. April—A Discourse of Marcus Aurelius. May—Fragments from Sappho. June—Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets.

THOMAS B. MOSHER, Portland, Maine.

Please Mention THE PHILISTINE.

The Philistine.

Edited by H. P. Taber.

CONTENTS FOR JULY, 1895.

JEREMIADS:

An Interview with the Devil, Walter Blackburn Harte.

Fashion in Letters and Things, Elbert Hubbard.

Where is Literature At? Eugene R. White.

A Free Lunch League, William McIntosh.

The New Hahnemann, Herbert L. Baker.

OTHER THINGS:

Some Little Verses, Edwin R. Champlin.

The Laughter of the Gods, Rowland B. Mahany.

The Lord of Lanturlu, G. F. W.

Side Talks with The Philistines.

Some More Verses.

Advertisements.

THE PHILISTINE is published monthly at $1 a year, 10 cents a single copy. Subscriptions may be left with newsdealers or sent direct to the publishers.

Business communications should be addressed to THE PHILISTINE. East Aurora, New York. Matter intended for publication may be sent to the same address or to Box 6, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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

_COPYRIGHT, 1895._

THE PHILISTINE

NO. 2. July, 1895. VOL. 1.

SOME LITTLE VERSES.

OF EDWARD ROWLAND SILL.

Since he is dead who once was so alive, And all is living that in life he saw, His written words provoke in me an awe And wonder if he still unseen doth thrive— His inmost being true to life and law.

LOST JOY.

Whence joy came I do not know, But she left me long ago; In a heart that still is free She abides—and loves not me.

EDWIN R. CHAMPLIN.

WHERE IS LITERATURE AT?

At any time the sight of a Don Quixote leveling an earnest lance at a mill is inspiring, hence a book called _Degeneration_, by one Max Simon Nordau, is worthy of attention. The book has been discussed pro and con as fully as it deserved. If not forgotten it is reserved for another generation to adjudicate its value. Enough that it has stirred up a valiant mess, out of which can come nothing but good.

As a whole it is worthless—it might well have been written by a son of Robert Elsmere and Mrs. Nickelby—for the mosaic of clever observation is wrought into a most grotesque picture. The perception of Mr. Nordau is fine, but his perspective is absurdly jumbled. The premises, logical enough, are made to form an absurd conclusion—yet the half-truths in the book are well worthy of note.

Genius was an abnormality long before Nordau found it out from Lombroso. Granted that everybody who has risen above the dead level of mediocrity is a maniac, let us head the list with Jesus of Nazareth. But does that detract from the value of their work or the good of their mission? Moses may have had asymmetrical ears, and Blind Homer been possessed with all sorts of mental afflictions. That is not the point. What Mr. Nordau does show us is that the literature of this decade is self conscious and that it is marked in general by a hopeless lack of unity. Not that these facts were discovered by the captious German: Good lack, they are apparent enough, but he has surely emphasized them. And the object of this is to say a say about the present non-importance of modern literature’s self consciousness and its lack of unity.

When one talks with a decrier of modernity, when our ears are stuffed with the prattle about self consciousness, should there be an attempt to say a word it is met with a flaunting statement about Homer. Homer is undeniably the great unsullied spring, the rock struck in the desert which pours forth a clear limpid stream. But the example does not serve. If Homer is pristine he is also primeval. Self consciousness in these days means nothing less than that one comprehends in part that momentous question of where we are at. Underlying which it means that it has a realizing sense of battles to fight and wrongs to retrieve. Marry and up, we might all be Homers had literature no past. The past is a millstone that has hung around the neck of many a sturdy man.

Truth to tell, there must be a certain self consciousness nowadays if anything is to be done. Besides, what is self consciousness? Not the kind that mistakes the medium for the work accomplished, but a genuine hearty self consciousness. Is it not manifestly absurd to deny to the father of an idea the most complete conception of his paternity? Can we interpret the works of an author in any other proportion than that which exists between our understanding and his?

But Nordau’s principal _casus belli_ is the present diversity in literature, he thinks; its lack of unity—a segregation which denotes decay.

Pish!

Diversity is a step towards universality. And is not the present aspect due primarily to a self assertive spirit, a declaration of individual independence in literature, built upon the lack of single leaders and the abolition of a great literary center?

Take the literary capillarity of a great name. It has a marvelous effect, availing perhaps for all time, but scarcely to the succeeding generation. Dante, Shakespeare and the world’s sons are but the flood marks of a great literary tidal wave that crests with eternity. These marks leave such an influence on the next generation that they can only be viewed with wonder. And when that same next generation perceives that deeds were wrought on certain lines, behold a mad rush to build on the same, to blindly copy after the model, to servilely imitate the pattern. This is the damning power of the so-called classicists. Not having the original spontaneity, such doing accomplishes little more than to emasculate itself wittingly.

Trend is an unseen thread in the warp and woof of literature. It bobs about, hides here and there, and who will say but now and then it drops a stitch? Yet the weave goes on for all that. Achievement in the realm of the real and the realm of the ideal are rarely synchronous. Literature acted as a John the Baptist for the Renaissance. Artistic expression antedated for centuries the march of science. Why should we of the purple trouble ourselves if science should now be the vanguard. It will be a close finish at the End of Things.

The Sleeping Beauty is now all ready for the magic kiss. The Prince is perhaps bending over her. He has cut a way through the thorns, the briars and brambles that hedged her in. He has climbed the stairs and looks her at last squarely in the face. She will be awake while we yet pule and despair that there is no good in us and that if a good thing ever came out of Nazareth it was immediately and ignominiously pushed along by the rabble.

That’s a close analogue, that Sleeping Beauty. Literature wanted not for thorns and brambles. Conventions, artificial ties and misconceptions were of the prickliest kind. Those that spring up where empty ancient forms are worshipped always are, but we have had some Princes with strong buskins, who laughed at the stings and bade the small things do their worst.

Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites were of that kind. Walt Whitman lacked the princely qualities, the blue blood of prestige that would work the magic charm, but he was valiant for all that. And there have been others who have not lacked in bravery.

Now, it is just that hardihood that Nordau derides. Let him creak and carp, let others erect their idols and worship thereat. Even fetiches have their use. The world wags on, however, and the line is forming anew. We will be happy yet.

It is a Gargantuan task to get at the heart of this multiple age. He will be a Titan who does it.

Form antedates concept. Thus far have we journeyed on this way of ours—the leaven of concept and of form both have broken out in patches here and there. Let someone arise who can master both.

Then—

E. R. W.

THE LAUGHTER OF THE GODS.

The laughter of the Gods is clear And sweet to those who do not know How, underneath its limpid flow, Lurk envy, hatred, hope and fear.

ROWLAND B. MAHANY.

FASHION IN LETTERS AND THINGS.

Periodicity exists throughout all nature. Day and night, winter and summer, equinox and solstice; years of plenty and years of famine, commerce active and business depressed; volcanoes in state of eruption, then at rest; comets return, eclipses come back, the striae of one glacial period are deepened by those of another, and the leg o’ mutton sleeves that our grandmammas wore in the thirties are again upon us.

When the hounds start game in the mountains, the hunter knowing that the deer moves in a circle, stands still on the run-way, biding his time. So no one need wail and strike his breast if his raiment is out of style: all such should be consoled by the fact that the fashion is surely coming back.

Mode in dress is only an outcrop of a general law. Why does fashion change? Because it is the fashion. The followers of fashion—that is to say, civilized men and women—are not content with being all alike. Esquimaux and Hottentots never vary their styles. But people in the temperate zones are intemperate and desire to excel—to be different from others—distinctive, peculiar, individual. Very seldom is any one strong enough to stand alone, so in certain social circles, by common consent, all overcoats are cut one length—say, to come just above the knee. Then this overcoat is gradually lowered: to the knee, just below the knee, to the ankle—until it conceals the feet. Then an enormous collar is added, which when turned up and viewed from behind completely hides the man. But this thing cannot last; it is not many days before the same men are wearing overcoats so short that the wearers look like matadors ready for the fray.

Ladies wear hoops; the hoops expand and expand, until the maximum of possibility in size is reached. Something must be done! The crinoline contracts until these same ladies appear in clinging skirts, and the pull-back lives its little hour. Then the former width of the dress is used to lengthen it. The skirt touches the ground, trails two inches, six, eight, a foot, two feet. Its length becomes too great to drag and so is carried, to the great inconvenience of its owner; or in banquet halls pages are employed. But this is too much, a protest comes and two hundred women in Boston agree to appear on the streets the first rainy day in skirts barely coming to the boot top. “Dress Reform” societies spring up, magazines become the organs of the protestants and the printing presses run over time.

The garb of the Quaker is only a revulsion from a flutter of ribbons and towering headgear. From Beau Brummel lifting his hat with great flourish and uncovering on slight excuse, we have William Penn who uncovers to nobody; the height of Brummel’s hat finds place in the width of Penn’s.

All things move in an orbit.

Even theories have their regular times of incubation. They are hatched, grow lusty, crow in falsetto or else cackle; then they proceed to scratch in the flower beds of conservatism to the hysterical fear of good old ladies, who shoo them away. Or if the damage seems serious, the ladies set dogs—the lap-dogs of war—upon them.

“The sun do move;” Brother Jasper is right. All things move. And when matters get pushed to a point where they fall on t’other side, a Reformer appears. The people proclaim him king, but he modestly calls himself “Protector.” He is spoken of in history as the Savior of the State.

There are only two classes of men who live in history: those who crowd a thing to its extreme limit, and those who then arise and cry “Hold!” A Pharaoh makes a Moses possible. The latter we write down in our books as immortal, the first as infamous.

This is true of all who live in history, whether in the realm of politics, religion or art. History is only a record of ideas (or lack of them) pushed to a point where revulsion occurs. If Rome had been moderate, Luther would have had no excuse.

Literature obeys the law; its orbit is an ellipse. The illustrious names in letters are those of the men who have stood at aphelion or perihelion and waved the flaring comet back.

The so-called great poets are the men stationed by fate at these pivotal points. And as fires burn brightest when the wind is high, so these men facing mob majorities have, through opposition, had their intellects fanned into a flame.

More than thirteen decisive battles have taken place in the world of letters. And the question at issue has always been the same: Radical and Conservative calling themselves Realist, Romanticist, Veritist or What-not struggling for supremacy.

Term it “Veritism” and “Impressionism” if you prefer—juggle the names and put your Union troops in gray, but this does not change the question.

The battle between the two schools of literature is a football game. The extreme goal on one side is tea table chatter, on the other an obscure symbolism. “The difference is this:” said Dion Boucicault, “when Romanticism goes to seed it is ‘rot;’ when Realism reaches a like condition it is only ‘drivel.’”

In literary production why should we hear so much about the dignity of this school and the propriety of that. Men who fail to appreciate the individual excellence of a certain literary output, declare it to be without sense and therefore base. In letters they assume that a style is wholly good or it is wholly bad. They make no allowances for temperament; they would have all men speak in one voice.

Yet liberty need not result in disorder, nor can originality serve as a pretext for boozy inaccuracy. In a literary production the bolder the conception the more irreproachable should be the execution.

There is a tendency for thought to get fixed in set forms, and this form is always that which has been used by some great man. For any one to express thought and feeling in a different way is blasphemy to the eunuchs who guard the tents of Tradition.

Writers of different schools exist because their style fits the mind of a certain style of reader. The sprightly, animated picturesqueness, the play of wit and flights of imagination are only a full expression of what many faintly feel. Thus their mood is mirrored and their thought expressed: hence they are pleased.

In fact the only reason why we like a writer is because he expresses our thought in a way we like. And the reason we dislike a writer is because he deals in that which is not ours. We of course might grow to like him, but the process is slow, for according to Herbert Spencer we must hear a thing six hundred times before we understand. If we comprehend a proposition at once, it is only because it was ours already. If the portrayal of a situation in fiction fascinates us, it is because we (in fancy or fact) have gone before and spied out the land.

There must be more than one school of literature, because there is more than one mood of mind: just as in religion there must be many sects. We worship God not only in sincerity and truth, but according to the temperament our mothers gave us.

The emotional “school of religion” finds its votaries in Methodism: Methodism fits a certain mind. The stately dignity of the Ritualist is a necessity to a certain cast of intellect. And until we get a church that is broad enough, and deep enough, and high enough to allow for temperament in men, “church union” will exist only as an abstract idea.

Until we have a school of literature that will combine all schools and give the liberty to a full expression of every mood, there will be a warfare between the “sects” that give free rein to imagination and the sect that, having no imagination, merely describes. When one school driven by the jibes and jeers of the other tilts to t’other side, a heavy man will start the teeter back, and he is the man we crown.

And let us ever crown the heavy man when we find him.

ELBERT HUBBARD.

THE LORD OF LANTURLU.

IDEA, METRE AND REFRAIN CRIBBED FROM THE FRENCH OF GABRIEL VICAIRE AS SET FORTH IN _Le Figaro_ OF MARCH 30, 1895 (_q. v._).

When swallows southward flew, Forth rode in armor fair Guy, Lord of Lanturlaire And Lanturlu.

Vowed he to cross the brine, Pausing not night nor day, That he might Paynims slay In Palestine.

Faithful a knight and true As you’d find anywhere, Guy, Lord of Lanturlaire And Lanturlu.

Half a league on his way Met him a shepherdess, Beaming in loveliness, Sweet as young day.

Gazed in her eyes of blue, Saw Love in hiding there, Guy, Lord of Lanturlaire And Lanturlu.

“Let the foul Paynim wait,” Plead Love, “and rest with me; Sullen and cold the sea, Here’s brighter fate.”

...

When swallows northward flew, Back to his home did fare Guy, Lord of Lanturlaire And Lanturlu.

Led he his charger gray, Bearing a shepherdess Beaming with loveliness, Sweet as young day.

White lambs, beribboned blue, Herded with anxious care Guy, Lord of Lanturlaire And Lanturlu.

Fine sport of him they made, Knights famous, old and lone, Strength, youth and hope all gone In the Crusade.

But in their hearts they knew, “He hath the better fare— Guy, Lord of Lanturlaire And Lanturlu.”

G. F. W.

A FREE LUNCH LEAGUE.

Before George Du Maurier created the one complaisant female who is admitted into all the good society of Europe and America he achieved some fame as the author of a recipe for keeping peace in families. The good wife was to apply the prescription, and it read “Feed the Brute.” Whether this meant to keep a good cook or to cater to the element in human nature which the paradox of civilization constantly brings into abnormal prominence among the overwrought people Mr. Du Maurier describes, is not clear. The man as a whole or his grosser nature may be the brute referred to. But the policy of feeding the unidentified fauna of Mr. Du Maurier’s world is in no doubt. Modern custom has settled the most direct road to satisfaction of the men and women who compose society. You may see its sign boards at any formal social meeting, and they all point to the dining room.