The Philistine: a periodical of protest (Vol. I, No. 3, August 1895)

OF PROTEST (VOL. I, NO. 3, AUGUST 1895) ***

The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest.

“_A harmless necessary cat._”—_Shylock._

[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 3. August, 1895.

The Philistine.

Edited by H. P. Taber.

CONTENTS FOR AUGUST, 1895.

JEREMIADS:

A Word About Art, Ouida

The Confessional in Letters, Elbert Hubbard

The Social Spotter, William McIntosh

OTHER THINGS:

The Dream, William Morris

Verses, Stephen Crane

For Honor, Jean Wright

The Story of the Little Sister, H. P. T.

Notes.

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._

AND THIS, THEN, IS THE THIRD OF THE BOOK OF THE PHILISTINE AND FIRST HERE IS PRINTED THE LINES CALLED

“THE DREAM”

WRITTEN BY MR. WILLIAM MORRIS: TO WHOM BE PRAISE AND REVERENCE AND MUCH THANKFULNESS FOR MANY DEEDS.

I dreamed A dream of you, Not as you seemed When you were late unkind, And blind To my eyes pleading for a debt long due; But touched and true, And all inclined To tenderest fancies on love’s inmost theme. How sweet you were to me, and ah, how kind In that dear dream! I felt Your lips on mine Mingle and melt, And your cheek touch my cheek. I, weak With vain desires and asking for a sign Of love divine, Found my grief break, And wept and wept in an unending stream Of sudden joy set free, yet could not speak: Dumb in my dream.

I knew You loved me then, And I knew, too, The bliss of souls in Heaven, New-shriven, Who look with pity on still sinning men And turn again To be forgiven In the dear arms of their God holding them, And spend themselves in praise from morn ’Till even, Nor break their dream. I woke In my mid-bliss At midnight’s stroke And knew you lost and gone. Forlorn I called you back to my unfinished kiss, But only this One word of scorn You answered me, “’Twas better loved to seem Than loved to be, since all love is foresworn, Always a dream.”

A WORD ABOUT ART.

[Sidenote: _Is there_]

How can we have great art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of some sort is the life-blood of art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to excite veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture both lost their greatness. When the Madonna and her Son lost that mystery and divinity, which for the simple minds of the early painters they possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we carve a Venus now, she is but a frivolous woman; when we paint a Jesus now, it is but a little suckling, or a sorrowful prisoner.

[Sidenote: _a woman, even in_]

We want a great inspiration. We ought to find it in the things that are really beautiful, but we are not sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does dominate us is a passion for nature: for the sea, for the sky, for the mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day. Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this, we shall reach greatness once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it, so is its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius and as a great Juvenal; and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes: but they do not make a Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make a Raffaelle or a Flaxman.

[Sidenote: _Boston,_]

Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful in the sight of the multitude—the perpetual adoration of that loveliness, material and moral, which men in the haste and greed of their lives are everlastingly forgetting: unless it be that, it is empty and useless as a child’s reed-pipe when the reed is snapt and the child’s breath spent.

[Sidenote: _who can_]

It must have been such a good life—a painter’s in those days: those early days of art. Fancy the gladness of it then—modern painters can know nothing of it.

[Sidenote: _produce literature_]

When all the delicate delights of distance were only half perceived; when the treatment of light and shadow was barely dreamed of; when aerial perspective was just breaking on the mind in all its wonder and power; when it was still regarded as a marvellous boldness to draw from the natural form in a natural fashion—in those early days only fancy the delights of a painter!

[Sidenote: _equal_]

Something fresh to be won at each step; something new to be penetrated at each moment; something beautiful and rash to be ventured on with each touch of colour—the painter in those days had all the breathless pleasure of an explorer; without leaving his birthplace he knew the joys of Columbus.

[Sidenote: _to this?_]

And one can fancy nothing better than a life such as Spinello led for nigh a century up on the hill here, painting because he loved it, till death took him. Of all lives, perhaps, that this world has ever seen, the lives of painters, I say, in those days were the most perfect.

In quiet places such as Arezzo and Volterra, and Modena and Urbino, and Cortona and Perugia, there would grow up a gentle lad who from infancy most loved to stand and gaze at the missal paintings in his mother’s house, and the coena in the monk’s refectory, and when he had fulfilled some twelve or fifteen years, his people would give in to his wish and send him to some bottega to learn the management of colours.

[Sidenote: _No, not even_]

Then he would grow to be a man; and his town would be proud of him, and find him the choicest of all work in its churches and its convents, so that all his days were filled without his ever wandering out of reach of his native vesper bells.

[Sidenote: _in Boston!_]

He would make his dwelling in the heart of his birthplace, close under its cathedral, with the tender sadness of the olive hills stretching above and around in the basiliche or the monasteries his labor would daily lie; he would have a docile band of hopeful boyish pupils with innocent eyes of wonder for all he did or said; he would paint his wife’s face for the Madonna’s, and his little son’s for the child Angel’s; he would go out into the fields and gather the olive bow, and the feathery corn, and the golden fruits, and paint them tenderly on ground of gold or blue, in symbol of those heavenly things of which the bells were forever telling all those who chose to hear; he would sit in the lustrous nights in the shade of his own vines and pity those who were not as he was; now and then horsemen would come spurring in across the hills and bring news with them of battles fought, of cities lost and won; and he would listen with the rest in the market-place, and go home through the moonlight thinking that it was well to create the holy things before which the fiercest rider and the rudest free-lance would drop the point of the sword and make the sign of the cross.

It must have been a good life—good to its close in the cathedral crypt—and so common too; there were scores of such lived out in these little towns of Italy, half monastery and half fortress, that were scattered over hill and plain, by sea and river, on marsh and mountain, from the daydawn of Cimabue to the after-glow of the Carracci.

And their work lives after them; the little towns are all grey and still and half peopled now; the iris grows on the ramparts, the canes wave in the moats, the shadows sleep in the silent market-place, the great convents shelter half a dozen monks, the dim majestic churches are damp and desolate, and have the scent of the sepulchre.

But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the Madonna and the child smiles in the Angel, and the olive and the wheat are fadeless on their ground of gold and blue; and by the tomb in the crypt the sacristan will shade his lantern and murmur with a sacred tenderness:

“Here he sleeps.”

OUIDA.

FOR HONOR.

By a turn of chance a father and son were thrown together in one of the Western frontier posts, the father as colonel in command, the son as a second lieutenant in one of the four companies quartered there. When the order came which had brought them together after the three years which had gone by since the boy left West Point, it brought great, but silent, happiness to the stern and gloomy old soldier, and a light-hearted pleasure to the young man; once more he would be with “dear old dad,” and besides, life must be rather exciting out there, and altogether worth a man’s while. And so he packed his traps in double-quick time, as a soldier must, and was off in twenty-four hours. The meeting between the two was a strange one. Effusive and very gay on the part of the young man, who made no effort to conceal his delight; stiff, even cold, on the part of the old man, whose very heart quivered with joy; and on whose stern and bronzed face a light came which the boy did not even see.

The colonel was not a popular man, hard and cold, rigid in the performance of his own duty, and with little sympathy for failure on the part of his men, he was respected, and, in a certain sense, admired, but not loved; sternly just according to his own light, but narrow and intolerant. With two passions—the exaggerated, hide-bound honor of a soldier who believes his profession to be the only one; the honor of a strictly honest and very proud man, jealous of the slightest stain upon his unimpeachable integrity. The other passion a carefully hidden but almost idolatrous love for his son. There had been one other passion, but she died.

Within a month after his coming, the young lieutenant was the most popular man at the post. He sang, he danced, he rode, and he played cards; he also drank rather more than was necessary.

Within two months it all palled upon him. Deadly ennui took possession of him. The great sunlit barren plains stretched out interminable. There were no Indians even to break the monotony. The iron routine of one day followed upon another with what seemed to him a stupid, trivial and meaningless regularity. So he stopped singing and dancing, and went on playing cards and drinking. Another thing that annoyed him was his father’s suppressed but uncompromising disapproval. Inward the colonel’s soul writhed that his boy should blemish his record as a soldier in this way; he did not doubt his courage should the time come for proving it, but in the meantime to show himself a weak and foolish man was almost unbearable. He could not understand the boy, and he said nothing, which was perhaps unfortunate.

Three weeks went by and the young lieutenant was deep in debt to the captain of another company. A sneering, black faced fellow, who had risen from the ranks; gaining his promotions during the last fifteen years for acts of dare-devil bravery. He was not a pleasant man to owe to; particularly if one was not too sure of being able to pay up when the notes fell due. Another month, and things were no better. It was in the early part of September, and the flat plains stretched out parched and arid, the sun beat down pitilessly on the treeless little post, and the money to the captain had to be paid to-morrow. It was certainly a disagreeable situation. But they played hard and drank hard, and the young lieutenant almost forgot that to-morrow was coming.

[Sidenote: _Is cheating at cards so rare as this?_]

But about one o’clock in the morning there was a row, and before many hours the whole post knew what was the matter. It does not take long for news to travel among a few hundred people, particularly so interesting and exciting a bit as this. For this gay young fellow, this dashing young soldier, this son of the stern old martinet of a colonel, had been caught cheating at cards, and was disgraced forever.

The news got round and finally reached the colonel. It was a brave man who told him. He waited an hour, and then putting a pistol in his holster, he went across to his son’s quarters. There was no answer to his knock, so he opened the door and went in. The boy was sitting by the table, with his head buried in his arms. He did not look up when his father spoke, “My son, there is but one thing for you to do. You know what it is,” and he laid the pistol on the table. There was no reply; and the colonel stood silent, straight and stern, but his face was gray, and his iron mouth was drawn. Presently the boy raised his head and looked straight into his father’s eyes. For the first time in his life he understood. “Yes, father,” he said. The colonel stood a moment, and then went out and shut the door. When he was half way across the parade ground he heard a pistol shot, but he did not go back.

JEAN WRIGHT.

THE CONFESSIONAL IN LETTERS.

In the year 1848 Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, Mass., made a lecturing tour through England. Among the towns he visited was Coventry, where he was entertained at the residence of Mr. Charles Bray. In the family of Mr. Bray lived a young woman by the name of Mary Ann Evans, and although this Miss Evans was not handsome, either in face or figure, she made a decided impression on Mr. Emerson.

A little excursion was arranged to Stratford, an antiquated town of some note in the same county. On this trip Mr. Emerson and Miss Evans paired off very naturally, and Miss Evans of Coventry was so bold as to set Mr. Emerson of Concord straight on several matters relating to Mr. Shakespeare, formerly of Stratford.

“What is your favorite book?” said Mr. Emerson to Miss Evans, somewhat abruptly.

“Rousseau’s _Confessions_,” said the young woman instantly.

“And so it is mine,” answered Mr. Emerson.

All of which is related by Moncure D. Conway in a volume entitled _Emerson at Home and Abroad_.

A copy of Conway’s book was sent to Walt Whitman, and when he read the passage to which I have just referred he remarked, “And so it is mine.”

Emerson and Whitman are probably the two strongest names in American letters, and George Eliot stands first among women writers of all time; and as they in common with many Lesser Wits stand side by side and salute Jean Jacques Rousseau, it may be worth our while to take just a glance at M. Rousseau’s book in order, if we can, to know why it appeals to people of worth.

The first thing about the volume that attracts is the title. There is something charmingly alluring and sweetly seductive in a confession. Mr. Henry James has said: “The sweetest experience that can come to a man on his pilgrimage through this vale of tears is to have a lovely woman ‘confess’ to him; and it is said that while neither argument, threat, plea of justification, nor gold can fully placate a woman who believes she has been wronged by a man, yet she speedily produces, not only a branch, but a whole olive tree when he comes humbly home and confesses.”

Now here is a man about to ’fess to the world, and we take up the volume, glance around to see if any one is looking, and begin at the first paragraph to read:

“I purpose an undertaking that never had an example and the execution of which will never have an imitation. I would exhibit myself to all men as I am—a man....

“Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I will come, with this book in my hand, and present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I will boldly proclaim: Thus have I acted, thus have I thought, such was I. With equal frankness have I disclosed the good and the evil. I have omitted nothing bad, added nothing good. I have exhibited myself, despisable and vile when so; virtuous, generous, sublime when so. I have unveiled my interior being as Thou, Eternal One, hast seen it.” Now where is the man or woman who could stop there, even though the cows were in the corn?

And as we read further we find things that are “unfit for publication” and confessions of sensations that are so universal to healthy men that they are irrelevant, and straightway we arise and lock the door so as to finish the chapter undisturbed. For as superfluous things are the things we cannot do without, so is the irrelevant in literature the necessary.

Having finished this chapter, oblivious to calls that dinner is waiting, we begin the next; and finding items so interesting that they are disgusting, and others so indecent that they are entertaining, we forget the dinner that is getting cold and read on.

And the reason we read on is not because we love the indecent, or because we crave the disgusting, although I believe Burke hints at the contrary, but simply because the writing down of these unbecoming things convinces us that the man is honest and that the confession is genuine. In short we come to the conclusion that any man who deliberately puts himself in such a bad light—caring not a fig either for our approbation or our censure—is no sham.

And there you have it! _We want honesty in literature._

The great orator always shows a dash of contempt for the opinions of his audience, and the great writer is he who loses self consciousness and writes himself down as he is, for at the last analysis all literature is a confession.

The Ishmaelites who purvey culture by the ton, and issue magazines that burden the mails—study very carefully the public palate. They know full well that a “confession” is salacious: it is an exposure. A confession implies something that is peculiar, private and distinctly different from what we are used to. It is a removing the veil, a making plain things that are thought and performed in secret.

And so we see articles on “The Women Who Have Influenced Me,” “The Books that Have Made Me,” “My Literary Passions,” etc. But like the circus bills, these titles call for animals that the big tent never shows; and this perhaps is well, for otherwise ’twould fright the ladies.

Yes, I frankly admit that these “confessions” suit the constituency of _The Ladies’ Home Journal_ better than the truth; and although its editor be a Jew, the fact that the writers of his confessions practice careful concealment of the truth that they have hands, senses, eyes, ears, organs, dimensions, passions, is a wise commercial stroke. You can prick them and they do not bleed, tickle them and they do not laugh, poison them and they do not die; simply because they are only puppets parading as certain virtues, and these virtues the own particular brand in which the subscribers delight.

That excellent publication, _The Forum_, increased its circulation by many thousand when it ran a series of confessions of great men wherein these great men made sham pretense of laying their lives bare before the public gaze. Nothing was told that did not redound to the credit of the confessor. The “Formative Influences” of sin, error and blunders were carefully concealed or calmly waived. The lack of good faith was as apparent in these articles as the rouge on the cheek of a courtesan: the color is genuine and the woman not dead, that’s all.

And the loss lies in this: These writers—mostly able men—sell their souls for a price, and produce a literature that lives the length of life of a moth, whereas they might write for immortality. Instead of inspiring the great, they act as clowns to entertain the rabble.