Chapter 2

Look at me! Behold, I am founding a New Movement! Observe me. . . . I am in Revolt! I revolt! Now persecute me, persecute me, damn you, persecute me, curse you, persecute me! Philistine, Bourgeois, Slave, Serf, Capitalist, Respectabilities that you are, Persecute me! Bah! You ask me, do you, what am I in revolt against? Against you, fool, dolt, idiot, against you, against everything! Against Heavy, Hell and punctuation . . . against Life, Death, rhyme and rhythm . . . Persecute me, now, persecute me, curse you, persecute me! Slave that you are . . . what do Marriage, Tooth-brushes, Nail-files, the Decalogue, Handkerchiefs, Newton's Law of Gravity, Capital, Barbers, Property, Publishers, Courts, Rhyming Dictionaries, Clothes, Dollars, mean to Me?

I am a Giant, I am a Titan, I am a Hercules of Liberty, I am Prometheus, I am the Jess Willard of the New Cerebral Pugilism, I am the Mod- ern Cave Man, I am the Comrade of the Cosmic Urge, I have kicked off the Boots of Superstition, and I run wild along the Milky Way without ingrowing toenails, I am I! Curse you, what are You? You are only You! Nothing more! Ha! Bah! . . . persecute me, now persecute me!

Fothy always gets excited and trembles and chokes when he reads his own poetry, and while he was reading it Papa came into the room and disgraced himself by asking if there was any MONEY in that kind of poetry, and Fothy was so agitated that he fairly screamed when he said:

"Money . . . money . . . curse money! Money is one of the things I am in revolt against. . . .

Money is death and damnation to the free spirit!"

Papa said he was sorry to hear that; he said one of his companies needed an ad writer, and he didn't have any objection to hiring a free spirit with a punch, but he couldn't consider getting anyone to write ads that hated money, for there was a salary attached to the job.

And Fothy said: "You are trying to bribe me! Capitalism is casting its net over me! You are trying to make me a serf: trying to silence a Free Voice! But I will resist! I will not be enslaved! I will not write ads. I will not have a job.

And then Papa said he was glad to hear Fothy's sentiments. He had been afraid, he said, that Fothy had matrimonial designs about me. And the man who married HIS daughter would probably have to stand for possessing a good deal of wealth, too, for he had always intended doing something very handsome for his son-in-law. So if Fothy didn't want money, he wouldn't want me, for an enormous amount of it would go to me.

Papa, you know, thinks he can be awfully sarcastic.

So many Earth Persons pride themselves on their sarcasm, don't you think?

And Papa is an Earth Person entirely. I've got his horoscope. He isn't AT ALL spiritual.

But you can image that the whole scene was FRIGHTFULLY embarrassing to me -- I will NEVER forgive Papa!

And I haven't made up my mind AT ALL about Fothy. But what I do know is this: once I get my mind made up, I WILL NOT stand for opposition form ANY source.

One must be an Individualist, or perish!

HOW THE SWAMI HAPPENED TO HAVE SEVEN WIVES

Isn't it terrible about that elephant at the Zoo -- Oh, you know! -- it's like Gunga Din, only, of course, it isn't Gunga Din at all.

Anyhow, he's CHAINED FOR LIFE! I suppose some- one gave him tobacco for a joke and it made him cross. I've heard of those cases, haven't you?

An elephant is such a -- such a -- well, NOBLE beast, isn't he?

It's transmigration of souls makes them that way, perhaps.

Oh is it a Rajah?

Anyhow, it sits on top of an elephant.

We took up transmigration of souls one time -- our little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know -- and it's wonderful; simply WONDERFUL!

That was when the Swami Brandranath used to talk to us. The dear Swami! Such eyes -- so pure and yet so magnetic! -- I have never seen in a human being.

The eye is the window of the soul, you know.

He's in jail now, the poor, dear Swami. But he wasn't really a bigamist at all. You see, he had seven spiritual planes. All of us do, only most of us don't know it. But he could get from one plane to another quite easily.

Of course, he couldn't remember what he'd done on one plane while he was on the next one above or below it. And that's the way he happened to have seven wives -- one for each spiritual plane.

Only the Court took a sordid view of it. It seems there was something about life insurance mixed up with it, too.

The Occidentals are so apt to miss the spiritual sweetness of the Oriental, don't you think?

We are -- all but the Leaders of Thought, and a little group, here and there -- so commonplace.

Don't you LOATHE the commonplace?

Not loathe, really, of course -- because the harmonious mind does not let itself be disturbed.

The harmonious mind realizes that dirt is only useful matter in the wrong place, as Tennyson sings so sweetly somewhere.

Tennyson has quite gone out, of course. He is so -- so, well, if you get what I mean -- so mid- Victorian, somehow.

It seems he WAS mid-Victorian all the time, but it's only recently that it's been found out on him.

Though I always will think of "come Into the Garden, Maud," as one of the world's sweetest little epics.

I'm very independent that way, in spite of the critics. After all, criticism comes down to a question of individual taste, doesn't it? That is, in the final analysis.

Independence! That is what this age needs. Nearly every night before I got to bed I say to myself: "Have I been independent today? Or have I FAILED?"

I believe in those little spiritual examinations, don't you?

It helps one to keep in tune with the Infinite, you know.

The Infinite! How much it comprises! And how little we really understand it!

We're going to take it up, the Infinite, in a serious way soon -- our Little Group of Advanced Thinkers, you know.

THE ROMANTIC OLD DAYS

It must have been terribly difficult getting around in the days before automobiles were invented, or railroads or anything like that.

Though, of course, it was wonderfully romantic, too.

The old coaching days, particularly, when everybody blew on horns as they drove from town to town, and there were highwaymen and cavaliers with swords and all those people, you know, riding by the coaches.

Don't you just DOTE on romance? I do!

But, of course, there's no place for it in our hurried modern life, and I suppose we shouldn't regret it.

But now and then I sigh over it. Like dropping a tear, you know, in a dear old chest perfumed with lavender and old roses.

I always say that one can be advanced and in the van of modern progress, and still drop a tear, you know.

Do you think that all this study of sex hygiene means the death of romance?

It's a serious thought, isn't it?

But what I always say is: "Which of these things will do the most GOOD in the world?"

Especially good to the POOR!

You know how frightfully interested I am in the poor.

I make that my test. I always say to myself: "Which will do the most good to the great masses?"

I take such a serious interest in the MASSES!

We should think twice before we take romance out of their lives and replace it with science of any kind.

For, after all, you know, they represent the Future.

We should all think of the Future.

That's what makes the Feminist Movement such a WONDERFUL thing -- it is moving right straight ahead toward the Future!

I'm thinking of being a Suffragist again. I was once, you know, but I resigned.

The sashes and banners are such a frightful shade of yellow, you know. So I quit.

Beauty, after all, is the chief thing. What, after all, do all our reforms come to, if the world is not to be made more beautiful because of them?

And I simply CANNOT wear yellow.

HERMIONE'S BOSWELL EXPLAINS

Believe me, 'tis not with elation I dwell on Hermione's madness; The result of my rapt contemplation Is sadness, a terrible sadness!

I weep when I note how she drivels; I sigh o'er her fake philanthropies; I am pained when I see how she frivols, Like a kitten, with serious topics.

It is grief that her mental condition Inspires, not laughter or scorning; If she has any use, 'til her Mission To stand as a Horrible Warning.

I am moral, essentially moral; I am grave, and hate everything trashy, And that is the reason I quarrel With intellects flighty and flashy.

I yearn for the truth, I am earnest; I yearn to face facts without blinking,

Of all of my years, quite the yearnest Is my yearn to be thorough in thinking.

That's why I'm severe with this darling, Nor pardon nor whitewash nor gloss her, -- The linnet -- the parrot -- the starling! I weep over her and expose her.

SYMBOLS AND DEW-HOPPING

Last week the Loveliest man lectured to us -- to our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know -- on the Ultimate Symbolism. In art and life both, you know.

It was simply wonderful -- WONDERFUL!

Art, you know, used to be full of symbolism.

But now, it seems, symbolism has dropped out of Art, and Nature has taken it up.

Odd, isn't it? But really not surprising when you come to think about it.

For, you know, Nature is always trying to keep up with advanced ideas -- evolving and evolving toward the Superman.

And the Superwoman, too.

I think it is the duty of us who are advanced thinkers to give Nature a worthy idea to evolve toward, don't you?

To set Nature a mark to come up to, you know.

For what is the use of evolution if it doesn't evolve forward instead of backward?

And the Best People, I think, should feel a sense of social responsibility and give evolution a model.

Each should be a Symbol -- that's what I always ask myself each night now: "Have I been a Symbol today? Or have I failed to be a symbol?"

Down at the beach last week I nearly drowned -- you don't mean to say you haven't heard of it? It was frightful.

I'd always heard that, when a person sinks, his whole past life passes before him in review.

But it didn't with me. What I said as I went down was: "Have I been a Symbol? Or have I failed?"

And the life guard who got me out -- he was simply the most gorgeous man! -- burned bronze, you know, and with shoulders like a Greek god! -- and with the most wonderful eyes and white teeth -- he asked me, the guard did, "What, marm?"

It was fearfully disappointing! Sometimes they are college men, you know, just life-guarding through the summer. But would any college man have said, "What, marm?"

And then he went and saved a blonde creature in the most scandalous bathing suit I ever saw.

He saved one in the most business-like way, too, as if he were a waiter, you know, passing from one table to another.

No wonder the social fabric is crumbling when quite impossible people like life guards permit themselves to become blase' over such matters!

The lower classes are very discouraging anyhow, don't you think? -- after all we do for them in the way of philanthropy and sociology and uplifting them generally, you know!

Of course, I haven't lost my interest in sociology -- not by any means. I always hold fast the thought that all the world are brothers.

I'm taking up Dew-hopping next week. It's a wonderful new nerve cure. Formerly it was quite the thing to walk barefoot in the dew at dawn.

But at this new place I've discovered they don't merely walk -- that's going out, quite. They HOP. Like frogs and toads, you know.

It brings the patients into closer kinship with the electric currents of the earth, hopping does, the doctor says. It's WONDERFUL!

He is the loveliest man -- with mystic eyes! -- the doctor is.

THE SONG OF THE SNORE

Fothergil Finch, Hermione's friend, the vers libre poet, dodges through life harried and hunted by one pursuing Fear.

"Some day," he said to me --

(It is Hermione's Boswell who is speaking in this sketch, in the first person, and not Hermione, the incomparable.) --

"Some day," Fothergil finch said to me, the other night, in a tone of intense, bitter conviction, "some day It will get me! Some day I will overtake me. The great Beat, Popularity, which pursues me! Some day It will clutch me and tear me and devour my Soul! Some day I will be a Popular Writer!"

It is my own impression that Fothergil's fears are exaggerated; but they are very real to him. He visualizes his own soul as a fugitive climbing higher and higher, running faster and faster, to escape this Beast. Perhaps Fothergil secretly hopes that the speed of his gong will induce combustion, and he will leap from the topmost hills of Art, flaming, directly into the heavens, there to burn and shine immortality, an authentic star. Well, well, we all have our little plane, our little vanities!

"Fothergil," I said, cheerily, "Popularity has not overtaken you yet. Cheer up -- perhaps it never will."

We were in Fothergil's studio in Greenwich Village, where I had gone to see how his poem on Moonlight was getting along. He strode to the window. Fothergil is not tall, and he is slightly pigeon-toed -- the fleshly toes of Fothergil symbolize the toes of his ever-fleecing soul -- but he strides. Female poets undulate. Erotic male poets saunter. Tramp poets lurch and swagger. Fothergil, being a vers libre poet, a Prophet of the Virile, a Little Brother of the Cosmic Urge, is compelled by what his verse is to stride vigorously across rooms as if they were vast desert places, in spite of what his toes are. He strode magnificently, triumphantly, to the window and flung the shade up and looked out at the amorphous mist creeping in across the roofs. The crawling fog must have suggested his great, gray Dread, for presently he turned away with a shudder and sank upon a couch and moaned.

'Ah, Heaven! Popularity! The disgrace of it -- the horror of it! Popularity! Ignominy! When it catches me -- when it happens ----"

He plucked from his pocket a small phial and held it up toward the light and gazed upon it desperately and raptly.

"I am never without this!" he said. "It is my means of escape. I will not be taken unawares! I carry it always. At night it is beneath my pillow. The day it happens -- the moment I feel myself in the grip of Popularity----"

I caught his hand; in his excitement he was raising the poison to his lips.

"What I cannot understand, Fothergil," I said, "is why a Poet of the Virile, a Reincarnation of the Cave Man -- excuse me, but that is what you are being this year, is it not ? -- should give way to Fear. Is it not more in character to meet this Beast and slay It? Is there not a certain contradiction between your profession and your practice?"

"More than a contradiction," he said eagerly. "It is more than contradictory! It is paradoxical!"

I eliminate much that followed. When Fothergil gets started on the paradox, time passes. He is never really interested in things until he has dis- covered the paradoxical quality in them. Sometimes I think that his enthusiasm over himself is due to the fact that he discovered early in life that he himself was a paradox -- and sometimes I think that discovery is the explanation of his enthusiasm for the paradox.

"What," said Fothergil, "is the most paradoxical thing in the world? The Human Snore! It seems Ugly-yet it is Beautiful! It seems a trivial function of the body -- and yet it is the Key to the Soul ----"

"The Key to the Soul?"

"Man sleeps," he said, "and his Conscious Mind is in abeyance. But his Subconscious Mind is still awake. It functions. It has its opportunity to utter itself. The Snore is the Voice of the Soul! And not only the Soul of the individual but of the Soul of the race. All the experiences of man, in his ascent from the mire to his present altitude, are retained in the Subconscious Mind-his fights, his struggles, his falls, his recoveries. And his dreams and nightmares are racial memories of these things. Snores are the language in which he expresses them. Interpret the Snore, and you have the psychic history of the ascent of man from Caliban to Shakespeare!

"And I can interpret it! I have listened to a million Snores, and learned the language of the Soul! Night after night, for years, I harked to the Human Snore -- in summer, hastening from park bench to beach and back again; in winter, haunting the missions and lodging houses. Ah, Heavens! with what devotion, with what passion of the discoverer, have I not pursued the Human Snore! I have gone miles to listen to some snore that was reported to be peculiar; I have denied my self luxuries, pleasures, and at times even food, in order to hire reluctant persons to Snore for me!

"And I have written the Epic of the Snore in vers libre. You shall hear the prelude!"

And this is Fothergil's prelude:

Snore me a song of the soul, Oh, sleeper, snore! Whistle me, wheeze me, grunkle and grunt, gurgle and snort me a Virile stave! Snore till the Cosmos shakes! On the wings of a snore I fly backward a billion years, and grasp the mastodon and I tear him limb from limb, And with his thigh hone I heat the dinosaur to death, for I am Virile! Snore! Snore! Snore! Snore, O struggling and troubled and squirming and suffering and choking and purple-faced sleeper, snore! Snore me the sound of the brutal struggle when the big bull planets bellowed and fought with one another. in the bloody dawn of time for the love of little yellow-haired moons, Snore! Snore till Chaos raps with his boot on the walls of Cosmos and kicks to the landlord!

Turn, choke, twist and struggle, sleeper, and snore me the song of life in the making, Sneeze me a universe full of star-dust, Snore me back to the days when I was a Cave Man, and with my bare hands slew the walrus, for I am Virile! Snore the death-rattle of the walrus, O struggling sleeper, snore! Snore me ----

But I was compelled to leave. There is a great deal of it, Fothergil says. If you know Fothergil you are aware that when he declaims his Virile verses he becomes excited; he swells physically; sometimes he looks quite five feet tall in his moments of expansion; all this is very bad for him. More than once the declamation of his poem, "Myself and the Cosmic Urge," has sent him shaking to the tea urn.

Before I left I was able to calm him somewhat. But with calm came reflection. And with reflection came his great, gray Dread again.

When I left,. Fothergil was looking out of the window and shuddering, as if the Monster Popularity might be hiding behind the neighboring chimneys. One hand clasped the phial caressingly.

But somehow I doubt that Fothergil will ever be compelled to drink the poison.

BALLADE OF UNDERSTANDING

"Does not the World's stupidity At times make Serious Thinkers fret?" I asked the fair Hermione; "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet .

We feel we owe the World a debt!" She waved a slim, bejeweled hand, She brooded on some vague regret. . "I hope," she sighed, "you'll UNDERSTAND!"

"Is not your high Philosophy Too subtle for the Mob to get?" I asked . . . She pondered seriously; "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet . . .

She trifled with an amulet Imported from some Orient land. . . . "What fish can burst the Cosmic Net? . . . I HOPE," she sighed, "you'll Understand."

"Art, Science and Psychology, Causes that rise and shine and set,

Do all these never weary thee?" -- "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet . Would Thought and Life have ever met Unless" . . . She paused. Her lashes fanned Her eyes, with tears of ardor wet. . . . "I hope," she sighed, "YOU'LL Understand!"

"Princess, is Bull the One Best Bet?"- "Sometimes," she said, "and yet . . . and yet She mused, and then; in accents bland, "I hope," she said, "you'll UNDERSTAND!"

HERMIONE ON FASHIONS AND WAR

ISN'T war frightful, though; simply FRIGHTFUL!

What Sherman said it was, you know.

Though they say there's an economic condition back of this war, too.

We took up economics not long ago -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know -- and gave an entire evening to it.

It's wonderful; simply WONDERFUL!

Without economics, you know, there couldn't be any Civilization.

That's a thought that should give one pause, isn't it?

Although, of course, this war may destroy civilization entirely.

If I thought it was likely to do that I would join in the Peace Demonstration at once -- or have they had it already ? -- the march for peace, you know! Anyhow, no matter what the personal sacrifice might be, I would join in. Not that I care to march in the dust. And black never did become me. But I suppose there will be some autos. And, well -- one must sacrifice.

For if Civilization dies out, what will become of us then?

Will we revert to the Primordial?

Will the Cave Man triumph?

The very idea gives me the creeps!

Because, you know, the Cave Man is all right -- and the Primitive, and all that -- as a protest against Decadence-and in a LITERARY way -- but if ALL men were Cave Men!

Well, you know, the thought is frightful; simply frightful!

You can have a feeling for just ONE Cave Man, you know, in the midst of Civilization, when a MILLION Cave Men would ----

But the idea is too terrible for words!

And in this crisis it is Woman who must save the world.

The loveliest woman -- she's quite advanced, really, and has the most charming toilettes -- told our Little Group of Serious Thinkers the other night that this is the time when Woman must rule the world.

It is the test of the New Woman.

If ANYTHING is saved from the wreck it will be because of Her.

She can write letters to the papers, you know, against war and-and all that sort of thing, you know.

And, of course, if the Germans and Russians and English do all get together and conquer Paris, I suppose they won't kill the modistes and designers.

Civilization, you know, is not so easily killed after all. The Romans were conquered, you know, but all their styles and philosophies and things were taken up by the Medes and Persians who conquered them, and have remained unchanged in those countries ever since.

But in a time like this, it's comforting to have a Cause to cling to.

No matter what happens, the advanced thinkers must cling together and make their Cause count.

And if England should conquer France, and put a king on the throne there again, no doubt there will be a great revival of fashion, as there was in the days of Napoleon I. and the Empress Eugenie.

But if all the advanced thinkers in the world could only get together in one place and THINK Peace and Harmony -- sit down in circles, you know, and send Psychic Vibrations across the ocean -- who can tell but what the war might not end ?

The triumph of mind over matter, you know.

I'm going to propose the idea to our little group and pass it on to all the other little groups.

I'd be willing to give up an entire evening to it myself.

URGES AND DOGS

We had quite a discussion the other evening -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know -- as to whether it was Idealism or Materialism that had gotten the Germans into this dreadful war.

Isn't Idealism just simply wonderful!

Fothy Finch said it was neither; he said it was the Racial Urge.

It's like the Cosmic Urge, you know; except it's altogether German, Fothy explained.

Every once in a while you hear of a New Urge. That's one of the things that distinguishes Modern Thought from the old philosophies, don't you think?

Although, of course, the Cosmic Urge isn't what it used to be a year or two ago.

It's become -- er -- well, VULGARIZED, if you know what I mean. EVERYBODY'S writing and talking about it now, don't you know.

I think, myself, it's going out soon. And a leader -- a real pioneer in thought, you know, would scarcely care to talk about it now without a smile.

I've just about dropped it myself. It's the same way with everything exclusive. It soon becomes common.