Part 5

Doubtless you fancy that I and the others of my kind concern ourselves with aping the dress and manners of these society people. If so, you were never more mistaken in your life. It is they who copy and imitate us. They go where we go, they wear what we wear, they eat what we eat and they drink what we drink. Only, as is always the case with imitators, they fall far short of their models. How is it possible that any man can appear the perfect gentleman of leisure unless, indeed, his life is actually a life of ease and pleasure? We have no cares and no responsibilities. They have a thousand. We have no social duties to distract our attention. They are constantly consulting their watches. And, lastly, Sir, we have art, and they have none.

I can not imagine what has led these misguided innkeepers to think that they can do without us. But I can tell you, they will soon regret their recent action, whatever motives may have moved them to take it, for they will find very shortly that their hotels are not nearly so necessary to us as we are to their hotels. I am, Sir,

PERCIVAL PIGEONBREAST.

FROM SARAH SHELFWORN

_To the Editor of The Idler._

DEAR SIR: I have to complain of an abuse which is daily growing greater and which, if not checked, will soon assume the proportions of a national menace. It is my purpose, Sir, to call to your attention and to the attention of all earnest thinking people, a pernicious influence exercised by a certain portion of our daily press--by those vulgar flaunting publications known as “yellow journals”. Now do not misunderstand me, Mr. _Idler_; this letter is no ill-considered general attack upon the press; no incoherent or fanatical outcry against the publication of disagreeable facts. It is, on the contrary, a protest against a certain idealism which pervades the pages of these newspapers and which unduly excites the imagination of our young men. I do not refer to stories of crime, extravagance or anything of that sort--but to the publication of pictures of beautiful women.

You may ask, what possible harm can come of the publication of these pleasing portraits? Well, Sir, I will tell you; but in order that you may understand my point of view, I must first tell you something of myself and explain somewhat, my own experience.

I, Sir, am a school-teacher--an instructor in English literature--and since the school where I am employed is a public high school, it is hardly necessary to add, I am a woman. Or perhaps it would be more truthful to say I _was_ a woman once upon a time. When I was young and fairly pretty, there was no more womanly woman than I in all this section of the country, but let me tell you, Sir, ten years of teaching school is an experience calculated to unsex any person, man or woman. We veteran school-teachers constitute what a magazine writer recently referred to as “an indeterminate sex.” We have left in us nothing of the masculine or feminine nature. We think, feel, argue and reason like one another and like nobody else in the world--we are neuter throughout. It is, perhaps, for this reason that I can now look back upon my wasted life with only a passing regret, and that I can, without any feeling of outraged modesty or womanly reserve, lay bare to you the dreams of my girlhood and the thoughts of my maturity.

To begin, then, I have always lived in the little town where I am now teaching, though to be sure, since I became a teacher, I have traveled more or less during my vacations. I have visited many places in Europe and America at one time or another. I have made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon six times in as many years, and it is perhaps for this reason that I have never found time to read any of Shakespeare’s works beyond the four or five plays which we read in class. Be that as it may, when I was a girl of seventeen or eighteen, I was a bright, merry-hearted young creature who had not a care in the world, nor a thought for anything but pleasure. Not that I was without sentiment, for truth to tell, I was as sentimental as any, and let me tell you, Sir, one girl of eighteen has more sentiment in her composition than all of the old men in the world. I say “old men,” because I have observed that whereas sentiment comes to a woman early in life, so that she is soon done with it, men seldom become sentimental until they have passed middle age. And that is why, Sir, you will observe in the restaurants and cafés of your city, young men with old women and old men with young women. Like is naturally attracted to like. The old man loves the young woman for her romanticism which is akin to his own, and the young woman loves the old man because he is not ashamed to admit his infatuation and glories in his subjection to her charms. The young man, upon the other hand, is attracted to the older woman by her knowledge of the world, her masculine view-point, her independence of mind, her air of good-fellowship, and her frank acceptance of a temporary affection. The old woman finds in the young man the only sensible, sober and sane being that wears trousers.

As I say, Sir, I was as sentimental as any; I had my girlish dreams of home and fireside, of husband and little ones, but I was not obsessed with this pleasant dreaming. I took all that for granted as my natural birthright, and a career which was guaranteed to me by virtue of my very womanhood. I was cheerful, a capable housekeeper, possessed of a clear complexion, good eyes, sound teeth, a fair figure--in short, I was passably good-looking. Why should not I be married in due time, as my mother was before me, and as the girls of my native village had always been? I was not hump-backed, bow-legged, nor squint-eyed. I was neither a shrew nor a prude. I could manage a house and (I had no doubt) I could manage a husband; how could I fail to get him?

Alas! Sir, my youthful optimism was my undoing. I delayed my choice and I lost my opportunity. I refused one or two offers of marriage that came to me in the first flush of my womanhood--and I have never since received another! The young men of our town had always married our home girls. With the exception of a few prodigals who left home to see the world and who never returned, some going to jail and some to congress, none of our young men sought their wives among strangers. They were well content with what they found at home. How, then, could I anticipate a sudden exodus of eligible young men? An exodus, I say! For an exodus it was, and an exodus it has continued, year by year, ever since that fatal day when Willie Titheridge Talbott went over to Ithaca and married Minna Meyerbeer who won the Tompkins County beauty contest!

No sooner do our young men arrive at that age when they can don a fuzzy hat and coax a mustache without exciting the ridicule of their little brothers, than they shake the dust of this town from their feet and set out to find a wife among those vampire beauties whose portraits decorate the pages of our Sunday papers. As for our girls, they are left as I was, to choose between frank spinsterhood at home, or to follow the young men out into the world, there to become chorus girls, manicures, stenographers--or to engage in some other similar profession which exerts such a glamour and fascination over the men as to make up for their lack of classical beauty.

And who, Sir, is to blame for this lamentable state of affairs? The beauties? No, not altogether, for if they were not so exploited by the newspapers, our young men would never suspect that they existed. For, Sir, even if he were to meet her face to face, the ordinary young man is so lacking in sentiment, so matter-of-fact, that he would never suspect one of those beauties of being anything extraordinary if her beauty were not vouched for by some newspaper. The young man who has not been corrupted in this way, and who has not had fostered in him by these newspapers the silly notion that he is a knight errant searching the world for beauty in distress, is a docile creature, easily captured and easily managed. He treats matrimony as he treats his meals, he takes what is set before him and afterward grumbles as a matter of course, but deep down in his heart he is very well satisfied. It is the editors, Sir, who have caused all of the trouble; the editors with their silly beauty contests and their simpering half-tone, half-world women of the stage flaunting their coquettish graces and flirting with our young men from the pages of the Sunday papers.

Now, Sir, I hope that you will not dismiss this letter as a matter of no consequence and the peevish complaint of a disappointed spinster, for I assure you the roots of this evil go deeper than appears at first glance. Our magazines are asking, “Why do young men leave the farm?” Our sociologists are asking why are our villages becoming depopulated? Superficial observers often reply that the young men go to the city for the sake of money-making. But I, Sir, know better. The young men are leaving the farms and the villages to hunt for wives because the newspapers, with their photographs, have made them dissatisfied with what they find at home. And now that you know the cause of it, Mr. _Idler_, is there no hope that you may devise some way to put a stop to it?

I am, Sir, SARAH SHELFWORN.

FROM ANNA PEST

_To the Editor of The Idler._

DEAR SIR: Doubtless you are familiar with some of the newer schools of poetry, as for instance, that one which has abandoned rhyme for assonance, which has led an ignorant and prejudiced critic to say of it that its poetry may be rich in assonance, but that he finds in it more of asininity. Such is the treatment accorded all independent artists by the hidebound adherents of outworn ideals!

Now, Mr. _Idler_, nobody is more convinced than I am that we need new forms of poetry. I have been writing poems for a number of years and I feel that I speak with authority when I say that the old classical forms are entirely inadequate for modern poetic expression. I have tried them all and I have found them all wanting, for though I have written poems in the form of sonnets, lyrics, triolets, quatrains, couplets, rondels--and even in blank verse--I was never able to produce a decent poem in any of them. I therefore conclude that what every modern poet needs is to shake off the shackles of poetic convention and follow a form suited to his nature. I have been greatly encouraged by the introduction of the _vers libre_ in France and I am heartily in accord with the aims of those pioneers of the new poetry who are laboring to educate the public taste to modern ideals, but I fear that in one or two instances they have overshot the mark.

Much as I admire the courage of Monsieur Alexandre Mercereau, who has, with splendid audacity, forsaken verse altogether and determined to write all of his poetry in prose, I do not believe it advisable to attempt to accomplish the poetic revolution at one step. I am more in sympathy with those who have abandoned rhyme, but retained rhythm.

For my own part, I have invented a form which I think better than either. I believe that this form is as superior to the sonnet as the sonnet is to the limerick. I call this form the _duocapet_ because it is, in a sense, double-headed, having two rhyming words in every line--one at each end. I have discarded rhythm but retained rhyme. I had good reasons for adopting this course. I regard meter as a useless encumbrance. It is meter, not rhyme, which hampers the true poet. The poet should be free--free as the air--free as the birds. It is a crime against art to bind him with silly meaningless meters and rhythms which distract his attention from his theme and serve only to furnish critics with an excuse for picking flaws. I hope that the happy day will soon arrive when laymen will leave to the poets the settling of all questions of form, but in the present state of public ignorance and prejudice I think it advisable to concede them something in order that they may realize that we are writing poetry. Later, when the public is sufficiently educated to recognize poetry without any of its ancient ear-marks, I may discard rhyme also.

For the present I think the _duocapet_ is the most logical and artistic of existing forms. Writing in the _duocapet_, the poet has only one rule to observe--that the first word of every line shall rhyme with the last. I have, in fact, reduced the couplet to a single line, making the two rhyming words come one at each end of that line, where they logically belong, one opening and one closing the line, instead of placing them one under the other in the manner of Pope. Standing in this position they may be likened to two sentries that guard the thought of the poet. It is as if the rhyme at the first end of the line called out, “Who goes there?” and the other responds, “A friend!” In the _duocapet_ the poet may make his lines short or long as best pleases him without regard for the length of lines that go before or that follow.

This poetry is produced as all true poetry should be produced, a line at a time. No whole can be perfect which is defective in any part. In the _duocapet_ every line is a perfect poem, complete in itself, every line contains a distinct thought, and though the sentence may sometimes extend from one line to another, this is never necessary and rests with the discretion of the poet. Should he choose, he might write a whole poem consisting of nothing but complete sentences, a sentence a line, with a period at the end of each. The poem can be made ten lines in length or ten thousand, and asterisks and italics can be introduced at will. With the exception of the rhyme, the poet is as free in this form as in any form of _vers libre_. I append an example of _duocapet_ which should give you a good idea of the possibilities of this form:

MIDNIGHT

Gone is the day and I look out upon Night bathed in Luna’s sad illusive light ... Dark are the shadows out in Central Park; Hushed are the streets through which the traffic rushed ... _See! Underneath that weeping-willow tree Prone lies a figure on a bench alone!_ Why should he lie there ’neath the sky? Is there no home he can call his? Creeps now the moonlight where he sleeps ... Shakes then the outcast as he wakes, Chill with the bitter winds that fill All of the Park from wall to wall. Slinks then away in search of drinks. Soon he will be in a saloon. Still as I lean upon the sill And see the sky on every hand Sprinkled with those same stars that twinkled Bright on that blessed Christmas night When angels sang good-will to men ... Sore is my heart unto the core! Sick is my soul unto the quick! Sick is my soul ... my soul ... how sick!

I hope that you will publish this poem and letter in the interest of Poetic Art, and in order that the world may know that we poets of America are almost, if not quite, as progressive as those of France.

I am, Sir, ANNA PEST.

FROM SETH SHIRTLESS

_To the Editor of The Idler._

DEAR SIR: I am the victim of a most peculiar affliction. I am suffering from what appears to be a sort of disease and which can not be classified. As I am not able to find the true explanation of this matter myself and as physicians seem to be equally at a loss in regard to it, I have decided to appeal to the public at large in the hope that some one who reads my communication will be able to suggest a cure or at least some method of alleviation.

There is an old saying, Mr. _Idler_, borrowed from some author, if I mistake not, that “the apparel oft proclaims the man.” This I consider a true saying aptly put; but I believe, Sir, that apparel sometimes does more than proclaim the man--that it sometimes actually _makes_ the man. It is well known that men are often affected by the clothes they wear. Good clothing has a tendency to inspire confidence in the breast of the wearer, while poor clothing robs a man of his assurance, if not of his self-respect. That all men are more or less subject to the influence of their garments, there can be no doubt, but I, Sir, am peculiarly susceptible to it. It has been so all my life. Even in childhood I became supercilious and insolent with pride when clad in my best, and most envious and depressed the moment I had changed to my every-day wear.

Since I have come to manhood, I have felt this weakness growing upon me despite my most earnest efforts to resist it, until now, Mr. _Idler_, my character and my wardrobe are so inextricably mixed together that I may be said to change my nature with my clothing. When I am richly dressed I _feel_ rich, and my thoughts and sentiments are those of a wealthy person. At such times I am a firm believer in all measures for the protection of property and vested rights. I am a hearty adherent of the established order and I am distinctly suspicious of all so-called reforms and innovations in governmental machinery. When, on the other hand, I am dressed shabbily, my views and my feelings undergo a complete change. I am no longer a believer in the sacredness of property rights. Indeed, I look upon all rich men as so many robbers who have seized upon the land and the natural resources which should, of right, be the common property of all mankind. I feel that I have been defrauded of everything they have which I have not. Their insolence vexes me and their display drives me into a very fury of rage which is partly inspired by just indignation and partly by simple envy. At these times I am fiercely radical in politics. No measure of reform can be too revolutionary for my taste. My dearest wish is that the whole social fabric may be rent to shreds and rewoven in a pattern after my democratic heart.

To such extremes of sentiment do my clothes carry me. When I am fashionably clad a Socialistic pamphlet irritates me as a red rag enrages a bull. But when I am poorly dressed and shod, _I write such pamphlets_. Write them, and, Sir, incredible as it may seem, leave them lying about my quarters for the very purpose of irritating myself, and well knowing that when my eyes light on them while in my conservative frame of mind I shall fall upon them and tear them to tatters. I, Sir, am as a house divided against itself--I am a man at war with his own soul!

You have heard, I doubt not, of the celebrated case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and of other instances of double personality, where men, by reason of contending spirits within them, have been forced to lead double lives. I do not hesitate to say that such are blessed when their lot is compared to my own unhappy state, for I lead, not a double, but a _treble_ existence. In addition to these two personalities, which I term for want of a better nomenclature my Aristocratic and my Proletarian selves, I am also possessed of a Normal self which is in evidence only when I am completely disrobed.

Can you fancy, Sir, what this means to me? Can you imagine in what straits a man must be who can think clearly and logically only when he is naked, and who, before he can decide upon any matter of importance, must hurry home and throw off his clothes lest he be led astray by rabid prejudice or blind enthusiasm? That, Sir, is precisely my situation. When I awake in the morning I am compelled to make a choice between my two antagonistic personalities. My wardrobe stares me in the face as if asking the eternal question, “Which is it to be to-day--Aristocrat or Proletariat?” Always, upon falling asleep at night, I am haunted by the specter of the ordeal which awaits me in the morning.

In addition to this, my Aristocratic and my Proletarian selves have recently conceived a violent dislike for each other and they have begun to vent their spite in many petty ways, much to the disgust of my Normal self who has small use for either of them. For example, about a fortnight ago, my Proletarian self indulged himself freely in gin, a drink which is loathsome to my Aristocratic self. He stayed in this condition for a matter of four days and upon his return to my--perhaps I should say _our_ chambers, he wantonly destroyed a new top hat which my Aristocratic self had carelessly left lying upon the hall table. By way of retaliation, my Aristocratic self seized some overalls belonging to my Proletarian self and flung them into the ash-barrel. Altogether, they behave, Sir, in a fashion to make me thoroughly ashamed of them both.

Possibly you are wondering how it comes that I am in the habit of changing my clothing so frequently and varying the quality of my dress in this way. I may as well tell you that for many years I was a professional politician, much in demand as an orator, and that I was called to speak before audiences of widely different character, so that I sometimes found it expedient to dress in evening clothes and at other times it was necessary for me to appear a workingman. My constantly changing political convictions made it impossible for me to continue in this work, but by the time I gave it up I had come to know these two personalities so well that I was unwilling to trust myself for long in the hands of either of them. I have thought of purchasing a decent outfit of ready-to-wear clothing, but I realize that the result of such a step would be to render me hopelessly middle-class, a condition I have hitherto escaped. I have no desire to add a fourth personality to those I already possess.

I have consulted my tailor without good result, and the best that my physician has been able to do for me was to suggest a period of rest in the country. I am now very comfortably lodged in a quiet house in the suburbs, where I came upon the advice of my doctor and two of his colleagues with whom I discussed my trouble.

I am very well content here for a man who is virtually a prisoner. Not that I am confined by force, Sir, but I have determined never to put on another suit of clothes until I have solved the problem which confronts me, and I can not leave my room without dressing; the landlord of this place objects to my doing so. Here, then, I expect to remain until I hit upon some solution of my difficulty or until some other person is good enough to suggest a way out of my dilemma. I am, Sir,

SETH SHIRTLESS.

SARTOR-PSYCHOLOGY

_To the Editor of The Idler._

DEAR SIR: I am a social worker, and it is in this capacity that I address you upon a subject which appears to me to be of vital importance to all classes of society. I have, Sir, hit upon a plan which will, if generally adopted, work the greatest reform that has ever been effected, and which will, I am convinced, completely do away with the necessity for long-term sentences to imprisonment. In simple honesty I must admit that this idea is not entirely my own. It was suggested to me by the extraordinary and very interesting communication from Mr. Seth Shirtless which appeared in your January issue.