Part 2

“Get out of my way, you ugly little sweep,” said one woman, elbowing the boy off the pavement; and the men pushed him hither and thither. The fashionable women looked right through the ragged urchin and his evidently dubious companions, as if they were glass, and their gaze seemed to bite like frost. Not one woman remarked the surpassing loveliness of the boy’s perfect face.

At the corner of the Common the young man sent the boy about his business.

“Who is he, and what does all this mean?”

“That is Adonis--the one-time victor of Venus. He fell upon evil days when clothes made the king, and rags the knave.”

WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE.

LIFE.

I sometimes think life is but a see-saw board, with hope at one end and despair at the other. First hope goes up, and despair goes down, and then it reverses. There seems to be no break in the steady rise and fall. We live on, clinging to the belief that hope will outbalance despair, but it does not, and men come and men go, and life still teeters away.

JOSEPH ANDREWS CONE.

A SONNET FOR POETS.

Sometimes birds sing not though the morn is fair; Sometimes flowers folded lie beneath the sun; Sometimes no dew falls though the day is done; Sometimes where fruit should grow the branch is bare; Sometimes the truest poet must forbear To make his music, though the hour is one With perfect beauty ended and begun: Sometimes his power has left him to despair, Sometimes he standeth spelled and dumb, though all Is great around him, though he plainly sees The beauty, and the grand sound plainly hears. But if, ere glories vanish, it befall That his sweet tongue doth loosen; as it frees He thrills with rapture, hymning through his tears.

WILLIAM FRANCIS BARNARD.

THE LITTLE GREEN HAT.

They were coming out of the matinee, and there was something in the way he took her arm and swung her out of the crush, that the experienced eye of the married man or married woman could at once detect as the assurance of the husband, accustomed to being adored, and quietly and covertly conscious of other feminine eyes in the crowd.

He turned up her fur collar and they walked along in silence. She was scrutinizing each face in the slowly moving throng. He was picking his way, falling in her wake to give room to the opposing stream, and occasionally to glance behind and strengthen some impression of a silhouette, that awoke a momentary pang, and then faded into the blur of faces, the rustle of silks and the subtle perfume of a well dressed crowd of women.

Once he turned half round sharply, as a tall, handsome woman swept by, creaking and rustling like a great galleon in a swell of wind and rolling sea. His wife brought back his eyes with a glance of interrogation.

“Pretty little green hat, that,” he said. “I think it would just suit you.”

“Ah yes,” answered she. “Strange you never notice hats in the milliners’ windows.”

JONATHAN PENN.

THE NEW GOD.

It is altogether fitting and proper, as Abraham Lincoln would say if he were not dead, that that there should be an immediate definition of the “New God.” It is not easy to define the New Woman--not easy to define the New Man, nor to formulate New Ideas, but, in these days, when the passion for money getting over-shadows everything else in life, and colors our religion and philosophy, with the cheap cynicism of poor cheated greed, it is easy to define the New God. In the first place, He is everything that the Old God was not; and that is saying everything that the Modern Dives wishes said--and for which he pays his preacher. The successful modern preacher has to be a man of great intellectual parts, and some knowledge of affairs. He must be a man of the world, for it is the function of a new prophet in a successful metropolitan church to preach the New God. And this is most effectively done while occupying the Old Pulpit. An adroit and conservative judicial spirit has entirely renovated and made respectable the gift of prophecy in the Christian church. So we see the churches filled with the social charity of sweet and silken equality, and all things are kept as sweet and peaceful as possible in this atmosphere that once reeked with sulphurous fumes for the wicked. But the sweet savor of camphor and smelling salts has stifled the sulphur,--and all other disagreeable odors in God’s House.

The churches of today are mostly mausoleums in which rest the crumbling remains of the ancient God. But an intellectual age still delights in the glamor of impressive ritual, and his name and attributes are enshrined in Creed, Decalogue and Hymn. But the old Law is serenely disobeyed, with the assurance that the New God is much too good or much too distant to perplex himself with the peccadillos of good society. As a certain French countess said in the court of Louis XV., “The good God would surely think twice before damning people of quality”--and undoubtedly the New God is more liberal and refined than the old one.

The New God, like the cynic man of the world, takes the world as he finds it. He is a being of an infinite indifference to syndicates (_sin_-di-cates!), deals (in which lurks the de’il!), coal oil monopolies (whence come endowments that throttle free speech on social questions), sugar trusts (that capture Congress), and the ways of a man with a maid--or, what is quite as wonderful--the ways of a new maid with an old man.

The New God is a dilettante in religion, who winks (when bribed with a good service in a fine church) and looks the other way when broad-cloth and satin sow unto the flesh.

It is to be suspected that the New Girl in her way is better than the New God. If the New Man becomes any worse, he ought to--well, it would be impolitic to say what he ought to do. But between the New God and the cynics of Mammon this world does not seem to promise the millennium or Utopia just yet a while.

L. LEMMAH.

THE SCHOOL OF NECESSITY.

If we are to come into our inheritance as an artistic people, let us hear less of Art with a big A. Let us turn from the oracle of the Personally Conducted and make bonfires of our Baedeckers.

The “Old Masters” were plain men, for the most part, with the virtues and vices of their time, and would kill a man or paint a Madonna with equal skill and enthusiasm. Art was to them only one form of a manifold activity, not a problem to be solved nor a fetish to be worshipped. Cellini made salt cellars and bragged about them long before he cast his Perseus. Michaelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling because the Pope commanded him, and not because he was divinely inspired to do it. Raphael and Rubens ran picture factories which turned out paintings of a certain brand, like so many barrels of flour. Shakespeare patched together threadbare scenes and situations for special occasions, as managers now prepare a Christmas pantomime; and Balzac wrote the “Comedie Humaine” to pay his debts.

Literature is not a thing of limited editions, nor painting of spring exhibitions. While you are seeking the coming novelist between rich covers he may be doing a daily “story” for some sensational morning paper; and the new Raphael you think of as hid away in some sequestered north-lit studio may be designing labels for boxes in a lithograph factory.

Respect, therefore, the poster, though it _is_ obtrusive, and despise not the Japanese print, though it be cheap. Admit that there is more merit in the pen and ink picture of which are printed a million copies, than in the etching on your library walls, of which there are only ten.

Believe that the baths and aqueducts of Rome, however marvellous, are puerile as feats of engineering compared with a city floated on Lake Michigan mud; and learn that while you drowse over your “standard authors” of today the work of him who will be the standard author of tomorrow may be appearing in these despised pages.

CLAUDE FAYETTE BRAGDON.

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK.

Let the world wag as it may, the wits must live by waggery.

The optimists who are so comfortably situated that they can support optimism without any severe strain upon their imaginations, say, “What is, is right.” But they fail to tackle the corollary proposition, “What isn’t, isn’t.”

I received a book the other day from one of the leading publishers for review, and for three days and nights I have labored with it. It is one of those dull and dreary affairs, without even the single redeeming grace of conscious striving egotism, and it is written by one of the most prominent members of the New York Scratchback Club, a man whose name is in everybody’s mouth in the country. I wrote a scorching review of the book, in my happiest vein of gory glee; but upon reflection I shall not print it. This author is too infernally stupid to deserve so good an “ad.”

The poets are not the only sufferers in these sober strenuous days, in which the beautiful distractions of idleness are not properly understood or appreciated. Full many a wag is born to waste his wit upon the desert air--or the thick skull of an anthropoid on the “night desk.”

It has been suggested by an undiscouraged friend of humanity that, at the close of the Age of Consent discussion, a committee should be organized among the society women who live in the highly fashionable locality in Boston that is honored with the presence of Mrs. Helen H. Gardener, to raise necessary funds to defray the cost of giving the sources of this lady’s literary inspiration a good Spring cleaning. He urges, and with some apparent show of reason, that after her arduous labors as the historian of the Age of Consent movement, Mrs. Gardener cannot wait until spring, and her consent should be sought at an early date. Mrs. Gardener is well known as a sort of social tornado in fiction, though I believe she claims to belong to the Red Cross or Sanitary school of writers. She is, anyhow, the head and front of the inodorous infliction called the Age of Consent agitation, and the author of that delightfully aromatic literary confection--you should read it held off in a pair of tongs--“Is this your son, my Lord?” We can say with _empressement_, no, thank God! This particular kind of pathological fiction is only possible to a certain haunted, morbid feminine imagination.

Hall Caine tells young authors that when they are tempted to describe a scene of more than usual delicacy to refrain from it, if it is not absolutely necessary to the story. What about writing your story around a delicate situation, as Shakespeare did in “The Rape of Lucrece”? A delicate situation, delicately expressed, requires more talent than an indelicate one indelicately described.

A great many readers of the powerful poem called “The Wail of the Hack Writer” in this issue, picturing a mood of revulsion and despair common enough among all writers who have to earn a livelihood by the pen, will be surprised in coming upon the name of the author, Sam Walter Foss. This is an interesting phase of personality. This poem reveals a new and serious personality in a writer already known to a wider circle of readers than few of us can ever hope to reach. For years the name of Sam Walter Foss has been synonymous with the most bubbling humor and spontaneous, genial fun. One could guess this man took life smiling from the laugh in all his work, and his optimistic, large belief in his fellows. And the superficial reader, caught with these merry jingles and this good-natured philosophy, might naturally think that Mr. Foss was a man who took all life as a joke, who hated serious books, and never saw the sad side of life. The optimism of the man is in his work, but it is not a narrow optimism, and all this light fun is born of a deep and serious interest in the human drama being played out today. The man himself is a serious man in all his ideas and interests in life, and there is a serious undercurrent of purpose in all his fun making.

Yvette Guilbert, the famous Paris chanteuse, who is now singing at the Olympia in New York, is said to give in her repertoire some humorous songs with more point in them than our English speaking audiences are accustomed to. As two thirds of her English speaking audiences will not be able to thoroughly understand her, even those who can read and speak French being unable to follow it closely when sung, it must be interesting to watch the faces of her audiences. While Mlle. Guilbert is singing her sweet ditties of love-lorn maiden’s hopes and trials, it is ten to one the greater part of her audience will be imagining all sorts of wicked, depraved things are being publicly sown in the hearts of our innocent people. London has pronounced her songs shocking. We can scarcely expect Mlle. Guilbert will be much better understood on this side, for the Anglo-Saxon has rarely the temperament to catch the play of Gallic humor. So half the audience will sit and dream in abandonment of the wicked things wicked people are reported to do; and those who are so fortunate as to have wicked thoughts of their own will think them, and Mlle. Guilbert will have to bear all their blushes.

The FLY LEAF appeals to the Young Man and Young Woman’s sense of humor. It is time some of us youngsters were allowed to belong to some generation, and if we do not assert our right to be _now_, we shall experience some difficulty in squeezing into the ranks of the generations unborn. The old fogies fail to see the reasonableness of this. If the younger generation also fails to perceive our right to exist, it will bring our gray hairs in sorrow to the grave--for we are but belated boys, after all. This is a world in which it takes one a long while to grow up, when one is poor--especially in Grub Street.

When I get so poor that I cannot afford to buy any more clothes, I intend to dress in _Fly Leaves_, as I believe this badge of honorable endeavor will save me somewhat from the scoffs of the mob, in a community that holds letters in the high esteem they are held in Boston. Then when I am dead and gone ten cities will contend for the honor of my birth. I never tell where I was born. It is unwise; for people will never forgive the impertinence of your being born among them.

All these personal notes are relevant in up-to-date journalism, because this is an age of confidences; and not to let the public know all about one’s private life is to argue one’s self unknown. I may begin on my autobiography in earnest, in a little while. I have “Passions” in great number and variety.

To J. W. S.: No, my dear friend, I sympathize with your ambition, but you cannot bribe the Editor of the FLY LEAF with any such consideration as a year’s subscription to print your Ode. We have not yet been tempted, as some of our popular contemporaries are every month, with an offer to purchase an edition of fifty thousand and dine the editor; but conscious virtue inclines us to repudiate your one dollar and get the full credit of it with posterity.

A young lady writes to me from a western city and encloses her photograph, which shows her to be a blooming, chubby-cheeked beauty of eighteen summers. She says, in her letter, she is studying very hard and sitting up night after night until daybreak, reading all the great authors of our era: E. P. Roe, Edward W. Bok, Richard Harding Davis and Dr. J. G. Holland, with the intention of adopting literature as a career. These are all truly “great masters,” and their selection shows an unerring judgment in one contemplating a career in _American_ contemporary literature. I made the mistake of choosing certain obscure Elizabethans and seventeenth century Englishmen as my masters; and so have never got out of Grub Street. A woman can scarcely offend against the canons of morality if she models her ideals of fictitious propriety after the examples of these litterateurs who have made simpering the grace and distinction of our epoch. It was unkind of fate to deny these great minds the innocency of petticoats, but they have remained wonderfully unspotted from the world. They have reduced all morality to etiquette. But I am afraid my young lady will spoil her beauty with all this strain to rid her mind of original predilections after the manner of these “masters,” and she may develop that shocking severity of countenance, which is so appallingly rife among our female moralists in any illustrated book catalogue. All women are beautiful, of course; but those who try to look like seers in their photographs usually look as if life were a perpetual washing day with them. It seems that scribbling often fatally undermines geniality in the female temperament, and indeed most women write novels because they lack a sense of humor. This severe superciliousness of our female celebrities, I hold, is a warning to the New Woman to cultivate flippant male society as much as possible. I warn my correspondent not to grow a face that appals young love and stops clocks.

The _Arena_ should not hide its light under a bushel. It should put out a sign, “Worlds reformed while you wait!”

The actress who finds herself too fat to be cast for the heroine (heroines are always slender) and has to thin down upon a diet of nothing but beef tea and hot water with a squeeze of lemon in it for three months, buys fame almost as dearly as do the poets. Ambition seems to have a trick of cheating the stomach; but asceticism and mortification of the flesh on the stage have strangely enough made their belated appearance with the advent of The Woman who Did.

The great trouble with human nature is that it is everywhere. If it were only confined like a mad dog and rampaged solely in one country or continent, we could take ideal views of life. And we could be patriots without being scoundrels.

To the sentimental: Please do not forget that it was Dr. Johnson and not the writer who said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

THE LONDON ACADEMY

The Leading Critical Literary Journal of London, in a long review of “MEDITATIONS IN MOTLEY,” by WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE, says, among other things:

“When any book of good criticism comes it should be welcomed and made known for the benefit of the persons who care for such works. The book under notice is one of these. It is, so far as I know, the first from the author’s pen; but his writings are well known, and those who read his present book will, with some eagerness, await its successor. For it is a book in which wit and bright, if often satirical, humor are made the vehicle for no flimsy affectations, but for genuine thought. Mr. Ruskin has affirmed that the virtue of originality is not newness, but genuineness.

“In this true sense Mr. Harte’s book is original. Here is his own thought on several topics, pleasantly displayed, and no mere echo or second-hand production of the ideas of others. If Mr. Harte continues to act up to this sentiment, [a long quotation from the book under consideration] as he does in the present book, he may not achieve the triumph of twentieth editions, but he will be a power for good--as every true man of letters is, and must be in the world. If it were practicable I should be much disposed to let the author recommend himself by giving copious quotations from these essays. At his best--that is, in his most characteristic and seemingly unconscious passages--he reminds one of Montaigne: the charming inconsequence, the egotism free from arrogance.”

PRICE IN HANDSOME CLOTH, $1.25.

_For sale by all Booksellers, or sent Postpaid on receipt of Price by the Publishers_,

The Arena Publishing Co., Copley Square, Boston, Mass.

In Mens Sana, in Corpore Sano.

Some wicked nurses lull crying, starving children by putting the rubber bulb of an empty nursing bottle into their mouths. This fills the babe with evil wind and destroys its judgment, character, digestion and intellect. The old fashioned popular periodicals do the same thing for inquiring and curious minds, seeking nourishment and amusement. They give them a bottle of windy pap, called _nice, pure domestic literature_, and the result is the same as with the poor baby--only aggravated.

THE FLY LEAF is a robust, masculine, periodical for grown-up, common sense young men and women. It takes the point of view of the young man of today in literature and life. It is new, but sane. Its audacity is integrity of opinion and not mere eccentricity. It advocates greater freedom in American literature, and it discusses the aims and tendencies of the new movement and new writers.

THE FLY LEAF is young, but not such a cherub that it lacks wisdom teeth, and those who appreciate waggery are laughing over its little ironies. It is certain the new babe can live by its wits very well in a community which appreciates wit as keenly as does the great American public.

THE FLY LEAF, 269 St. Botolph Street, Boston, Mass.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.