Chapter 2

During the editor's term of office the paper lost such artists as Charles Keene, Du Maurier, and Sir John Tenniel; but it also saw the rise of Mr. Linley Sambourne's forceful caricature, of Mr. Raven-Hill's delightful rusticities, of the nervous and most expressive art of the lamented Phil May. In fact, barring an inclination to overindulgence in rather trite doggerel, _Punch's_ jorum has rarely been more tasty than in the past quarter century. Its only serious rival in the comic field has been _Fliegende Blätter_.

There is, of course, the prevailing American view that _Punch_ is dull. Dull it is, in the sense that the best fun of the most jocose family may be merely tantalizing to the outsider. A nudge to the initiated may be sufficient to recall jokes proved by a thousand laughs; the uninitiated needs a clue. Now, _Punch's_ family is London--a family whose acquaintance is tolerably worth while--and probably no one who has not imaginatively made himself familiar with the mood of London has any business with _Punch_ at all. It is the homesickness for London that extends the subscription list to the bounds of the empire; it is the desire to know what London thinks of itself, of the provinces, of the world, that makes readers for _Punch_ in every land. It represents London in the mood of intellectual dalliance as thoroughly as _Fliegende Blätter_ does non-Prussian Germany. This representative quality gives to these two comic papers something of the solemnity of institutions.

THE OLD JOURNALISM COLORED BY THE NEW.

Norman Hapgood Declares that Yellow Journals Have Shaken the Newspapers Out of Their Old Rut.

"Yellowness," in the newspaper sense, means sensationalism; sensationalism means exaggeration; exaggeration means wrong proportion and the distortion of truth. On the other hand, it is pointed out that yellowness means interest; interest means closer attention from a larger audience; the larger audience means wider editorial influence.

Aside from the main arguments for and against yellowness, there are noticeable effects which the new journalism has had indirectly upon the old. Speaking recently before the League for Political Education, in New York City, Norman Hapgood, the editor of _Collier's Weekly_, attributed the increased boldness and popular tone of the conservative newspapers to the influence of yellow journalism:

Yellow journalism has its faults, but it was the first to shake the newspapers out of the old rut and give them new vigor. Before the advent of this class of journals there was no organ among the conservative press to speak down to the people. It was the consequence of a growing democracy and had for its purpose the establishment of a press wherein the laboring classes would have expression.

HOW TO ASSIMILATE THE BEST IN BOOKS.

John Morley, the English Statesman and Scholar, Tells the Secret of Making One's Reading Pay.

When a man knows books as thoroughly as John Morley knows them, his opinions as to what and how to read are worth having. Mr. Morley has revised and put together as an article for _The Critic_ several of his extemporaneous addresses on books and reading. From this article the following paragraphs have been culled and condensed with care to select those passages which contain practical advice for people who desire to make their reading count for something:

The object of reading is not to dip into everything that even wise men have ever written. In the words of one of the most winning writers of English that ever existed--Cardinal Newman--the object of literature in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address, and expression.

Literature consists of all the books--and they are not so many--where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form. Poets, dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political orators--they are all literature in so far as they teach us to know man and to know human nature.

What I venture to press upon you is that it requires no preterhuman force of will in any young man or woman--unless household circumstances are more than usually vexatious and unfavorable--to get at least half an hour out of a solid busy day for good and disinterested reading. Some will say that this is too much to expect, and the first persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be those who waste their time most. At any rate, if I cannot get half an hour, I will be content with a quarter.

Multiply the half-hour by three hundred and sixty-five, and consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of the year, and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they would have given you during all the days of your life.

You may have often heard from others, or may have found out, how good it is to have on your shelves, however scantily furnished they may be, three or four of those books to which it is well to give ten minutes every morning, before going down into the battle and choking dust of the day. Perhaps it matters little what it may be so long as your writer has cheerful seriousness, elevation, calm, and, above all, a sense of size and strength, which shall open out the day before you, and bestow gifts of fortitude and mastery.

If a man is despondent about his work, the best remedy that I can prescribe to him is to turn to a good biography; there he will find that other men before him have known the dreary reaction that follows long-sustained effort, and he will find that one of the differences between the first-rate man and the fifth-rate lies in the vigor with which the first-rate man recovers from this reaction, and crushes it down, and again flings himself once more upon the breach.

A taste for poetry is not given to everybody, but anybody who does not enjoy poetry, who is not refreshed, exhilarated, stirred by it, leads but a mutilated existence. I would advise that in looking for poets--of course after Shakespeare--you should follow the rule of allowing preferences, but no exclusion.

Various mechanical contrivances and aids to successful study are not to be despised by those who would extract the most from books. The wise student will do most of his reading with a pen or pencil in his hand. He will not shrink from the useful toil of making abstracts and summaries of what he is reading.

Again, some great men--Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster was another, and the great Lord Stafford was a third--always before reading a book made a short, rough analysis of the questions which they expected to be answered in it, the additions to be made to their knowledge, and whither it would take them.

Another practise is that of keeping a commonplace book, and transcribing into it what is striking and interesting and suggestive. And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught us, you will put every entry under a head, division, or subdivision. This is an excellent practise for concentrating your thought on the passage, and making you alive to its real point and significance.

ARE WE SURFEITED WITH WIT AND HUMOR?

Jerome K. Jerome Says that the American Sense of Humor Has Been Overfed by Brilliant Humorists.

More great humorists have arisen in the United States during the last seventy-five years than in any other country. Among the professionals are, or have been, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain, and George Ade. Who of these have been and who still are there is no need of saying. But certainly the constellation is brilliant with these names alone, though the lesser stars have been many.

Have we had too much humor? Are we sated? Jerome K. Jerome, after several months of personal observation, answers yes. Near the end of his recent tour of the country he said:

It seems to me that the American people have been surfeited with humor. So many brilliant men have written their jokes for so long that they have become jaded. I thought at first that the American sense of humor was radically less subtle than ours in England, but now I know better. It is simply overfed.

Mark Twain is, I think, the only living humorist of the old American school, and he, like _Falstaff_, is growing old. But the subtle touch that England likes still and America liked once is still his. You laugh with him now, I think, more from a sense of duty than a sense of the ridiculous. You have grown tired and need coarser fare to stimulate your appetite. And I've discovered the cause of it, too. It is the comic supplement of the Sunday papers.

The New York _World_ takes exception to Mr. Jerome's remarks, and answers him as follows:

In the name of Punch and the Prophet, figs! The history of American humor is a chronicle of development to a present pitch of refinement and subtlety with which the work of the earlier humorists suffers by comparison. It is the history of the evolution of the pun into the witticism.

Could Petroleum V. Nasby get a hearing to-day? Or the Danbury News Man, or "Peck's Bad Boy"? Would not a Burdette writing for the more exacting twentieth-century perception find his occupation gone? Even an Artemus Ward and a Josh Billings appealing to latter-day readers would perceive the essential need of a purification and refinement of method if they were to hold their audience under anything like the old spell.

Progress from broad lines approaching buffoonery to delicacy, from the obvious and the apparent to the elusive, is observable in all humorists who hold their public. It was seen in Eugene Field. It is discernible in Mark Twain, whom Mr. Jerome cites as a survival of the "old American school." Between "The Innocents Abroad" and "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" is all the contrast of the changed taste of a new generation. _Falstaff_ is not now the fashion.

WOMAN'S REAL PLACE IN LITERARY WORK.

An Unkind Frenchman Says That Her Limitations Must Always Keep Her in a Secondary Role.

We have often been told by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman that woman, as a type, ranks higher in almost every respect than man; and there are many people of both sexes who agree with her. Nevertheless, the champions of feminine superiority may find it hard work to shout down the glorifiers of masculine achievement.

Here is a Frenchman, Georges Pellisier, a literary critic, who argues that woman cannot write great literature, because she is intellectually as well as physically inferior to man. He assigns to her the secondary literary rôle of acting as mistress of the literary salon--a position which, he thinks, has a valuable influence. He expresses his views as follows, in _La Revue_ (Paris), the translation being that of the _Literary Digest_:

Philosophy, criticism, and history are beyond her mental scope, and I know of none who has made a lasting impression in these domains. Philosophy requires a force of abstraction and a power of application rarely possessed by women, the power of reflection being, with them, as one of the greatest of them has admitted, "rather a happy accident than a peculiar or permanent attribute." Naturally impulsive, they fail to follow out the logic of their ideas.... In the domain of criticism woman is too much the slave of first impressions, or preconceived notions, which must be admitted, however, to be generally very vivid and often very just.

Her personal preferences, nevertheless, obscure her views and misguide her opinions, while she lacks almost wholly the faculty of weighing her judgments.... A proper study or understanding of history is impossible without the philosophic and the critical faculties, and, above all, a disinterested love of truth. Woman colors events according as passion or sentiment sways her. The real historian must totally efface both himself and his bias; and this, woman, of her nature, is incapable of doing....

There remain to her the drama, poetry, and the novel. In dramatic art, no woman has produced anything of lasting note, the reason being that the dramatist must, perforce, be without egotism and be capable of detaching the Ego from the action of the play--a thing impossible in woman.

In poetry this critic allows to woman but "the shadow of a name"; for few women, he argues, have written verse that endured. "The principal defect she evinces in poetry," he says, "is a lack of artistic execution." Woman's best work, he thinks, has been done in romance, though he refuses to class any woman with the master-novelists. Even this small credit he awards grudgingly and carpingly. He cannot ignore success, but he tries to belittle it.

Apart from the fact that they may indulge in solecism and anachronism without being severely called to task by the critics, their composition is faulty. Even Georges Sand was not above suspicion. There is palpable in their novels an incoherent notion of logical plot, while their imagination is subjected to no salutary discipline. Their work lacks vigor, and in its weakness, not an unattractive quality in woman herself, there is something commonplace that is not redeemed by elegance. Above all, woman's temperament recoils from a depiction of the stern reality of life.... She has no sense of proportion, and for her the beautiful and the pretty are interchangeable terms.

RACE SUICIDE MAY PROVE A BLESSING.

Welfare of the Offspring Is Much More Important Than Their Number, Says This Cincinnati Professor.

Dr. Charles A.L. Reed, of the University of Cincinnati, has published an address on "The American Family," in which he makes this strong statement: "We see in a declining birth-rate only a natural and evolutional adjustment of race to environment--an adjustment that insures rather than menaces the perpetuation of our kind under favoring conditions." Thus he argues that "race suicide" may prove a blessing, since, as a matter of fact, it implies an intelligent regard for the rights and necessities of children rather than an aversion to motherhood:

If reduced to its last analysis, it does not indicate a loss, but rather a development, if not an actual exaltation of the maternal function. American women recognize, subconsciously, possibly, certainly not in definite terms, but they nevertheless recognize, the force of the law enunciated by Mr. Spencer that whatever conduces to the highest welfare of offspring must more and more establish itself, since children of inferior parents reared in inferior ways will ever be replaced by children of better parents reared in better ways.

A much greater danger, according to Dr. Reed, is overpopulation. As influences inimical to the American family he classes "everything that tends to the early and wide dispersion of its members," such as--

The development of residential schools, the extension of far-reaching transportation facilities, the diversification of industries, the industrial employment of women, the popularization of hotels and apartments for residential purposes, and, finally, the development of clubs for both men and women at the expense of the home.

WORTH WHILE TO LIVE IN A LARGE CITY.

The Real Blessings of Urban Life Have Been Too Much Neglected By the Apostles of the Country.

City life has been more or less maligned--unintentionally. Unhealthful crowding, lack of the inspiration of outdoor life, and greater immorality are the principal charges. Lately, however, people have begun to believe that the city is little if any more immoral, proportionately to its inhabitants, than the country; that the absence of outdoor life has compensations, especially when one can spend part of the year in the country; that most of the dangers of crowding can be averted by improved sanitary methods and a greater number of parks. Edward S. Martin, writing in _Appleton's Magazine_, states the case attractively:

After all, there is an unrivaled attraction about human society, and it is considerably wholesome. It takes superior people to thrive on solitude even with quiet thrown in. Feebler folk have been known to regenerate even in the blessed country. It is no more possible in these days to stop the country people from coming to town than to stop the rivers from flowing to the sea.

The cities offer the best opportunities to the people who are qualified to improve them. The cities are the great markets for talent and skill, as well as for commodities. They would be badly off if the energy that makes them hum were not perpetually re-enforced out of the great country reservoirs. The country would be a worse place if the superfluous vigor that is bred there had not the cities in which to spend itself.

To get to some town is the natural and legitimate aspiration of a considerable proportion of the sons and daughters of American farmers. But as the waters that run to the sea are carried back by the process of evaporation, so there must be, as our cities grow greater, a return current out of them countryward for the people for whom town life is no longer profitable, and whose nerves and thews need nature's medication.

There is such a current as it is. People who get rich in town promptly provide themselves with country homes, and spend more and more of the year in them as their years increase and their strength declines. But for the people who don't get rich, the combination, or the transition, is not so easy. A due proportion of the people who are game to stand more noise, canned food, and struggle in their lives, and who ought to get to town, will get there.

The other process--to get back into the country the families, and especially the children, who have had more continuous city life than is good for them--needs a good deal of outside assistance, and gets some, though not yet as much as it requires.

MAKING MONEY IS A RELIGIOUS DUTY.

John D. Rockefeller Recounts His Own Early Struggles and Shows to Young Men the Virtues of Economy.

It may be, as sometimes has been said, that more is to be learned from the mistakes of other men than from their successes. If that be true it is because the reasons for their mistakes can hardly be concealed. Whether or not successful men betray the secrets of their successes, however, usually rests with themselves. In studying success, it is the occasional intimate disclosure that bears value rather than the superficial record.

John D. Rockefeller has addressed to the Bible class over which his son presides a pamphlet entitled "First Ledger of a Successful Man of Affairs." In it he tells of the ledger he kept as a young man, in which all his receipts and expenditures were most carefully recorded; and starting with this reminiscence he gives his advice to the young men of to-day. He begins with the dictum that "it is a religious duty to get all the money you can"--that is, "honestly and fairly"--and he sings the virtues of rigid economy. Speaking of his own efforts to "get a footing," he says:

If you all feel as I did when I was just starting in, I feel sorry for you. But I would not be without the memory of that struggle. And, discussing the struggle for success, what is success? Is it money? Some of you have all you need.

Who is the poorest man in the world? I tell you, the poorest man I know is the man who has nothing but money, nothing else in the world upon which to devote his ambition and thought. That is the sort of man I consider to be the poorest in the world. Money is good if you know how to use it.

Now, let me give you a little word of counsel. Keep a ledger, as I did. Write down in it all that you receive, and do not be ashamed to write down what you pay out. See that you pay it away in such a manner that your father and mother may look over your book and see just what you did with your money. It will help you to save money, and that you ought to do.

It is a mistake for any man who wishes for happiness and to help others to think that he will wait until he has made a fortune before giving away money to deserving objects.

LET DOCTORS TELL WHAT THE MATTER IS.

A Plea by Grover Cleveland for a Greater Degree of Confidence Between Physician and Patient.

Our only living ex-President, Mr. Cleveland, gave a bit of advice to the doctors a few weeks ago. Speaking before the New York State Medical Society, in session at Albany, he pleaded the rights of the patient to know what his physician was doing to him. He humorously represented himself as attorney for the great army of patients in their appeal to the powerful minority of doctors:

In all seriousness I desire to concede without the least reservation on behalf of the great army of patients that they owe to the medical profession a debt of gratitude which they can never repay, on account of hard, self-sacrificing work done for their benefit and for beneficent results accomplished in their interest.

But at the same time we are inclined to insist that while our doctors have wonderfully advanced in all that increases the usefulness and nobility of their profession, this thing has not happened without some corresponding advance in the intelligent thought and ready information of their patients along the same lines.

We have come to think of ourselves as worthy of confidence in the treatment of our ailments, and we believe if this was accorded to us in greater measure it would be better for the treatment and better for us. We do not claim that we should be called in consultation in all our illnesses, but we would be glad to have a little more explanation of the things done to us.

FOOD AS A PRIME FACTOR OF CHARACTER.

What We Eat May Be More Important Than Where We Live or Who Our Parents Are.

Food makes the man; not heredity, not environment. Thus speaks John Spargo, socialistic lecturer and author. The badly fed or underfed baby quickly departs from the normal; imbecility, crime, pauperism all are directly or indirectly due to the lack of food or its poor quality during the plastic years.

Without accepting the doctrine that food is the sole factor in evolution, some profit may be drawn from a more extended statement of Mr. Spargo's views given in the New York _World_:

The nervous, irritable, half-ill children to be found in such large numbers in our public schools represent poor material. They are largely drawn from the homes of poverty, and constitute an overwhelming majority of those children for whom we have found it necessary to make special provision--the dull pupils found year after year in the same grades with much younger children.