Part 39

The publishers of this REVIEW hope that, without having their motives misconstrued, they can add, from their own experience, a very suggestive illustration of the main contention of the foregoing article. Most of the readers of the REVIEW are familiar with the Home University Library, and some of them have praised it highly. In England it has had a phenomenal success, in America but a very moderate one. The American publishers are constantly being told that in England it is on every railway news stand, and asked why it is not here. The answer is that here the flood of cheap periodicals leaves no room for anything more substantial. The Home University Library appeals to a popular constituency, and there is a tremendous popular demand for it in England, while in America there is none: its circulation here is virtually restricted to the highly educated. The rank and file of American readers have their tastes formed and supplied by the Sunday newspapers and the cheap periodicals. The idea of gathering a library of cheap books on substantial subjects is virtually unknown among them.

The worst feature of the whole case is that the enormous demand for inferior stuff limits the field for writers who can produce valuable matter, and consequently checks the development of such writers. It would be as difficult to produce a Home University Library in America as it is to sell it. We have men of the requisite knowledge, but our conditions do not attract them to cultivate the literary art. Few of our scientific men and scholars are writers, many more of those in England are. And as for imaginative literature!

The cheap carriage of our periodicals was avowedly enacted as a government subvention to literature. Why was it not extended to books? In a year's shipments they do not bulk nearly as large as periodicals. Are we forced to the conclusion that at the present stage of evolution, a helpful subvention to literature is beyond the power of a pure democracy? If so, that is one reason for working all the harder to raise the character of that democracy. Would the withdrawal of the subvention be a good beginning?

EN CASSEROLE

_Special to Our Readers_

Many of our readers whom we have met have asked: "Why don't you give us the names of your contributors?" and we suppose that many whom we have not had the pleasure of meeting have the same curiosity.

Well, in the first place, we wish our articles to be taken on their merits, and each, so far as practicable, to carry whatever authority the REVIEW as a whole may be able to attain.

Next, among the popular fashions that we do not wish to follow is that of exploiting names.

And finally, to be very candid, we need to profit by whatever discussion may be aroused by speculation regarding the authorship of the contributions.

Three months of anonymity, however, will be enough to secure the first consideration, to lessen the objections inherent in the second, and to give us most of whatever benefit may be realized from the third; and therefore in such lists of contents of previous numbers as are included in our advertising pages, we shall indicate the authors.

Moreover our advertising pages will often include lists of our most frequent contributors, and this may add zest to such guessing at the authorship of contributions as our readers may care to do.

Virtually all our contributors approve the anonymity, perhaps partly because the names of most of them are so well known as to make farther publicity a matter of indifference.

* * * * *

Another question often put to us by friends is: "How are you getting along?"

Well (again), as our title indicates, we entered upon the enterprise with our eyes wide open to the fact that it could never be popular. Our only hope was that there might be enough people with standards above the popular, to support the undertaking. We still feel justified in entertaining that hope. Of course some ludicrous failures to understand what we are about have been forced upon our attention, but not as many as we expected; and we looked for more letters like the first one following, which, we are surprised and glad to say, is the only one of the kind we have received. All other dissent has been expressed with intelligence and courtesy; and this is the only occasion when our motives have been impugned. We think we can trust our readers to understand why we give the letter, and also the answer which the writer of the letter did not expect us to send. The former seems to us one of the most interesting and instructive contributions it has been our privilege to present, though not exactly for the reasons which make our other contributions worth while. We are glad to repeat, however, that the indications, so far, are that there is less of this sort of thing about than we had supposed.

Here is the letter, in its essentials:

... This number contains some of the most insidious and dangerous fallacies that it has been my fortune to peruse in many years, and that are only intended to craftily instil into the minds of the "rather large class" of people the erroneous doctrines thus covertly inculcated by insinuations and to promote the consequent satisfaction with their comparatively hard lot and the necessity of contentment with their own condition as well as with that of those who are subjects of a more forlorn state.

Now I am going to make a proposition to you that will prove conclusively that your object in publishing that REVIEW is solely for the purpose last above enumerated, as I do not hope that you will accept my proposition; and that the REVIEW is supported by the capital of the men who are a part of the financial oligarchy that is bent on ruining the poorer classes of this country: I will write you an article in opposition to the _Irrepressible Conflict_ and the _Juggernaut of the Majority_, which will be written in as good a diction as either of those articles and not more controversial in tone and style than _Irrepressible Conflict_, and shall expect as much pay for it as either of those two articles secured to their respective authors, or as much as it is worth if those articles were produced by respective members of the said oligarchy; and shall insist, if you refuse to publish it, that it is the substance and doctrine of it that make it unavailable and _not_ the diction and style. I have a right to ask this as the public press which claims to be the leaders of public opinion, are teeming with just such articles as these that I have criticised and are published for the _express purpose_ of leading me and the remainder of the public astray on vital questions affecting the material interests of us all,--in other words, there is a comprehensive and well formed conspiracy among publishers of almost _all_ newspapers and magazines to do as I have said and to refuse to permit the other side to be heard. I do not expect to ever get an answer to this letter but I shall make just such use of the reticence and your silence as my poor judgment teach me is legitimate and proper.

Our answer was:

... THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW is entirely the property of its publishers.

It is not a forum for discussion, but a pulpit for the preaching of what we believe to be sound doctrine. As you don't believe our doctrine is sound, probably we would not believe yours is sound: so your challenge to us to put it in our pulpit is of course outside the case. You should send it to somebody of your own way of thinking, or set up a pulpit of your own--into which we certainly should not wish to challenge you to insert anything of ours.

A change of subject may be welcome.

If any of our readers have been expecting an article on Psychical Research in this number, their disappointment at not finding one may be somewhat assuaged by the realization that the article in the first number was of four times the average length. The apparent neglect here however, is not real, but it has been impracticable to get what we wanted. We hope to be more fortunate in the future.

_A Specimen of "Uplift" Legislation_

Since the bull against the comet, there has probably been no assertion of authority as absurd as one recently furnished by our National Government. Yet there was no attention called to it in the debate preceding the passage of the act containing it, and we do not remember seeing any notice of it in the press, although it was immense enough and pitiful enough to justify Iliads.

For years, government--and no government more energetically than President Wilson's--had been hammering away at the trusts, especially those producing petroleum, steel and tobacco. Yet petroleum, steel and tobacco are not necessaries of life, nor have their prices been rising as much as the prices of necessaries of life. These have been rising more than anything else. What has been done about them by the government that has been destroying the trusts in other things? It has simply gone out of its way to specially legalize a trust in these things. In a bill providing money to fight trusts in comparatively non-essential things, Congress specially exempted from prosecution any trust that may be formed by the farmers to raise the price of food. Other trusts claim to lower the prices of their products, and sometimes have done it; but our government has not merely authorized the farmers to form trusts, to raise the price of foods, but has specially authorized them, in the letter of the law, to use methods denied to everybody else but wage-earners; and this at a time when the one problem above all others was how to lower the price of foods, and when the high price was the one burden above all others on the poor.

This piece of imbecility was virtually a "rider" on the trade-union-exemption rider, and was of course "playing politics" to catch support for the principal rider.

_A Model of Divinatory Criticism_

In our efforts to uphold the dignity of letters, of course we intend that each of our contributions shall be as nearly as possible a perfect example from its special field, and ordinarily it would ill become us to suggest the possibility of degrees of perfection. But our readers will, we trust, find justification for our calling special attention to the following model of divinatory criticism.

The fact that it has already passed the ordeal of the Authors' Club, though a trifling derogation from its novelty, is much weightier as a reason for presenting it for the careful consideration of our readers. [Ed.]

* * * * *

The subject is the proper interpretation of a familiar lyric poem, which runs, in the _textus receptus_, as follows:

Dr. Foster went to Gloucester In a shower of rain; He stepped in a puddle up to his middle And never went there again.

The question is, What does this poem mean? What does it mean, that is, in its intimate and ultimate essence? According to the conventional interpretation these lines are didactic. Their higher import--what we may call their spiritual center of gravity--is believed to reside in a pragmatic moral conveyed, or at least adumbrated, in the last line: "He never went there again." The idea is supposed to be--remember that I am now speaking of the conventional interpretation--that he never went there again because he had learned wisdom by experience--the annoying experience of the puddle. According to this view the dominant note of the poem is not lyrical feeling, but what literary critics are wont to call--usually with a shade of contempt--ethicism. It is supposed to be a sort of psalm of life--pitched to be sure in a minor key, but essentially didactic.

I wish to show you that this conventional interpretation is altogether wrong. I shall try to prove that we have to do here, not with a shallow didactic rime, not with a piece of brain-spun ethicism, such as a common poetaster might produce, but with a lyrical ballad of deeply felt tragic import.

I call your attention, in the first place, to the singular ambiguity in that famous last line. "He never went there again." "Never went where?" one instinctively asks. Are we to understand merely that Foster henceforth avoided the particular puddle into which he had stepped, or that he in after time discontinued his visits to Gloucester altogether? This is evidently a question of vital importance, and the poem at first does not seem to answer it at all. In the absence of biographical data extraneous to the text, we can only attack the problem by analytic methods. Let us consider the only two possible hypotheses.

1. That Foster never went to Gloucester again. This supposition is utterly untenable, because it is clearly inconsistent with Foster's character, which can be read from the poem itself with entire certainty. In the first place, he was clearly a doctor of medicine. Had he been a doctor of laws, or letters, or philosophy, there would have been no special urgency in his call to Gloucester, and he would surely have waited until the weather should clear up. Secondly he was a youngish doctor. Had he been an elderly practitioner he would not have gone himself, but would have sent his assistant. Or perhaps he would have telephoned that he would come immediately, and would then have quietly waited for the rain to cease. But our Dr. Foster "went"--went in a shower of rain. From this we see, in the third place, that he was a man of energy, capable of self-abnegation, dominated by a strong sense of professional duty. Now can we suppose that such a man would have renounced forever his practice in Gloucester merely because he had stepped casually into a puddle in a well meant effort to reach the place? The supposition is an insult to his intelligence and to ours. No doubt the incident of the puddle was humiliating, but we do not read that there were spectators. In the absence of specific evidence to the contrary we must assume that Foster was alone. That being so, a man of his character would surely have extricated himself from his unpleasant dilemma, given vent to his emotions in language suited to the occasion, and gone on his way. It is simply impossible to believe that he can have taken from the puddle such a deep and lasting chagrin that he would have been willing to renounce forevermore his growing practice in Gloucester.

2. We turn now to the other hypothesis, according to which Mater Anser means merely that Foster never again stepped in that particular puddle. This supposition makes the whole poem trivial to the point of banality. Why in the world should any man in his senses deliberately step into a deep puddle a second time? Remember too that it was raining at the time. The puddle did not exist ordinarily, but was a transitory affair due to the freshet. Had Foster chosen to come back the next day, there would have been no puddle there, hence nothing to be afraid of. To assume that a man of Foster's intelligence would have retained through life a morbid dread of a mere depression in the ground where he had once encountered a puddle is contrary to all reason. Evidently we must seek some other interpretation for that mysterious last line, "He never went there again."

And now observe, please, a singular technical defect in a poem which is otherwise technically perfect. I refer to the dubious rime _puddle-middle_. There has never been a time in the history of the English language, so far as I know, when that was a tolerable rime. If puddle were of French origin and had retained its French _ü_-sound, "He stepped in a püddle up to his middle" might perhaps pass muster. But _puddle_ is not of French origin. It was this bad rime, coupled with the anatomical vagueness of the phrase "up to his middle," which led me to conjecture that the _textus receptus_ must be corrupt. It is pretty evident that Mater Anser originally wrote not "middle," but some word which was taken for "middle" by a pestilent scribe. And what word can that possibly have been but "noddle"? Perhaps a captious critic may object that, as a matter of rime, _puddle-noddle_ is not much better than _puddle-middle_. But remember that in early English o and u were often confused. It is altogether likely that the word which we pronounce _puddle_ was familiar to Mater Anser's dialect as _poddle_. What she wrote was: He stepped in a poddle up to his noddle.

In the light flashed on the poem by this recension of the text, we penetrate at once the mystery of that last line, "He never went there again," because he never went anywhere again. He perished. His promising career came then and there to an untimely end. We now understand why it is that the career of Dr. Foster subsequent to his memorable expedition to Gloucester has failed to interest the Muse. There was no subsequent career.

I trust I have made it clear that Dr. Foster is the hero of a tragical ballad. He is evidently a being of the same order as Achilles and Siegfried--those dazzling heroes of the Dawn who are destined to run a brilliant career in the pride of their youthful strength, and then to meet with an untimely end. It is true that Achilles and Siegfried are invulnerable, except in one place, and that we hear nothing of Foster's invulnerability. But if you look closely you will find something in his case that is quite analogous. The underlying idea of the invulnerability is always simply this: That the hero is fated to die in one particular way, and in no other. Now it is clear that Foster was fated to die by water. Water was his enemy, his fate. A pious mother had no doubt brought him up to dread and avoid it. When he set out on that last journey he of course took an umbrella, but his precautions did not end there. In view of the inclement weather he of course felt the need of something to fortify the inner man, but he durst not and did not drink water. He drank something else. Just what it was we are not told, but it was evidently something that made him a little unsteady on his feet. And so, just as in the case of Oedipus, the very precautions that he took to avoid his predestined fate only served to precipitate it.

* * * * *

I conclude by summing up briefly what my interpretation does for the advancement of science.

1. It converts what has been supposed to be a rather trivial didactic rime into a tragical ballad of heart-rending pathos.

2. It removes the one serious technical defect of the poem.

3. It accounts in a natural way for the oblivion which has settled like a pall over the career of Dr. Foster after his visit to Gloucester.

4. It enables us to connect Foster with the great heroes of epic song.

_Some Deserving "Climbers"_

Language, like society, has to recruit its upper strata from the lower. Here are some recent candidates.

I. The very eminent author of _The Baby and the Bee_ in this number puts into the mouth of one of the characters the word "humans" as an equivalent for human beings. The same use of it has been met elsewhere in quarters of less dignity. Many of our readers must have regretted the absence from the language of a single word equivalent to _homo_. Is not "human" as a noun worthy of being raised to that dignity?

II. Another new labor-saving locution has already found its way into the Standard Dictionary, and seems worthy of general recognition. The dictionary treats it thus:

thon, 1 thon; 2 thon, pron. sing. pl. [thon's, poss.; thon, obj.] that one; he, she, or it; a pronoun of the 3rd person, common gender; a contracted and solidified form of _that one_, proposed in 1858 by Charles Crozat Converse, of Erie, Pennsylvania, as a substitute in cases where the use of a restrictive pronoun involves either inaccuracy or obscurity, or its non-employment necessitates awkward repetition. The following examples, first as ordinarily written, and afterward with the substitution of the genderless pronoun, illustrate the grammatical deficiencies of the English language in this particular and the proposed method of removal: "If Harry or his wife comes, I will be on hand to meet _him_ or _her_ (or whichever appears)." "Each pupil must learn _his_ or _her_ own lesson." With the substitution of _thon_; "If Harry or his wife comes, I will be on hand to meet _thon_ (i.e., that one who comes)." "Each pupil must learn thon's lesson (i.e., _his_ or _her_ own)." Compare he'er, him'er, his'er.

III. A third applicant for the _cachet_ is "near," not as a preposition, but as an adjective signifying imitation or ineffective approximation, as, near pearls, near lover, near artist, etc., etc. It would at least often save several syllables, and sometimes save a circumlocution. It seems to have begun rather low down. We don't half like it, and we were surprised to find it as far up as in an article by an eminent professor in our present number. But there it was, and it seems well on the way to full habilitation.

_Simplified Spelling_

The invitation in the January number for views on Simplified Spelling has brought some interesting letters from both sides. The best objections that we have seen anywhere are the following:

(1) From an eminent professor:

... This point, briefly, is whether the spoken language is the only _entity_, so to say, to be considered in the case, and the written language merely an effort to represent it, or whether the written language is equally a reality for the purposes of civilization....

I have just received a holiday greeting ... reading

Harty Crismas Greetings. The chain of frendship reaching far Links days that wer with days that ar.

For him [the sender] all written characters are absolutely nothing but the effort to express spoken sounds, and he puts anything on paper which he thinks will represent the sound he wants most immediately for the reader's intelligence. If he is right, if our written language is nothing but this, there should be no delay in altering it radically.

But is my philological friend right? I think certainly not. Since printing came to take a really large place in civilization, the written word has been a _logos_--a direct means of representing thought--quite as truly as the spoken. As an agency for communicating thought between absent persons, for preserving thought from one time to another, and even for communicating the knowledge of a foreign tongue to a contemporary learner, the written word actually exceeds the spoken in general importance. And to a very large extent it does this _not_ by representing the sounds of the spoken word, but by representing the idea through an independent convention. When I read the word "choir" I do not think first that it represents the syllable _kwiir_, and then that the syllable _kwiir_ means a company of singers. Some foreigners who have learned English orally doubtless do go through this process; but those who have learned it primarily by reading, or for reading, do not....

The participle _finished_ has a certain real existence as a language fact, undisturbed by the accident that it is now pronounced _finisht_.