Part 1
The Philistine A Periodical of Protest.
_I am sure care’s an enemy to life._—TWELFTH NIGHT.
[Illustration: Vol. III. No. 2.]
Printed Every Little While for The Society of The Philistines and Published by Them Monthly. Subscription, One Dollar Yearly Single Copies, 10 Cents. July, 1896.
THE PHILISTINE.
CONTENTS FOR JULY.
A Sea Song, F. W. Pickard.
A Bit of War Photography, T. W. Higginson.
A Prologue, Stephen Crane.
A Hot Weather Idyll, Estes Baker.
A Venture in Manuscript, Charles M. Skinner.
The Micketts of a Wybirt, Ian Taylor.
The Purple Insurgent, Frank W. Noxon.
Heart to Heart Talks with Men, J. Howe Adams.
Plots and Things, Kenneth Brown.
Side Talks with the Philistines. Conducted by the East Aurora School of Philosophy.
Have you seen the Roycroft Quarterly? The “Stephen Crane” number is attracting much attention and we believe it will interest you. 25 cents a copy.
_Entered at the Postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as mail matter of the second class._
_COPYRIGHT, 1896, by B. C. Hubbard._
NOTICE TO
Collectors of Artistic Posters.
On receipt of 10 cents we will send to any address, a copy of our largely illustrated catalogue of 500 posters exhibited by “The Echo” and “The Century.”
“The Echo” is the pioneer in fostering the poster in America. It began its department of Poster-Lore in August, 1895, and has printed it fortnightly, with many illustrations, ever since.
Each issue of “The Echo” bears a poster design, in two or more colors, on its cover. During the past year seven of these covers were by Will H. Bradley.
“The Echo” is $2.00 a year, 10 cents a number. NEW YORK, 130 Fulton Street.
LOOK OUT for the second and popular edition of “Cape of Storms,” price 25 cents. One sent free with every year’s subscription to “The Echo.”
_THE LOTUS._
_A Miniature Magazine of Art and Literature Uniquely Printed and Illustrated_.
A graceful flower.—_Rochester Herald._
It is a wonder.—_Chicago Times-Herald._
The handsomest of all the bibelots.—_The Echo._
Alone in its scope and piquancy.—_Boston Ideas._
Artistic in style and literary in character.—_Brooklyn Citizen._
The prettiest of the miniature magazines.—_Syracuse Herald._
Each bi-weekly visit brings a charming surprise.—EVERYBODY.
THE LOTUS _seeks to be novel, unconventional and entertaining without sacrificing purity and wholesomeness. It seeks to be a medium for the younger writers._
THE LOTUS _is published every two weeks and is supplied to subscribers for One Dollar a year; foreign subscription, $1.25. Sample copy five cents. On sale at all news stands._
THE LOTUS, Kansas City, Mo.
The Roycroft Quarterly:
Being a Goodly collection of Literary Curiosities obtained from Sources not easily accessible to the average Book-Lover. Offered to the Discerning every three months for 25c. per number or one dollar per year.
Contents for May:
I. Glints of Wit and Wisdom: Being replies from sundry Great Men who missed a Good Thing.
II. Some Historical Documents by W. Irving Way, Phillip Hale and Livy S. Richard.
III. As to Stephen Crane. E. H. A preachment by an admiring friend.
IV. Seven poems by Stephen Crane.
1—The Chatter of a Death Demon. 2—A Lantern Song. 3—A Slant of Sun on Dull Brown Walls. 4—I have heard the Sunset Song of the Birches. 5—What Says the Sea? 6—To the Maiden the Sea was Blue Meadow. 7—Fast Rode the Knight.
V. A Great Mistake. Stephen Crane. Recording the venial sin of a mortal under sore temptation.
VI. A Prologue. Stephen Crane.
THE PHILISTINE.
NO. 2. July, 1896. VOL. 3.
A SEA SONG.
Away with care! Away with grief! Hurrah for life! Hurrah, we’re free! Away with sorrow! Perish wrong! Hurrah, Hurrah! The sea! The sea! Yo ho, The waves are dashing, Yo ho, The billows crashing, Yo ho, The spray goes flashing Down the bay. Hurrah! The gulls are winging, O’er bows the waves are flinging The cooling, pelting, stinging, Salt sea spray. Away with care! Away with grief! Hurrah for life! Hurrah, we’re free! Away with sorrow! Perish wrong! Hurrah, Hurrah! The sea! The sea!
F. W. PICKARD.
A BIT OF WAR PHOTOGRAPHY.
After the applause won by Mr. Stephen Crane’s _Red Badge of Courage_, a little reaction is not strange; and this has already taken, in some quarters, a form quite unjust and unfair. Certainly any one who spent so much as a week or two in camp, thirty years ago, must be struck with the extraordinary freshness and vigor of the book. No one except Tolstoi, within my knowledge, has brought out the daily life of war so well; it may be said of these sentences, in Emerson’s phrase, “Cut these and they bleed.” The breathlessness, the hurry, the confusion, the seeming aimlessness, as of a whole family of disturbed ants, running to and fro, yet somehow accomplishing something at last; all these aspects, which might seem the most elementary and the easiest to depict, are yet those surest to be omitted, not merely by the novelists, but by the regimental histories themselves.
I know that when I first read Tolstoi’s _War and Peace, The Cossacks and Sevastopol_, it seemed as if all other so-called military novels must become at once superannuated and go out of print. All others assumed, in comparison, that bandbox aspect which may be seen in most military or naval pictures; as in the well known engraving of the death of Nelson, where the hero is sinking on the deck in perfect toilette, at the height of a bloody conflict, while every soldier or sailor is grouped around him, each in spotless garments and heroic attitude. It is this Tolstoi quality—the real tumult and tatters of the thing itself—which amazes the reader of Crane’s novel. Moreover, Tolstoi had been through it all in person; whereas this author is a youth of twenty-four, it seems, born since the very last shot fired in the Civil War. How did he hit upon his point of view?
Yet this very point of view, strange to say, has been called a defect. Remember that he is telling the tale, not of a commanding general, but of a common soldier—a pawn in the game; a man who sees only what is going on immediately around him, and, for the most part, has the key to nothing beyond. This he himself knows well at the time. Afterward, perhaps, when the affair is discussed at the campfire, and his view compared with what others say, it begins to take shape, often mixed with all sorts of errors; and when it has reached the Grand Army Post and been talked over afterward for thirty years, the narrator has not a doubt of it all. It is now a perfectly ordered affair, a neat and well arranged game of chess, often with himself as a leading figure. That is the result of too much perspective. The wonder is that this young writer, who had no way of getting at it all except the gossip—printed or written—of these very old soldiers, should be able to go behind them all, and give an account of their life, not only more vivid than they themselves have ever given, but more accurate. It really seems a touch of that marvelous intuitive quality which for want of a better name we call genius.
Now is it a correct criticism of the book to complain, as one writer has done, that it does not dwell studiously on the higher aspects of the war? Let the picture only be well drawn, and the moral will take care of itself; never fear. The book is not a patriotic tract, but a delineation; a cross section of the daily existence of the raw enlisted-man. In other respects it is reticent, because it is truthful. Does any one suppose that in the daily routine of the camp there was room for much fine talk about motives and results—that men were constantly appealing, like Carlyle’s Frenchman, “to posterity and the immortal Gods?” Fortunately or unfortunately, the Anglo Saxon is not built that way; he errs on the other side; habitually understates instead of overstating his emotions; and while he is making the most heroic sacrifices of his life, usually prefers to scold about rations or grumble at orders. He is to be judged by results; not by what he says, which is often ungracious and unornamental, but by what he does.
The very merit of this book is that in dealing with his men the author offers, within this general range, all the essential types of character—the man who boasts and the man who is humble—the man who thinks he may be frightened and is not, and the man who does not expect to be, but is. For his main character he selects a type to be found in every regiment—the young man who does not know himself, who first stumbles into cowardice, to his own amazement, and then is equally amazed at stumbling into courage; who begins with skulking, and ends by taking a flag. In Doyle’s _Micah Clarke_ the old Roundhead soldier tells his grandchildren how he felt inclined to bob his head when he first heard bullets whistle, and adds “If any soldier ever told you that he did not, the first time that he was under fire, then that soldier is not a man to trust.” This is putting it too strongly, for some men are born more stolid, other more nervous; but the nervous man is quite as likely to have the firmer grain, and to come out the more heroic in the end. In my own limited experience, the only young officer whom I ever saw thoroughly and confessedly frightened, when first under fire, was the only one of his regiment who afterwards chose the regular army for his profession, and fought Indians for the rest of his life.
As for _The Red Badge of Courage_, the test of the book is in the way it holds you. I only know that whenever I take it up I find myself reading it over and over, as I do Tolstoi’s _Cossacks_, and find it as hard to put down. None of Doyle’s or Weyman’s books bear re-reading, in the same way; you must wait till you have forgotten their plots. Even the slipshod grammar seems a part of the breathless life and action. How much promise it gives, it is hard to say. Goethe says that as soon as a man has done one good thing, the world conspires against him to keep him from doing another. Mr. Crane has done one good thing, not to say two; but the conspiracy of admiration may yet be too much for him. It is earnestly to be hoped, at least, that he may have the wisdom to stay in his own country and resist the temptation to test his newly-found English reputation by migrating—an experiment by which Bret Harte has been visibly dwarfed and Henry James hopelessly diluted.
T. W. HIGGINSON.
Cambridge, Mass.
A PROLOGUE.
A GLOOMY STAGE. SLENDER CURTAINS AT A WINDOW, CENTRE. BEFORE THE WINDOW, A TABLE, AND UPON THE TABLE, A LARGE BOOK, OPENED. A MOONBEAM, NO WIDER THAN A SWORD-BLADE, PIERCES THE CURTAINS AND FALLS UPON THE BOOK.
A MOMENT OF SILENCE.
FROM WITHOUT, THEN—AN ADJACENT ROOM IN INTENTION—COME SOUNDS OF CELEBRATION, OF RIOTOUS DRINKING AND LAUGHTER. FINALLY, A SWIFT QUARREL. THE DIN AND CRASH OF A FIGHT. A LITTLE STILLNESS. THEN A WOMAN’S SCREAM. “AH, MY SON, MY SON.”
A MOMENT OF SILENCE.
CURTAIN.
STEPHEN CRANE.
A HOT WEATHER IDYLL.
The new assistant sat in the office, vainly endeavoring to discourage the perspiration in its efforts to show him how the water comes down at Lodore. But, with a perseverance worthy a wetter cause than the dry weather, it continued to flow from his mobile brow and neck, mop he never so well. The thermometer on the wall registered 89, and the calendar only May 1st. It was the new assistant’s first day in the office, and he had already begun to contemplate with humid horror the prospect of spending an entire summer in a place that was already warm enough to have caused his once stiff and glossy collar to emulate his puff-bosom shirt.
“Why,” he gasped to the Old Book-keeper, “what _will_ it be when summer really comes?”
The latter, who had been a cent short in his cash the night before, gruffly replied that it would probably be June 1st. But, before the day was over, he, too, was forced to realize the heat and to speak of it. So, when his face began to assume the appearance of a greasy plank under a hydrant, he concluded that it might not be so great a compromise to his dignity for him to agree with his junior, and his looks showed him to be rapidly thawing. They managed to survive that day and the next and several others that followed. In the meantime the thermometer seemed bent, in fact, warped, upon beating all previous records, and the two sufferers watched the mercury climb, until it seemed to be trying to reach its Olympian namesake. The thought that the worst was to come served to increase their distress. It always does.
Finally, the Old Book-keeper, who occupied a sort of oldest inhabitant position in the neighborhood, although he had always worked for a living, threw up the sponge and reluctantly admitted that, for so early in the season, it really beat all the weather he ever saw. The new assistant sympathized with the old man in his defeat, and went so far in his efforts to cheer him, as across the street to buy the beer, without first proposing to match for it.
So affairs went on, nothing worthy of note transpiring, except, of course, the two now becoming warm friends. Every morning and again after lunch they would enter the office, take off their coats and everything else that Mr. Comstock might not object to, and drearily settle down to their work, always wondering if they would be able to stand it when summer really came. By this time, they had ceased to consult the thermometer, and the calendar was forgotten. Several pages that should have been torn from the latter remained there still: not enough air was stirring to move them. At last, one afternoon just as the new assistant had succeeded in opening his attenuated countenance wide enough to say, as usual—“I wonder what it will be when summer really”—the door was suddenly darkened by a portly form enveloped in a heavy overcoat and a confident manner that unmistakably stamped their wearer as the Boss, and a hearty voice exclaimed—“Well, this bracing weather is delightful after a hot summer on the Riviera!” The Old Book-keeper and the new assistant staggered to the door and looked out. The snow was falling thick and fast.
ESTES BAKER.
Knoxville, Tenn.
A VENTURE IN MANUSCRIPT.
Having finished some literature I put it into an envelope, with postage stamps to get it back; for that happened sometimes, even when it was real, hand-made literature, as in this case. It came back, because the editor of the _Bugle_ said it was too long. I sat up that night paring and changing, and when it had been condensed a third it occurred to me that maybe there was a surer market for it in the office of the _Banner of Freedom_. Another try; more postage stamps. Returned with statement that “We never print stories less than 6,000 words long and yours is too short.” I rewrote it in part, restoring an episode on which I had slightly prided myself in the original version, and as it was neither long nor short I sent it, this time to _Tomlinson’s Bi-Monthly_. Tomlinson kept it for nearly two years before returning it, and it reached me a veritable tramp of a manuscript, dusty, creased, dog-eared and ragged, with editorial changes in blue pencil that could not be erased, and the remark that, as _Tomlinson’s_ circulated largely among the Bulgarians in America, and received advertising patronage from them, it was impossible to print anything that might offend Bulgarians. This surprised me, because the fact that one of my characters, Gilhooly McManus, was a Bulgarian had nearly escaped my notice. He was introduced because his nationality made occasion for an incident that I needed, and had he been an American every reader would have denounced his conduct as absurd.
There was nothing for it but to copy it afresh and send it to _Bloxam’s_. It was returned in the next mail, manifestly unread, with the usual form announcement that “owing to pressure” etc., it was impossible, etc., so I tried _The Pacific_ with it next. It came back in time with the objection that it was too sensational, and the next week it was returned by the _Chambermaid’s Own_ as too quiet. _Hanks’ Review_ would not have it because plots were going out of fashion, and _The Athenian_ suggested that I imbue it with at least a trace of interest. At last a little one-horse magazine in Texas offered to print it if I would subscribe for three years to his magazine at two dollars per year. I accepted the offer by return mail, stipulating only that the magazine should be sent, with my compliments, to an almshouse.
And I set out on my next story wondering if the time would ever come when a man could speak his mind to his fellow men in print, or if all written things would have to be shaped according to the Procrustean notions of the average editor.
CHARLES M. SKINNER.
THE MICKETTS OF A WYBIRT.
Then with a touchbox of transalpine tar, Turning thrice round, and stirring not a jot, He threw five tons of red hot purple Snow, Into a Pigmy’s mouth, nine inches square. Which straight, with melancholy mov’d, Old Bembus Burgomaster of Pickt-hatch, That plunging through the Sea of Turnbull street, He safely did arrive at Smithfield Bars. Then did the Turntripes on the Coast of France, Catch fifteen hundred million grasshoppers, With fourteen Spanish Needles, bumbasted, Poach’d with the Eggs of fourscore Flanders Mares. Mounted upon the foot of Caucasus, They whirled the football of conspiring Fate, And brake the shins of smug-fac’d Mulciber: With that, grim Pluto all in Scarlet blue, Gave fair Persephone a kiss of Brass, At which all Hell danc’d Trenchmore in a string. Whilst Acheron and Termagant did sing, “The Mold-warp,” all this while in white broth bath’d, Did Carol Didoes happiness in love, Upon a Gridiron made of whiting-mops, Unto the tune of “John Come Kiss Me Now,” At which Avernus Music ’gan to roar, Enthron’d upon a seat of three-leav’d grass, Whilst all the Hibernian Kernes in multitudes, Did feast with Shamrocks stewed in Usquebaugh. At which banquet made of didillary Took great distaste, because the Pillory Was hunger-starv’d for want of Villains ears, Whom to relieve, there was a Mittimus, Sent from Tartaria in an oyster boat, At which the King of China was amaz’d, And with nine grains of Rhubard, stellified, As low as to the altitude of shame, He thrust four Onions in a Candle-case, And spoil’d the meaning of the world’s misdoubt. Thus with a Dialogue of crimson Starch, I was inflamed with a nun-cold fire, Upon the tenterhooks of Charlemagne. The Dogstar howl’d, the Cat a Mountain smil’d, And Sisyphus drank Muscadel and eggs, In the horn’d hoof of huge _Bucephalus_, Time turn’d about, and show’d me Yesterday, Clad in a Gown of mourning; had I wist, The motion was almost too late they said, Whilst sad despair made all the World stark mad; They all arose, and I put up my pen, It makes no matter, where, why, how, or when.
IAN TAYLOR.
THE PURPLE INSURGENT.
Clangingharp told Frostembight the only prophetic way to write an epic was to save all the rough drafts, with interlinear corrections. He said your biographer could thus trace the growth of your work from its earliest inception to its final bloom, and the photographic reproductions would do away with the cost of sketches. Frostembight said a man that would write an epic was a lunk-head. Clangingharp started to get up and destroy Frostembight, but he stepped on Marcus Aurelius, and with a rush of words to the throat fell helpless into his chair. Marcus Aurelius was the cat. “Dam that cat,” added Clangingharp.
One night when Clangingharp sat writing, an episode occurred. Clangingharp couldn’t write on an empty stomach, and the verses he made when he was sober were so drab and elegiac that in spite of his remark to Frostembight he threw them away and went out after cocktails. He could write shriller and hotter stuff when he had had cocktails. Well, one night he sat thinking of what an empty thing a cocktail is. He had been writing verses, and he knew they were regrettable. But he did not go out and have cocktails. It might be told why he didn’t, but what’s the use? You go to a comedy to get away from your business troubles, and the chief clown constantly thrusts under your nose a big wad of stage money. It would simply be dragging in sordid matter that should have no place in a psychological study. It is enough to say he didn’t go out. He sat and plunked drops of purple ink from his pen into a blotter with an insurance advertisement on it that lay submissively on the desk. Then Marcus Aurelius leaped onto the blotter, and a fiendish shine glittered dryly in the epicist’s eye. He noticed the cat was white. Rainy afternoons on the fire-escape had made the beast very white. Clangingharp plunked a drop of royal purple on the tip of Marcus Aurelius’s tail.
The next instant Clangingharp had written:
“And gave him hemorrhage of the soul.”
“Great!” he screeched in a seething cauldron of joy. “Powerful!”
He began to wonder whether or not cattails were as effective as cocktails. He plunked another royal purple drop onto the cat’s tail, and wrote another line. It was not so good as hemorrhage of the soul, but it was pretty fair:
“And freshet-flushed his hydrant eye.”
For two weeks Clangingharp’s days and nights were dry. He did not go out after cocktails, and as there was a drought on the fire-escape the cat was becoming splendidly regal. The window was kept open, for the weather was hot; but Marcus Aurelius got no nourishment excepting an occasional mouse and what he absorbed from the ink, so he staid in. Clangingharp would sit there for hours and deliberately sling ink at him. Not a growl from Marcus. At last he would take down the folding-bed, and before getting in would remember the pen and wipe it along Marcus’s spine. Not a plaint from the cat: always patient and forgiving.
The epic was growing. It had become so vast now that Clangingharp had long since stopped saving rough drafts, and the complete copy was piled up neatly on his desk. There was so much that he had even ceased reading the whole of it through after writing each new line. The evening came when Clangingharp felt that he could finish the last canto. His heroine was about to get her document so she could be married to the hero, and Clangingharp felt that without stimulants he was scarcely up to writing the heroine’s final spasm to the jury. It may as well be said here that Clangingharp had been hearing from home lately, so he decided to go out and have them for a last strain. He piled his manuscript fondly on a corner of the desk, dipped his pen thoughtfully into the ink-well, and gazing abstractedly at Marcus, plunked the whole penful into a mute Aurelian eye.