The Fly Leaf, No. 4, Vol. 1, March 1896

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK.

Various

Women are the exceptions to every rule. That is what rules are made for—so that women can be exceptions to them.

Wickedness in women is expiated by the joy it affords the saints.

We all profess to think well of humanity because we want to be well thought of.

It is something to convert one’s enemies, but the disillusion of life comes when one attempts to convert one’s friends.

The definition of an immoral story in the eyes of a certain caste of critics and the smugs is one that has a moral.

A man who values his peace of mind marries a plain woman.

We get a good deal of literature about the Woman with a Past. A woman has not got a past until she begins the folly of repentance.

There is something radically wrong with a misanthrope who is not merry and cheerful, for this is a state of mental and moral independence and self-complacency.

Another impending catastrophe that looms up large on the literary horizon is a serial publication of the innocuous, but insufferably tedious William Black. This is one of the most notorious modern instances of a writer of fine abilities who has fallen into the slough of mere money making. Black ceased to write anything that really seizes one’s interest almost as long ago as ten years. He has written nothing but guide and patter-book stories of the Scotch highlands since his first legitimate successes, and today he writes simply for the largest audience. The style and workmanship is always up to his own standard, for, of course, he is a good workman, but the charm of a forceful and original mind that we enjoyed in “Shandon Bells” and the rest, is lacking in these later stories, in which the conventional love story of old-fashioned romance is told over and over again, with a background of London and Scotch country houses.

Mrs. Humphrey Ward is in the field again. She is the female political and religious prophet of the nonconformist many-headed. She is to contribute an interminable, commonplace snob-novel, dealing with utterly superfluous English “society” and political life, to one of the American magazines for mature sucklings. It is bad enough to get this freak female in books.

It is a poor imitation of Anthony Trollope, and it is filled with the profound platitudes that have made the Ward nightmare a ludicrous libel and parody of George Eliot. Such is the taste of the serious minded women readers of our time, that this unendurably tiresome portrayer of merely snob life and snob philosophy is hailed as one of the geniuses of our age.

I hope I am a good Democrat here at home, but in following English politics in the newspapers I observe one intellectual characteristic of a Tory government which touches my admiration and enthusiasm, and inclines me to prefer the Tories to the Liberals. The Liberals, like the large army of “Reformers” we have with us in this country, are rather apt to appeal to the mawkish sentimentality of the unbalanced and short-sighted masses, and they encourage schemes for the reformation of human nature by Act of Parliament. The Tories are saner, broader and more tolerant of human failings that are in the nature of things incurable. Perhaps it is because they themselves do not pretend to be wholly incorruptible on the moral side that they have perception enough to recognize the fact, that folly and wickedness are the sole compensations of the lower orders for the hardships of existence. The Lord save the poor from the dispensation of the reformers and moralists! I am glad to note that Lord Salisbury has just turned down a deputation of fanatics on the liquor question with the curt remark that the subject did not attract the government after past experience, and, moreover, the government had other more important matters to attend to. It is time these Prohibition lunatics learned that free men will never relinquish their divine and human rights to go to the devil in their own way. And besides, liquor is not by any means the worst evil in this world.

It is time Americans arrived at maturity of judgment in intellectual matters, instead of complacently occupying a position of servile dependence upon English opinion. A declaration of Literary Independence is needed, and must soon be made by some bold spirits.

It is ridiculous to see the American cultivated public taking all its opinions in literary matters from the organs of British complacency and ancient prejudice. The London Times, an ancient bulwark of immovable Tory Know-nothingism, is regarded seriously on this side. Then there is the Saturday Review, a dirty gutter rag of imbecile impertinence, which diverts the naturÄl “sports” and hobbledehoys of the British aristocracy. It is written in choice English superciliousness, by snobbish and half baked boys, for English country houses, where the coagulation of insular stupidity needs a whip and stable-boy familiarities to set any wits in motion. These astounding journals of civilization are taken seriously by the American reading public, and more especially by the critics, who will, with very few exceptions, dance to any jig that is played in London.

That the English “bag-men” of literature do not fail to take advantage of American credulity and servile deference to English opinion, which is as easily counterfeited as “public opinion” is here, is shown once more for the thousandth time, by a recent statement in The London Times. The English do not take any trouble to dissemble their contempt of everything American, and a good stirring spirit of retaliation in every department, including literature and criticism in this country, would increase John Bull’s friendliness and tolerance as much as Cleveland’s message on the Monroe doctrine did in one astonishing fortnight. We now learn the English love us! After all those scurrilous articles in their magazines!

The Times says: “Nothing but a boom in London will induce American publishers to boom an author in the States. There are very few literary journals in the United States, so that ours have a remarkable influence, and their verdict on a new work is eagerly scanned and, as a rule, accepted.”

Well, it is time the literary journals we have awoke to their duty and opportunity, and gave up singing to English piping, and took to thinking for themselves. They might also look around here, and learn something of their own writers. It is really worth while to encourage authorship in America. There is an abundance of talent here, and, when circumstances are favorable, real genius.

The howling of the critics and the frantic female moralists convinced me that I must read “Jude the Obscure,” which I might have postponed until I was less busy, and so finally have missed, as I have many good things—swept on with the tide of events and affairs. But when the frantic female moralist is stirred up in holy indignation, I know that there is something moving forward worthy of masculine consideration.

I’ve read “Jude the Obscure.” It is the comedy and tragedy of real human life. I have no criticism. It seems Thackeray ought to have lived to have remarked the literary successor of Henry Fielding. I’m like Oliver Twist. Alarmed at my own temerity, I want some more.

Let our English literature be written for men and women. Let it dare, even if it can never achieve the range of Balzac, the Aristophanes, the Shakspeare of modern fiction.

One very significant change has almost imperceptibly crept into English fiction of recent years. It will be remembered that all Dickens’ and Thackeray’s heroines were in their teens; only adventuresses and wicked women being allowed a fictitious existence after passing their twentieth birthday. And so with all the conventional novels from that time to date—all the heroines are sylphish, roguish, innocent, or pale-faced, meditative maids. To-day the heroines in some rather advanced books are allowed to be as aged as twenty-five. This is moral and intellectual progress. A woman is now also allowed to be in love with a man before he pops any question.

The February “Bachelor of Arts” has an article on “The Yale Prom [From the Girl’s Point of View].” It is signed by “Florence Guertin.” In the second paragraph we read: “Skirt the ballroom with boxes; place in them hundreds of pretty girls, typical American beauties from all parts of the country; offset these by a fringe of diamond-decked chaperones; confront them with a solid phalanx of white-shirted, handsome, muscular young men, and you have a rough sketch of the outward aspect of the Junior Promenade.” “White-shirted!” Why, Florence! Is the Yale Prom such a barbarous, uncivilized affair? This out-Poteats Mrs. Poteat, who said she had rather send her son to hell than to Yale (she was not a Harvard grad., either). Our moral sensibilities are rudely disturbed by this vision, but we struggle on for a few paragraphs not knowing what awful disclosure Florence will make next, till we heave a sigh of relief when we read: “Yale University teaches one thing not down in the curriculum: it teaches a man how to dress. The majority of students could pass a hundred in this course.” From this we are led to infer that the solid phalanx of handsome, muscular young men had something else on beside white shirts, and that there was more regard for the conventionalities of modern civilization at New Haven than Florence at first would have us believe. But why “white-shirted?” Did Florence expect that Yale men would appear in their dress suits with colored shirts? Or perhaps she thought they wore sweaters.

I do not know how it may be with other Epicureans, but I find the complete dominance of daily journalism, the stage, and a certain class of magazines with a million readers apiece, by the Fractionally-attired Female of the variety stage or of society, is becoming distinctly nauseating.

To get the semi-nude fleshly female thrust upon us in bulk at every turn, day after day, awakens a fierce revolt in some masculine minds against this insane worship of the Triumphant Harlot, which is fast growing to be the principal characteristic of modern civilization. It is getting to be a nightmare to all who cherish any intellectual and moral ideal aims in life, and instead of increasing the witchery of woman it makes her a loathsome vacuous symbol of the corrupt millions who are groaning and praying for a Utopia of unrestrained bestial content. I hope they may never throw off the yokes that keep them tame—and out of my neighborhood. This degradation of the stage and literature is enough to create a race of Epicurean misogynists.

Mr. Edward Sanford Martin, in a department called “This Busy World” in Harper’s Weekly, expresses his strenuous disapproval of the Bibelot movement in contemporary literature, and of the aims of the Fly Leaf in particular. He says: “The Fly Leaf is a periodical of the New—not to say the ‘Fresh.’”

I should have thought a man who has enough love of real literature to turn to the good old eighteenth century form of the gossipy essay, as Mr. Martin has done in one or two books, would have had enough sense of humor to appreciate a sincere and honest attempt to rehabilitate free thought, robust opinion and high endeavor in present day literature. The revival of the old and honorable pamphlet form, which is and always has been the vehicle of free thought, free fancy and the honest literature of Democracy since the popularization of the printing press should appeal to a bookman.

Mr. Martin is, however, a much better Tory than he is a humorist; and to those who are not aware of it, it is well to point out that one of the significant developments in American literature is the Tory spirit of a certain clique of comfortables, who regard literature not as the sacred tables of the human mind, but as a mere game for people of taste. It is disappointing, however, to find a man who shows his appreciation of the good old school of essayists by attempting to work out a career as one of this scanty apostolic succession, so completely vitiated in his critical and humorous perception by bad company that he can only find a cheap, cant term, borrowed from the gutter or the class-room, for the honest work of men, who, in this age of clatter and notoriety, are striving against odds to bring in the ideals of the old robust English literature.

But a Tory cannot be tolerant of Grub Street, or stick at simple honesty in criticism. He is bound to associate genius with prosperity, or some of his friends’ fame will suffer, and discriminating readers will grow overbold in their choice of polite literature. Fame depends nowadays on one’s appreciations of one’s well to do contemporaries. It is the solemn business of all “respectable” critics to keep literature as the sacred gift and heirloom of a close corporation of perfectly “respectable” and inoffensive writers.

But perhaps time will bring a sense of humor to Mr. Martin. We hope so, as we have a tenderness for every man who cares for and writes essays. Mr. Martin’s attitude surprised us somewhat, as he really can write an amusing essay and we expect much toleration from an essayist. But he may live to grow mellow and learn to love stout heretics. Every independent writer since Job has appeared “fresh” to smug complacency, and an essayist should never countenance smuggery, if he would hold any status with book men.

It always appears ridiculous to a clique that other men should fight for and demand a hearing. But we must honestly aver our egotistical opinion that there is fully as much brains in Grub Street, frowned upon as it is by the respectable tin gods of contemporary criticism and literature, as there is in other and more respectable coteries of literature.

The true ideal of a democracy is a natural aristocracy of intellect, recruited in every generation from all classes—the survival of the fittest. But just now almost everything in our social, intellectual, political, and even religious activity, caters to the mass of lowest intelligences and their gross prejudices.

In the Fly Leaf the Beast will find no such pandering to his muddy and addled brains. There are plenty of periodical muck-heaps for him to wallow in. This thing is intended for our intellectual coevals and contemporaries, and we shall not be easily convinced that, in this seething time of wholesome change, there are not enough such people in America to sympathize with and support a periodical with such aims.

The Fly Leaf and its writers appeal to that rare and delightful being, the discriminating reader. Bookish folk constitute a division in the human species, a class by themselves, and as a Booklover as well as a quillfeather, I firmly believe that only those who are possessed of some intellectual and catholic interests of this sort will be found human and worthy enough to be admitted to Heaven. The Almighty will surely not destroy his own peace by allowing the fools to outnumber and outvote Him. The dull and unintelligent deserve to be lost. An acute philosopher (but why dissimulate to delude the dull, since the philosophic quip is my own?) has divided the human race into thinkers and readers—and mere bipeds. Why remain simply a humble biped when you can read the Fly Leaf and hope for Heaven?

It should be distinctly understood by all readers who visit the book stores with the idea of getting the most for their money, that the Fly Leaf cannot be put upon the scale and weighed against the picture periodicals. It tips hopelessly in the air, and this airiness and lightness and intangible delicacy is the characteristic of all thought. It flies into the air while mud settles at once into its congenial mire. Thought and wit and fancy always fly up in this fashion; and this is the honor and distinction of the Fly Leaf and its staff, whether we win or lose.

We candidly do not appeal to the gross and clumsy wits of the many-headed, although we conserve the tradition of the democracy of fine spirit in literature. Nature’s aristocracy of intellect is all that makes humanity tolerable. We appeal to the Remnant, without which democracy would be the unmitigated dominion of the Beast; and luckily we see evidences everywhere of the rapid growth of this class and of a salutary revolt against the dominion of the Beast in journalism, literature, and even in politics. Let it grow—for no nation can take its proper place in civilization which is governed by its tail instead of by its head.

The Man in the Moon.

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