The Genial Idiot: His Views and Reviews

“Well, I might consent to be a cousin to a poem of that kind. I’ve read worse and written some that are quite as bad. But you know, Mr. Idiot, even so great a masterpiece as that won’t make a book,” said the Poet.

“Of course it won’t,” retorted the Idiot. “That’s only for the summer. Here’s another one on winter. Just listen:

“Now the man who deals in mittens and in tabsIs a-smiling broadly – aye, from ear to ear —As he reaches out his hand and fondly grabsAll the shining, golden shekels falling near.“Now the snow lies on the hill-side and the roof,And the birdling to the sunny southland flies;While the frowning summer landlord stands aloof,And to solemncholy meditation hies.“Now the tinkling of the sleigh-bells tinge the air,And the coal-man is as happy as can be;While the hulking, sulking, grizzly seeks his lair,And the ice-man’s soul is filled with misery.“Clad in frost are all the distant mountain-peaks,And the furnace is as hungry as a boy;While the plumber, as he gloats upon the leaks,Is the model that the painter takes for ‘Joy.’“And from all of this we learn the lesson sweet —The glad message of Dame Nature, grand and clear:That the summer-time has gone with all its heat,And the crisp and frosty winter days are here.

You see, Mr. Poet, that out of that one idea alone – that cataloguing of the things of the four seasons – you can get four poems that are really worth reading,” said the Idiot. “We could call that section ‘The Seasons,’ and make it the first part of the book. In the second part we could do the same thing, only in greater detail, for each one of the months. Just as a sample, take the month of February. We could run something like this in on February:

“Now o’er the pavement comes a hushAs pattering feet wade deep in slushThat every Feb.Doth flow and ebb.”

“I see,” said the Poet. “It wouldn’t take long to fill up a book with stuff like that.”

“To make the appeal stronger, let me take the month of July, which is now on,” resumed the Idiot. “You may find it even more convincing:

“Now the fly —The rhubarb-pie —The lightning in the sky —Thermometers so spry —That leap up high —The roads all dry,The hoboes nigh,The town a-fry,The mad ki-yiA-snarling by,The crickets cry —All tell us that it is July.

Eh?”

“I don’t believe anybody would believe I wrote it, that’s all,” said the Poet, shaking his head dubiously. “They’d find out, sooner or later, that you did it, just as they discovered that Will Carleton wrote ‘Paradise Lost,’ and Dick Davis was the real author of Shakespeare. Why don’t you publish the thing over your own name?”

“Too modest,” said the Idiot. “What do you think of this:

“Now the festive candidateGoes a-sporting through the State,And he kisses babes from Quogue to Kalamazoo;For he really wants to winWithout spending any tin,And he thinks he has a chance to kiss it through.”

“That’s fair, only I don’t think you’ll find many candidates doing that sort of thing nowadays,” said the Poet. “Most public men I know of would rather spend their money than kiss the babies. That style of campaigning has gone out.”

“It has in the cities,” said the Idiot. “But back in the country it is still done, and the candidate who turns his back on the infant might as well give up the race. I know, because a cousin of mine ran for supervisor once, and he was licked out of his boots because he tried to do his kissing by proxy – said he’d give the kisses in a bunch to a committee of young ladies, who could distribute them for him. Result was everybody was down on him – even the young ladies.”

“I guess he was a cousin of yours, all right,” laughed the Doctor; “that scheme bears the Idiot brand.”

“Here’s one on the opening of the opera season,” said the Idiot:

“Now the fiddlers tune their fiddlesTo the lovely taradiddlesOf old Wagner, Mozart, Bizet, and the rest.Now the trombone is a-tootingOut its scaley shute-the-chuteingAnd the oboe is hoboing with a zest.“Now the dressmakers are working —Not a single minute shirking —Making gowns with frills and fal-lals mighty queer,For the Autumn days are flying,And there’s really no denyingThat the season of the opera is near.”

Mr. Brief took a hand in the discussion at this moment.

“Then you can have a blanket verse,” he said, scribbling with his pencil on a piece of paper in front of him. “Something like this:

“And as Time goes on a-stalking,And the Idiot still is talkingIn his usual blatant manner, loud and free,With his silly jokes and rhyme,It is – well it’s any timeFrom Creation to the jumping-off place that you’ll find at the far end of Eterni-tie.”

“That settles it,” said the Idiot, rising. “I withdraw my proposition. Let’s call it off, Mr. Poet.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Mr. Brief. “Isn’t my verse good?”

“Yes,” said the Idiot. “Just as good as mine, and that being the case it isn’t worth doing. When lawyers can write as good poetry as real poets, it doesn’t pay to be a real poet. I’m going in for something else. I guess I’ll apply for a job as a motorman, and make a name for myself there.”

“Can a motorman make a name for himself?” asked the Doctor.

“Oh yes,” said the Idiot. “Easily. By being civil. A civil motorman would be unique.”

“But he wouldn’t make a fortune,” suggested the Poet.

“Yes he would, too,” said the Idiot. “If he could prove he really was civil, the vaudeville people would pay him a thousand dollars a week and tour the country with him. He’d draw mobs.”

With which the Idiot left the dining-room.

“I think his poems would sell,” smiled Mrs. Pedagog.

“Yes,” said Mr. Pedagog. “Chopped up fine and properly advertised, they might make a very successful new kind of breakfast food – provided the paper on which they were written was not too indigestible.”

XIII

HE DISCUSSES THE MUSIC CURE

”GOOD-MORNING, Doctor,” said the Idiot, as Capsule, M.D., entered the dining-room, “I am mighty glad you’ve come. I’ve wanted for a long time to ask you about this music cure that everybody is talking about, and get you, if possible, to write me out a list of musical nostrums for every-day use. I noticed last night, before going to bed, that my medicine-chest was about run out. There’s nothing but one quinine pill and a soda-mint drop left in it, and if there’s anything in the music cure, I don’t think I’ll have it filled again. I prefer Wagner to squills, and, compared to the delights of Mozart, Hayden, and Offenbach, those of paregoric are nit.”

“Still rambling, eh?” vouchsafed the Doctor. “You ought to submit your tongue to some scientific student of dynamics. I am inclined to think, from my own observation of its ways, that it contains the germ of perpetual motion.”

“I will consider your suggestion,” replied the Idiot. “Meanwhile, let us consult harmoniously together on the original point. Is there anything in this music cure, and is it true that our medical schools are hereafter to have conservatories attached to them, in which aspiring young M.D.’s are to be taught the materia musica in addition to the materia medica?”

“I had heard of no such idiotic proposition,” returned the Doctor. “And as for the music cure, I don’t know anything about it; haven’t heard everybody talking about it; and doubt the existence of any such thing outside of that mysterious realm which is bounded by the four corners of your own bright particular cerebellum. What do you mean by the music cure?”

“Why, the papers have been full of it lately,” explained the Idiot. “The claim is made that in music lies the panacea for all human ills. It may not be able to perform a surgical operation like that which is required for the removal of a leg, and I don’t believe even Wagner ever composed a measure that could be counted on successfully to eliminate one’s vermiform appendix from its chief sphere of usefulness; but for other things, like measles, mumps, the snuffles, or indigestion, it is said to be wonderfully efficacious. What I wanted to find out from you was just what composers were best for which specific troubles.”

“You’ll have to go to somebody else for the information,” said the Doctor. “I never heard of the theory, and, as I said before, I don’t believe anybody else has, barring your own sweet self.”

“I have seen a reference to it somewhere,” put in Mr. Whitechoker, coming to the Idiot’s rescue. “As I recall the matter, some lady had been cured of a nervous affection by a scientific application of some musical poultice or other, and the general expectation seems to be that some day we shall find in music a cure for all our human ills, as the Idiot suggests.”

“Thank you, Mr. Whitechoker,” said the Idiot, gratefully ratefuly. “I saw that same item and several others besides, and I have only told the truth when I say that a large number of people are considering the possibilities of music as a substitute for drugs. I am surprised that Dr. Capsule has neither heard nor thought about it, for I should think it would prove to be a pleasant and profitable field for speculation. Even I, who am only a dabbler in medicine and know no more about it than the effects of certain remedies upon my own symptoms, have noticed that music of a certain sort is a sure emollient for nervous conditions.”

“For example?” said the Doctor. “Of course, we don’t doubt your word; but when a man makes a statement based upon personal observation it is profitable to ask him what his precise experience has been, merely for the purpose of adding to our own knowledge.”

“Well,” said the Idiot, “the first instance that I can recall is that of a Wagner opera and its effects upon me. For a number of years I suffered a great deal from insomnia. I could not get two hours of consecutive sleep, and the effect of my sufferings was to make me nervous and irritable. Suddenly somebody presented me with a couple of tickets for a performance of ‘Parsifal,’ and I went. It began at five o’clock in the afternoon. For twenty minutes all went serenely, and then the music began to work. I fell into a deep and refreshing slumber. The intermission came, and still I slept on. Everybody else went home, dressed for the evening part of the performance, had their dinner, and returned. Still I slept, and continued so to do until midnight, when one of the gentlemanly ushers came and waked me up, and told me that the performance was over. I rubbed my eyes, and looked about me. It was true – the great auditorium was empty, and was gradually darkening. I put on my hat and walked out refreshed, having slept from five-twenty until twelve, or six hours and forty minutes straight. That was one instance. Two weeks later I went again, this time to hear ‘Götterdämmerung.’ The results were the same, only the effect was instantaneous. The curtain had hardly risen before I retired to the little ante-room of the box our party occupied and dozed off into a fathomless sleep. I didn’t wake up this time until nine o’clock the next day, the rest of the party having gone off without awakening me as a sort of joke. Clearly Wagner, according to my way of thinking, then, deserves to rank among the most effective narcotics known to modern science. I have tried all sorts of other things – sulfonal, trionel, bromide powders, and all the rest, and not one of them produced anything like the soporific results that two doses of Wagner brought about in one instant. And, best of all, there was no reaction: no splitting headache or shaky hand the next day, but just the calm, quiet, contented feeling that goes with the sense of having got completely rested up.”

“You run a dreadful risk, however,” said the Doctor, with a sarcastic smile. “The Wagner habit is a terrible thing to acquire, Mr. Idiot.”

“That may be,” said the Idiot; “worse than the sulfonal habit by a great deal, I am told; but I am in no danger of becoming a victim to it while it costs from five to seven dollars a dose. In addition to this experience, I have also the testimony of a friend of mine who was cured of a frightful attack of the colic by Sullivan’s ‘Lost Chord,’ played on a cornet. He had spent the day down at Asbury Park, and had eaten not wisely but too copiously. Among other things that he turned loose in his inner man were two plates of lobster salad, a glass of fresh cider, and a saucerful of pistache ice-cream. He was a painter by profession, and the color scheme he thus introduced into his digestive apparatus was too much for his artistic soul. He was not fitted by temperament to assimilate anything quite so strenuously chromatic as that, and, as a consequence, shortly after he had retired to his studio for the night, the conflicting tints began to get in their deadly work, and within two hours he was completely doubled up. The pain he suffered was awful. Agony was bliss alongside of the pangs that now afflicted him, and all the palliatives and pain-killers known to man were tried without avail, and then, just as he was about to give himself up for lost, an amateur cornetist who occupied a studio on the floor above began to play the ‘Lost Chord.’ A counter-pain set in immediately. At the second bar of the ‘Lost Chord’ the awful pain that was gradually gnawing away at his vitals seemed to lose its poignancy in the face of the greater suffering, and physical relief was instant. As the musician proceeded, the internal disorder yielded gradually to the external and finally passed away, entirely leaving him so far from prostrate that by 1 A. M. he was out of bed and actually girding himself with a shot-gun and an Indian club to go up-stairs for a physical encounter with the cornetist.”

“And you reason from this that Sullivan’s ‘Lost Chord’ is a cure for cholera morbus, eh?” sneered the Doctor.

“It would seem so,” said the Idiot. “While the music continued my friend was a well man, ready to go out and fight like a warrior; but when the cornetist stopped the colic returned, and he had to fight it out in the old way. In these incidents in my own experience I find ample justification for my belief, and that of others, that some day the music cure for human ailments will be recognized and developed to the full. Families going off to the country for the summer, instead of taking a medicine-chest along with them, will be provided with a music-box with cylinders for mumps, measles, summer complaint, whooping-cough, chicken-pox, chills and fever, and all the other ills the flesh is heir to. Scientific experiment will demonstrate before long just what composition will cure specific ills. If a baby has whooping-cough, an anxious mother, instead of ringing up the doctor, will go to the piano and give the child a dose of ‘Hiawatha.’ If a small boy goes swimming and catches a cold in his head and is down with a fever, his nurse, an expert on the accordion, can bring him back to health again with three bars of ‘Under the Bamboo Tree’ after each meal. Instead of dosing the kids with cod-liver oil when they need a tonic, they will be set to work at a mechanical piano and braced up on ‘Narcissus.’ ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night’ will become an effective remedy for a sudden chill. People suffering from sleeplessness can dose themselves back to normal conditions with Wagner the way I did. Tchaikowsky, to be well shaken before taken, will be an effective remedy for a torpid liver, and the man or woman who suffers from lassitude will doubtless find in the lively airs of our two-step composers an efficient tonic to bring their vitality up to a high standard of activity. Nothing in it? Why, Doctor, there’s more in it that’s in sight to-day that is promising and suggestive of great things in the future than there was of the principle of gravitation in the rude act of that historic pippin that left the parent tree and swatted Sir Isaac Newton on the nose.”

“And the drug stores will be driven out of business, I presume,” said the Doctor.

“No,” said the Idiot. “They will substitute music for drugs, that is all. Every man who can afford it will have his own medical phonograph, or music-box, and the drug stores will sell cylinders and records for them instead of quinine, carbonate of soda, squills, paregoric, and other nasty-tasting things they have now. This alone will serve to popularize sickness, and, instead of being driven out of business, their trade will pick up.”

“And the doctor, and the doctor’s gig, and all the appurtenances of his profession – what becomes of them?” demanded the Doctor.

“We’ll have to have the doctor just the same to prescribe for us, only he will have to be a musician, but the gig – I’m afraid that will have to go,” said the Idiot.

“And why, pray?” asked the Doctor. “Because there are no more drugs, must the physician walk?”

“Not at all,” said the Idiot. “But he’d be better equipped if he drove about in a piano-organ or, if he preferred, an auto on a steam-calliope.”

XIV

HE DEFENDS CAMPAIGN METHODS

”GOOD-MORNING, gentlemen,” said the Idiot, cheerily, as he entered the breakfast-room. “This is a fine Sunday morning in spite of the gloom into which the approaching death of the campaign should plunge us all.”

“You think that, do you?” observed the Bibliomaniac. “Well, I don’t agree with you. I for one am sick and tired of politics, and it will be a great relief to me when it is all over.”

“Dear me, what a blasé old customer you are, Mr. Bib,” returned the Idiot. “Do you mean to say that a Presidential campaign does not keep your nerve-centres in a constant state of pleasurable titillation? Why, to me it is what a bag full of nuts must be to a squirrel. I fairly gloat over these quadrennial political campaigns of ours. They are to me among the most exhilarating institutions of modern life. They satisfy all one’s zest for warfare without the distressing shedding of blood which attends real war, and regarded from the standpoint of humor, I know of nothing that, to the eye of an ordinarily keen observer, is more provocative of good, honest, wholesome mirth.”

“I don’t see it,” said Mr. Bib. “To my mind, the average political campaign is just a vulgar scrap in which men who ought to know better descend to all sorts of despicable trickery merely to gain the emoluments of office. This quest for the flesh-pots of politics, so far from being diverting, is, to my notion, one of the most deplorable exhibitions of human weakness that modern civilization, so called, has produced. A couple of men are put up for the most dignified office known to the world – both are gentlemen by birth and education, men of honor, men who, you would think, would scorn baseness as they hate poison – and then what happens? For three weary months the followers of each attack the character and intelligence of the other until, if you really believed what was said of either, neither in your estimation would have a shred of reputation left. Is that either diverting or elevating or educational or, indeed, anything but deplorable?”

“It’s perfectly fine,” said the Idiot, “to think that we have men in the country whose characters are such that they can stand four months of such a test. That’s what I find elevating in it. When a man who is nominated for the Presidency in June or July can emerge in November unscathed in spite of the minute scrutiny to which himself and his record and the record of his sisters and his cousins and his aunts have been subjected, it’s time for the American rooster to get upon his hind legs and give three cheers for himself and the people to whom he belongs. Even old Diogenes, who spent his life looking for an honest man, would have to admit every four years that he could spot him instantly by merely coming to this country and taking his choice from among the several candidates.”

“You must admit, however,” said the Bibliomaniac, “that a man with an honorable name must find it unpleasant to have such outrageous stories told of him.”

“Not a bit of it,” laughed the Idiot. “The more outrageous the better. For instance, when The Sunday Jigger comes out with a four-page revelation of your Republican candidate’s past, in which we learn how, in 1873, he put out the eyes of a maiden aunt with a red-hot poker, and stabbed a negro cook in the back with a skewer, because she would not permit him to put rat-poison in his grandfather’s coffee, you know perfectly well that that story has been put forth for the purpose of turning the maiden aunt, negro, and grandfather votes against him. You know well enough that he either never did what is charged against him, or at least that the story is greatly exaggerated – he may have stuck a pin into the cook, and played some boyish trick upon some of his relatives – but the story on the face of it is untrue and therefore harmless. Similarly with the Democratic candidate. When the Daily Flim Flam asserts that he believes that the working-man is entitled to four cents a day for sixteen hours’ work, and has repeatedly avowed that bread and water is the proper food for motormen, everybody with common-sense realizes at once that even the Flim Flam doesn’t believe the story. It hurts no one, therefore, and provokes a great deal of innocent mirth. You don’t yourself believe that last yarn about the Prohibition candidate, do you?”

“I haven’t heard any yarn about him,” said the Bibliomaniac.

“That he is the owner of a brewery up in Rochester, and backs fifteen saloons and a pool-room in New York?” said the Idiot.

“Of course I don’t,” said the Bibliomaniac. “Who does?”

“Nobody,” said the Idiot; “and therefore the story doesn’t hurt the man’s reputation a bit, or interfere with his chances of election in the least. Take that other story published in a New York newspaper that on the 10th of last August Thompson Bondifeller’s yacht was seen anchored for six hours off Tom Watson’s farm, two hundred miles from the sea, and that the Populist candidate, disguised as a bank president, went off with the trust magnate on a cruise from Atlanta, Georgia, to Oklahoma – you don’t believe that, do you?”

“It’s preposterous on the face of it,” said Mr. Bib.

“Well, that’s the way the thing works,” said the Idiot. “And that’s why I think there’s a lot of bully good fun to be had out of a political campaign. I love anything that arouses the imagination of a people too much given over to the pursuit of the cold, hard dollar. If it wasn’t for these quadrennial political campaigns to spur the fancy on to glorious flights we should become a dull, hard, prosaic, unimaginative people, and that would be death to progress. No people can progress that lacks imagination. Politics is an emery-wheel that keeps our wits polished.”

“Well, granting all that you say is true,” said the Bibliomaniac, “the intrusion upon a man’s private life that politics makes possible – surely you cannot condone that.”

The Idiot laughed.

“That’s the strangest argument of all,” he said. “The very idea of a man who deliberately chooses public life as the sphere of his activities seeking to hide behind his private life is preposterous. The fellow who does that, Mr. Bib, wants to lead a double life, and that is reprehensible. The man who offers himself to the people hasn’t any business to tie a string to any part of him. If Jim Jones wants to be President of the United States the people who are asked to put him there have a right to know what kind of a person Jim Jones is in his dressing-gown and slippers. If he beats his mother-in-law, and eats asparagus with the sugar-tongs, and doesn’t pay his grocer, the public have a right to know it. If he has children, the voters are perfectly justified in asking what kind of children they are, since the voters own the White House furniture, and if the Jim Jones children wipe their feet on plush chairs, and shoot holes in the paintings with their bean-snappers and putty-blowers, Uncle Sam, as a landlord and owner of the premises, ought to be warned beforehand. You wouldn’t yourself rent a furnished residence to a man whose children were known to have built bonfires in the parlor of their last known home, would you?”

“I think not,” smiled the Bibliomaniac.

“Then you cannot complain if Uncle Sam is equally solicitous about the personal paraphernalia of the man who asks to occupy his little cottage on the Potomac,” said the Idiot. “So it happens that when a man runs for the Presidency the persons who intrude upon his private life, as you put it, are conferring a real service upon their fellow-citizens. When I hear from an authentic source that Mr. So-and-So, the candidate of the Thisorthatic party for the Presidency, is married to an estimable lady who refers to all Frenchmen as parricides, because she believes they have come from Paris, I have a right to consider whether or not I wish to vote to place such a lady at the head of my official table at White House banquets, where she is likely, sooner or later, to encounter the French ambassador, and the man who gives me the necessary information is doing me a service. You may say that the lady is not running for a public office, and that, therefore, she should be protected from public scrutiny, but that is a fallacy. A man’s wife is his better half and his children are a good part of the remainder, and what they do or don’t do becomes a matter of legitimate public concern. As a matter of fact, a public man can have no private life.”