The Hohenzollerns in America

I was pausing again and trying to invest myself with an air of further interest, when another man was introduced to her, quite evidently, from his appearance, a vapid jackass without one tenth of the brain calibre that I have.

"Oh, how do you do?" he said. "I say, I've just heard that Harvard beat Princeton this afternoon. Great, isn't it?"

In two minutes they were talking like old friends. How do these silly asses do it?

When Dressed Hogs are Dull

An equally unsuccessful type of conversation, often overheard at receptions, is where one of the two parties to it is too surly, too stupid, or too self-important and too rich to talk, and the other labours in vain.

The surly one is, let us say, a middle-aged, thick-set man of the type that anybody recognizes under the name Money Hog. This kind of person, as viewed standing in his dress suit, mannerless and stupid, too rich to have to talk and too dull to know how to, always recalls to my mind the head-line of the market reports in the newspapers, "Dressed Hogs are Dull."

The other party to the conversation is a winsome and agreeable woman, trying her best to do her social duty.

But, tenez, as the Comtesse of Z– would say, I can exactly illustrate the position and attitude of the two of them from a recollection of my childhood. I remember that in one of my nursery books of forty years ago there was a picture entitled "The Lady in Love With A Swine." A willowy lady in a shimmering gown leaned over the rail of a tessellated pig-sty, in which an impossibly clean hog stood in an attitude of ill-mannered immobility. With the picture was the rhyming legend,

There was a Lady in love with a swine,"Honey," said she, "will you be mine?I'll build you a silver styAnd in it you shall lie.""Honk!" said He.

There was something, as I recall it, in the sweet willingness of the Lady that was singularly appealing, and contrasted with the dull mannerless passivity of the swine.

In each of the little stanzas that followed, the pretty advances of the Lady were rebuffed by a surly and monosyllabic "honk" from the hog.

Here is the social counterpart of the scene in the picture-book. Mr. Grunt, capitalist, is standing in his tessellated sty,—the tessellated sty being represented by the hardwood floor of a fashionable drawing-room. His face is just the same as the face of the pig in the picture-book. The willowy lady, in the same shimmering clothes and with the same pretty expression of eagerness, is beside him.

"Oh, Mr. Grunt," she is saying, "how interesting it must be to be in your place and feel such tremendous power. Our hostess was just telling me that you own practically all the shoemaking machinery factories—it IS shoe-making machinery, isn't it?—east of Pennsylvania."

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt.

"Shoe-making machinery," goes on the willowy lady (she really knows nothing and cares less about it) "must be absolutely fascinating, is it not?"

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt.

"But still you must find it sometimes a dreadful strain, do you not? I mean, so much brain work, and that sort of thing."

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt.

"I should love so much to see one of your factories. They must be so interesting."

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt. Then he turns and moves away sideways. Into his little piggy eyes has come a fear that the lady is going to ask him to subscribe to something, or wants a block of his common stock, or his name on a board of directors. So he leaves her. Yet if he had known it she is probably as rich as he is, or richer, and hasn't the faintest interest in his factories, and never intends to go near one. Only she is fit to move and converse in polite society and Mr. Grunt is not.

2.—Heroes and Heroines

"What are you reading?" I asked the other day of a blue-eyed boy of ten curled up among the sofa cushions.

He held out the book for me to see.

"Dauntless Ned among the Cannibals," he answered.

"Is it exciting?" I enquired.

"Not very," said the child in a matter-of-fact tone. "But it's not bad."

I took the book from him and read aloud at the opened page.

"In a compact mass the gigantic savages rushed upon our hero, shrieking with rage and brandishing their huge clubs. Ned stood his ground fearlessly, his back to a banana tree. With a sweep of his cutlass he severed the head of the leading savage from his body, while with a back stroke of his dirk he stabbed another to the heart. But resistance against such odds was vain. By sheer weight of numbers, Ned was borne to the ground. His arms were then pinioned with stout ropes made of the fibres of the boobooda tree. With shrieks of exultation the savages dragged our hero to an opening in the woods where a huge fire was burning, over which was suspended an enormous caldron of bubbling oil. 'Boil him, boil him,' yelled the savages, now wrought to the point of frenzy."

"That seems fairly exciting, isn't it?" I said.

"Oh, he won't get boiled," said the little boy. "He's the hero."

So I knew that the child has already taken his first steps in the disillusionment of fiction.

Of course he was quite right as to Ned. This wonderful youth, the hero with whom we all begin an acquaintance with books, passes unhurt through a thousand perils. Cannibals, Apache Indians, war, battles, shipwrecks, leave him quite unscathed. At the most Ned gets a flesh wound which is healed, in exactly one paragraph, by that wonderful drug called a "simple."

But the most amazing thing about this particular hero, the boy Ned, is the way in which he turns up in all the great battles and leading events of the world.

It was Ned, for example, who at the critical moment at Gettysburg turned in his saddle to General Meade and said quietly, "General, the day is ours." "If it is," answered Meade, as he folded his field glass, "you alone, Ned, have saved it."

In the same way Ned was present at the crossing of the

Delaware with Washington. Thus:—

"'What do you see, Ned?' said Washington, as they peered from the leading boat into the driving snow.

"'Ice,' said Ned. 'My boy,' said the Great American General, and a tear froze upon his face as he spoke, 'you have saved us all.'"

Here is Ned at Runningmede when King John with his pen in hand was about to sign the Magna Carta.

"For a moment the King paused irresolute, the uplifted quill in his hand, while his crafty, furtive eyes indicated that he might yet break his plighted faith with the assembled barons.

"Ned laid his mailed hand upon the parchment.

"'Sign it,' he said sternly, 'or take the consequences.'

"The King signed.

"'Ned,' said the Baron de Bohun, as he removed his iron vizor from his bronze face, 'thou hast this day saved all England.'"

In the stories of our boyhood in which Ned figured, there was no such thing as a heroine, or practically none. At best she was brought in as an afterthought. It was announced on page three hundred and one that at the close of Ned's desperate adventures in the West Indies he married the beautiful daughter of Don Diego, the Spanish governor of Portobello; or else, at the end of the great war with Napoleon, that he married a beautiful and accomplished French girl whose parents had perished in the Revolution.

Ned generally married away from home. In fact his marriages were intended to cement the nations, torn asunder by Ned's military career. But sometimes he returned to his native town, all sunburned, scarred and bronzed from battle (the bronzing effect of being in battle is always noted): he had changed from a boy to a man: that is, from a boy of fifteen to a man of sixteen. In such a case Ned marries in his own home town. It is done after this fashion:

"But who is this who advances smiling to greet him as he crosses the familiar threshold of the dear old house? Can this tall, beautiful girl be Gwendoline, the child-playmate of his boyhood?"

Well, can it? I ask it of every experienced reader—can it or can it not?

Ned had his day, in the boyhood of each of us. We presently passed him by. I am speaking, of course, of those of us who are of maturer years and can look back upon thirty or forty years of fiction reading. "Ned," flourishes still, I understand, among the children of today. But now he flies in aeroplanes, and dives in submarines, and gives his invaluable military advice to General Joffre and General Pershing.

But with the oncoming of adolescent years something softer was needed than Ned with his howling cannibals and his fusillade of revolver shots.

So the "Ned" of the Adventure Books was supplanted by the Romantic Heroine of the Victorian Age and the Long-winded Immaculate who accompanied her as the Hero.

I do not know when these two first opened their twin career. Whether Fenimore Cooper or Walter Scott began them, I cannot say. But they had an undisputed run on two continents for half a century.

This Heroine was a sylph. Her chiefest charm lay in her physical feebleness. She was generally presented to us in some such words as these:

"Let us now introduce to our readers the fair Madeline of Rokewood. Slender and graceful and of a form so fragile that her frame scarce fitted to fulfil its bodily functions…she appeared rather as one of those ethereal beings of the air who might visit for a brief moment this terrestrial scene, than one of its earthly inhabitants. Her large, wondering eyes looked upon the beholder in childlike innocence."

Sounds simple, doesn't it? One might suspect there was something wrong with the girl's brain. But listen to this:—

"The mind of Madeline, elegantly formed by the devoted labours of the venerable Abbe, her tutor, was of a degree of culture rarely found in one so young. Though scarce eighteen summers had flown over her head at the time when we introduce her to our readers, she was intimately conversant with the French, Italian, Spanish, and Provencal tongues. The abundant pages of history, both ancient and modern, sacred and profane, had been opened for her by her devoted instructor. In music she played with exquisite grace and accuracy upon both the spinet and the harpsichord, while her voice, though lacking something in compass, was sweet and melodious to a degree."

From such a list of accomplishments it is clear that Madeline could have matriculated, even at the Harvard Law School, with five minutes preparation. Is it any wonder that there was a wild rush for Madeline? In fact, right after the opening description of the Heroine, there follows an ominous sentence such as this:—

"It was this exquisite being whose person Lord Rip de Viperous, a man whose reputation had shamed even the most licentious court of the age, and had led to his banishment from the presence of the king, had sworn to get within his power."

Personally I don't blame Lord Rip a particle; it must have been very rough on him to have been banished from the presence of the king—enough to inflame a man to do anything.

With two such characters in the story, the scene was set and the plot and adventures followed as a matter of course. Lord Rip de Viperous pursued the Heroine. But at every step he is frustrated. He decoys Madeline to a ruined tower at midnight, her innocence being such and the gaps left in her education by the Abbe being so wide, that she is unaware of the danger of ruined towers after ten thirty P.M. In fact, "tempted by the exquisite clarity and fulness of the moon, which magnificent orb at this season spread its widest effulgence over all nature, she accepts the invitation of her would-be-betrayer to gather upon the battlements of the ruined keep the strawberries which grew there in wild profusion."

But at the critical moment, Lord de Viperous is balked. At the very instant when he is about to seize her in his arms, Madeline turns upon him and says in such icy tones, "Titled villain that you are, unhand me," that the man is "cowed." He slinks down the ruined stairway "cowed." And at every later turn, at each renewed attempt, Madeline "cows" him in like fashion.

Moreover while Lord de Viperous is being thus cowed by Madeline the Heroine, he is also being "dogged" by the Hero. This counterpart of Madeline who shared her popularity for fifty years can best be described as the Long-winded Immaculate Hero. Entirely blameless in his morals, and utterly virtuous in his conduct, he possessed at least one means of defending himself. He could make speeches. This he did on all occasions. With these speeches he "dogged" Lord de Viperous. Here is the style of them:—

"'My Lord,' said Markham…" (incidentally let it be explained that this particular brand of hero was always known by his surname and his surname was always Markham) —"'My lord, the sentiments that you express and the demeanour which you have evinced are so greatly at variance with the title that you bear and the lineage of which you spring that no authority that you can exercise and no threats that you are able to command shall deter me from expressing that for which, however poor and inadequate my powers of speech, all these of whom and for what I am what I am, shall answer to it for the integrity of that, which, whether or not, is at least as it is. My lord, I have done. Or shall I speak more plainly still?'"

Is it to be wondered that after this harangue Lord Rip sank into a chair, a hideous convulsion upon his face, murmuring—"It is enough."

But successful as they were as Hero and Heroine, Markham and Madeline presently passed off the scene. Where they went to, I do not know. Perhaps Markham got elected in the legislature of Massachusetts. At any rate they disappeared from fiction.

There followed in place of Madeline, the athletic sunburned heroine with the tennis racket. She was generally called Kate Middleton, or some such plain, straightforward designation. She wore strong walking boots and leather leggings. She ate beef steak. She shot with a rifle. For a while this Boots and Beef Heroine (of the middle nineties) made a tremendous hit. She climbed crags in the Rockies. She threw steers in Colorado with a lariat. She came out strong in sea scenes and shipwrecks, and on sinking steamers, where she "cowed" the trembling stewards and "dogged" the mutinous sailors in the same fashion that Madeline used to "cow" and "dog" Lord Rip de Viperous.

With the Boots and Beef Heroine went as her running mate the out-of-doors man, whose face had been tanned and whose muscles had been hardened into tempered steel in wild rides over the Pampas of Patagonia, and who had learned every art and craft of savage life by living among the wild Hoodoos of the Himalayas. This Air-and-Grass-man, as he may be called, is generally supposed to write the story… He was "I" all through. And he had an irritating modesty in speaking of his own prowess. Instead of saying straight out that he was the strongest and bravest man in the world, he implied it indirectly on every page.

Here, for example, is a typical scene in which "I" and Kate figure in a desperate adventure in the Rocky Mountains, pursued by Indians.

"We are about to descend on a single cord from the summit of a lofty crag, our sole chance of escape (and a frightfully small chance at that) from the roving band of Apaches.

"With my eye I measured the fearsome descent below us.

"'Hold fast to the line, Miss Middleton,' I said as I set my foot against a projecting rock. (Please note that the Air-and-Grass Hero in these stories always calls the Heroine Miss Middleton right up to the very end.)

"The noble girl seized the knotted end of the buckskin line. 'All right, Mr. Smith,' she said with quiet confidence.

"I braced myself for the effort. My muscles like tempered steel responded to the strain. I lowered a hundred fathoms of the line. I could already hear the voice of Kate far down the cliff.

"Don't let go the line, Miss Middleton,' I called. (Here was an excellent piece of advice.)

"The girl's clear voice floated up to me… 'All right,

Mr. Smith,' she called, 'I won't.'"

Of course they landed safely at the foot of the cliff, after the manner of all heroes and heroines. And here it is that Kate in her turn comes out strong, at the evening encampment, frying bacon over a blazing fire of pine branches, while the firelight illuminates her leather leggings and her rough but picturesque costume.

The circumstances might seem a little daring and improper. But the reader knows that it is all right, because the hero and heroine always call one another Miss Middleton and Mr. Smith.

Not till right at the end, when they are just getting back again to the confines of civilization, do they depart from this.

Here is the scene that happens… The hero and heroine are on the platform of the way-side depot where they are to part… Kate to return to the luxurious home of her aunt, Mrs. van der Kyper of New York, and the Air-and-Grass Man to start for the pampas of Patagonia to hunt the hoopoo. The Air-and-Grass Man is about to say goodbye. Then… "'Kate,' I said, as I held the noble girl's gloved hand in mine a moment. She looked me in the face with the full, frank, fearless gaze of a sister.

"'Yes?' she answered.

"'Kate,' I repeated, 'do you know what I was thinking of when I held the line while you were half way down the cliff?'

"'No,' she murmured, while a flush suffused her cheek.

"'I was thinking, Kate,' I said, 'that if the rope broke

I should be very sorry.'

"'Edward!' she exclaimed.

"I clasped her in my arms.

"'Shall I make a confession,' said Kate, looking up timidly, half an hour later, as I tenderly unclasped the noble girl from my encircling arms, …'I was thinking the same thing too.'"

So Kate and Edward had their day and then, as Tennyson says, they "passed," or as less cultivated people put it, "they were passed up in the air."

As the years went by they failed to please. Kate was a great improvement upon Madeline. But she wouldn't do. The truth was, if one may state it openly, Kate wasn't TOUGH enough. In fact she wasn't tough at all. She turned out to be in reality just as proper and just as virtuous as Madeline.

So, too, with the Air-and-Grass Hero. For all of his tempered muscles and his lariat and his Winchester rifle, he was presently exposed as a fraud. He was just as Long-winded and just as Immaculate as the Victorian Hero that he displaced.

What the public really wants and has always wanted in its books is wickedness. Fiction was recognised in its infancy as being a work of the devil.

So the popular novel, despairing of real wickedness among the cannibals, and in the ruined tower at midnight, and on the open-air of the prairies, shifted its scenes again. It came indoors. It came back to the city. And it gave us the new crop of heroes and heroines and the scenes and settings with which the fiction of to-day has replaced the Heroes and Heroines of Yesterday. The Lure of the City is its theme. It pursues its course to the music of the ukalele, in the strident racket of the midnight cabaret. Here move the Harvard graduate in his dinner jacket, drunk at one in the morning. Here is the hard face of Big Business scowling at its desk; and here the glittering Heroine of the hour in her dress of shimmering sequins, making such tepid creatures as Madeline and Kate look like the small change out of a twenty-five cent shinplaster.

3.—The Discovery of America; Being Done into Moving Pictures and Out Again

"No greater power for education," said President Shurman the other day, "has come among us during the last forty years than the moving picture."

I am not certain that it was President Shurman. And he may not have said it the other day. Nor do I feel absolutely sure that he referred to the LAST forty years. Indeed now that I come to think of it, I don't believe it WAS Shurman. In fact it may have been ex-President Eliot. Or was it, perhaps, President Hadley of Yale? Or did I say it myself? Judging by the accuracy and force of the language, I think I must have. I doubt if Shurman or Hadley could have put it quite so neatly. There's a touch about it that I recognise.

But let that pass. At any rate it is something that everybody is saying and thinking. All our educators have turned their brains towards the possibility of utilising moving pictures for the purpose of education. It is being freely said that history and geography, and even arithmetic, instead of being taught by the slow and painful process of books and memory, can be imparted through the eye.

I had no sooner heard of this idea than I became impassioned to put it into practice. I have therefore prepared, or am preparing, a film, especially designed for the elementary classes of our schools to narrate the story of the discovery of America.

This I should like the reader to sit and see with me, in the eye of his imagination. But let me first give the plain, unvarnished account of the discovery of America as I took it from one of our school histories.

"Christopher Columbus, otherwise Christoforo Colombo, the celebrated discoverer of America, was born of poor but honest parents in the Italian city of Genoa. His mother, Teresa Colombo, seems to have been a woman of great piety and intelligence. Of his father, Bartolomeo Colombo, nothing is recorded. From his earliest youth the boy Christopher developed a passion for mathematics, astronomy, geodesy, and the other sciences of the day…"

But, no,—stop! I am going too fast. The reader will get it better if we turn it into pictures bit by bit as we go on. Let the reader therefore imagine himself seated before the curtain in the lighted theatre. All ready? Very good. Let the music begin—Star Spangled Banner, please—flip off the lights. Now then.

DISCOVERY OF AMERICA AUTHORIZED BY THE BOARD OF CENSORS OF NEW YORK STATE

There we are. That gives the child the correct historical background right away. Now what goes on next? Let me see. Ah, yes, of course. We throw an announcement on the screen, thus.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.. Mr. Quinn

Here the face of Mr. Quinn (in a bowler hat) is thrown on the screen and fades out again.

We follow him up with

SPIRIT OF AMERICA.. Miss E. Dickenson

Now, we are ready to begin in earnest. Let us make the scenario together. First idea to be expressed:

"Christopher Columbus was the son of poor but honest parents."

This might seem difficult to a beginner, but to those of us who frequent the movies it is nothing. The reel spins and we see—a narrow room—(it is always narrow in the movies)—to indicate straitened circumstances—cardboard furniture—high chairs with carved backs—two cardboard beams across the ceiling (all this means the Middle Ages)—a long dinner table—all the little Columbuses seated at it—Teresa Colombo cutting bread at one end of it—gives a slice to each, one slice (that means poverty in the movies)—Teresa rolls her eyes up—all the little children put their hands together and say grace (this registers honesty). The thing is done. Let us turn back to the history book and see what is to be put in next.

"…The father of Christopher, Bartolomeo Colombo, was a man of no especial talent of whom nothing is recorded."

That's easy. First we announce him on the screen:

BARTOLOMEO COLOMBO.. Mr. Henderson

Then we stick him on the film on a corner of the room, leaning up against the cardboard clock and looking at the children. This attitude in the movies always indicates a secondary character of no importance. His business is to look at the others and to indicate forgetfulness of self, incompetence, unimportance, vacuity, simplicity. Note how this differs from the attitudes of important characters. If a movie character—one of importance—is plotting or scheming, he seats himself at a little round table, drums on it with his fingers, and half closes one eye. If he is being talked to, or having a letter or document or telegram read to him, he stands "facing full" and working his features up and down to indicate emotion sweeping over them. If he is being "exposed" (which is done by pointing fingers at him), he hunches up like a snake in an angle of the room with both eyes half shut and his mouth set as if he had just eaten a lemon. But if he has none of these things to express and is only in the scene as a background for the others, then he goes over and leans in an easy attitude against the tall cardboard clock.

That then is the place for Bartolomeo Colombo. To the clock with him.

Now what comes next?

"…The young Christopher developed at an early age a passion for study, and especially for astronomy, geometry, geodesy, and the exact science of the day."