The Genial Idiot: His Views and Reviews

”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.”

“Then you approve of these stories of candidates’ cousins, the prattling anecdotes of their grandchildren, these paragraphs narrating the doings of their uncles-in-law, and all that?” sneered the Bibliomaniac.

“Certainly, I do,” said the Idiot. “When I hear that Judge Torkin’s grandson, aged four, has come out for his grandfather’s opponent I am delighted, and give the judge credit for the independent spirit which heredity accounts for; when it is told to me that Tom Watson’s uncle is going to vote for Tom because he knows Tom doesn’t believe what he says, I am almost inclined to vote for him as the uncle of his country; when I hear that Debs’s son, aged three, has punched his daddy in the eye, on general principles I feel that there’s a baby I want in the White House; and when it is told to me that the Prohibition candidate’s third cousin has just been cured of delirium tremens, I feel that possibly there is a family average there that may be struck to the advantage of the country.”

“Say, Mr. Idiot,” put in the Poet, at this point, “who are you going to vote for, anyhow?”

“Don’t ask me,” laughed the Idiot. “I don’t know yet. I admire all the candidates personally very much.”

“But what are your politics – Republican or Democratic?” asked the Lawyer.

“Oh, that’s different,” said the Idiot. “I’m a Sammycrat.”

“A what?” cried the Idiot’s fellow-boarders in unison.

“A Sammycrat,” said the Idiot. “I’m for Uncle Sam every time. He’s the best ever.”

XV

ON SHORT COURSES AT COLLEGE

MR. PEDAGOG threw down the morning paper with an ejaculation of impatience.

“I don’t know what on earth we are coming to!” he said, stirring his coffee vigorously. “These new-fangled notions of our college presidents seem to me to be destructive in their tendency.”

“What’s up now? Somebody flunked a football team?” asked the Idiot.

“No, I quite approve of that,” said Mr. Pedagog; “but this matter of reducing the college course from four to two years is so radical a suggestion that I tremble for the future of education.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t if I were you, Mr. Pedagog,” said the Idiot. “Your trembling won’t help matters any, and, after all, when men like President Eliot of Harvard and Dr. Butler of Columbia recommend the short course the idea must have some virtue.”

“Well, if it stops where they do I don’t suppose any great harm will be done,” said Mr. Pedagog. “But what guarantee have we that fifty years from now some successor to these gentlemen won’t propose a one-year course?”

“None,” said the Idiot. “Fact is, we don’t want any guarantee – or at least I don’t. They can turn colleges into bicycle academies fifty years from now for all I care. I expect to be doing time in some other sphere fifty years from now, so why should I vex my soul about it?”

“That’s rather a selfish view, isn’t it, Mr. Idiot?” asked Mr. Whitechoker. “Don’t you wish to see the world getting better and better every day?”

“No,” said the Idiot. “It’s so mighty good as it is, this bully old globe, that I hate to see people monkeying with it all the time. Of course, I wasn’t around it in the old days, but I don’t believe the world’s any better off now than it was in the days of Adam.”

“Great Heavens! What a thing to say!” cried the Poet.

“Well, I’ve said it,” rejoined the Idiot. “What has it all come to, anyhow – all this business of man’s trying to better the world? It’s just added to his expenses, that’s all. And what does he get out of it that Adam didn’t get? Money? Adam didn’t need money. He had his garden truck, his tailor, his fuel supply, his amusements – all the things we have to pay cash for – right in his backyard. All he had to do was to reach out and take what we fellows nowadays have to toil eight or ten hours a day to earn. Literature? His position was positively enviable as far as literature is concerned. He had the situation in his own hands. He wasn’t prevented from writing ‘Hamlet,’ as I am, because somebody else had already done it. He didn’t have to sit up till midnight seven nights a week to keep up with the historical novels of the day. Art? There were pictures on every side of him, splendid in color, instinct of life, perfect in their technique, and all from the hand of that first of Old Masters, Nature herself. He hadn’t any Rosa Bonheurs or Landseers on his farm, but he could get all the cow pictures he wanted from the back window of his bungalow without their costing him a cent. Drama? Life was a succession of rising curtains to Adam, and while, of course, he had the errant Eve to deal with, the garden was free from Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmiths, there wasn’t a Magda from one end of the apple-orchard to the other, and not a First, Second, or Third Mrs. Tanqueray in sight. Music? The woods were full of it – the orioles singing their cantatas, the nightingales warbling their concertos, the eagles screeching out their Wagnerian measures, the bluejays piping their intermezzos, and no Italian organ-grinders doing De Koven under his window from one year’s end to the other. Gorry! I wish sometimes Adam had known a good thing when he had it and hadn’t broken the monologue.”

“The what?” demanded Mr. Brief.

“The monologue,” repeated the Idiot. “The one commandment. If ten commandments make a decalogue, one commandment makes a monologue, doesn’t it?”

“You’re a philologist and a half,” said the Bibliomaniac, with a laugh.

“No credit to me,” returned the Idiot. “A ten years’ residence in this boarding-house has resulted practically in my having enjoyed a diet of words. I have literally eaten syllables – ”

“I hope you haven’t eaten any of your own,” said the Bibliomaniac. “That would ruin the digestion of an ostrich.”

“That’s true enough,” said the Idiot. “Rich foods will overthrow any kind of a digestion in the long run. But to come back to the college tendencies, Mr. Pedagog, it is my belief that in this short-course business we haven’t more than started. It’s my firm conviction that some day we shall find universities conferring degrees ‘while you wait,’ as it were. A man, for instance, visiting Boston for a week will some day be able to run out to Harvard, pay a small fee, pass an examination, and get a bachelor’s degree, as a sort of souvenir of his visit; another chap, coming to New York for a brief holiday, instead of stealing a spoon from the Waldorf for his collection of souvenirs, can ring up Columbia College, tell ’em all he knows over the wire, and get a sheepskin by return mail; while at New Haven you’ll be able to stop off at the railway station and buy your B. A. at the lunch-counter – they may even go so far as to let the newsboys on the train confer them without making the applicant get off at all. Then the golden age of education will begin. There’ll be more college graduates to the square inch than you can now find in any ten square miles in Massachusetts, and our professional men, instead of beginning the long wait at thirty, will be in full practice at twenty-one.”

“That is the limit!” ejaculated Mr. Brief.

“Oh, no indeed,” said the Idiot. “There’s another step. That’s the gramophone course, in which a man won’t have to leave home at all to secure a degree from any college he chooses. By tabulating his knowledge and dictating it into a gramophone he can send the cylinder to the university authorities, have it carefully examined, and receive his degree on a postal-card within forty-eight hours. That strikes me as being the limit, unless some of the ten-cent magazines offer an LL. D. degree with a set of Kipling and a punching-bag as a premium for a one year’s subscription.”

“And you think that will be a good thing?” demanded the Bibliomaniac.

“No, I didn’t say so,” said the Idiot. “In one respect I think it would be a very bad thing. Such a method would involve the utter destruction of the football and rowing seasons, unless the universities took some decided measures looking toward the preservation of these branches of undergraduate endeavor. It is coming to be recognized as a fact that a man can be branded with the mark of intellectual distinction in absentia, as the Aryan tribes used to put it, but a man can’t win athletic prowess without giving the matter attention in propria persona, to adopt the phraseology of the days of Uncle Remus. You can’t stroke a crew by mail any more than you can stroke a cat by freight, and it doesn’t make any difference how wonderful he may be physically, a Yale man selling dry-goods out in Nebraska can’t play football with a Harvard student employed in a grocery store at New Orleans by telephone. You can do it with chess, but not with basket ball. There are some things in university life that require the individual attention of the student. Unless something is done by our colleges, then, to care for this very important branch of their service to growing youth, the new scheme will meet with much opposition from the public.”

“What would you, in your infinite wisdom, suggest?” asked the Doctor. “The wise man, when he points out an objection to another’s plans, suggests a remedy.”