Part 10 (2/2)
Others on Sabbath afternoons write Sabbath-school hymns, adding to the batch of infinite nonsense that the children are compelled to swallow. For others a beautiful curl is a corkscrew pulling out canto after canto.
Nine-tenths of the rhyme that comes to a printing office cannot be used.
You hear a rough tear of paper, and you look around to see the managing editor adding to the responsibilities of his chip-basket. What a way that is to treat incipient Tennysons and Longfellows!
Next to the poetic effusions tumble out treatises on ”const.i.tutional law”
heavy enough to break the basket. We have noticed that after a man has got so dull he can get no one willing to hear him he takes to profound exposition. Out from the same chip-basket rolls a great pile of announcements that people want put among the editorials, so as to save the expense of the advertising column. They tell us the article they wish recommended will have a highly beneficial effect upon the Church and world.
It is a religious churn, or a moral horse-rake, or a consecrated fly trap.
They almost get us crying over their new kind of grindstone, and we put the letter down on the table while we get out our pocket-handkerchief, when our a.s.sistant takes hold the doc.u.ment and gives it a ruthless rip, and pitches it into the chip-basket.
Next in the pile of torn and upset things is the speech of some one on the momentous occasion of the presentation of a gold-headed cane, or silver pitcher, or bra.s.s kettle for making preserves. It was ”unexpected,” a ”surprise” and ”undeserved,” and would ”long be cherished.” ”Great applause, and not a dry eye in the house,” etc., etc. But there is not much room in a paper for speeches. In this country everybody speaks.
An American is in his normal condition when he is making a speech. He is born with ”fellow-citizens” in his mouth, and closes his earthly life by saying, ”One word more, and I have done.” Speeches being so common, newspaper readers do not want a large supply, and so many of these utterances, intended to be immortal, drop into oblivion through that inexhaustible reservoir, the editorial chip-basket.
But there is a hovering of pathos over this wreck of matter. Some of these wasted things were written for bread by intelligent wives with drunken husbands trying to support their families with the pen. Over that mutilated ma.n.u.script some weary man toiled until daybreak. How we wish we could have printed what they wrote! Alas for the necessity that disappoints the literary struggle of so many women and men, when it is ten dollars for that article or children gone supperless to bed!
Let no one enter the field of literature for the purpose of ”making a living” unless as a very last resort. There are thousands of persons to-day starving to death with a steel pen in their hand. The story of Grub street and poets living on thin soup is being repeated all over this land, although the modern cases are not so conspicuous. Poverty is no more agreeable because cla.s.sical and set in hexameters. The hungry author cannot breakfast on ”odes to summer.” On this, cold day how many of the literati are s.h.i.+vering! Martyrs have perished in the fire, but more persons have perished for lack of fire. Let no editor through hypercriticism of contributed articles add to this educated suffering.
What is that we hear in the next room? It is the roar of a big fire as it consumes unavailable literary material--epics, sonnets, homilies, tractates, compilations, circulars, dissertations. Some of them were obscure, and make a great deal of smoke. Some of them were merry, and crackle. All of them have ended their mission and gone down, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
CHAPTER x.x.xVI.
THE MANHOOD OF SERVICE.
At the Crawford House, White Mountains, we noticed, one summer, unusual intelligence and courtesy on the part of those who served the tables. We found out that many of them were students from the colleges and seminaries--young men and women who had taken this mode of replenis.h.i.+ng their purses and getting the benefit of mountain air. We felt like applauding them. We have admiration for those who can be independent of the oppressive conventionalities of society. May not all of us practically adopt the Christian theory that any work is honorable that is useful? The slaves of an ignominious pride, how many kill themselves earning a living!
We have tens of thousands of women in our cities, sitting in cold rooms, stabbing their life out with their needles, coughing their lungs into tubercles and suffering the horrors of the social inquisition, for whom there waits plenty of healthy, happy homes in the country, if they could only, like these sons and daughters of Dartmouth and Northampton, consent to serve. We wish some one would explain to us how a sewing machine is any more respectable than a churn, or a yard stick is better than a pitchfork.
We want a new Declaration of Independence, signed by all the laboring cla.s.ses. There is plenty of work for all kinds of people, if they were not too proud to do it. Though the country is covered with people who can find nothing to do, we would be willing to open a bureau to-morrow, warranting to give to all the unemployed of the land occupation, if they would only consent to do what might be a.s.signed them. We believe anything is more honorable than idleness.
During very hard times two Italian artists called at our country home, asking if we did not want some sketching done, and they unrolled some elegant pictures, showing their fine capacity. We told them we had no desire for sketches, but we had a cistern to clean, and would pay them well for doing it. Off went their coats, and in a few hours the work was done and their wages awarded. How much more honorable for them to do what they could get to do rather than to wait for more adapted employment!
Why did not the girls of Northampton spend their summers embroidering slippers or hemming handkerchiefs, and thus keep at work un.o.bserved and more popular? Because they were not fools. They said: ”Let us go up and see Mount Adams, and the Profile, and Mount Was.h.i.+ngton. We shall have to work only five hours a day, and all the time we will be gathering health and inspiration.” Young men, those are the girls to seek when you want a wife, rather than the wheezing victims of ruinous work chosen because it is more popular. About the last thing we would want to marry is a medicine-chest.
Why did not the students of Dartmouth, during their vacation, teach school?
First, because teaching is a science, and they did not want to do three months of damage to the children of the common school. Secondly, because they wanted freedom from books as man makes them, and opportunity to open the ponderous tome of boulder and strata as G.o.d printed them. Churches and scientific inst.i.tutions, these will be the men to call--brawny and independent, rather than the bilious, short-breathed, nerveless graduates who, too proud to take healthful recreation, tumble, at commencement day, into the lap of society so many Greek roots.
CHAPTER x.x.xVII.
BALKY PEOPLE.
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