Part 3 (1/2)

We are all born with certain bromidic tendencies, and children are the greatest bromides in the world. What boy of ten will wear a collar different from what his school-mates are all wearing? He must conform to the rule and custom of the majority or he suffers fearfully. But, if he has a sulphitic leaven in his soul, adolescence frees him from the tyrannical traditions of thought. In costume, perhaps, men still are more bromidic than women. A man has, for choice, a narrow range in garments--for everyday wear at most but four coats, three collars and two pairs of shoes.

Fewer women become Sulphites. The confession is ungallant and painful, but it must be made. We have only to watch them, to listen--and to pity.

But stay! If there is anything in heredity, women should be most sulphitic. For of all Bromides Adam was the progenitor, while Eve was a Sulphite from the first!

Alice in Wonderland, however, is the modern type--a Bromide amidst Sulphites.

What, then, is a Sulphite? Ah, that is harder to define. A Sulphite is a person who does his own thinking, he is a person who has surprises up his sleeve. He is explosive. One can never foresee what he will do, except that it will be a direct and spontaneous manifestation of his own personality.

You cannot tell them by the looks. Sulphites come together like drops of mercury, in this bromidic world. Unknown, unsuspected groups of them are scattered over the earth, and we never know where we are going to meet them--like fireflies in Summer, like Americans in Europe. The Bromide we have always with us, predicating the obvious. The Sulphite appears uncalled.

But you must not jump to the conclusion that all Sulphites are agreeable company. This is no cla.s.sification as of desirable and undesirable people. The Sulphite, from his very nature, must continually surprise you by an unexpected course of action. He must explode. You never know what he will say or do. He is always sulphitic, but as often impossible. He will not bore you, but he may shock you.

You find yourself watching him to see what is coming next, and it may be a subtle jest, a paradox, or an atrocious violation of etiquette.

All cranks, all reformers, and most artists are sulphitic. The insane asylums are full of Sulphites. They not only do ordinary things in unusual ways, but they do unusual things in ordinary ways. What is more intensely sulphitic than, when you have said your farewells, to go immediately? Or, as you swim out to rescue a drowning girl, to keep your pipe burning, all the while? They do not attempt to ”entertain”

you, but let you choose your own pastime. When they present a gift, it has either rhyme or reason to it. Their letters are not pa.s.sed about to be read by the family.

Hamlet was a Sulphite; Polonius a Bromide. Becky Sharp was sulphitic; Amelia Sedley bromidic. So we might follow the line of cleavage between the two groups in Art, Religion and Politics. Compare, for instance, President Roosevelt with his predecessor in office--the Unexpected versus the sedate Thermometer of Public Opinion. Compare Bernard Shaw with Marie Corelli--one would swear that their very brains were differently colored! Their epigrams and plat.i.tudes are merely the symptoms of different methods of thought. One need not consult one's prejudice, affection or taste--the Sulphitic Theory explains without either condemning or approving. The leopard cannot change his spots.

But if, along with these contrasts, we take, for example, Lewis Carroll as opposed to Dr. Johnson, we are brought up against an extraordinary inconsistency. It is, however, only an apparent paradox--beneath it lies a vital principle. Dr. Johnson was, himself, a Sulphite of the Sulphites, but how intensely bromidic were his writings! One yawns to think of them. As for Lewis Carroll, in his cla.s.sic nonsense, so sulphitic as often to be accused by Bromides of having a secret meaning, his private life was that of a Bromide. Read his biography and learn the terrors of his formal, set entertainments to the little girls whom he patronized! They knew what to expect of him, and he never, however agreeably, disappointed them. No, unfortunately a Sulphite does not always produce sulphitic art. How many writers we know who are more interesting than their work! How many who are infinitely less so! Your professional humorist is usually a dull, melancholy fellow in his private life--and a clergyman may preach infant d.a.m.nation and be a merry father at home.

Such considerations point inevitably to the truth that our theory depends essentially not upon action or talk, but upon the quality and rationale of thought. It is a question of Potentiality, rather than of Dynamics. It is the process of reasoning which concerns us, not its translation into conduct. A man may be a devoted supporter of Mrs.

Grundy and yet be a Sulphite, if he has, in his own mind, reached an original conclusion that society needs her safeguards. He may be the wildest-eyed of Anarchists and yet bromidic, if he has accepted another's reasons and swallowed the propaganda whole.

It will be doubtless through a misconception of this principle that the first schism in the Sulphitic Theory arises. Already the cult has become so important that a newer heretic sect threatens it. These protestants cannot believe that there is a definite line to be drawn between Sulphites and Bromides, and hold that one may partake of a dual nature. All such logic is fatuous, and founded upon a misconception of the Theory.

There is, however, a subtlety which has perhaps had something to do with confusing the neophyte. It is this: Sulphitism and Bromidism are, symbolically, the two halves of a circle, and their extremes meet. One may be so extremely bromidic that one becomes, at a leap, sulphitic, and _vice versa_. This may be easily ill.u.s.trated.

Miss Herford's inimitable monologues, being each the apotheosis of some typical Bromide--a shopgirl, a country dressmaker, a bargain-hunter and so on--become, through her art, intensely sulphitic. They are excruciatingly funny, just because she represents types so common that we recognize them instantly. Each expresses the crystallized thought of her particular bromidic group. Done, then, by a person who is herself a Sulphite _par excellence_, the result is droll. ”One has,” says Emerson, ”but to remove an object from its environment and instantly it becomes comic.”

The same thing is done less artistically every day upon the vaudeville stage. We love to recognize types; and what Browning said of beauty:

We're made so that we love First, when we see them painted, Things we have pa.s.sed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see