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Love, both of family and neighbor, faithful, and satisfied.

These are the six chiefly useful things to be got by Political Economy--the great "savoir mourir" is doing with them.

The first three, I said, are Pure Air, Water, and Earth.

Heaven gives you the main elements of these. You can destroy them at your pleasure, or increase, almost without limit, the available quantities of them.

You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any extent. You might easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of you. Some of you Jingo Americans at present want to vitiate it in every direction;--chiefly with corpses, and animal and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff into noxious gas. But everywhere, and all day long, you are vitiating it with foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you call towns, Buffalo, Pittsburg, Chicago and the like , are little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease.

On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the trees which cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere--is literally infinite. You might make every breath of air you draw, food.

Secondly, your power over the rain and rain-waters of the earth is infinite. You can bring rain where you will, by planting wisely and tending carefully--drought, where you will, by ravage of woods and neglect of the soil. You might have the rivers as pure as the crystal of the rock; beautiful in falls, in lakes, in living pools--so full of fish that you might take them out with your hands. Or you may do always as you have done now, turn your rivers into a common sewer, so that you cannot as much as baptize a Yankee baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain; and even that falls dirty.

Then for the third, Earth--meant to be nourishing for you, and blossoming--you have used your scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive and deathful things, to make it grow cotton and tobacco, and grain for malt and whiskey, giving nothing back to the earth that she may be blossoming and life-giving. Yes, you have turned the Mother-Earth, Demeter, into the Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone--with the voice of your brother's blood crying out of it, in one wild cry round all its murderous sphere.

That is what you have done for the three Material Useful Things.

Then for the three Immaterial Useful Things. For admiration, you have learned contempt and conceit. There is no lovely thing ever yet done by man that you care for, or can understand; but you are persuaded you are able to do much finer things yourselves. You gather, and exhibit together, as if equally instructive, what is infinitely bad, with what is infinitely good. You do not know which is which: most Americans instinctively prefer the bad, and do more of it. You instinctively hate the Good, and destroy it.

Then, secondly, for Hope. You have not so much spirit of it in you as to begin any plan which will not pay for ten years; nor so much intelligence of it in you as to be able to form one clear idea of what you would like your country to become.

Then, thirdly, for Love. You were ordered by the Founder of your religion to love your neighbor as yourselves. But you have framed an entire Science of Political Economy, founded on rivalry and strife, which is what you have stated to be the constant instinct of man--the desire to overreach his neighbor.

And you have driven your women so that they ask no more for Love, nor for fellowship with you; but stand against you, and ask for "justice."

Are there any of you who are tired of all this?

Well then try to make some small piece of ground beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no untended or unthought-of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick; none idle, but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant obedience to known law, and appointed persons; no equality upon it, but recognition of every good that we can find. We will have plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in our fields. We will have some music and some poetry; the children shall learn to dance it and sing--perhaps some of the old people, in time, may also. We will have some art, moreover pictures and hand-made books; we will at least try if, like the Greeks, we can't make pottery. The Greeks used to paint pictures of gods on their pots; we, probably, cannot do as much, but we may put some pictures of flowers--butterflies, and frogs, if nothing better. Little by little, some higher art and imagination may manifest themselves among us; and feeble rays of science may dawn for us. Botany, though too dull to dispute the existence of flowers; and history, though too simple to question the nativity of men; nay--even perhaps an uncalculating and uncovetous wisdom, as of rude Magi, presenting, at such nativity, gifts of gold and frankincense.

CLAVIGERA.

Cumberland, April 6, 1896.

THE RAILER.

"There is no joy thro' all the earth: Hope is a witless mocker's jest: There is no nobler second birth-- Nor fair, nor best!

"The touch of Death is over all And life is portal to the hell Where men are cattle in a stall To buy and sell!

"Yea, he who tears his brother's heart To cast it to the ravening crowd Is hailed as master of the mart With plaudits loud.

"He wears his crown a little space Until a fiercer knave than he Shall push him from his vantage place And monarch be!

"The shadows drive away the sun-- The flowers are hid by jealous Night, The fruit is plundered--never won-- And Might rules Right!"

Thus raves the scoffer, age in age, Who bears no message of his own Save the blind clamor of his rage From breast of stone.

He holds a balance in his claw To weigh with loaded penny-weights The mighty universe of Law With all its fates!

This, to the railer from the tombs Who makes not, neither loves nor gives: Spite of the crackle of thy dooms God lives! God lives!

JOHN JEROME ROONEY.

SHADOWS.

"My wife? She is dead!" said the man.

"God help you to bear it," were the answering words of the woman.

"And you would have me do my duty?"

"You could do naught else. There are other things than love, my friend; there is honor, and we must abide by that--and the inevitable."

"I am the resurrection and the life saith the Lord; he that believeth in me though he were dead yet shall he live: and whosoever believeth in me, shall never die."

The last friend had paid his final tribute to the departed. All had gone save the husband, his little daughter, the mother--and a woman simply clad in black. Her face was pale, marked by delicate traceries of mental suffering--a suffering so intense that the whole contour was radiant with martyrdom and the inner spiritual beauty of her woman's soul. Her eyes, earth brown and blazing with the hidden sunlight of her year's sad spring, were fixed in mute appeal upon the still, white face within its house of immortality.

It was the husband now, who, taking her gently by the hand, lead her to the carriage.

Was it "kismet" that, by some grim coincidence, placed these two human, saddened souls in the same carriage--alone!

The way was long, and the roads as yet unsoftened by the Spring's nestling bloom. For a while neither spoke, and then the woman's voice vibrated through the silence like a breath of air light as the apple blossoms caroling in May, when leaf and bud unite in song to praise their creator.

The carriage stopped before the open grave, and as the woman watched the damp earth fall--kneeling, she dropped a single passion flower upon the coffin's lid, and through her mist of tears beheld the cross; then murmuring "In His Name," she entered the carriage--alone!

FAITH BIGELOW SAVAGE.

FAST RODE THE KNIGHT WITH SPURS, HOT AND REEKING EVER WAVING AN EAGER SWORD. "TO SAVE MY LADY!" FAST RODE THE KNIGHT AND LEAPED FROM SADDLE TO WAR. MEN OF STEEL FLICKERED AND GLEAMED LIKE RIOT OF SILVER LIGHTS AND THE GOLD OF THE GOOD KNIGHTS BANNER STILL WAVED ON A CASTLE WALL. ... A HORSE BLOWING, STAGGERING, BLOODY THING FORGOTTEN AT FOOT OF CASTLE WALL. A HORSE DEAD AT FOOT OF CASTLE WALL.

STEPHEN CRANE.

AS TO BORES.

A little while ago I read in a paper the following scathing paragraph:

There is nothing so terrible as to be fairly well informed on a subject and have some unutterable bore come around and insist on pouring into your ear a mass of ill-digested misinformation on that subject.

This looks profoundly, dismally true. It undoubtedly is. No, there is one thing more terrible, and that is to be conscious of being the bore.

The boree has been heard from frequently since the Renaissance, and his sentiments have undergone little change. The borer hasn't had much to say for himself. Yet who can place his hand upon his heart and assert that he has never experienced what it is to be one? To have to be the victim of such, dear sir, is the payment the gods exact for the treasure of extraordinary learning. Nobody has a monopoly of advanced knowledge on this planet, but most of us are born ignorant and remain so until by the grace of heaven we become bores. The state of borehood is the chrysalis stage of the human intelligence, intermediate between grub and butterfly. The apple-borer has such a stage, so has the ordinary unqualified borer of urban life. He has eaten his modicum of the tough, indigestible portion of the tree of knowledge, and must undergo metamorphosis before sipping the nectar of its fruit. The writer of my text may be an exception to this generalization, for clearly he never advanced from ignorance through the purgatory of borehood to celestial learning, or he would know how terrible it is to be an unutterable bore.

Alas, poor bore! Will nobody pray for you, or drop a pitying tear?

The bore we have always with us. He who would enjoy his superior culture in immunity from the eleemosynary appeals of spiritual mendicants should go into the desert and become a hermit and learn to say like the hermit in Homo Sum, nihil humanum alienum me puto. I do suspect, though, that the saint in question himself fled into the desert to avoid a bore. And that reminds me that a saint of my acquaintance was once called upon to help one of these spiritual apple-borers through the tough integuments of a theological cocoon. He received a visit from the painful creature about every day. How unutterably it must have bored him! But he never said so. At last the poor bore achieved wings and flew away into a Universalist orchard; and as there are few things about which people in general know so much that ain't so as they do about the subject on which he is now well posted, he probably realizes how terrible it is to be the victim of the morally dyspeptic, misinformed or uninformed, unutterable bore.

But the man who has a mission to mankind can't afford to be bored. Jesus Christ, who was, if anybody ever was, born with fine intuitions, on some subjects, that transcended any laboriously acquired knowledge, must have been the worst bored man in Palestine when his disciples came around and asked him such questions as who should be first in the kingdom of heaven, or the Sadducees propounded that conundrum about the woman with seven husbands. But instead of putting his unutterable boredom on record in a crisp text he answered their irritating questions in that sweetly wise way of his, which must, if anything could, have caused those poor souls to sprout wings.

He also said, whatsoever we would that men should do to us, we ought to do to them; and did not except bores.

ANNIE L. MEARKLE.

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