Gives me an epileptic fit.

  What use is Gold?

  Alas, poor dross,

  That brings but sorrow, pain and loss,

  What after all the use of riches?

  ’Twill buy fine clothes and velvet breeches,

  Stone houses, pictures, motor cars,

  Roast quail on toast and large cigars.

  But oh, my friends, will this compare

  With a fresh draught of mountain air?

  Will wretched viands such as these

  Compare with simple bread and cheese?

  Nay let me to my bosom press

  The gastronomic watercress,

  And hug within my diaphragm

  The spoon of thimbleberry jam,

  And while the wicked wine I spurn,

  Quaff deep the wholesome mountain burn,

  The simple life, the harmless drink

  Is good enough,—I do not think.

  August 18, 1577

  (Birth of Rubens)

  Think it not idle affectation

  If I express my admiration

  Of frescoes, canvases and plasters,

  In short, the work of Ancient Masters.

  You take a man like Botticelli,

  Or the Italian Vermicelli,

  Rubens and Titian, Angelo,

  Anheuser Busch, Sapolio,

  John P. Velasquez and Murillo,

  Fra Lippo Lipp, Buffalo Billo,

  Pilsener Lager and Giotto;

  Admire them! Why you’ve simply got to!

  What if you do not understand

  Just the idea they had in hand,

  What if they do not quite convey

  The meaning that they should portray?

  What if you don’t exactly find

  A purpose in them, never mind,

  Beneath the coat of gathered dust

  Take the great geniuses on trust.

  If you should see in public places

  Fat cherubs whose expansive faces

  Wear a strong anti-temperance air

  The work is Rubens, you may swear;

  Fat ladies in inclined position

  You always may ascribe to Titian,

  While simple love-scenes in a grotto

  Portray the master hand of Giotto.

  But if you doubt, do not enquire,

  Fall into ecstasies, admire,

  Stare at the picture, deeply peer

  And murmur, “What an atmosphere”;

  And if your praises never tire

  No one will know you are a liar.

  August 19, 1897

  (Introduction of the Horseless Cab)

  Farewell, a long farewell, Old Friend,

  ’Tis the beginning of the end.

  So there you stand, poor patient brute,

  Dressed in your little leather suit;

  Your harness, buckles, straps and bows

  An outline parody of clothes.

  Speechless, confined, without volition,

  It seems to me that your position

  Is with a subtle meaning rife,—

  A queer analogy with life.

  A depth of meaning underlies

  Those blinkers that restrain your eyes;

  I see a melancholy omen

  In straps that cramp your poor abdomen,

  I could supply, would it avail,

  Sad speculations on your tail

  So docked that, swishing at the fleas,

  Its arc is only nine degrees;

  But more than all, I seem to trace

  Analogies in your long face,

  So utterly devoid of humour,

  Long ears that hearken every rumour,

  A sweeping snout, protruding teeth,

  And chinless underlip beneath;

  So joyless and so serious

  Well may your features weary us.

  For musing thus, I think perhaps

  Your life is ours; the little straps,

  The shafts that hold us to the track,

  The burden ever on the back,—

  Enough. The theme is old, of course,

  I am an ass, you are a horse.

  August 20, 1896

  (Fridtjof Nansen’s Ship “The Fram” returns safely to Skjervoe)

  What a glorious day

  For old Norway,

  When The Fram came sailing into the Bay

  To the dear old fjord,

  With its crew on bjord

  All safely restjord

  By the hand of the Ljord;

  And they shouted “Whoe

  Is this Skjervoe?”

  And they rent the ajer with a loud Hulljoe;

  While the crowd on skiis

  As thick as biis

  Slid down

  To the town

  On their hands and kniis.

  And oh! what cries

  When they recognize

  A man with a pair of sealskin pants on

  And thjere, I decljare, is Fridtjof Nansen.

  August 22, 1903

  (Expedition on the “Neptune” under Commander Low to Hudson Straits)

  While we welter

  In the swelter

  Of the pestilential Heat

  Drinking Sodas

  In Pagodas

  At the Corner of the Street

  It seems to me

  That it would be

  My highest aspiration

  To Sail away

  On a Holiday

  Of Arctic Exploration.

  Let me lie in my pyjamas on the ice of Baffin’s Bay,

  In the thinnest of chemises, where the Polar breezes play,

  Underneath a frozen awning let me lie at ease a span,

  While beneath the bright Aurora roars the ventilation fan.

  Can you wonder now that Nansen, and that Peary, and that Low,

  Should wander forth,

  And struggle North,

  As far as they can go?

  When the hero

  Under Zero

  Lives on frozen lager beer

  And a demi-can

  Of Pemmican,

  You need not shed a tear.

  He seeks a higher latitude,

  I quite admit the feat;

  The reason is a platitude,

  He’s crazy with the heat.

  August 26, 1346

  (Great Slaughter of the French by the English at Creçy)

  How strange it seems to me that even then

  Man raised his hand against his fellow-men,

  Fretful and eager, still his mind he bent

  New Engines of destruction to invent.

  Poor little Creature, through his whole life story

  Waving his little flag and shouting Glory.

  Vexing his puny strength and panting breath

  Merely to hasten ever-certain Death.

  August 27, 1870

  (Invention of the Gramophone)

  I freely admit that the gay gramophone

  Possesses attractions entirely its own,

  I frankly concede that the wonders of science

  Are seen at their best in that very appliance;

  And yet notwithstanding, I deeply deplore

  The gramophone owned by the Joneses next door.

  I rise in the morning, the first thing I hear

  Is “Sleep on, my Darling, for Mother is near,”

  I sit down to breakfast and hear with surprise

  A loud invitation to “Drink with Mine Eyes.”

  I come from my office, the gramophone’s strain

  Informs me that Johnnie has marched home again.

  I sit down to read, but the minute I do so

  The Joneses arouse a carouse with Caruso,

  Their strains all the veins of my cerebrum clog,

  My slumbers their numbers monotonous dog,

  Will nothing but homicide end or prevent it,

  Oh, Edison, why did you ever invent it?

  Over the Footlights

  CONTENTS

  Cast Up by the Sea. A Sea Coast Melodrama (As Thrown up for 30 cents) — Period, 1880

  The Soul Call. An Up-to-date Piffle Play. Period, 1923. (In Which a Man and Woman, Both Trying to Find Themselves, Find One Another)

  Dead Men’s Gold. A film of the great Nevada desert in which Red-Blooded, Able-Bodied Men and Women a hundred per cent American live and love among the cactus and chaparral. Something of the Ozone of the Cow Pasture mingled with the gloom of the great canyons blows all through this play.

  Oroastus — A Greek Tragedy. (As presented in our colleges)

  The Sub-Contractor. An Ibsen Play. Done out of the Original Norwegian with an axe.

  Historical Drama

  The Russian Drama

  The Platter of Life

  People We Meet in the Movies. The Vampire Woman; as Met in the Movies

  The Raft: An Interlude

  OTHER FANCIES

  First Call for Spring. — or — . Oh, Listen to the Birds

  How I Succeeded in My Business. Secrets of Success as Related in the Best Current Literature

  The Dry Banquet

  My Lost Dollar

  Radio A New Form of Trouble

  Roughing It in the Bush. My Plans for Moose Hunting in the Canadian Wilderness

  Abolishing the Heroine. (A Plea that Fewer Heroines and More Crimes Would Add Sprightliness to our Fiction)

  My Affair with My Landlord

  Why I Refuse to Play Golf

  The Approach of the Comet. Do You Really Care if it Hits You?

  Personal Experiments with the Black Bass

  L’Envoi. The Faded Actor

  Cast Up by the Sea. A Sea Coast Melodrama (As Thrown up for 30 cents) — Period, 1880

  EVERYBODY WHO HAS reached or passed middle age looks back with affection to that splendid old melodrama Cast Up by the Sea. Perhaps it wasn’t called exactly that. It may have been named Called Back from the Dead, or Broken Up by the Wind, or Buried Alive in the Snow, or anything of the sort. In fact I believe it was played under about forty different names in fifty different forms. But it was always the same good old melodrama of the New England Coast, with the farmhouse and the yellow fields running down to the sea, and the lighthouse right at the end of the farm with the rocks and the sea beyond, looking for trouble.

  Before the cinematograph had addled the human brain and the radio broadcast had disintegrated the human mind, you could go and see Cast Up by the Sea any Saturday afternoon in any great American City for thirty cents; you got a thrill from it that lasted twenty years. For thirty cents you had an orchestra chair on the ground floor where you could sit and eat peanuts and study the program till the play began. After it had begun you couldn’t eat any more; you were too excited.

  The first thing everybody used to do in studying the program was to see how many years elapsed between the acts; because in those days everybody used to find it wiser to go out between the acts — for air. And the more years that elapsed and the more acts there were, the more air they could get. Some of the plays used to have ten acts and the people got out nine times. Nowadays this is all changed. People talk now of the unity of the drama, and in some of the plays to-day there is a deliberate announcement on the program that reads “Between Acts II and III the curtain will be merely lowered and raised again.” We wouldn’t have stood for that in 1880. We needed our two years between the acts. We had a use for it.

  As I say, it was necessary to study the program. Nobody had yet invented that system of marking the characters “in the order of their appearance.” You had to try and learn up the whole lot before the play began. You couldn’t really. But you began conscientiously enough. Hiram Haycroft, a farmer; Martha, his wife; Hope, their daughter; Phœbe, a girl help; Zeke, a hired man, — Rube also a hired man, — and by that time you had just forgotten the farmer’s own name and looked back for it when just then —

  Up went the curtain with a long stately roll, two men at the side hoisting it, and there you were looking at the farmstead by the sea.

  Notice how quick and easy and attractive that old fashioned beginning was. One minute you were eating peanuts and studying the program and the next minute the play had begun. There was none of that agonizing stuff that precedes the moving pictures of to-day: No “Authorized by the Board of Census of the State of New York.” The world, even New York State, was so good in 1880 that it had never heard of a censor. Nor was there any announcement of something else altogether heralded as “A Great Big Compelling Life Drama — Next Week.”

  If the moving picture people could have been in control (forty years before their time) they would have announced the farm and lighthouse play with a written panegyric on what they were going to show,— “a gripping heart-drama in which the foam of the sea and the eerie of the spindrift carry to the heart a tale of true love battled by the wind next Thursday.”

  But if they had worked that stuff on an audience of 1880 it would have gone out and taken another drink, and never come back until next Thursday.

  So the play began at once. There was the farmhouse, or at least the porch and door, at the right hand side of the stage, all bathed in sunlight (yellow gas) and the grass plot and the road in the centre, and the yellow wheat (quite a little bunch of it) at the left, and the fields reaching back till they hit the painted curtain with the lighthouse and the rocks and the sea.

  Everybody who looked at that painted curtain and saw that lighthouse knew it wasn’t there for nothing. There’d be something doing from that all right, and when they looked back at the program and saw that Act IV was marked In the Lighthouse Tower — Midnight, they got the kind of a thrill that you can never get by a mere announcement that there is going to be a “gripping heart-drama next Tu., Thurs., and Sat.”

  Surely enough there would be something doing with that lighthouse. Either the heroine thrown off it, or the hero thrown over it — anyway something good.

  But for the moment all is peace and sunlight, on the seashore farm. There is no one on the stage but two men on the left, evidently Zeke and Rube, the hired men. They’ve got scythes and they are cutting the little patch of wheat over at the edge of the stage. Just imagine it, real wheat, they’re actually cutting it! Upon my word those stage effects of 1880 were simply wonderful. I do wish that “Doug” Fairbanks and those fellows who work so hard to give us thrills could realize what we used to get in 1880 by seeing Zeke and Rube cutting real wheat on the left hand side of the stage.

  Then they speak. You can’t really hear what they say — but it sounds like this:

  Zeke says, “I swan b’gosh heck b’gosh gum yak! yak!”

  And Rube answers: “Heck gosh b’gum, yes, yak! yak!”

  And they both laugh.

  These words probably have a meaning, but you don’t need it. The people are still moving into their seats and this is just the opening of the play. It’s a mere symbol. It stands for New England dialect, farm life, and honesty of character. Presently Rube gets articulate. He quits reaping and he says:

  “So Miss Hope’ll be coming back this morning.”

  “Yes, sir, that she will. A whole year now it’ll be that she’s been to boarding school.”

  And Rube says:

  “Yep, a whole yer come Gurdlemas.”

  Rube and Zeke have a calendar all their own.

  “She’ll be a growd up lady now all right.”

  “Yes sir, and as purty as a pitcher, I’ll be bound, by heck.”

  They whet their scythes with a clang and out comes Martha, the farmer’s wife, and Phœbe, the help, from the porch on the right. With them comes a freckled boy, evidently the younger son of the farm family. This freckled boy is in all the melodramas. It is his business to get his ears boxed, mislay the will, lose the mortgage, forget to post the letters and otherwise mix up the plot.

  “Do you see the buggy yet, Rube? Can you see them coming yet, Zeke?”

  Zeke and Rube hop about making gestures of looking down the road, their hands up over their eyes.

  “Not yet, Missus, but they’ll be along right soon now.”

  “There they are,” calls Phœbe, “coming along down in the hollow.”

  There is great excitement at once. Martha cries, “Land’s sake, if it ain’t Hope all right,” and boxes the freckled boy’s ears. The others run to and fro saying, “Here they come!” so as to get the audience worked up with excitement, at the height of which there comes the actual clatter of the horse’s hoofs and the next moment a horse and buggy, a real horse and buggy, drive on to the stage. That clattering horse coming on to the stage was always one of the great effects in 1880, — a real horse with real harness and with added anxiety for fear that the horse would misbehave himself when he came on.

  The buggy stops with a lot of shouting of “Whoa there,” — intended to keep the horse lively. If they didn’t shout at it this stage horse was apt to subside into a passive melancholy not suited for the drama.

  So here is the farmer sitting in the buggy in a suit of store clothes and a black slouch hat, and beside him is Hope, his daughter, just home from boarding school. How sweet and fresh she looks in her New England sun hat with the flowers on it. I don’t know what they did to the girls in the boarding schools in 1880 — some line of algebra perhaps — to make them look so fresh. There are none like them now.

  Hope leaps out in one spring and kisses her mother in one bound and she cries, “Well, Mother! Well, Phœbe! Why, Zeke! Why Rube!” They all circulate and hop and dance about saying, “Well, Miss Hope, well I never!” And all the while there’s the sunshine in the yellow fields and the red hollyhocks beside the porch, and light and happiness everywhere.

  You’d think, would you not, that that old homestead represented the high water mark of happiness? And so it does. But wait a bit. Before long they’ll start trouble enough. All the audience know in advance that that farm will be mortgaged and the farmer ruined and Hope driven from home, — oh, there’s lots of trouble coming. Trouble was the proper business of the melodrama. So presently they all get through their congratulations and Hope has embraced everybody, and the farmer’s wife has got off two jokes about the size of Boston and then the freckled boy wants to take Hope away to see the brindle cow, and they all fade away off the stage except the farmer and his wife.

 

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