FOOLISH DREAMERS.
It is a marvelous truth that this golden era of the world’s history has inspired no great poets that rank with Byron and Burns and Tom Moore and a long list of other immortals who have enriched literature with their songs; and it has developed but few prose writers worthy to wear the mantles of Blackstone and Kent in law, of Gibbon and Macaulay in history, and Scott and Bulwer in romance and fiction.
It is well we call it the golden era, for it is an era of commercialism, when men are trampling literature and art and music under their feet in the mad rush for gold and the gilded glory that it buys. To be a millionaire is greater in the estimation of modern worshipers of mammon than to be a Goldsmith; and a multimillionaire is greater in their gold-jaundiced eyes than a William Shakespeare. The highest aspiration of these nervous and strenuous generations is the acquirement and hoarding of gold. Religion is tinged with it. Politics is its ally—and alloy in the ratio of sixteen of gold to one of Patriotism. And most of the business and social relations of this enlightened age are purely golden and measured only by the circumference of a dollar. The English poet sounded the keynote of true philosophy when he sang:
“Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”
The true wealth of a nation rests not so much on bricks of gold as upon golden thought—the riches of brain and heart—the treasures of truth and the pure and beautiful sentiments of life. In the wild scramble for sordid gain and the golden reins of power in these wing-footed days of avarice and materialism, the angels of happiness no longer beckon from the landscape and the stream nor call from the sweet solitudes of the forest; but they stand tip-toe on the burnished domes and glittering towers of the city and the town, with crowns of gold in their hands. And the brain and brawn of the land gather there from the hills and hollows to climb after them on a thousand ladders of dreams. But the environments of domes and towers, while they stimulate the brain to grasp great financial problems and to weave the web of glory around the thrones of money kings, contract the nobler and better ideals and impulses of the heart to the gilded forms of artificial pleasure.
Did you ever watch a bevy of city swells and society belles swinging and whirling under flaming chandeliers until the coat-tails of the swells popped like whip crackers and the skirts of the belles flapped like the sails of a schooner in a high wind? That was a piping gale of pleasure in high life in the town. Did you ever attend a great reception in the heart of the metropolis? It was a gorgeous scene of icicles and spectacles, of broadcloth, and jewels arrayed in white slippers and costly gowns of richest colors; and the icicles and spectacles bowed to the jewels, and the jewels bowed to the icicles and spectacles and they held sweet converse on the subject of their bicycles and tricycles and various and sundry articles and drank champagne and sherry and all got very merry and wound up with oysters and dill pickles. And then the tipsy icicles and spectacles got in their elegant vehicles and went home with the jewels in the morning. That was the cream of urban civilization. Did you ever gaze on a gaudy throng of bald-headed Apollos and painted Minervas walling their eyes in speechless rapture before the garish lights of the grand opera? How the fans and ribbons fluttered and the side-whiskers swayed and spluttered amid the inscrutable harmonies of Wagner! That was the tuneless pandemonium of urban music. Did you ever watch the bulls and bears of finance turn the stock exchange into a howling wilderness of confusion in the struggle to raise or lower prices? That was the third heaven of artificial pleasure and excitement in the city.
But what is a thrill of victory in the gambling hell of frenzied finance compared with the joy a fisherman feels down on the farm when a game trout strikes his baited hook in the darkening eddy of a crystal stream and the good reel sings as he gives him line and the fishing rod bends and the waters splash? What is the gilded club room where the wizards of finance meet to sip and smoke and shuffle the cards of fortune compared with a fisherman’s tent and a fisherman’s luck on the bank of a moonlit river where hearts are trumps and souls overflow with song and story?
Did you ever hear the tale of Mark Antony, the funeral orator of Rome and the Romeo of the Nile? He went angling in Egypt one day on the royal barge with the beautiful Cleopatra and he fished and fished and fished, unrewarded by a nibble, until the hours grew dull and heavy. But the cunning queen conceived a plan to change her lover’s luck and unfolded the scheme to a slave; and the slave secretly dived from the larboard side of the boat and hung a dried herring on the General’s hook and then gave his line a vigorous pull. “By Jupiter!” shouted Mark Antony, “I have hooked a monstrous fish.” “Take care, my lord, and give him line lest he drag thee into the sea,” cried the dark-eyed queen, as she chuckled behind her fan.
“By the gods! that fish shall flounder on thy deck, or I shall flounder beneath the waves!” cried the impetuous Roman. He squared himself and gave a mighty jerk, but fell sprawling on his back at the feet of the laughing queen, and when he looked up and saw nothing but a little dried herring dangling among the ropes above him, he blandly smiled and dryly said: “He was a monstrous fish while biting, but between his bite and my jerk, he has wonderfully shriveled. But he’s the oldest looking fish and has the loudest smell of any that ever perfumed the royal barge.”
And so many an ambitious Antony sits in the stock exchange of the great city and drops his hook in the sea of speculation, and he fishes and fishes with his little wad of hard earned cash, until some shrewd manipulator, just to change his luck, takes the little wad off and gives the line a heavy pull, and when our guileless Antony thinks he has hooked a million, he jerks and falls at the feet of fickle fortune, and finds dangling in the air above him only the dried herring of a shrivelled hope, and there is nothing left but the aged look of an empty purse and the smell of a dream that is vanished!
