“Oh, but not much of one, Sir Walter,” put in Doctor Johnson, deprecatingly.
“No,” said Confucius. “I don’t want them excluded, but they should be controlled. You don’t let a shoemaker who has become a member of this club turn the library sofas into benches and go pegging away at boot-making, so why should you let the poets turn the place into a verse factory? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“I don’t know but what your point is well taken,” said Blackstone, “though I can’t say I think your parallels are very parallel. A shoemaker, my dear Confucius, is somewhat different from a poet.”
“Certainly,” said Doctor Johnson. “Very different—in fact, different enough to make a conundrum of the question—what is the difference between a shoemaker and a poet? One makes the shoes and the other shakes the muse—all the difference in the world. Still, I don’t see how we can exclude the poets. It is the very democracy of this club that gives it life. We take in everybody—peer, poet, or what not. To say that this man shall not enter because he is this or that or the other thing would result in our ultimately becoming a class organization, which, as Confucius himself says, we are not and must not be. If we put out the poet to please the sage, we’ll soon have to put out the sage to please the fool, and so on. We’ll keep it up, once the precedent is established, until finally it will become a class club entirely—a Plumbers’ Club, for instance—and how absurd that would be in Hades! No, gentlemen, it can’t be done. The poets must and shall be preserved.”
“What’s the objection to class clubs, anyhow?” asked Cassius. “I don’t object to them. If we could have had political organizations in my day I might not have had to fall on my sword to get out of keeping an engagement I had no fancy for. Class clubs have their uses.”
“No doubt,” said Demosthenes. “Have all the class clubs you want, but do not make one of this. An Authors’ Club, where none but authors are admitted, is a good thing. The members learn there that there are other authors than themselves. Poets’ Clubs are a good thing; they bring poets into contact with each other, and they learn what a bore it is to have to listen to a poet reading his own poem. Pugilists’ Clubs are good; so are all other class clubs; but so also are clubs like our own, which takes in all who are worthy. Here a poet can talk poetry as much as he wants, but at the same time he hears something besides poetry. We must stick to our original idea.”
“Then let us do something to abate the nuisance of which I complain,” said Confucius. “Can’t we adopt a house rule that poets must not be inspired between the hours of 11 A.M. and 5 P.M., or in the evening after eight; that any poet discovered using more than five arm-chairs in the composition of a quatrain will be charged two oboli an hour for each chair in excess of that number; and that the billiard-marker shall be required to charge a premium of three times the ordinary fee for tables used by versifiers in lieu of writing-pads?”
“That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” said Sir Walter Raleigh. “I, as a poet would not object to that. I do all my work at home, anyhow.”
“There’s another phase of this business that we haven’t considered yet, and it’s rather important,” said Demosthenes, taking a fresh pebble out of his bonbonnière. “That’s in the matter of stationery. This club, like all other well-regulated clubs, provides its members with a suitable supply of writing materials. Charon informs me that the waste-baskets last week turned out forty-two reams of our best correspondence paper on which these poets had scribbled the first draft of their verses. Now I don’t think the club should furnish the poets with the raw material for their poems any more than, to go back to Confucius’s shoemaker, it should supply leather for our cobblers.”
“What do you mean by raw material for poems?” asked Sir Walter, with a frown.