The Boulevard of Rogues we called it for a time. But after Barton had been in the mayor’s office a year he dumped the O’Grady statue into the river, destroyed the tablets, and returned to the Follonsby Fund out of his own pocket the money he had paid for them. Three noble statues of honest patriots now adorn the boulevard, and half a dozen beautiful fountains have been distributed among the parks.
The Barton plan is, I submit, worthy of all emulation. If every boss-ridden, machine-managed American city could once visualize its shame and folly as Barton compelled us to do, there would be less complaint about the general failure of local government. There is, when you come to think of it, nothing so preposterous in the idea of perpetuating in outward and visible forms the public servants we humbly permit to misgovern us. Nothing could be better calculated to quicken the civic impulse in the lethargic citizen than the enforced contemplation of a line of statues erected to rascals who have prospered at the expense of the community.
I’m a little sorry, though, that Barton never carried out one of his plans, which looked to the planting in the centre of a down-town park of a symbolic figure of the city, felicitously expressed by a barroom loafer dozing on a whiskey barrel. I should have liked it, and Barton confessed to me the other day that he was a good deal grieved himself that he had not pulled it off!
THE OPEN SEASON FOR AMERICAN
NOVELISTS
[1915]
I
THIS is the open season for American novelists. The wardens are in hiding and any one with a blunderbuss and a horn of powder is entitled to all the game he can kill. The trouble was started by Mr. Edward Garnett, a poacher from abroad, who crawled under the fence and wrought great havoc before he was detected. His invasion roused the envy of scores of native hunters, and at their behest all laws for game protection have been suspended, to satisfy the general craving for slaughter. Mr. Owen Wister on his bronco leads the field, a daring and orgulous knight, sincerely jealous for the good name of the ranges. The fact that I was once beguiled by an alluring title into purchasing one of his books in the fond hope that it would prove to be a gay romance about a lady, only to find that the heroine was, in fact, a cake, does not alter my amiable feelings toward him. I made a pious pilgrimage to the habitat of that cake and invested in numerous replicas for distribution all the way from Colorado to Maine, accompanied by copies of the novel that so adroitly advertised it—a generosity which I have refrained from mentioning to Mr. Wister or his publisher to this day.
Mr. Wister’s personal experiences have touched our oldest and newest civilization, and it is not for me to quarrel with him. Nor should I be saddling Rosinante for a trot over the fearsome range had he not taken a pot shot at poor old Democracy, that venerable offender against the world’s peace and dignity. To drive Mr. Bryan and Mr. Harold Bell Wright into a lonely cleft of the foot-hills and rope and tie them together seems to me an act of inhumanity unworthy of a good sportsman. As I am unfamiliar with Mr. Wright’s writings, I can only express my admiration for Mr. Wister’s temerity in approaching them close enough to apply the branding-iron. Mr. Bryan as the protagonist of Democracy may not be dismissed so easily. To be sure, he has never profited by any ballot of mine, but he has at times laid the lash with a sure hand on shoulders that needed chastisement. However, it is the free and unlimited printing of novels that here concerns us, not the consecration of silver.
Democracy is not so bad as its novels, nor, for that matter, is a constitutional monarchy. The taste of many an American has been debased by English fiction. At the risk of appearing ungracious, I fling in Mr. Garnett’s teeth an armful of the writings of Mr. Hall Caine, Mrs. Barclay, and Marie Corelli. The slightest regard for the literary standards of a young and struggling republic should prompt the mother country to keep her trash at home. It is our most grievous sin that we have merely begun to manufacture our own rubbish, in a commendable spirit of building up home industries. In my youth I was prone to indulge in pirated reprints of engrossing tales of adorable curates’ nieces who were forever playing Cinderella at hunt balls, and breaking all the hearts in the county. They were dukes’ daughters, really, changed in the cradle—Trollope, with a dash of bitters; but their effect upon me I believe to have been baneful.
A lawyer of my acquaintance used to remark in opening a conference with opposing counsel: “I am merely thinking aloud; I don’t want to be bound by anything I say.” It is a good deal in this spirit that I intrude upon the field of carnage, fortified with a white flag and a Red Cross badge. The gentle condescension of foreign critics we shall overlook as lacking in novelty; moreover, Mr. Lowell disposed of that attitude once and for all time.