No sooner do our young men arrive at that age when they can don a fuzzy hat and coax a mustache without exciting the ridicule of their little brothers, than they shake the dust of this town from their feet and set out to find a wife among those vampire beauties whose portraits decorate the pages of our Sunday papers. As for our girls, they are left as I was, to choose between frank spinsterhood at home, or to follow the young men out into the world, there to become chorus girls, manicures, stenographers—or to engage in some other similar profession which exerts such a glamour and fascination over the men as to make up for their lack of classical beauty.
And who, Sir, is to blame for this lamentable state of affairs? The beauties? No, not altogether, for if they were not so exploited by the newspapers, our young men would never suspect that they existed. For, Sir, even if he were to meet her face to face, the ordinary young man is so lacking in sentiment, so matter-of-fact, that he would never suspect one of those beauties of being anything extraordinary if her beauty were not vouched for by some newspaper. The young man who has not been corrupted in this way, and who has not had fostered in him by these newspapers the silly notion that he is a knight errant searching the world for beauty in distress, is a docile creature, easily captured and easily managed. He treats matrimony as he treats his meals, he takes what is set before him and afterward grumbles as a matter of course, but deep down in his heart he is very well satisfied. It is the editors, Sir, who have caused all of the trouble; the editors with their silly beauty contests and their simpering half-tone, half-world women of the stage flaunting their coquettish graces and flirting with our young men from the pages of the Sunday papers.
Now, Sir, I hope that you will not dismiss this letter as a matter of no consequence and the peevish complaint of a disappointed spinster, for I assure you the roots of this evil go deeper than appears at first glance. Our magazines are asking, “Why do young men leave the farm?” Our sociologists are asking why are our villages becoming depopulated? Superficial observers often reply that the young men go to the city for the sake of money-making. But I, Sir, know better. The young men are leaving the farms and the villages to hunt for wives because the newspapers, with their photographs, have made them dissatisfied with what they find at home. And now that you know the cause of it, Mr. Idler, is there no hope that you may devise some way to put a stop to it?
I am, Sir,
Sarah Shelfworn.
FROM ANNA PEST
To the Editor of The Idler.
Dear Sir: Doubtless you are familiar with some of the newer schools of poetry, as for instance, that one which has abandoned rhyme for assonance, which has led an ignorant and prejudiced critic to say of it that its poetry may be rich in assonance, but that he finds in it more of asininity. Such is the treatment accorded all independent artists by the hidebound adherents of outworn ideals!
Now, Mr. Idler, nobody is more convinced than I am that we need new forms of poetry. I have been writing poems for a number of years and I feel that I speak with authority when I say that the old classical forms are entirely inadequate for modern poetic expression. I have tried them all and I have found them all wanting, for though I have written poems in the form of sonnets, lyrics, triolets, quatrains, couplets, rondels—and even in blank verse—I was never able to produce a decent poem in any of them. I therefore conclude that what every modern poet needs is to shake off the shackles of poetic convention and follow a form suited to his nature. I have been greatly encouraged by the introduction of the vers libre in France and I am heartily in accord with the aims of those pioneers of the new poetry who are laboring to educate the public taste to modern ideals, but I fear that in one or two instances they have overshot the mark.
Much as I admire the courage of Monsieur Alexandre Mercereau, who has, with splendid audacity, forsaken verse altogether and determined to write all of his poetry in prose, I do not believe it advisable to attempt to accomplish the poetic revolution at one step. I am more in sympathy with those who have abandoned rhyme, but retained rhythm.