Read Ebook: The Fly Leaf No. 5 Vol. 1 April 1896 by Various Harte Walter Blackburn Editor

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When one looks at the great blotches of ignorant and inferior races which dot the map of the United States in different industrial sections, one wonders where and when an "American" literature or "American" anything will come in. Emigration is all right when it comes from the right quarters, but the recent social history of this country shows how it is absorbing the barbaric scum of Europe.

JONATHAN PENN.

DEPENDENCE.

SHE.

Since thou hast come, dear heart, I live no more Save in the hours when thou art by. Thy grave, Full penetrating voice and speech I crave, And all thy cares.... I wonder how before This satisfied companionship I bore The old dull days, for thou with marriage gave So much! And yet,--bear with me, dear!--My brave Heart seems defenceless now! Those days of yore Full of ambitious dreams, beyond my reach Have vanished far. O love me! since the whole Of life is narrowed down to this! and teach Me willing subjugation, as years roll,-- Be more than lost ambitions I beseech,-- My lord and husband, since thou hast my soul!

HE.

Dear one, dost think thou art alone in this Great overwhelming conflict of love's might? Dost think thou art dependent, and my right Is subjugating thee? O sweet, the bliss Of marriage lies beyond such talk as this! True love is most dependent, and all right Is yours as mine, since our supreme delight Lies with each other; then let us not miss The joy of this full time by hint of war, Or agonize ourselves with distant fears,-- A truce to these misgivings! With such store Of love we'll front our happiness, that years Will bring us compensations more and more. I master? nay, a beggar,--see these tears!

JOHN ARMSTRONG.

PARILEE'S DREAM.

"Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?"

Her husband turned on his pillow and looked at her. She was asleep, and the smiles that played over her features, now and again interrupted by a look of gentle sadness, showed that she was dreaming. He was about to wake her, but he hesitated to break in upon what he knew must be a very sweet vision, and, keeping his eyes upon her face, he awaited the end.

They had been married two years. He had come suddenly into her life, taking her away from several admirers and out of a continuous round of pleasure and excitement, and after a short courtship they had wed. Parilee often said to herself: "How much better off I am," and thought with satisfaction that instead of being a silly and superficial girl she was a wife, and at the head of a home. There had been hardly a discord in their lives since the day of their union; and Parilee believed she was quite happy.

As she lay there, her lips moved in the words, "I love you," and her face flushed so deeply that her husband, doubting his eyes, speculated as to whether she was really asleep.

As the early light of the sun burst into the room, she started up, thinking, "What a dream for me!"

At her old home she had wandered along by the creek which ran through her father's fields. She had been in quest of something, but what that something was she did not know; there was a longing and a longing, very deep and sad. Suddenly she had seen Tom Harding coming toward her. Taking him by the hand, she had led him to a large rock near, and they had both sat down upon it. Then, in a trembling voice she had said: "Tom, I've been seeking you such a long time; I love you."

Looking at her searchingly and with tenderness, Tom had replied, oh, so softly; "You love me! I have long loved you, too"; and had taken her in his arms and kissed her.

"What were you dreaming about?" her husband asked, as she stirred and opened her eyes; "I saw you smiling in your sleep." She did not answer, but went over her dream again and again, recalling every minute detail. Sweeter sensations never lingered after a real kiss. She revelled in memory as she looked out on the morning sky and thought of Tom's embrace.

"Were you dreaming of me, Parilee?"

She hesitated, thinking: "I can't tell him of my dream; it was not such a thing as a wife would want to repeat to her husband. Perhaps I ought to tell him, though. No, it will not be best; he would be displeased. I would better let him think that his surmise is correct than to make him sad or jealous. Besides, I am not responsible for what happens in my sleep. If the dream had included a thought or recognition of Harry, I should think that I was harboring improper feelings. But it was only a dream."

"Yes, Harry, I was dreaming of our old lover days."

When her husband started for his office he gave Parilee his accustomed farewell kiss. To him it was the same as usual, but to her it seemed slightly insipid; the dream kiss was still upon her lips.

"It is because we have been married so long; I have grown used to him," she reasoned when left alone. "I love Harry, and always shall." Then she sat down by the window, looked far away into space, and went over the dream again.

"I wonder where Tom is now," she questioned in her thought. "Probably married by this time." A disagreeable feeling went to her heart. "He loved me before I met Harry. What changes time brings." And she mused on.

OLGA ARNOLD.

THE NEW CIRCE.

She has no wand nor needs one. Her demesne Is ev'ry drawing-room. A slender chair Be-carved and gilt, her throne that any queen Might wish to sit upon. About her there They crowd, the subjects of this guileless fair, Fain for the services she may commend; Content forever the sweet bonds to wear,-- That even Egypt's moly cannot rend,-- If she, though loving not, to love them will pretend.

EDWARD W. BARNARD.

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK.

The great books teach us to smile at life.

The old proverb that there is nothing new under the sun gives much latitude to dullards and plagiarists, who are altogether destitute of the fascination of a mood or manner. Egoism is the last virtue of modern literature.

It is not so much what a man says, but what he looks, with women. It is the fantasy of wickedness that flashes from eye to eye among dumb clods that keeps poetry perennially in the world.

If the sun shone only upon the righteous, he would not need to get up so early in the morning.

I have my livelihood to earn, and consequently I am an optimist.

There is something intellectually lacking in all converts to brand new dogmas and creeds. A deep sense of wickedness is but a phase of immaturity of mind.

A woman who is not at heart a tyrant in her dreams of love is a perversion of nature.

So far as can be learned at this distance, there is only one industry in the new South which is really in a flourishing condition, and that is the unlimited production of abominable trashy "literature."

If some half baked people would consent to go to night school instead of covering endless reams with horrible aberrations, the progress of aesthetics would be more rapid in America. Some people cannot realize that mere mellifluous meanderings in verse or plain prose are simply indications of an affection of the gray matter, akin to a cold in the head, and are of no more significance to the outside world than the week's washing.

The instability of all industrial and business life in America is one of the horrors of existence here, and it is one of the factors that make culture impossible here. A nation on the jump runs to "smartness" but not to intellect. There is only one class in our society that enjoys stability, and that is the Police. Whether we may expect any aesthetic appreciation from this quarter remains to be seen.

The poor alone trust in Providence. The rich own Providence.

The woman who has plenty of red blood corpuscles, a body that is a body and not a poetic wraith of the spirit, seems to be tumbling into fiction nowadays. As the new heroine she is rudely disturbing the reign of the pink and white saints, expressly made in Paris dollhouses for the heroines of English novels, who open and close their eyes and smile in every chapter.

Educate yourself to tell little lies easily and artistically, and the big ones will take care of themselves.

The trouble with the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois is they have no picturesqueness. They have an abundance of vices, but no redeeming ones.

The majority of men are Christians and pagans, Democrats and Republicans, princes and paupers, and what not, first of all, and themselves last of all--usually only in crises.

The salvation of stupidity in this world is that the instinct of self-preservation has given it an undisputed currency among the masses of men as common-sense.

Democracy is the damnation of ideals. Old John Calvin, if he were living and working out his logic in the midst of modern life, would have laid even greater distress upon total depravity and the eternal damnation of the majority. That is the only dream which can console us for the dominion of the vulgar in this life; and, unfortunately, there is no substantial logic or evidence to support it. If instead of having lived a quiet life in Geneva, in the sixteenth century, Calvin were living to-day in the heart of New York or Chicago, he would have made his theology more terrible. The kernel of his doctrines was evidently derived from the observation of human society, and a career amid the brutality of our modern cities would have left no room in his creed for any compromises. The perseverance of the saints is not in evidence in the cut-throat scramble of modern life.

This doctrine of damnation has always condoned for me many of the intolerable narrownesses in Calvinism. If it is probable that God himself cannot contemplate an invasion of the mob without trepidation, I cannot see what argument can be made in support of democracy in our social and intellectual life here below. I envy all those who hold this doctrine of damnation without any troublesome doubts. Calvin had evidently fathomed human nature, even if he did not enjoy any special revelation of the life hereafter.

About the only woman whose novels I am curious to read at this moment is Diana of the Crossways. And her "Princess Egeria" and the rest are out of reach forever.

Now here is a nice psychological point. A very clever woman, who knows men and women as only some wonderful women can, and who yet has never written a novel, came to me the other day, as to a Father Confessor of the smaller sophistries of conscience, upon which religion affords no certain light and assurance. The point she wished to know was whether she was a new woman or simply a harmless flirt of the old school. As I could not decide this momentous matter, I concluded to ventilate it in print, suppressing the name of my friend. The situation is this: She loves her husband with all her heart, but yet she sometimes lacks the moral courage to tell some men whom she meets casually that she is a married woman.

It does not seem to add to England's glory to appoint Uriah Heep to the job of court clown. The old jesters made better sport.

I sometimes wonder what peculiar influence in their environment makes so many literary critics attached to the editorial staff of periodicals, whose chief staple is some denominational form of religious conviction, so offensively positive and dogmatic. They are seldom troubled with any judicial hesitations. They proclaim their ipse dixits with a solemnity and excess of asseveration and finality which is hideously funny to the lay mind, that takes its own peculiar predilections and distastes, with a shade of something approximating good-natured tolerance of the possible tastes of others. I think this critical attitude of the religious Pontifex is largely due to some profound mental and moral confusion. He is so accustomed to dealing out fire and brimstone and damnation with a callous and easy conscience to all who differ with him in the domain of religious belief, and especially to those who occupy the agnostic and rational attitude toward the eternal problems of life, that he finally gets into the trick of using the thunder of Jehovah for smaller offences and occasions.

Here is a case in point. A solemn and inspired lunatic writes, in the New York "Independent," of George Meredith, the greatest living writer in the English speaking world, in this utterly mendacious and injudicious fashion. "The most elaborately feminine man in English literary life." "The Amazing Marriage" is then described as "a crazy structure gorgeously decorated, in which dwell nympholepts, aged satyrs, erotic wives and foredoomed maidens, all moving on to rainbow-hued destruction or jaundiced delight."

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