The Genial Idiot: His Views and Reviews, John Kendrick Bangs [e ink ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: John Kendrick Bangs
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“I don’t recall any other,” said Mr. Whitechoker.
“Well,” said the Idiot, “there’s one, and it’s the nerviest of ’em all—‘Water never runs up hill.’ Ask any man in Wall Street how high the water has run up in the last five years and see what he tells you. And then, ‘You may drive a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink,’ is another choice specimen of the Waterbury School of Philosophy. I know a lot of human horses who have been driven to water lately, and such drinkers as they have become! It’s really awful. If I knew the name of that[10] particular Maximilian who invented those water proverbs I’d do my best to have him indicted for doing business without a license.”
“It’s very unfortunate,” said Mr. Whitechoker, “that modern conditions should so have upset the wisdom of the ancients.”
“It is too bad,” said the Idiot. “And I am just as sorry about it as you are; but, after all, the wisdom of the ancients, wise and wisdomatic as it was, should not be permitted to put at nought all modern thought. Why not adapt the wisdom of the ancients to modern conditions? You can’t begin too soon, for new generations are constantly springing up, and I know of no better outlet for reform than in these self-same Spencerian proverbs which the poor kids have to copy, copy, copy, until they are sick and tired of them. Now, in the writing-lessons, why not adapt your means to your ends? Why make a beginner in penmanship write over and over again, ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?’—which it isn’t, by-the-way, to a man who is a good shot—when you can bear in on his mind that ‘A dot on[11] the I is worth two on the T’; or, for the instruction of your school-teachers, why don’t you get up a proverb like ‘It’s a long lesson that has no learning’? Or if you are interested in having your boy brought up to the strenuous life, why don’t you have him make sixty copies of the aphorism, ‘A punch in the solar is worth six on the nose?’ You tell your children never to whistle until they are out of the woods. Now, where in the name of all that’s lovely should a boy whistle if not in the woods? That’s where birds whistle. That’s where the wind whistles. If nature whistles anywhere, it is in the woods. Woods were made for whistling, and any man who ever sat over a big log-fire in camp or in library who has not noticed that the logs themselves whistle constantly—well, he is a pachyderm.”
”Well, as far as I can reach a conclusion from all that you have said,“ put in Mr. Whitechoker, “the point seems to be that the proverbs of the ancients are not suited to modern conditions, and that you think they should be revised.”
[12] “Exactly,” said the Idiot.
“It’s a splendid idea,” said Mr. Brief. “But, after all, you’ve got to have something to begin on. Possibly,” he added, with a wink at the Bibliomaniac, “you have a few concrete examples to show us what can be done.”
“Certainly,” said the Idiot. “Here is a list of them.”
And as he rose up to depart he handed Mr. Brief a paper on which he had written as follows:
“You never find the water till the stock falls off twenty points.”
“A stitch in time saves nothing at all at present tailors’ rates.”
“You look after the pennies. Somebody else will deposit the pounds.”
“It’s a long heiress that knows no yearning.”
“Second thoughts are always second.”
“Procrastination is the theme of gossips.”
“Never put off to-day what you can put on day after to-morrow.”
[13] “Sufficient unto the day are the obligations of last month.”
“One good swat deserves another.”
“By Jove!” said Mr. Brief, as he read them off, “you can’t go back on any of ’em, can you?”
“No,” said the Bibliomaniac; “that’s the great trouble with the Idiot. Even with all his idiocy he is not always a perfect idiot.”
[14] IIHE DISCUSSES THE IDEAL HUSBAND
WELL, I see the Ideal Husband has broken out again,” said the Idiot, after reading a short essay on that interesting but rare individual by Gladys Waterbury Shrivelton of the Woman’s Page of the Squehawkett Gazoo. “I’d hoped they had him locked up for good, he’s been so little in evidence of late years.”
“Why should you wish so estimable an individual to be locked up?” demanded Mr. Pedagog, who, somehow or other, seemed to take the Idiot’s suggestion as personal.
“To keep his idealness from being shattered,” said the Idiot. “Nothing against the gentleman himself, I can assure you. It would be a pity, I think, once you have[15] really found an Ideal Husband, to subject him to the coarse influences of the world; to let him go forth into the madding crowd and have the sweet idyllic bloom rubbed off by the attritions of the vulgar. I feel about the Ideal Husband just as I do about a beautiful peachblow vase which is too fragile, too delicate to be brought into contact with the ordinary earthen-ware of society. The earthen-ware isn’t harmed by bumping into the peachblow, but the peachblow will inevitably turn up with a crack here and a nick there and a hole somewhere else after such an encounter. If I were a woman and suddenly discovered that I had an Ideal Husband, I think at my personal sacrifice I’d present him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or immure him in some other retreat where his perfection would remain forever secure—say, up among the Egyptian mummies of the British Museum. We cannot be too careful, Mr. Pedagog, of these rarely beautiful things that are now and again vouchsafed to us.”
“What is an Ideal Husband, anyhow?”[16] asked Mr. Brief. “Has the recipe for such an individual at last been discovered?”
“Yes,” put in Mrs. Pedagog, before the Idiot had a chance to reply, and here the dear old landlady fixed her eyes firmly and affectionately upon her spouse, the school-master. “I can tell you the recipe for the Ideal Husband. Years, sixty-three—”
“Sixty-two, my dear,” smiled Mr. Pedagog, “and—er—a fraction—verging on sixty-three.”
“Years, verging on sixty-three,” said Mrs. Pedagog, accepting the correction. “Character developed by time and made secure. Eyes, blue; disposition when vexed, vexatious; disposition when pleased, happy; irritable from just cause; considerate always; calm exterior, heart of gold; prompt in anger and quick in forgiveness; and only one old woman in the world for him.”
“A trifle bald-headed, but a true friend when needed, eh?” said the Idiot.
“I try to be,” said Mr. Pedagog, pleasantly complacent.
“Well, you succeed in both,” said the Idiot.
[17] “For your trifling baldness is evident when you remove your hat, which, like a true gentleman, you never fail to do at the breakfast-table, and, after a fifteen years’ experience with you, I for one can say that I have found you always the true friend when I needed you—I never told how, without my solicitation and entirely upon your own initiative, you once loaned me the money to pay Mrs. Pedagog’s bill over which she was becoming anxious.”
“John,” cried Mrs. Pedagog, severely, “did you ever do that?”
“Well, my dear—er—only once, you know, and you were so relieved—” began Mr. Pedagog.
“You should have lent the money to me, John,” said Mrs. Pedagog, “and then I should not have been compelled to dun the Idiot.”
“I know, my dear, but you see I knew the Idiot would pay me back, and perhaps—well, only perhaps, my love—you might not have thought of it,” explained the school-master, with a slight show of embarrassment.
[18] “The Ideal Husband is ever truthful, too,” said the landlady, with a smile as broad as any.
“Well, it’s too bad, I think,” said the Lawyer, “that a man has to be verging on sixty-three to be an Ideal Husband. I’m only forty-four, and I should hate to think that if I should happen to get married within the next two or three years my wife would have to wait at least fifteen years before she could find me all that I ought to be. Moreover, I have been told that I have black eyes.”
“With the unerring precision of a trained legal mind,” said the Idiot, “you have unwittingly put your finger on the crux of the whole matter, Mr. Brief. Mrs. Pedagog has been describing her Ideal Husband, and I am delighted to know that what I have always suspected to be the case is in fact the truth: that her husband in her eyes is an ideal one. That’s the way it ought to be, and that is why we have always found her the sweetest of landladies, but because Mrs. Pedagog prefers Mr. Pedagog in this race for supremacy[19] in the domain of a woman’s heart is no reason why you who are only bald-headed in your temper, like most of us, should not prove to be equally the ideal of some other woman—in fact, of several others. Women are not all alike. As a matter of fact, a gentleman named Balzac, who was the Marie Corelli of his age in France, once committed himself to the inference that no two women ever were alike, so that, if you grant the truth of old Balzac’s inference, the Ideal Husband will probably vary to the extent of the latest count of the number of women in the world. So why give up hope because you are only forty-nine?”
“Forty-four,” corrected the Lawyer.
“Pardon me—forty-four,” said the Idiot. “When you are in the roaring forties, five or six years more or less do not really count. Lots of men who are really only forty-two behave like sixty, and I know one old duffer of forty-nine who has the manners of eighteen. The age question does not really count.”
“No—you are proof of that,” said the[20] Bibliomaniac. “You have been twenty-four years old for the last fifteen years.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bib,” said the Idiot. “You are one of the few people in the world who really understand me. I have tried to be twenty-four for the past fifteen years, and if I have succeeded, so much the better for me. It’s a beautiful age. You feel that you know so much when you’re twenty-four. If it should turn out to be the answer to ‘How old is Ann?’ the lady should be congratulated. But, as a matter of fact, you can be an Ideal Husband at any old age.”
“Humph! At seven, for instance?” drawled Mr. Brief.
“Seven is not any old age,” retorted the Idiot. “It is a very certain old youth. Nor does it depend upon the color of the eyes, so long as they are neither green nor red. Nobody could ever make an Ideal Husband out of a green-eyed man, or a chap given to the red eye, either—”
“It all depends upon the kind of a man you are, eh?” said the Bibliomaniac.
[21] “Not a bit of it,” said the Idiot. “It depends on the kind of wife you’ve got, and that’s why I say that the Ideal Husband varies to the extent of the latest count of the women in the world. Take the case of Mr. Pedagog here. Mrs. Pedagog accuses him of being an Ideal Husband, and he, without any attempt at evasion, acknowledges the corn, like the honorable gentleman he is. But can you imagine Mr. Pedagog being an Ideal Husband to some lady in the Four Hundred, with a taste for grand opera that strikes only on the box; with a love for Paris gowns that are worth a fortune; with the midnight supper and cotillion after habit firmly intrenched in her character; with an ambition to shine all summer at Newport, all autumn at Lenox, all winter at New York, with a dash to England and France in the merry, merry springtime? Do you suppose
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