The Inventions of the Idiot, John Kendrick Bangs [tools of titans ebook txt] 📗

thanking you just the same for the chance."

"You can put me down for one share, to be paid for in poetry," said the Poet, with a wink at the Idiot.

"You'll never make good," said the Idiot, slyly.

"And I," said the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally imbibes, "shall be most happy to take five shares to be paid for in advice and high-balls. Moreover, if your company needs good-will to establish its enterprise, you may count upon me for unlimited credit."

"Oh, as for that," said the Idiot, "I have plenty of good-will. Even Mr. Pedagog supplies me with more of it than I deserve, though by no means with all that I desire."

"That good-will is yours as an individual, Mr. Idiot," returned the School-master. "As a corporation, however, I cannot permit you to trade upon me even for that. Your value is, in my eyes, entirely too fluctuating."

"And it is in the fluctuating stock that the great fortunes are made, Mr. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "As an individual I appreciate your good-will. As a corporation I am soulless, without emotions, and so cherish no disappointments over your refusal. I think if the scheme goes through it will be successful, and I fully expect to see the day when Idiot Preferred will be selling as high, if not higher, than Steel, and leaving utterly behind any other industrial that ever was known, copper or rope."

"If, like the railways, you could issue betterment bonds you might do very well," said the Doctor. "I think ten million dollars spent in bettering you might bring you up to par."

"Or a consolidated first-mortgage bond," remarked the Bibliomaniac. "Consolidate the Idiot with a man like Chamberlain or the German Emperor, and issue a five-million-dollar mortgage on the result, and you might find people who'd take those bonds at seventy-five."

"You might if they were a dollar bond printed on cartridge-paper," said Mr. Pedagog. "Then purchasers could paper their walls with them."

"Rail on," said the Idiot. "I can stand it. When I begin paying quarterly dividends at a ten-per-cent. rate you'll wish you had come in."

"I don't know about that," said Mr. Pedagog. "It would entirely depend."

"On what?" queried the Idiot, unwarily.

"On whether that ten per cent. was declared upon your own estimate of your value or upon ours. On yours it would be fabulous; on ours—oh, well, what is the use of saying anything more about it. We are not going in it, and that's an end to it."

"Well, I'll go in it if you change your scheme," said the Doctor. "If instead of an Idiot Publishing Company you will try to float yourself as a Consolidated Gas Company you may count on me to take a controlling interest."

"I will submit the proposition to my friends," said the Idiot, calmly. "It would be something to turn out an honest gas company, which I should, of course, try to be, but I am afraid the public will not accept it. There is little demand for laughing-gas, and, besides, they would fear to intrust you with a controlling interest for fear that you might blow the product out and the bills up—coining millions by mere inflation. They've heard of you, Doctor, and they know that is the sort of thing you'd be likely to do."

V
University Extension

"I was surprised and gratified last evening, Mr. Idiot," observed the School-master as breakfast was served, "to see you at the University Extension Lecture. I did not know that you admitted the necessity of further instruction in any matter pertaining to human knowledge."

"I don't know that I do admit the necessity," returned the Idiot. "Sometimes when I take an inventory of the contents of my mind it seems to me that about everything I need is there."

"There you go again!" said the Bibliomaniac. "Why do you persist in your refusal to allow any one to get a favorable impression concerning you? Mr. Pedagog unbends sufficiently to tell you that you have at last done something which he can commend, and you greet him with an Idiotism which is practically a rebuff."

"Very well said," observed the School-master, with an acquiescent nod. "I came to this table this morning encouraged to believe that this young man was beginning to see the error of his ways, and I must confess to a great enough interest in him to say that I was pleased at that encouragement. I saw him at a lecture on literature at the Lyceum Hall last evening, and he appeared to be interested, and yet this morning he seems to show that he is utterly incorrigible. May I ask, sir, why you attended that lecture if, as you say, your mind is already sufficiently well furnished?"

"Certainly you may ask that question," replied the Idiot. "I went to that lecture to have my impressions confirmed, that is all. I have certain well-defined notions concerning University Extension, and I wished to see if they were correct. I found that they were."

"The lecture was not upon University Extension, but upon Romanticism, and it was a most able discourse," retorted Mr. Pedagog.

"Very likely," said the Idiot. "I did not hear it. I did not want to hear it. I have my own ideas concerning Romanticism, which do not need confirmation or correction. I have already confirmed and corrected them. I went to see the audience and not to hear Professor Peterkin exploding theories."

"It is a pity the chair you occupied was wasted upon you," snapped Mr. Pedagog.

"I agree with you," said the Idiot. "I could have got a much better view of the audience if I had been permitted to sit on the stage, but Professor Peterkin needed all that for his gestures. However, I saw enough from where I sat to confirm my impression that University Extension is not so much of a public benefit as a social fad. There was hardly a soul in the audience who could not have got all that Professor Peterkin had to tell him out of his books; there was hardly a soul in the audience who could not have afforded to pay one dollar at least for the seat he occupied; there was not a soul in the audience who had paid more than ten cents for his seat or her seat, and those for whose benefit the lecture was presumably given, the ten-cent people, were crowded out. The lectures themselves are not instructive—Professor Peterkin's particularly—except in so far as it is instructive to hear what Professor Peterkin thinks on this or that subject, and his desire to be original forces him to cook up views which no one else ever held, with the result that what he says is most interesting and proper to be presented to the attention of a discriminating audience, but not proper to be presented to an audience that is supposed to come there to receive instruction."

"You have just said that you did not listen to the lecture. How do you know that what you say is true?" put in the Bibliomaniac.

"I know Professor Peterkin," said the Idiot.

"Does he know you?" sneered Mr. Pedagog.

"I don't think he would remember me if you should speak my name in his presence," observed the Idiot, calmly. "But that is easily accounted for. The Professor never remembers anybody but himself."

"Well, I admit," said Mr. Pedagog, "that the Professor's lectures were rather advanced for the comprehension of a person like the Idiot, nevertheless it was an enjoyable occasion, and I doubt if the fulminations of our friend here will avail against University Extension."

"You speak a sad truth," said the Idiot. "Social fads are impervious to fulmination, as Solomon might have said had he thought of it. As long as a thing is a social fad it will thrive, and, on the whole, perhaps it ought to thrive. Anything which gives society something to think about has its value, and the mere fact that it makes society think is proof of that value."

"We seem to be in a philosophic frame of mind this morning," said Mr. Whitechoker.

"We are," returned the Idiot. "That's one thing about University Extension. It makes us philosophic. It has made a stoic of my dear old daddy."

"Oh yes!" cried Mr. Pedagog. "You have a father, haven't you? I had forgotten that."

"Wherein," said the Idiot, "we differ. I haven't forgotten that I have one, and, by-the-way, it is from him that I first heard of University Extension. He lives in a small manufacturing town not many miles from here, and is distinguished in the town because, without being stingy, he lives within his means. He has a way of paying his grocer's bills which makes of him a marked man. He hasn't much more money than he needs, but when the University Extension movement reached the town he was interested. The prime movers in the enterprise went to him and asked him if he wouldn't help it along, dilating upon the benefits which would accrue to those whose education stopped short with graduation from the high-schools. It was most plausible. The notion that for ten cents a lecture the working masses could learn something about art, history, and letters, could gather in something about the sciences, and all that, appealed to him, and while he could afford it much more ill than the smart people, the four hundred of the town, he chipped in. He paid fifty dollars and was made an honorary manager. He was proud enough of it, too, and he wrote a long, enthusiastic letter to me about it. It was a great thing, and he hoped the State, which had been appealed to to help the movement along, would take a hand in it. 'If we educate the masses to understand and to appreciate the artistic, the beautiful,' he wrote, 'we need have little fear for the future. Ignorance is the greatest foe we have to contend against in our national development, and it is the only thing that can overthrow a nation such as ours is.' And then what happened? Professor Peterkin came along and delivered ten or a dozen lectures. The masses went once or twice and found the platform occupied by a man who talked to them about Romanticism and Realism; who told them that Dickens was trash; who exalted Tolstoi and Ibsen; but who never let them into the secret of what Romanticism was, and who kept them equally in the dark as to the significance of Realism. They also found the best seats in the lecture-hall occupied by the smart set in full evening-dress, who talked almost as much and as loudly as did Professor Peterkin. The masses did not even learn manners at Professor Peterkin's first and second lectures, and the third and fourth found them conspicuous by their absence. All they learned was that they were ignorant, and that other people were better than they, and what my father learned was that he had subscribed fifty dollars to promote a series of social functions for the diversion of the four hundred and the aggrandizement of Professor Peterkin. He started in for what might be called Romanticism, and he got a Realism that he did not like in less time than it takes to tell of it, and to-day in that town University Extension is such a fad that when, some weeks ago, the swell club of that place talked of appointing Thursday evening as its club night, it was found to be impossible, for the reason that it might interfere with the attendance upon the University Extension lectures. That, Mr. Pedagog, is a matter of history and can be proven, and last night's audience confirmed the impression which I had formed from what my father had told me. Professor Peterkin's lectures are interesting to you, a school-master, but they are pure Greek to me, who would like to know more about letters. I would gather more instruction from your table-talk in an hour than I could from Professor Peterkin's whole course."

"You flatter me," said Mr. Pedagog.

"No," returned the Idiot. "If you knew how little the ignorant gain from Peterkin you would not necessarily call it flattery if one should say he learned more from your conversation over a griddle-cake."

"You misconceive the whole situation, I think, nevertheless," said Mr. Whitechoker. "As I understand it, supplementary lectures, and examinations based on them, are held after the lectures, when the practical instruction is given with great thoroughness."

"I'm glad you spoke of that," said the Idiot. "I had forgotten that part of it. Professor Peterkin received pay for his lectures, which dealt in theories only; plain Mr. Barton, who delivered the supplementary lectures, got nothing. Professor Peterkin taught nothing, but he represented University Extension. Plain Mr. Barton did the work and represented nothing. Both reached society. Neither reached the masses. In my native town plain Mr. Barton's supplementary lectures, which were simply an effort to unravel the Peterkin complications, were attended by the same people in