Project Gutenberg's The Fly Leaf, No. 2, Vol. 1, January 1896, by Various This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: The Fly Leaf, No. 2, Vol. 1, January 1896 Author: Various Editor: Walter Blackburn Harte Release Date: June 19, 2020 [EBook #62430] Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FLY LEAF, JANUARY 1896 *** Produced by hekula03, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) The Fly Leaf A Pamphlet Periodical of the New—the New Man, New Woman, New Ideas, Whimsies and Things. Conducted by Walter Blackburn Harte. With Picture Notes by H. Marmaduke Russell. Published Monthly by the Fly Leaf Publishing Co., Boston, Mass. Subscription One Dollar a Year. Single Copies 10 Cents. January, 1896. Number Two. A Word of Praise in Season. Philip Hale, the well-known and brilliant Boston literary and musical critic writes as follows: “Walter Blackburn Harte is beyond doubt and peradventure the leading essayist in Boston today. For Boston perhaps you had better read ‘the United States.’ His matter is original and brave, his style is clear, polished when effect is to be gained thereby, blunt when the blow of the bludgeon should fall, and at times delightfully whimsical, rambling, paradoxical, fantastical. But read for yourself, Miss Eustacia; and Harte’s ‘Meditations in Motley’ will remain one of your favorite books. And now Mr. Harte is the editor of The Fly Leaf. The first number is out, and let us earnestly call your attention to it.” A vigorous writer and thoroughly animated by the idea that the field of letters in this country should bloom with the genius of its youth. If The Fly Leaf doesn’t achieve a great success it will not be for lack of talent and energy on the part of its director.—The Boston Traveller. A new and wholly up to date brochure, The Fly Leaf, has just appeared under the conductorship of Walter Blackburn Harte, one of the brightest young men in American literature.—The Boston Home Journal. Promises to be something of a novelty in periodical literature, for it is filled with piquant comments on current fads and fashions, and contains some spicy and whimsical essays in miniature, written in a vivid impressionistic manner.—The Boston Transcript. These are a few press notices. But all the young men and women in every city and town in the United States are discussing The Fly Leaf and spreading its fame. The Fly Leaf No. 2. January, 1896. Vol. 1. [1] THE MONK. We were gay fellows, all of us, And christened him “the Monk.” He sat among us silently, His wine was never drunk. He heard the music passionate, But did not join the dance, Unmoved, he saw white arms and throats, Unloving, caught Love’s glance. I asked him why he cared to live, “Because,” responded he,— “I like to watch these pictures Of the things inside of me.” Claude F. Bragdon. THE VISION OF YOUTH. It may be accepted as an axiom that the strong are always audacious, and so when we hear of any man in literature who is shocking and rumpling all the susceptibilities of nice, quiet, drowsy people we may be sure that his capital crime is independence of thought and opinion. He is looking at life for himself, instead of through the refracted lenses of old class habit or antiquated religious dogma. And it is a thousand to one he has the criminal audacity to be young; for the vision of youth is clearer and more sure, and more pitying than the old green or crimson goggles of selfish age, that would paint the world as popes and kings and classes and governments, with rewards and honors to give, would have it. All men whose life and work make for the uplifting of human conditions and thought are set in the way of truth before reaching thirty. If a man is timorous before thirty, he will be an unmitigable coward, perhaps knave, for the rest of his days. And today the only profession which demands any active spirit of heroism is the calling of literature, that has become the Deus ex machina of all modern civilized life. Every truly ambitious writer, or for that matter, every manly writer, be he a genius or a mediocrity, has certain large ideal aims to serve in all his literature. It is not enough for a manly man to simply evoke applause. A nude nymph from the gutter of Paris dancing a can-can on a cafe table, also lives by popular suffrage, and wins such popular approbation as is never given to literature—the incoherent cries in which the whole body emits its tingling void of aching, sensuous delight, the deep, whole-hearted greed of the flaming instincts and soul of the race. There are a thousand arts and tricks that gain applause and good pay, and have the world’s countenance (and ours, for we are not such rigid moralists as to try to upset nature); but it is the business of the artist to gain respect, not for himself as an individual, for in that capacity we can allow much to temptation, but for his precious art, which is the voice of all the dumb ones of our kind. Surely, if there is any thing that Almighty God could forbear in tenderness to destroy, of all man’s sad attempts to win a home in this inhospitable world, it is the written pages that hold the highest aspirations of the human soul—some pages that we, in our overweening pride in the glory of our fellows, think hold a beauty and breadth that must partake of Divinity itself. But the wind of deathless Time is rushing even now, and we know that nothing can escape its touch. It is the final business of literature to quicken the spirit of humanity and stir those noblest impulses that make us despise the mere grovelling life of those who have not learned the irony of things. We hide ourselves like guilty creatures among our dusty, dusty possessions, afraid to waste time for living and thought, and so the days and nights that should be ours pass and we enjoy them not. Only a few poets possess the days and nights, and even they know the sweetness of life mostly in sorrow. All literature is trivial that lacks this large relevance to human life, and so, in looking over the bulk of contemporary American literature, it is to be feared that neither charity nor policy can make it out to be very important. It is destitute of any of the spirit of genius, and it is for the most part merely a travesty of the small talk of the surface life of so-called “good society.” It nowhere touches upon the reality of human passion, existent under every mask of custom and artificial seeming of refinement, and its inspiration is evident in every hasty line—money and advertising. To be quite candid, could any other country boast such an utterly mediocre, uninspired group of literary artisans as is represented by the Scratchback Club of New York, which in its membership really furnishes all that passes for contemporary “American” literature in our periodicals? They show the intellectual and imaginative poverty of a people merely pushing and ingenious. They reveal the shallowness of the prevailing idea that mere education furnishes those deep forces of personality which have made all true literature, and all true cultivation, with or without education. There is none of the audacity of real spontaneous thought in these men and women’s work; it is all written to order, as mechanically as an auctioneer’s catalogue. But it is well to have a definite aim in literature, and the pens concerned in the production of the Fly Leaf are at least inspired by a sense of the fluidity of this excellent medium of prose, and though they may fail in the haste of periodical writing to achieve the perfect ends of art, at least they will not wantonly strive to debase the public judgment and taste by pandering to the narrow minds of ignorant prudes, after the fashion of the popular periodical literature of the day. The Fly Leaf has a definite aim and purpose in being, and that is, to get more latitude in literature written in English, and to make the work of the real writers of our end of the century better known to the great democracy of readers. These are the younger men and not the old, fogy carpenters, brought up to write moral tracts under Dr. J. G. Holland at the close of the fifties. The Fly Leaf looks to the younger generation to enable it to make its aims a force in our intellectual and literary life here in America. There is a revolt and a quickening sense of changes and forces in the air. The work of any individual writer or worker can effect little or nothing. But the earnest enthusiasm of a little band of men and women, inspired with a belief in the impartiality of the good God and the perpetual renewal of imagination and thought and genius in every branch of the race, can set such an enthusiasm for better things and higher ideals in not merely the substance but the spirit of all our art endeavor as shall bring in a harvest of real, robust literature from every quarter of this country—largely from the most unsuspected quarters. It is this scattered interest in a nobler ideal than obtains in our contemporary periodical literature that the Fly Leaf will attempt to focus. At present nearly all the writers with any individual style and force and robustness and largeness of aim are shut out of American periodical literature, because such qualities in literature are deemed too shocking nowadays. The Fly Leaf believes there are still readers who appreciate boldness, original conceptions, audacity of treatment, and [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] the varied play of fancy over the whole and not merely a part of human existence. These are the qualities that gave us our standard English literature, and in the early days inspired our greatest writers in America. They must be the impulse and inspiration of today, if Americans are not content to be represented in literature by snobbish boys trying to write like “ladies,” and women who write without effort like the deuce knows what. When we say we appeal to the younger people it must not be thought that we appeal to the children—although since they are so far more critical than their grandparents, we shall not dare to forget them altogether. We mean that we desire to enlist the interests and sympathies of our own generation—say those born sometime in the sixties and since. Our grandparents may be very good folk and quite smart in getting around today, but they were largely brought up on almanacs, and their literary tastes are narrow and eccentric without being picturesque. They belong to ancient times without holding the antique novelties of the really far away ancient times, which were really more in touch with the intellectual bustle and eager curiosity of our day than those gray years of smug Anglo-Saxon absorption in a civilization of mere bread and beer that lie immediately behind us, and still cast the chill shadow of their prurient morality over all our literature. Even some of the direct parents of this generation are a little threadbare in their craniums. They have read domestic literature all their lives and of course are incapable of thought. The stirring gray matter is found in the heads of those born not much further back, say, than ’49, the year of gold. Let us resolve to make this fin de siecle the golden age of American literature. And if there are, as I suspect there are, some belated grandparents still on earth, animated with the spirit and ideals of Milton and the Martyrs, young at heart in their enthusiasm for the truth, for the art that touches and ennobles life, and for freedom of thought and expression, these are of us also, and will gladly find in the Fly Leaf, in its burst of youth, the ideals that have always permeated robust and honest literature—especially in the old days when a man might swing or burn for an audacious pamphlet. With such old fogies we have no bone of contention. But the old fogies in petticoats, the gingerbread writers, we shall probably toss up in a blanket nine times as high as the moon—when we are not so pressed for space and time. [7] [8] GREY EYES. Brown eyes for passion and blue eyes for life, Pink eyes and green eyes and black eyes for strife, But the eyes of my love are grey. Bright eyes that are happy, dull eyes that are sad, Wide innocent eyes and eyes to make mad, But I love the soft eyes that are grey. I love the soft eyes that are grey, love, And grey’ll be the eyes of the angels above, For in heaven your eyes will be grey. Sherwin Cody. A GEOLOGICAL PARABLE. It was at the place afterwards called Solenhofen. The weather was miserable, as Jurassic weather usually was. The rain beat steadily down, and carbon dioxide was still upon the earth. The Archaeopteryx was feeling pretty gloomy, for at that morning’s meeting of the Amalgamated Association of Enaliosaurians he had been blackballed. He was looked down upon by the Pterodactyl and the Ichthyosaurus deigned not to notice him. Cast out by the Reptilia, and Aves not being thought of, he became a wanderer upon the face of the earth. “Alas!” sighed the poor Archaeopteryx, “this world is no place for me.” And he laid him down and died; and became imbedded in the rock. And ages afterward a featherless biped, called man, dug him up, and marvelled at him, crying, “Lo, the original Avis and fountain-head of all our feathered flocks!” And they placed him with great reverence in a case, and his name became a by-word in the land. But the Archaeopteryx knew it not. And the descendant for whom he had suffered and died strutted proudly about the barn-yard, crowing lustily cock-a-doodle-do! S. P. Carrick, Jr. [9] THE WAIL OF THE HACK WRITER. Ah, dreary is the toil for dull And shallow thought—the chaff-choked grain, That comes from just beneath the skull, Not from the brain within the brain. But all the dull, chaff-nourished tribe Must have its favorite food of bran, And he who writes must let the scribe Murder the poet in the man. Oft must he stem the tides that roll From thought’s interior deep, and, dead To their far voices, sell his soul— No, not for gold, for bread. And he must leave the heights that shine And hasten down their arduous steeps To feed the million-throated swine, That gulps its garbage and then sleeps. Sam Walter Foss. [10] ADONIS IN TATTERS. A PARABLE ON THE POWER OF BEAUTY. The audience at a parlor lecture in a Beacon Street drawing room is apt to be rather intense and rapt in its attention, and discreet in its enthusiasm, with the emphasis of discernment which subdued, well-bred applause confers. At Mrs. Reginald Beveridge Vincent’s this is always particularly noticeable, for Mrs. Vincent is one of the social law givers of the “smart” set, and her rooms on these occasions are thronged with all sorts of ambitious social strugglers, who pay insidious homage to their hostess in their admiration of the idols for whom she stands sponsor. There are all sorts of people here, and among them many of the great army of the small celebrities, who are somewhat more distinguished than prosperous, and who would fain pass from the appreciation of imaginative literature to the serious consideration of dining. The fact is, the socially nebulous, who rebel against their birth’s invidious bar and strive to get out of the obscurity of the mass of humanity, are really the backbone of the enthusiasm for letters in fashionable society. These rather dubious folk, with no redeeming big bank account, are spurred by ambition to attach themselves to some sort of superiority—the superiority not always inherently residing in them; and so literature becomes their easy spoil. They constitute the one stable element in all literary gatherings out of Grub Street; and even Mrs. Vincent, with all her social prestige, could not dispense with them. And so they come, and dream of passing the rubicon, and so on to more important functions. There are many who are considered good enough and worthy to sit at a feast of reason and a flow of soul, who would never be deemed eligible for the holier function of stuffing with baked meats and wines. These literary afternoons, it may be noted, for the benefit of the ambitious, serve an incidental purpose as a sort of preliminary investigation into the character, standing and desirability of new acquaintances. Many are called to the feast of literature —but few are chosen to break bread at dinner. But the success of parlor lectures, at the most dispiriting hour of the afternoon in winter when the city streets are sunless and melancholy and depressing, depends almost entirely upon the lure of social hopes, that influence the more or less obscure to give up the comfort of their mediocre leisure to swell the triumph of those who secure the glory of the passing show of life. The woman who wants to shine as a patron of the fine arts must not neglect these mixed social elements, or her rooms will be empty. Exemplary activity in church politics and an interest in letters, are the humble beginnings, the corduroy roads, as it were, of many who ultimately shine with more certain lustre as leaders of the german. Therefore, every wise blue stocking is affable and accessible to the crowd of dubious persons whose admirations may be depended upon—unless hope burns stronger in some other quarter. One thing is certain: the grand dames of the upper social heavens are not to be depended upon when literature or philosophy is the only attraction offered, even when a grand dame is herself holding the reception. There are so many petty jealousies, and so many rival courts; and, moreover, the grand dames have so many questions of social diplomacy to occupy them—men, for instance (nice, eligible men are scarce); consequently they do not often come under the spell of the literary impressario, who gains a precarious subsistence in the lap of luxury; and, besides, the afternoon is the meridian of the shopping fever. The large drawing room was crowded on this particular afternoon, and Mrs. Vincent was in high feather, for she had secured the new poet of the season, Mr. Blanco Winterbourne, to give his lecture on “Ideals of Beauty in Modern Life.” This was in itself a victory. Winterbourne was a brand new poet, who had dropped straight from the skies and been immediately accepted in London, so that he had all the freshness and glamour of a debutante, and his reputation being still in the making in the inner circles of society, the gold dust was still upon his wings, unbrushed and untarnished by the chill after-thoughts of envious Grub Street criticism. Everybody sat in an attitude of rare rapture, and every time the lecturer uttered some especially well sounding and uplifting sentiment, and paused a moment for the rapid click of eyes, some fine idealist in the group would fix the hostess’s wandering glance with a gleam of appreciation. This was intended to isolate him in her memory as a man of discernment and culture worthy of remembrance in the Elysian domain of dining. There is indeed something almost pathetic in this intense concentration of mind, this painful anxiety of appreciation, which is so evidently the tribute to the hostess and not to the new genius himself. Only so much rapture goes to the lecturer as appearances demand. The glory of the occasion belongs to the patron; for skill and talent are largely a matter of labor and discipline, whereas the recognition of excellence is the quick flash of pure intellect, genius! But the audience is charitable enough, and the most terrible ordeal for the lecturer, fresh from Parnassus or Grub Street, is the pervasive and distracting rustling and swishing of silken skirts—a sound that is the most tangible symbol of women’s potent whims in the sensuous consciousness of man. There was one exception to the general air of complete absorption and satisfaction, and this was a queer, oval cynical face, half in the light of the waning day, and half in the shadow of the curtains. It belonged to a young man, who leaned half forward in a rigid, high-backed chair, and alternately glanced curiously from face to face in the audience, and then turned completely about and looked out across the bare tree-tops of the Common. A look of weariness, and even of contempt, crept about his eyes and mouth, as certain high-flown phrases reached his ears. Here is a bit of rapid rhetoric that evoked the applause of the company, and made him only curl his lip. “The dominion of beauty obtains forever in the human heart, and so long as this is so, no class nor humanity at large can be utterly bad; for the discernment of beauty involves the recognition of moral feeling. All permanent beauty is essentially moral and is sure of ready acceptance, especially among women, in whom the religious instinct is strongest. Modern life can never annihilate this innate and instinctive perception of intellectual nobility and pure beauty. Nay, since the form is the body of the soul, the finest type of pure physical beauty will always rightly command our admiration. It breaks through all creeds and castes, and holds the race in unity of feeling and thought.” [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] The lecture closed in a culminating clapping of hands, and the guests all moved forward to congratulate the lecturer and the patron. The young man turned and studied the different groups with an amused smile. A lady, who had been watching the young man’s mocking comment on the scene in the changing expression of his eyes and pursed lips, suddenly arose from a divan in the angle of the room, and crossed over to where he sat in the afternoon twilight. She stopped him from arising with a gesture, and sank down into a seat beside him. “You do not seem particularly pleased with Mr. Blanco Winterbourne’s lecture?” “Well, it doesn’t interest me, because you see I come into contact with life as it really is. I have heard all this cant about the beauty of purity and character before so many times, but when I see beauty of character in life I find it always taken advantage of. And as for the dignity of physical beauty, I need scarcely tell one of your sex the difference between a beauty in rags and a beauty in silks.” “Oh, but I protest, that although the world is gross, and the half of us are mere Mammon worshippers, there is an instinct of delight, and irresistible attraction for us, especially for we women, in sheer beauty without any trappings of finery.” “Ah, indeed; that sounds like the magnanimity of humanity, universally asserted by popular moralists. But your sex is really the least amenable, as I could easily prove to you.” “Then prove it.” “I will, if you can put on your hat and coat and come at once.” “Well, I’m in a blaze of curiosity for the adventure.” As they crossed Beacon Street a beggar boy stepped up to them, and in piping tones of want asked the lady for alms. She glanced for a moment into his face with a blank look of negation on her own, and with a sort of comprehensive intake of his dirt and rags she gathered her skirts about her and passed through the turnpike and down the steps to the Common. But her companion lingered behind, and presently joined her, half dragging the boy by his tattered sleeve. “Come here, Miss Lorillard, and look at the boy. I want to know if this isn’t beauty?” She turned and looked into the boy’s face, as her companion held it up to the light between his two hands. The extraordinary and perfect beauty of his features seized upon her in a sort of wonderment. Where had she ever seen such a face before?—And her memory swept through the galleries of Europe. In none of them. How was it she had not noticed it at first? The dirt? It was incomparable—it seemed superhuman in its sweetness and beauty, its appeal, and its glow of divinity. God’s hand was plainly set in that face. “This is the boy,” said the young man, laconically, watching her expression. “Come along.” And linking his arm in that of the ragged youngster, the trio sauntered along with the fashionable throng coming out of the matinees. “Get out of my way, you ugly little sweep,” said one woman, elbowing the boy off the pavement; and the men pushed him hither and thither. The fashionable women looked right through the ragged urchin and his evidently dubious companions, as if they were glass, and their gaze seemed to bite like frost. Not one woman remarked the surpassing loveliness of the boy’s perfect face. At the corner of the Common the young man sent the boy about his business. “Who is he, and what does all this mean?” “That is Adonis—the one-time victor of Venus. He fell upon evil days when clothes made the king, and rags the knave.” Walter Blackburn Harte. [16] [17] [18] LIFE. I sometimes think life is but a see-saw board, with hope at one end and despair at the other. First hope goes up, and despair goes down, and then it reverses. There seems to be no break in the steady rise and fall. We live on, clinging to the belief that hope will outbalance despair, but it does not, and men come and men go, and life still teeters away. Joseph Andrews Cone. [19] A SONNET FOR POETS. Sometimes birds sing not though the morn is fair; Sometimes flowers folded lie beneath the sun; Sometimes no dew falls though the day is done; Sometimes where fruit should grow the branch is bare; Sometimes the truest poet must forbear To make his music, though the hour is one With perfect beauty ended and begun: Sometimes his power has left him to despair, Sometimes he standeth spelled and dumb, though all Is great around him, though he plainly sees The beauty, and the grand sound plainly hears. But if, ere glories vanish, it befall That his sweet tongue doth loosen; as it frees He thrills with rapture, hymning through his tears. William Francis Barnard.