The Inventions of the Idiot

IX

A Clearing-house for Poets

"How is your Muse these days, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Bibliomaniac one Sunday morning while the mush was being served.

"Flourishing," said the Idiot. "Just flourishing – and no more."

"I should think you'd be pleased if she is flourishing," said the Doctor.

"I'd rather she'd stop flourishing and do a little writing," said the Idiot. "She's a queer Muse, that one of mine. She has all the airs and graces of an ordinary type-writer with an unconquerable aversion to work."

"You look upon your Muse as you would upon your type-writer, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog.

"Yes," said the Idiot. "That's all my Muse is, and she isn't even a capable type-writer. The general run of type-writers make sense of what you write, but my Muse won't. You may not believe it, but out of ten inspirations I had last week not one of them is fit for publication anywhere but in a magazine or a puzzle column. I don't know what is the matter with her, but when I sit down to dictate a comic sonnet she turns it into a serious jingle, and vice versa. We can't seem to get our moods to fit. When I want to be serious she's flippant, and when I become flippant she's serious."

"She must be very serious most of the time," said the Doctor.

"She is," said the Idiot, innocently. "But that's only because I'm flippant most of the time. I'm going to give her warning. If she doesn't brace up and take more interest in her work I'm going to get another Muse, that's all. I can't afford to have my income cut down fifty per cent. just because she happens to be fickle."

"Maybe she is flirting with somebody else," suggested the Poet. "My Muse does that occasionally."

"I doubt it," said the Idiot. "I haven't observed any other poet encroaching upon my particular province. Even you, good as you are, can't do it. But in any event I'm going to have a change. The day has gone by when a one-muse poet achieves greatness. I'm going to employ a half-dozen and try to corner the poetry market. Queer that in all these years that men have been writing poetry no one has thought of that. People get up grain corners, corners in railway stock, monopolies in gas and oil and everything else, about, but as yet no poet has cornered the market in his business."

"That's easily accounted for," said the Bibliomaniac. "The poet controls only his own work, and if he has any sense he doesn't want to monopolize that."

"That isn't my scheme at all," said the Idiot. "You have a monopoly of your own work always if you choose to avail yourself of it, and, as you say, a man would be crazy to do so. What I'd like to see established is a sort of Poetic Clearing-house Association. Supposing, for instance, that I opened an office in Wall Street – a Bank for Poets, in which all writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw against them just as they do in ordinary banks with their money. It would be fine. Take a man like Swinburne, for instance, or our friend here. Our poet could take a sonnet he had written, endorse it, and put it in the bank. He'd be credited with one sonnet, and wouldn't have to bother his head about it afterwards. He could draw against it. If the Clearing-house company could dispose of it to a magazine his draft would be honored in cash to its full value, less discount charges, which would include postage and commissions to the company."

"And suppose the company failed to dispose of it?" suggested the Poet.

"They'd do just as ordinary banks do with checks – stamp it 'Not Good,'" said the Idiot. "That, however, wouldn't happen very often if the concern had an intelligent receiving-teller to detect counterfeits. If the receiving-teller were a man fit for the position and a poet brought in a quatrain with five lines in it, he could detect it at once and hand it back. So with comic poems. I might go there with a poem I thought was comic, and proceed to deposit it with the usual deposit slip. The teller would look at it a second, scrutinize the humor carefully, and then if it was not what I thought it, would stamp it 'Not Comic' or 'Counterfeit.' It is perfectly simple."

"Very simple," said Mr. Pedagog. "Though I should have used a synonym of simple to describe it. It's idiotic."

"That's what people said of Columbus's idea that he could discover America," said the Idiot. "Everything that doesn't have dollars slathered all over it in plain view is idiotic."

"The word slathered is new to me," said the School-master; "but I fancy I know what you mean."

"The word slathered may be new to you," said the Idiot, "but it is a good word. I have used it with great effect several times. Whenever any one asks me that foolish question that is asked so often, 'What is the good word?' I always reply 'Slathered,' and the what's-the-good-word fiend goes off hurt in his mind. He doesn't know what I mean any more than I do, but it shuts him up completely, which is just so much gained."

"I must confess," said the Poet, "that I cannot myself see where there is any money for your Rhyme Clearing-house. Ordinarily I quite approve of your schemes, but in this instance I go over to the enemy."

"I don't say that it is a gold-mine," said the Idiot. "I doubt if I had every cent that is paid for poetry in a year by everybody to everybody that my income would reach one hundredth part of what I'd receive as a successful manufacturer of soap; but there would be more money in poetry than there is if by some pooling of our issues we could corner the market. Suppose every writer of a quatrain in America should send his whole product to us. We could say to the magazines, 'Gentlemen, quatrains are not quatraining as hard as they were. If you need a four-line bit of gloom and rhyme to finish off your thirty-second page, our price is twenty-five dollars instead of seventy-five cents, as of yore.' So with all other kinds of verse. We'd simply name our figure, force the editors to accept it, and unload. We might get caught on the last thirty or forty thousand, but our profits on the others would enable us to more than meet the losses."

"And would you pay the author the twenty-five dollars?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.

"Not if we were sane," replied the Idiot. "We'd pay the author two dollars and fifty cents, which is one dollar and seventy-five cents more than he gets now. He couldn't complain."

"And those that you couldn't sell?" asked the Bibliomaniac.

"We'd simply mark 'Not Good' and return to the author. That's what happens to him now, so no objection could be raised to that. But there's still another side to this matter," said the Idiot. "Publishers would be quite as anxious to help it along as the poets. Dealing through us, they would be spared the necessity of interviewing poets, which I am informed is always painful because of the necessity which publishers labor under to give the poet to understand that they are in the business for profit, not for pleasure or mere love of sinking money in a magazine. So the publishers would keep a standing account of hard cash in our bank. Say a magazine used one hundred dollars' worth of verse in a month. The publisher at the beginning of the year would deposit twelve hundred dollars with us, and throughout the year would draw out sonnets, ballads, or pastels-in-metre just as he needed them. The checks would read something like this: 'The Poets' Clearing-house Association of the City of New York will pay to John Bluepencil, Editor, or Order, Ten Sonnets. (Signed) Blank Brothers & Co.' Or perhaps we'd receive a notice from a Southern publisher to this effect: 'Have drawn on you at sight for eight quatrains and a triolet.' Now, when you consider how many publishers there are who would always keep a cash balance in the treasury, you begin to get some notion as to how we could meet our running expenses and pay our quarterly dividends to our stockholders anyhow; and as for future dividends, I believe our loan department would net us a sufficient amount to make the stock gilt-edged."

"You would have a loan department, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog.

"That would be popular," said the Poet; "but there again I dispute the profit. You could find plenty of poets who would borrow your funds, but I doubt the security of the loans."

"All of your objections are based on misconceptions," said the Idiot. "The loan department would not lend money. It would lend poems for a consideration to those who are short and who need them to fulfil their obligations."

"Who on earth would want to borrow a poem, I'd like to know?" said the Bibliomaniac.

"Lovers, chiefly," said the Idiot. "Never having been a poet yourself, sir, you have no notion how far the mere faculty of being able to dash off a sonnet to a lady's eyebrow helps a man along in ultimately becoming the possessor of that eyebrow, together with the rest of the lady. I have seen women won, sir, by a rondeau. In fact, I have myself completely routed countless unpoetic rivals by exploding in their ranks burning quatrains to the fair objects of our affections. With woman the man who can write a hymn of thanksgiving that he is permitted to gaze into her cerulean orbs has a great advantage over the wight who has to tell her she has dandy blue eyes in commonplace prose. The commonplace-prose wight knows it, too, and he'd pay ten per cent. of his salary during courtship if he could devise a plan by means of which he could pass himself off as a poet. To meet this demand, our loan department would be established. An unimaginative lover could come in and describe the woman he adored; the loan clerk would fish out a sonnet to fit the girl, and the lover could borrow it for ten days, just as brokers borrow stock. Armed with this he could go up to Harlem, or wherever else the maiden lived, and carry consternation into the hearts of his rivals by spouting the sonnet as nonchalantly as though he had just thought of it. So it would go on. For the following call he could borrow a ballad singing the glories of her raven locks, likening them to the beautiful night, or, if the locks were red instead of black, to the aurora borealis."

"You'd have trouble finding a rhyme to borealis," said the Poet.

"Tutt!" said the Idiot. "What's the matter with 'Glory, Alice,' 'Listen to my story, Alice,' 'I'm going to war so gory, Alice,' 'I fear you are a Tory, Alice' (this for a Revolutionary poem), or 'Come rowing in my dory, Alice'? There's no end to 'em."

"If you'll write a rhyming dictionary I'll buy a copy," was the Poet's sole comment.

"That will come later," said the Idiot. "Once get our clearing-house established, we can branch out into a general Poetry Trust and Supply Company that will make millions. We'll make so much money, by Jove!" he added, slapping the table enthusiastically, "that we can afford to go into the publishing business ourselves and bring out volumes of verse for anybody and everybody. We can deal in Fame! A man that couldn't write his own name so that anybody could read it could come to us and say: 'Gentlemen, I've got everything but brains. I want to be an author and 'mongst the authors stand. I am told it is delightful to see one's book in print. I haven't a book, but I've got a dollar or two, and if you'll put out a first-class book of poems under my name I'll pay all expenses and give you a royalty of twenty per cent. on every copy I give away!' No money in it? Bah! You gentlemen don't know. If you say fortune would not wait upon this venture I say you are the kind of men who would sell government bonds for their value as mere engravings if you had the chance."

"You certainly do draw a roseate picture," said Mr. Whitechoker.

"I do indeed," said the Idiot, "and the paint is laid on thick."

"Well, I hope it goes," said the Poet. "I'll make a deposit the first day of three hundred and sixty-seven ballads, four hundred and twenty-three couplets, eighty-nine rondeaus, and one epic about ten yards in length, all of which I have in my desk at this moment."

"Very well," said the Idiot, rising, "With that encouragement from you I feel warranted in ordering the 'Not Good' stamp at least."

X

Some Electrical Suggestions

"If I were beginning life all over again," said the Idiot, "I'd be an electrician. It seems to me that of all modern pursuits, barring architecture perhaps, electricity is the most fascinating."

"There's probably more money in it than there is in Idiocy, too, I fancy," said the Bibliomaniac, dryly.

"Well, I should think so," assented the Idiot. "Idiocy is merely an intellectual diversion. Electricity is a practical science. Idiocy cannot be said to be anything more than a luxury, while electricity has become a necessity. I do not even claim that any real lasting benefit can come to the world through Idiocy, but in electricity are possibilities, not yet realized, for which the world will be distinctly better and happier."

"It is kind of you to speak so highly of electricity," said the Doctor. "The science may now advance, knowing that you approve."

"Approve?" cried the Idiot. "Approve is not the word, sir. I enthuse – and why should I not, feeling, as I do, that in the electrical current lies the germ of the Elixir of Life! I thoroughly believe that a bottle of liquefied electricity would make us all young."

"Then don't take it!" said the School-master. "You have suffered from an aggravated case of youngness for as long a time as I have known you. Pray do nothing to intensify your youth."

"I fear I shall be forced to deny myself that pleasure, Mr. Pedagog," returned the Idiot, mildly, "for the unhappy reason that as yet the formula for the Electrical Elixir has not been discovered; that it will be discovered before I die I hope and pray, because, unlike the man in the hymn, I would live always. I'd like to be an immortal."

"An immortal Idiot! Think of it!" said the Doctor.

"I didn't expect much sympathy from you, Dr. Capsule," said the Idiot. "The man with car-horses to sell does not dote upon the trolley-car."

"The application of the allegory is not entirely apparent," said the Doctor.

"No?" said the Idiot. "I am surprised. I thought you intellectuals absorbed ideas more quickly. To deal in plain terms, since it appears to be necessary, a plan which involves the indefinite extension of mortal life and the elimination of bodily ills is not likely to receive the hearty endorsement of the medical profession. If a man could come home on a stormy night and offset the deleterious effects of wet feet by swallowing an electric pill, one containing two volts, like a two-grain quinine pill, for instance, with greater certainty than one feels in taking quinine, your profession would have to put up the shutters and go into some such business as writing articles on 'Measles as It Used to Be,' or 'Disorders of the Ante-Electrical Period.' The fine part of it all is that we should not have to rely for our medicines upon the state of the arsenic market, or the quinine supply, or the squill product of the year. Electric sparks can be made without number whether the sun shines or not. The failure of the Peruvian Bark Crop, or the destruction by an early frost of the Castor Oil Wells, would cease to be a hideous possibility to delicate natures. They could all fail for all mankind need fear, for electricity can be generated when and wherever one has need of it. If your electric pills were used up, and the chemist too far away from your house for you to get the supply replenished at the moment, you could put on your slippers and by walking up and down your carpeted floor for ten or fifteen minutes generate enough electricity to see you through. Of course you'd have to have a pair of dynamic-storage-reservoir slippers to catch the sparks as they flew, but I fancy they'd be less costly in the long run than the medicines we have to-day."

"Why have wet feet at all if electricity is to be so all-powerful?" suggested Mr. Whitechoker. "Why not devise an electrical foot-protector and ward off all possibility of damp, cold feet?"

"You couldn't do that with men and women constituted as they are," said the Idiot. "Your foot-protector would no doubt be a good thing, but so are rubber overshoes. Nothing will ever be patented to compel a man to keep his feet dry, and he won't do it except under compulsion, but once having his feet wet he will seek the remedy. It's the Elixir of Life that I bank on most, however. I don't believe there is one among us, excepting Mrs. Pedagog, to whom twenty-five was not the most delightful period of existence. To Mrs. Pedagog, as to all women, eighteen is the limit. But men at twenty-five and women at eighteen know so much, enjoy so much, regard themselves so highly! There is nothing blasé about them then. Disillusion – which I think ought to be called dissolution – comes later. At thirty a man discovers that the things he knew at twenty-five aren't so; and as for a woman at twenty-five, if so be she is unmarried, her life is empty, and if so be she is married, she has cares in the shape of children and a husband, who as a theory was a poet, but who as a reality is a mere business machine who is oftentimes no fonder of staying at home than he was before he was married and went out to see her every night."

"What a wise little pessimist he is!" said Mr. Pedagog to the Doctor.

"Very. But I fail to comprehend why he branches off into Pessimism when Electricity was his text," said the Doctor.

"Because he's the Id – " began the Bibliomaniac, but the Idiot interrupted him.

"Don't jump fences, gentlemen, before you know whether they are made of barbed wire or not. I'm coming to the points you are bringing up, and if you are not careful they may puncture you," he said. "I am not in any sense a pessimist. Quite the contrary. I am an optimist. I'm not old enough or cross-grained enough as yet to be a pessimist, and it's because I don't want to be a pessimist that I want this Elixir of Electricity to hurry up and have itself patented. If men when they reached the age of twenty-five, and women at eighteen, would begin to take this they might live to be a thousand and yet retain all the spirit and feelings of twenty-five and eighteen. That's the connection, Dr. Capsule. If I could be twenty-five all my life I'd be as happy as a bird – and if I were the Poet here I'd immortalize that idea in verse —

"That's a good idea," returned the Poet. "I'll make a note of that, and if I sell it I'll give you a commission."

"No, don't do that," said the Idiot, slyly. "I shall be satisfied to see your name in print."

The Poet having accepted this sally in the spirit in which it was intended, the Idiot resumed:

"But of course the Elixir and the Electrical Pills are as yet all in the air. We haven't even taken a step in that direction. Mr. Edison and other wizards have been too much occupied with electric lights and telephones and phonographs and transatlantic notions to pay any attention to schemes to prolong life and keep us, despite our years, perpetually young."

"I fancy they are likely to continue to do so," said the Doctor. "Whatever motive you may attribute to me for pooh-poohing your notions, I do so. No sane person wants to live forever, and if it were possible that all men might live forever, you'd soon find the world so crowded that the slighter actors in the human comedy would be shoved off the stage. There are enough people in the world now, without man's adding all future generations to their number and making death an impossibility."

"That's all nonsense," said the Idiot. "My Elixir wouldn't make death an impossibility. Any man who thought he'd had enough at the end of a thousand years could stop taking the Elixir and shuffle off the mortal coil. As a matter of fact, not more than ten per cent. of the people in the world would have any faith in the Elixir at all. I know people to-day who do not take advantage of the many patent remedies that are within their reach, preferring the mustard-plaster and catnip-tea of their forefathers. There's where human nature works again. I believe that if I were myself the discoverer of the formula for my mixture, and for an advertisement secured a letter from a man saying, 'I was dying of old age, having reached the advanced period of ninety-seven; I took two bottles of your Electrical Elixir and am now celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday again,' ninety-nine per cent. of the people who read it would laugh and think it had strayed out of the funny column. People lack confidence in their fellow-men – that's all; but if they were twenty-five and eighteen that would all be changed. We are very trustful at twenty-five and eighteen, which is one of the things I like about those respective ages. When I was twenty-five I believed in everybody, including myself. Now – well, I'm older. But enough of schemes, which I must admit are somewhat visionary – as the telephone would have seemed one hundred years ago. Let us come down to realities in electricity. I can't see why more is not made of the phonograph for the benefit of the public. Take a man like Chauncey M. De Choate. He goes here and he goes there to make speeches, when I've no doubt he'd much prefer to stay at home cutting coupons off his bonds. Why can't the phonograph voice do his duty? Instead of making the same speech over and over again, why can't some electrician so improve the phonograph that De Choate can say what he has to say through a funnel, have it impressed on a cylinder, duplicated and reduplicated and scattered broadcast over the world? If Mr. Edison could impart what poets call stentorian tones to the phonograph, he'd be doing a great and noble work. Again, for smaller things, like a dance, Why can't the phonograph be made useful at a ball? I attended one the other night, and when I wanted to dance the two-step the band played the polka; if I wished the polka it played a waltz. Some men can only dance the two-step – they don't know the waltz, the polka, or the schottische. Now why can't the phonograph come to the rescue? In almost any hotel in New York you can drop a nickel in a slot and hear Sousa's band on the phonograph. Why not extend the principle and have a phonograph for men who can dance nothing but the two-step, charged with 'The Washington Post March,' and supplied with four tubes with receivers to put in the ears of the listeners? Make it small enough for a man to carry in his pocket; then at a ball he could go up to a young lady, ask her to dance, put two of the receivers in her ears, two in his, and trip the light fantastic toe utterly independently of what other people were dancing. It's possible. Mr. Edison could do it in five minutes, and every one would be satisfied. It might be rather droll to see two people dancing the two-step while eight others were fastened on to a lanciers phonograph, and a dozen or more other couples were dancing respectively the waltz, schottische, and Virginia reel, but we'd soon get used to that, and no man need become a wall-flower because he couldn't dance the dance that happened to be on. Furthermore, you'd be able to do away with the musicians, who always cast a pall over dances because of their superiority to the rest of the world in general and the dancers in particular."