Post Impressions Part 11

Mid-irons (guaranteed not to cut).

Advertising.

And countless other things which every one can imagine being different in a better-organised world than ours.

But does your advertising expert recognise the distinction between things which must under no consideration be different and things which must be made different if they are to find acceptance? Not in the least.

In season and out he sounds his poor little catch-word, and frightens away as many customers as he attracts. Under such circ.u.mstances one can only wonder why advertising should continue to be the best-paid branch of American literature. Of what use are the Science of Advertising, the Psychology of Advertising, the Dynamics of Advertising, the Ethics of Advertising, the Phonetics of Advertising, the Strategy and Tactics and Small-Fire Manuals of Advertising--on all of which subjects I have perused countless volumes--if all this theoretical study will not teach a man that it is appropriate to say: "Try our latest Hall Caine, it is different," and quite out of place to say, "Try our quart measures, they are different"?

Between the things that must never be different and the things that ought never to be the same, there is a vast cla.s.s of commodities which may be the same or may be different according to choice. Linen collars, musical machines, newspapers, ignition systems, interior decoration--it is evident that some people may like them the same and some people may like them different. My own inclinations, as I have intimated, are toward the same, but my sympathies are with those who want things different. The argument advanced by the advertiser in behalf of his latest three-b.u.t.ton, long-hipped, university sack with rolling collar, that it is different and that it radiates my individuality, leaves me cold. I am not moved by the plea that the rolling-collar effect is so different that a quarter-million suits of that model have already been sold west of the Alleghanies. I remain indifferent on being told that the three-b.u.t.ton effect would radiate my individuality even as it is radiating the individuality of ten thousand citizens of Spokane. When it is a choice between wearing unindividual clothes of my own or being different with a hundred thousand others, I suppose I must be cla.s.sed as a reactionary and a fossil.

XIX

ACADEMIC FREEDOM

The approaching end of another college year gives peculiar timeliness to the following account of a recent meeting of the Supercollegiate Committee on Entrance Examinations. For the details of the story I am indebted to the able and conscientious correspondent of the Disa.s.sociated Press at Nottingham. The discerning reader will have no difficulty in identifying the persons mentioned. Professor Munsterberg is, of course, Professor Munsterberg. Professor Lounsbury is Professor Lounsbury. Professor Hart is Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Dr. Woods Hutchinson is Dr. Woods Hutchinson.

Professor Munsterberg: The meeting will please come to order. We are now in the first week of October. This fact, which the average citizen has probably accepted without question, has been amply confirmed in an elaborate series of laboratory tests carried on by means of white and yellow cards and rapidly revolving disks. Thus we are prepared to discuss once more the highly interesting question, why the vast majority of freshmen cannot spell. Neither can they write their native tongue in accordance with the rules of grammar.

Professor Lounsbury: Aw, gee! Why should they? Look at Chaucer, Milton, and Browning. The fiercest bunch of little spellers you ever saw. And their grammar is simply rotten. They didn't care a red cent for the grammarians. When they saw a word or a phrase they liked they went to it. If the grammarians didn't agree with them it was up to the grammarians. Chaucer should worry.

Dr. Hutchinson: Quite right.

Professor Lounsbury: The question is this: Are freshmen made for the English language or is language made for freshmen? Language is like a human being; change does it good. Stick to your Lindley Murray and it's a cinch your little old English tongue will be a dead one in fifty years.

Dr. Hutchinson: I agree with Professor Lounsbury, speaking from the standpoint of physiology. Constant use of a plural verb with a plural subject plays the deuce with the larynx. You know what the larynx is, gentlemen. It's the rubber disk in the human Victrola. Drop the pin on the rubber disk and the record will grind out the same formula, again and again. Keep it up long enough and the record wears out. That's the larynx under the operation of grammatical rules. It gets the habit, and the first law of health is to avoid all habits. What you want to do is to shake up the larynx by feeding it with new forms of expression. When a man says "I done it," it imparts a healthy jolt to the delicate muscles of the throat, limbers up his aorta and his diaphragm, and reconciles him with his digestion. This is the opinion of eminent physiologists, like Drinckheimer of Leipzig.

Professor Lounsbury: Whom did you say the man is?

Dr. Hutchinson: Drinckheimer, professor at Leipzig. He doesn't write for the magazines.

Professor Lounsbury: Then you agree with me that when a man has something to say he will say it?

Professor Munsterberg: We have an excellent ill.u.s.tration on this point in a history paper submitted in the last entrance examinations. In reply to the question, "Name the first two Presidents of the United States,"

one candidate wrote, "The first pressident was Gorge Was.h.i.+ngton; his predecea.s.sor was Alexander Hamilton." Observe the extraordinary psychological correlation between thought and expression in such a reply.

Professor Hart: I don't think the young man was guilty of an injustice with regard to Alexander Hamilton. You will recall that Hamilton was one of the princ.i.p.al founders of the system of privilege which has produced, in our own day, Lorimerism and the purchase of Southern delegates. If it had not been for Hamilton and his crowd we should not now be compelled to wage a campaign for social justice and I should not be under the necessity of writing Bull Moose history for _Collier's_.

Dr. Hutchinson: But getting back to the real point of our inquiry, whether the failure to spell and write correctly is a sign of mental feebleness--

Professor Munsterberg: On that point I believe I can speak with authority. Psychological tests in the laboratory show that the average freshman is as quick-witted to-day as his predecessor of fifty or a hundred years ago. We examined three hundred first-year men from eleven colleges and universities. Each man was required to peep into a dark box, shaped like a camera, through an eye-hole sixteen millimetres in diameter. By pressing a b.u.t.ton, light was flashed upon a slip of paper inside the box, on which was printed, in letters nine millimetres high, the following question: "What is your favourite breakfast food?" The candidate was required to signify his answer by tapping with his finger on the table, one tap for Farinetta, two taps for Dried Husks, three taps for Atlas Crumbs, and so forth. The average time for three hundred answers was six and seven-tenths seconds. Thereupon the candidates were asked to think over the question at their leisure and to hand in a written answer sworn to before a notary public. On comparing the written answers with the laboratory results, it appeared that only thirty-seven out of the three hundred had tapped the wrong answer. Need I say more?

Professor Lounsbury: May I ask how the written answers showed up from the point of view of spelling and grammar?

Professor Munsterberg: They were impressively defective.

Professor Lounsbury: I'm tickled to death. When you cut out bad spelling and grammar, you queer the evolution of the English language. There's nothing to it.

Professor Munsterberg: But take the case of the freshman squad whom we kept in a hermetically sealed room for twenty-four hours at a temperature of eighty-nine degrees--

Professor Lounsbury: May I ask what their language was when they were released at the end of twenty-four hours?

Professor Munsterberg: Truth compels me to say it was something awful.

Professor Lounsbury: But how about the grammar?

Professor Munsterberg: There was no grammar to speak of. They used mostly interjections.

Dr. Hutchinson: Finest thing in the world, interjections. Good for the lungs and the heart. Rapid process of inhalation and expulsion keeps the bellows in prime order. That's all a man is, gentlemen, a bellows on a pair of stilts driven by a hydraulic pump. If the bellows holds out under sudden strain, that's all you want. That's why I like to hear people swear. It's good for the wind. Next time you walk down a step too many in the dark or lose your hat under a motor truck, don't hold yourself back. It's the way nature is safeguarding you against asthma.

Professor Munsterberg: Then it is the consensus of opinion here that the psychological and cultural status of our college freshmen is everything it ought to be?

Professor Hart: I'd rather take the opinion of a roomful of freshmen on any subject than the opinion of the United States Supreme Court. They don't know anything about American history, but it's the kind of history that isn't worth knowing. I prefer them to know things as they ought to have been rather than as they were before the Progressive party was born. Whatever is worth preserving from the past, including the Decalogue, will be found in the Bull Moose platform. We don't want examination papers. We want social justice.

Professor Lounsbury: Between you and I, the English language won't get what's coming to it until all entrance examinations have been chucked into the discard.

Dr. Hutchinson: Spelling is demonstrably bad for the muscles of the chest and the abdomen.

Professor Lounsbury: You've said it.

XX

THE HEAVENLY MAID

As the familiar sound fell upon our ears, we walked to the window, drew aside the curtains, and shamelessly stared into the windows of the apartment across the court. That usually quiet home had been in evident agitation all that afternoon. There was the noise of hurrying feet.

Excited voices broke out now and then. Twice a woman scolded and we distinctly heard a child cry. Now the mystery was explained.

"The new Orpheola has come," said Emmeline. "I wonder how late they will keep it up the first night."

In the apartment across the way the family was gathered in a reverent circle about the new talking-machine, and we heard the opening strains of the "Song to the Evening Star."

"Have you ever thought," I said to Emmeline, "how infinitely superior the music of Wagner is to that of any other composer, in its immunity against influenza? The German Empire, you know, has a moist climate, and the magician of Bayreuth recognised that he must write primarily for a nation that is extremely subject to cold in the head. It was different with the Italian composers. Bronchial troubles are virtually unknown in Italy. When Verdi wrote, he failed to make allowance for a sudden attack of the grippe. That is why when Caruso catches cold they must change the bill at the Metropolitan. But if a Wagnerian tenor loses his voice, the papers say the next morning, 'Herr Donner sang Tristan last night with extraordinary intelligence.' Sometimes Herr Donner sings with extraordinary intelligence; sometimes he sings with marvellous histrionic power; sometimes he sings with an earnest vigour amounting to frenzy. Wagner, who foresaw everything, foresaw the disastrous effect of steam-heated rooms on the delicate organs of the throat. So he developed a music form in which the use of the throat is not always essential."

"I know," said Emmeline, "that you'd much rather listen to the la-la, la-la-la-la-la-lah from Traviata."

"I'd much rather listen to Traviata," I said, losing my temper, "than strive painfully to be electrified by the 'Ho-yo-to-ho' of eight Valkyrie maidens averaging one hundred and seventy-five pounds and leaping from crag to crag at a speed of two miles an hour."

When a man first acquires an Orpheola, he loses interest in his business. He leaves for home early and bolts his dinner. The first night he sits down before the machine from 6:30 to 11, and with a rapt expression on his face he runs off every record in his collection twice.

No one but himself is permitted to return the precious rubber disk to its envelope. Later in the week the eldest child, as a reward of good behaviour, may be allowed to adjust the record on the revolving base and to pull the starting lever, while mother watches anxiously from the dining-room. At intervals grandma puts her head in at the door to make sure that the proper needle has been inserted. The modern musical cabinet does not eliminate the personal factor. People can put all of their individuality into the music by choosing between a fine needle and one with a blunt point. Persons of temperament are particular about the speed at which the disk revolves. When a man is in high spirits he picks out a sharp needle and winds the spring up tight. Pessimists do just the opposite. It is imperative to keep the fine, steel points out of the baby's reach because irreparable harm might thereby be done to the record.