John Kendrick Bangs

“ The continual drip, drip, drip of a drop of water on a stone will gradually wear away the stone, and, by Jove! before we know it, by constant hammering away at this dream scheme of ours we’ll gain a position that won’t be altogether unenviable.”
“That’s so,” said Billy. “I wouldn’t wonder if with the constant drip, drip, drip of your drops of ink and inspiration you could wear the public out in a very little while. The only troublesome thing will be in getting a publisher for your quarterly.”
“I haven’t any idea that we want a publisher,” said Bedford Parke. ”

“ It is a hotel with a population larger than that of most cities, with streets running to and from all points of the compass; where men and women eat under conditions that Lucullus knew nothing of; where there is a carpeted boulevard on which walk all sorts and conditions of men; where one pays one’s bill to the dulcet strains of a string orchestra that woo him into a blissful forgetfulness of its size ”

“ As it is, you are here, and must fulfil your destiny.”
“Very well,” returned Van Squibber. “That being so, I will see what this roaring is. If it is a child endeavoring to frighten you, I shall get his address and have my man chastise his father, for I could never strike a child; but if it is a lion, as I fear, I shall do what seems best under the circumstances. I have been told, Miss Huyler, that a show of bravery awes a wild beast, while a manifestation of cowardice causes him to spring at once upon the coward. ”

“ I am told that when Cronky Gudehart gazes upon a rose it withers, and children passing him in the highways run shrieking to their mothers, as though escaping from the bogie man of Caine Hall—which castle, as you know, has latterly been haunted by horrors that surpass the imagination. His voice is like the strident cry of doom. Hearing his footsteps, strong men quail and women swoon ”

“ The hard part of literary work is, after all, the labor of production in a manual sense. These real geniuses don’t have to think. Their ideas come to them, and they let ’em develop themselves. In realistic writing, as I understand it, the author sits down with his pen in his hand and his characters in his mind’s eye, and they simply run along, and he does the private-detective [10] act—follows after them and jots down all they do. ”

“ Parke added, “not only in justification of myself, but also as a possible explanation of certain shortcomings in the work of the original master. Sometimes the action may seem to drag a trifle, but that is not the fault of the author, but of life itself. To be real one must be true, and truth is not to be governed by him who holds the pen.” ”

“ Of Cossack and of Samarcand!
Thou art enough for any soul’s desire!
Thou hast the beauty of cerulean fire!
But we who grovel on the damask earth
Are we despoilt of thy exigeant mirth?
“Canst listen to a prayer, Sarcophagus? ”

“ If the dilution, the faint echo of the originals, evoked such applause, how potent must have been the genius of the men who first gave life to Dooley and the fair Dolly!
“That’s good stuff, Greenwich,” said Billie Jones. “You must have eaten a particularly digestible meal. Now for the tenth ball. Who has it?”
“I,” said Dick Snobbe, rising majestically from his chair. “And I can tell you what it is; I had a tough time of it in my [164] dream, as you will perceive when I recite to you the story of my experiences at the battle of Manila.”
“Great Scott, Dick!” cried Bedford Parke. ”

“ The two grooms were men of wealth, and, had it not been for Cronky Gudehart’s malign influence, neither they nor their wealth would have passed into the control of the Church, a fact which Ramsay Ballawhaine, then Bishop of Man, was quick to note and act upon.
“The gloomier the world,” said he, “the more transcendently bright will Heaven seem; and if we can make Heaven seem bright, the Church will be able to declare dividends. Let us spread misery and sorrow. Let us destroy the sunshine of life that so gilds with glory the flesh and the devil. ”

“ Harry Snobbe.
“He can do the table of contents,” suggested St. Vincent.
“Or the fly-leaves,” said Tenafly Paterson.
“No,” said Huddy; “I shall ask that the pages I should have filled be left blank. There is nothing helps a book so much as the leaving of something to the reader’s imagination. I heard a great critic say so once. He said that was the strong point of the French writers, and he added that Stockton’s Lady or the Tiger took hold because Stockton didn’t insist on telling everything.” ”

“ Are we idiots? I ask you that. Are we? You may be, but, Mrs. Edwards, I am not. The idea of my falling asleep over Ivanhoe! Would I do that if I had my way? Well, I guess not! Would I even dare to say ‘I guess not’ in a magazine farce? Again, I guess not. I’m going to write to the editor this very night, and resign my situation. I want to be me. I don’t want to be what some author thinks I ought to be. Do you know what I think?”
Mrs. Edwards (warningly) . “Take care, Robert. Take care. You aren’t employed to think.”
Mr. Edwards. “Precisely. That’s what makes me so immortally mad. ”

“ Anyhow, you can’t criticise a poet for anything of that kind. His license permits him to take any liberties he may see fit with existing conditions.”
“All of which,” observed Dick Snobbe, “is wandering from the original point of discussion. What is the meaning of Haarley’s poem? I can’t see that as yet we have reached a definite understanding on that point.”
“Well, I must confess,” said Jones, [140] “that I can’t understand it myself; but I never could understand magazine poetry, so that doesn’t prove anything. I’m only a newspaper man.”
“Let’s have the title, Haarley,” cried Tenafly Paterson. ”

“ If you are rich enough to consume your own product with profit, it’s all right to be artistic; but if you are dependent on a salary, don’t forget your consumer. What else have they against you?”
“Read on, woman,” said the Gloomster.
“‘April 1, 1898,’” the lady read. “‘Gave a half-crown to a starving beggar.’” [121]
“That was another highly artistic act,” said Christian. “I told the Bishop that I had given the coin to the beggar knowing it to be counterfeit, and hoping that he would be arrested for trying to pass it. The Bishop cut me short by saying that my hope had not been fulfilled. ”

“ Mrs. Edwards. “I’d love to, Robert—but we can’t. There are no other things in the farce. The Billises are coming.”
Mr. Edwards. “Hang the Billises! Can’t we ever have an evening to ourselves?”
Mrs. Edwards. “How you do talk! How can we? There’s got to be some action in the farce, and it’s the Billis family that draws out our peculiarities.”
Mr. Edwards. “Well, I’m going out, and you can receive the Billises, and if it’s necessary for me to say anything to give go to the play, you can say it. I make you my proxy.”
Mrs. Edwards. “It can’t be done, Robert. They are here. ”

“ Perhaps if you gave it a title we might get at the mystery of its meaning. A title is a sort of Baedeker to the general run of magazine poems.”
Haarlem grew rather red of countenance as he answered, “Well, I didn’t exactly like to give it the title I dreamed; it didn’t seem to shed quite as much light on the subject as a title should.”
“Still, it may help,” said Huddy Rivers. “I read a poem in a magazine the other day on ‘Mystery.’ And if it hadn’t had a title I’d never have understood it. It ran this way:
“Life, what art thou? ”

“ Your smile is a terrified smile, as has been already noted.”
“It is,” said Miss Huyler, looking anxiously about her.
“And may I ask why?” asked Van Squibber, politely—for to do things politely was Van Squibber’s ambition.
“I—I—well, really, Mr. Van Squibber,” the girl replied, “I am always anxious when you are about. The fact is, you know, the things that happen when you are around are always so very extraordinary. I came here for a quiet walk, but now that you have appeared I am quite certain that something dramatic is about to occur. ”

“ It was a generally accepted fact, Bedford Parke had said, that all literature, not even excepting history, was based upon the imagination. Many of the masterpieces of fiction had their basis in actual dreams, and, when they were not founded on such, might in every case be said to be directly attributable to what might properly be called waking dreams. ”

“ To show that what exists is really not?
Or art thou just content to sit and say
Life’s but a specious, coral roundelay?”
“I committed the thing to memory because it struck me as being a good thing to remember—it was so full of good phrases. ‘Twitching woe,’ for instance, and ‘sleekish qualms,’” he continued.
“Quaking qualms would have been better,” put in Tenafly Paterson, who judged poetry from an alliterative point of view.
“Nevertheless, I liked sleekish qualms,” retorted Huddy. “Quaking qualms might be more alliterative, but sleekish qualms is less commonplace.”
“No doubt,” said Tenafly. ”

“ In America men have been known to toil for years to amass a fortune for the one cherished object of spending a week in this Olympian spot, and then to be content to return to their toil and begin life anew, rich only in the memory of its luxuries. ”

“ The fact that women don’t reason does not prove that they can’t. I can go up in a balloon if I wish to, but I don’t. I can read an American newspaper comic supplement, but I don’t. So it is with women. Women can reason, and therefore they have a right to be included in the classification whether they do or don’t. ”

“ Goodheart.
“Just then,” said Snobbe, “I awoke, and did not catch the author’s name. It is a curious thing about dreams that just when you get to the crucial point you wake up.”
“I wonder who the deuce the chap could have been?” murmured the other diners. “Has any London author with a residence on the Isle of Man ever shown any acquaintance with gloom?”
“I don’t know for sure,” said Billy Jones. “But my impression is that it must be the editor of Punch. What I am uncertain about is his residence on the Isle of Man. Otherwise I think he fills the bill.” ”

“ It is all very well to experience emotions, but no well-bred person ever shows them—that is, not in Yonkers.”
“Ah, but you don’t understand Huddy,” said Tenafly Paterson. “Huddy has two great ambitions in this life. One is to get into the Authors’ Club, and the other is to marry a certain young woman whose home is in Boston and whose ambitions are Bostonian. To appear before the world as a writer, which the Dreamers will give him a chance to do at small expense, will help him on to the realization of his most cherished hopes ”

“ Would Scotch humor ever prove great if not taken seriously? Oh, aye! Hendry never laughed [223] at his jokes, and Hendry knew a joke when he saw one. McTaggart never smiled at Lang Tammas; and as for the little Minister—he knew what was due to the humorist of Thrums, as well as to himself, and enjoyed the exquisite humor of Tammas with a reserve well qualified to please the Presbytery and the Congregation.
How long Lang Tammas would have stood petrified no man may say; but just then who should come along but the person he had come to call upon—Drumsheugh himself. ”

“ So you see these things require very little intellectual labor. It’s merely the drudgery of chasing a commonplace or supernatural set of characters about the world in order to get 400 pages full of reading-matter about ’em that makes the literary profession a laborious one. Our stenographer will enable us to avoid all this. There isn’t a man of us but can talk as easily as he can fall off a log, and a tale once told at our dinners becomes in the telling a bit of writing. ”

“ A professional reader is, after all, only human, and when to the responsibilities of his office is added the wearisome task of wading through a Spencerian morass after the will-o’-wisp of an idea, I don’t blame him for getting impatient. ”

“ Jedediah Wattles, of Chicago, and the children. Naturally I turned my attention to Wattles. A six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl could hardly be suspected of stealing a diamond stud. So drawing on Pinkham for five thousand dollars to pay expenses, I hired a room in a tenement-house in Rivington Street—a squalid place it was—disguised myself with an oily, black, burglarious mustache, and dressed like a comic-paper gambler. Then I wrote a note to Wattles, asking him to call, saying that I could tell him something to his advantage. ”

“ Vincent. “Tom hadn’t anything to do with it—it was the dinner. Honor to whom honor is due, say I. Praise the cook, or the caterer.”
“That’s the truth,” put in Billie Jones. “Fact is, when this book of ours comes out, I think, instead of putting our names on the title-page as authors, the thing to do is to print the menu.” [46]
“You miss the point of this association,” interjected Snobbe. “We haven’t banded ourselves together to immortalize a Welsh rabbit or a mince-pie—nay, nor even a ruddy duck. It’s our own glory we’re after.” ”