One Way of Putting Itelectronic editionCather, Willa, 1873-1947Jewell, Andrew, 1975-Ronning, Kari, 1949-Editorial AssistantJennifer MooreRevised edition, 2010Transformed TEI P4 encoding to TEI P5 encodingAndrew Jewellcat.j00032The Willa Cather Archivehttp://cather.unl.eduUniversity of Nebraska–LincolnCenter for Digital Research in the Humanities319 Love LibraryUniversity of Nebraska–LincolnLincoln, NE 68588-4100http://cdrh.unl.edu2010
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One Way of Putting ItNebraska State JournalWilla Cather13January 28, 1894
Text created for online distribution on the Willa Cather Archive
(http://cather.unl.edu).
End-of-line hyphenation silently removed where appropriate.
Typographical or spelling irregularities in the orginal have been
noted using markup.
Library of Congress Subject HeadingscolumnLansing (Theater : Lincoln, Neb.)--Theater curtainsAppreciation in literaturePolitical satireMartyrdomConversion of markup from TEI P4 to TEI
P5Third revision after Jennifer Moore's proofreadingSecond revision after Kari Ronning's proofreadingChecked; revisedEncodingConversion of Word files to HTML then XMLInitial Creation
One Way of
Putting It.
AT last it is over, thank heaven. Thursday was a day of
suppressed excitement. Every man you met looked as though he were going to be
married the next hour—until the first telegrams came, and then some of them
looked like they had recently been made widowers. Everyone talked about the
fight, and everyone hung around the telegraph offices, everyone except the
ministers and they kept the telephones redhot all day, firing in questions on
the city editors. Nothing but a prize fight or a presidential election could
have aroused such interest. If Gladstone and Bismarck had been having a joint
debate in Jacksonville, no one would have waited for the telegrams. If all the
great poets and painters in the world had assembled there to vie with each
other in great creation, the milkman would not have driven a bit faster to get
an evening paper. Young men of talent, the arts don't pay. If you want to be
beloved by your countrymen, if you want to draw near to the hearts of the
people, be cherished with their household gods, remembered in their prayers, if
you want to be truly great, there are but two careers open to you—politics and
the prize ring. It has been so ever since men were men. The old sports of Athens were much more interested in the victorious athlatai than the bards who meandered
about with the laurels on their heads. People come to the state fair to see the
horse racing, not to gaze upon Mrs. So-and-So's crayon work or silk crazy quilt.
The struggle of brawn with brawn seems to appeal
more strongly than anything else to the great mass of the people, and it seems
that all the primitive instincts have not died out of the world. Civilization
is a very large boast. Like Eli Perkins, it has a greater reputation than it
can live up to.
"A man's a man for all 'o that"and andand will be for some years to come. Civilization has not destroyed the needs or
passions of men's lives; the former it has only exaggerated and multiplied, the
latter it has alternately whetted and drugged and drained into a thousand
aimless, frivolous channels which nature knows naught of.
If it took Ruskin six months to interpret Turner's"Garden of the Hesperides," surely a person who is totally ignorant of
the technical laws of art may be allowed several weeks to struggle with the Lansing drop curtain. I have been suffering acutely from that curtain for two long years,
and sometimes I have longed for artistic knowledge, that I might understand and
appreciate
it better, but recently an artist told me that I was
enviable because of my ignorance, that art could not help one with that
curtain, for the more one knew of other pictures the less they knew of that. I
begin to believe his statement, for I have found art books as powerless to help
me with the anatomy as classical lexicons are to throw light upon that
abominable Latin. "Somnium Fons Vitales." I wonder how many people have been
able to translate it? Lincoln is full of colleges and ought to contain a good
deal of classical learning, but the lore of this generation has not got as far
as "Vitales." Most freshmen try to construe that Latin. The world looks very
bright to a freshman and he has the fond complacency to try anything from
discovering a new element to translating the Iliad in blank verse. He goes to
the theater saturated with Horace and he gazes on that mystic sentence and
tries to read it. When he fails he is chagrined. He swears that when he is a
senior he will translate those words. But when he is a senior he does not look
at it any more. By that time he has learned the lesson of his own littleness
and his own helplessness. He knows then that genius is something more than
eternal patience after all, and that even were he the proverbial patience on a
monument he would never write a Hamlet nor discover a new planet nor construe
the Latin of the Lansing drop curtain. He goes out into the world to live his
life and leaves the task to mightier men than he.
After all the sad, sad thing about that curtain
is that it should be such a contrast to the rest of the house, which is really
in very good taste. The drapings of the boxes, the color of the seats, the
frescoing, the woodwork, are all very artistic and the harmony of colors is
perfect. Very few theatres in the west can boast of such elegant interiors. It
seems like those gauzy women in front had got in the wrong place some way.
Perhaps, after all, there is method in the manager's madness, and the curtain
is there to make us more keenly conscious of the artistic settings of the house
itself. We should be sorry to interfere with any deep laid scheme like this,
but aren't the managers bearing down a little hard on us? Wouldn't a fifteen
minute exhibition of that curtain every night do? We would all promise to look
and suffer and get it over with. Then they might cover it up in some way and
let us enjoy ourselves for the rest of the evening.
No roof has ever served to shut out quite so
much aspiring egotism from the stars as the inoffensive one which Mr. Stout saw
fit to place upon the capitol building. It is a strange and amusing fact that
every one of the state officers and every one of their employes regard the
state house as their especial manor and place of abode. If you ask a
stenographer who works there, where his office is and what he does, his lips
may tell you various things, but his eyes always say, "The state house is my
office, and my business is running the state." The state house individual is
always carefully guarding state secrets which as a rule could be published to
the world without hurting anything—if they haven't been published already. He
is always finding out some dark political conspiracy which would turn the
wheels of civilization back a century or two if the vigilant state officer did
not expose it at the imminent risk of his re-election. The greatest part of his
time is taken up with keeping his honor clean. The state officer has a very
great opinion of his honor; no one admires it and respects it more than he. He
keeps it always by him and spends most of his leisure polishing it up. He is
most tiresome when he reaches the martyr stage, where he drags himself to work
when he is sick and burns the midnight gas—which the state furnishes. He then conceives
that he is there on a mission of mercy, that he is a philanthropist, not a
politician, and that he is doing it all for the good of his fellowmen. Now,
the truth is, my friend, you find it a fairly profitable martyrdom; you are not
there for your own health or your eternal brother, man; you are there for just
so many hun-hundred
dred dollars a year, and just so many chances of political
preferment, and you know it. Of course you can be a martyr if you choose, but
you should at least be a merry martyr, for you get a fairly comfortable salary
out of it, besides all the wealth you are supposed to be laying up where moths
do not corrupt, neither thieves break in and steal.
It is strange, but there seems to be something
in the air of that state house which causes an inevitable enlargement of the
head. The very janitor who mops the floor—sometimes he really does mop
it—imagines that if he should lay off a day the reign of chaos and old night would
begin immediately. There is a whole state house full of people, officers,
clerks, stenographers and janitors, each of whom murmersmurmurs daily to himself, "I
am the state." The fact is, my friends, you are not the state, you are not even
a very large part of it. You might all be impeached tonight and yet tomorrow
the sun would rise upon the world just as it has done for some centuries. You
might all be swept out into space, and still the street cars would run, the
musee band play, and the town clock lose time steadily and strike in its usual
erratic manner. You are just about as much a vital force in the state as the
statue of Lincoln who airs himself continually on the court house tower. You
are a figure-head, you stand for a great tradition.
"Heaven is not reached by a single bound," no,
nor THE JOURNAL editorial rooms. You get there by means of stairs; a man might
write a new gradatum on those stairs. They are long and steep and narrow and
dark; some people say there is an end to them somewhere, but they are dauntless
climbers who have more courage and wind than the average explorer. It is
strange that mounting those stairs doesn't drive the editors to alcoholic
stimulants; it is hard to see how the normal strength of any man can hold out
farther than the first platform. If you have never been up there just recall
your first ascent of the capitol dome and multiply it indefinitely and you will
be somewhere near conceiving those stairs. Many a youth with his first sonnet
hugged close in his breast pocket has been found unconscious somewhere on the
way up. Oh, ye of youthful, blue-ribboned manuscript so carefully written on
both sides, great is glory but it is not worth that struggle. Do not chase fame
up THE JOURNAL stairs, there are more advantageous grounds in which to
pursuepersue her. Long, long ere you reach the top you will decide that it is not
your vocation to be a litterateur, and probably before you reach the bottom
again your decision will be still more firm. The awful distance of the
editorial rooms from the ground has killed more ambition and saved the world
more bad poetry than we can ever know. One's aspirations may be high, but THE
JOURNAL stairs are higher. It is a long way up to the place where the poet
communes with the muses, and common mortals may not attain unto it. If the
"youth who bore 'mid snow and ice" had
been trained awhile on THE JOURNAL stairs, the Alps would never have fazed him, they would not even have disturbed his composure.