A Plea for Old Cap Collier | Page 6

happen to them.
Sure enough, the packet runs into a storm and founders. As she is going
down Lieutenant G----- puts his wife and baby into a lifeboat manned

by sailors, and then--there being no room for him in the lifeboat--he
remains behind upon the deck of the sinking vessel, while the lifeboat
puts off for shore. A giant wave overturns the burdened cockleshell and
he sees its passengers engulfed in the waters. Up to this point the
chronicle has been what a chronicle should be. Perhaps the phraseology
has been a trifle toploftical, and there are a few words in it long enough
to run as serials, yet at any rate we are getting an effect in drama. But
bear with me while I quote the next paragraph, just as I copied it down:
The wretched husband saw but too distinctly the destruction of all he
held dear. But here alas and forever were shut off from him all
sublunary prospects. He fell upon the deck-- powerless, senseless, a
corpse--the victim of a sublime sensibility!
There's language for you! How different it is from that historic passage
when the crack of Little Sure Shot's rifle rang out and another Redskin
bit the dust. Nothing is said there about anybody having his sublunary
prospects shut off; nothing about the Redskin becoming the victim of a
sublime sensibility. In fifteen graphic words and in one sentence Little
Sure Shot croaked him, and then with bated breath you moved on to the
next paragraph, sure of finding in it yet more attractive casualties
snappily narrated.
No, sir! In the nickul librury the author did not waste his time and
yours telling you that an individual on becoming a corpse would
simultaneously become powerless and senseless. He credited your
intelligence for something. For contrast, take the immortal work
entitled Deadwood Dick of Deadwood; or, The Picked Party; by
Edward L. Wheeler, a copy of which has just come to my attention
again nearly thirty years after the time of my first reading of it.
Consider the opening paragraph:
The sun was just kissing the mountain tops that frowned down upon
Billy-Goat Gulch, and in the aforesaid mighty seam in the face of
mighty Nature the shadows of a Warm June night were gathering
rapidly.
The birds had mostly hushed their songs and flown to their nests in the
dismal lonely pines, and only the tuneful twang of a well-played banjo
aroused the brooding quiet, save it be the shrill, croaking screams of a
crow, perched upon the top of a dead pine, which rose from the nearly
perpendicular mountain side that retreated in the ascending from the

gulch bottom.
That, as I recall, was a powerfully long bit of description for a nickul
librury, and having got it out of his system Mr. Wheeler wasted no
more valuable space on the scenery. From this point on he gave you
action--action with reason behind it and logic to it and the guaranty of a
proper climax and a satisfactory conclusion to follow. Deadwood Dick
marched many a flower-strewn mile through my young life, but to the
best of my recollection he never shut off anybody's sublunary prospects.
If a party deserved killing Deadwood just naturally up and killed him,
and the historian told about it in graphic yet straightforward terms of
speech; and that was all there was to it, and that was all there should
have been to it.
At the risk of being termed an iconoclast and a smasher of the pure
high ideals of the olden days, I propose to undertake to show that
practically all of the preposterous asses and the impossible idiots of
literature found their way into the school readers of my generation.
With the passage of years there may have been some reform in this
direction, but I dare affirm, without having positive knowledge of the
facts, that a majority of these half-wits still are being featured in the
grammar-grade literature of the present time. The authors of school
readers, even modern school readers, surely are no smarter than the run
of grown-ups even, say, as you and as I; and we blindly go on holding
up as examples before the eyes of the young of the period the
characters and the acts of certain popular figures of poetry and prose
who--did but we give them the acid test of reason--would reveal
themselves either as incurable idiots, or else as figures in scenes and
incidents which physically could never have occurred.
You remember, don't you, the schoolbook classic of the noble lad who
by reason of his neat dress, and by his use in the most casual
conversation of the sort of language which the late Mr. Henry James
used when he was writing his very Jamesiest, secured a