”THERE’S a harvest for you,” said the Idiot, as he perused a recently published criticism of a comic opera. “There have been thirty-nine new comic operas produced this year and four of ’em were worth seeing. It is very evident that the Gilbert and Sullivan industry hasn’t gone to the wall whatever slumps other enterprises have suffered from.”

“That is a goodly number,” said the Poet. “Thirty-nine, eh? I knew there was a raft of them, but I had no idea there were as many as that.”

“Why don’t you go in and do one, Mr. Poet?” suggested the Idiot. “They tell me it’s as easy as rolling off a log. All you’ve got to do is to forget all your ideas and remember all the old jokes you ever heard, slap ’em together around a lot of dances, write two dozen lyrics about some Googoo Belle, hire a composer, and there you are. Hanged if I haven’t thought of writing one myself.”

“I fancy it isn’t as easy as it looks,” observed the Poet. “It requires just as much thought to be thoughtless as it does to be thoughtful.”

“Nonsense,” said the Idiot. “I’d undertake the job cheerfully if some manager would make it worth my while, and, what’s more, if I ever got into the swing of the business I’ll bet I could turn out a libretto a day for three days of the week for the next two months.”

“If I had your confidence I’d try it,” laughed the Poet, “but, alas! in making me Nature did not design a confidence man.”

“Nonsense, again,” said the Idiot. “Any man who can get the editors to print sonnets to ‘Diana’s Eyebrow,’ and little lyrics of Madison Square, Longacre Square, Battery Place, and Boston Common, the way you do, has a right to consider himself an adept at bunco. I tell you what I’ll do with you: I’ll swap off my confidence for your lyrical facility, and see what I can do. Why can’t we collaborate and get up a libretto for next season? They tell me there’s large money in it.”

“There certainly is if you catch on,” said the Poet. “Vastly more than in any other kind of writing that I know. I don’t know but that I would like to collaborate with you on something of the sort. What is your idea?”

“Mind’s a blank on the subject,” sighed the Idiot. “That’s the reason I think I can turn the trick. As I said before, you don’t need ideas. Better go without ’em. Just sit down and write.”

“But you must have some kind of a story,” persisted the Poet.

“Not to begin with,” said the Idiot. “Just write your choruses and songs, slap in your jokes, fasten ’em together, and the thing is done. First act, get your hero and heroine into trouble. Second act, get ’em out.”

“And for the third?” queried the Poet.

“Don’t have a third,” said the Idiot. “A third is always superfluous; but, if you must have it, make up some kind of a vaudeville show and stick it in between the first and second.”

“Tush!” said the Bibliomaniac. “That would make a gay comic opera.”

“Of course it would, Mr. Bib,” the Idiot agreed. “And that’s what we want. If there’s anything in this world that I hate more than another it is a sombre comic opera. I’ve been to a lot of ’em, and I give you my word of honor that next to a funeral a comic opera that lacks gayety is one of the most depressing functions known to modern science. Some of ’em are enough to make an undertaker weep with jealous rage. I went to one of ’em last week called ‘The Skylark,’ with an old chum of mine who is a surgeon. You can imagine what sort of a thing it was when I tell you that after the first act he suggested we leave the theatre and come back here and have some fun cutting my leg off. He vowed that if he ever went to another opera by the same people he’d take ether beforehand.”

“I shouldn’t think that would be necessary,” sneered the Bibliomaniac. “If it was as bad as all that, why didn’t it put you to sleep?”

“It did,” said the Idiot. “But the music kept waking us up again. There was no escape from it except that of actual physical flight.”

“Well, about this collaboration of ours,” suggested the Poet. “What do you think we should do first?”

“Write an opening chorus, of course,” said the Idiot. “What did you suppose? A finale? Something like this:

“If you want to know who we are,
Just ask the Evening Star,
As he smiles on high
In the deep-blue sky,
With his tralala-la-la-la.
We are maidens sweet
With tripping feet,
And the googoo eyes
Of the skippity-hi’s,
And the smile of the fair gazoo;
And you’ll find our names
’Mongst the wondrous dames
Of the Who’s Who-hoo-hoo-hoo.”

“Get that sung with spirit by sixty-five ladies with blond wigs and gold slippers, otherwise dressed up in the uniform of a troop of Russian cavalry, and you’ve got your venture launched.”

“Where can you find people like that?” asked the Bibliomaniac.

“New York’s full of ’em,” replied the Idiot.

“I don’t mean the people to act that sort of thing – but where would you lay your scene?” explained the Bibliomaniac.

“Oh, any old place in the Pacific Ocean,” said the Idiot. “Make your own geography – everybody else does. There’s a million islands out there of one kind or another, and as defenceless as a two-weeks’-old infant. If you want a real one, fish it out and fire ahead. If you don’t, make one up for yourself and call it ‘The Isle of Piccolo,’ or something of that sort. After you’ve got your chorus going, introduce your villain, who should be a man with a deep bass voice and a piratical past. He’s the chap who rules the roost and is going to marry the heroine to-morrow. That will make a bully song:

“I’m a pirate bold
With a heart so cold
That it turns the biggest joys to solemn sorrow;
And the hero-ine,
With her eyes so fine,
I am going to – marry – to-morrow.

CHORUS

“He is go-ing to-marry – to-morrow
The maid with a heart full of sorrow;
For her we are sorry
For she weds to-morry —
She is going to-marry – to-morrow.”

“Gee!” added the Idiot, enthusiastically, “can’t you almost hear that already?”

“I am sorry to say,” said Mr. Brief, “that I can. You ought to call your heroine Drivelina.”

“Splendid!” cried the Idiot. “Drivelina goes. Well, then, on comes Drivelina, and this beast of a pirate grabs her by the hand and makes love to her as if he thought wooing was a game of snap-the-whip. She sings a soprano solo of protest, and the pirate summons his hirelings to cast Drivelina into a Donjuan cell, when boom! an American war-ship appears on the horizon. The crew, under the leadership of a man with a squeaky tenor voice, named Lieutenant Somebody or Other, comes ashore, puts Drivelina under the protection of the American flag, while his crew sing the following:

“We are jackies, jackies, jackies,
And we smoke the best tobaccys
You can find from Zanzibar to Honeyloo.
And we fight for Uncle Sammy,
Yes, indeed we do, for damme
You can bet your life that that’s the thing to do,
Doodle-do!
You can bet your life that that’s the thing to doodle —
doodle – doodle – doodle-do.”

“Eh! What?” demanded the Idiot.

“Well – what yourself?” asked the Lawyer. “This is your job. What next?”

“Well – the pirate gets lively, tries to assassinate the lieutenant, who kills half the natives with his sword, and is about to slay the pirate when he discovers that he is his long-lost father,” said the Idiot. “The heroine then sings a pathetic love-song about her baboon baby, in a green light to the accompaniment of a lot of pink satin monkeys banging cocoanut-shells together. This drowsy lullaby puts the lieutenant and his forces to sleep, and the curtain falls on their capture by the pirate and his followers, with the chorus singing:

“Hooray for the pirate bold,
With his pockets full of gold;
He’s going to marry to-morrow.
To-morrow he’ll marry,
Yes, by the Lord Harry,
He’s go-ing – to-marry – to-mor-row!
And that’s a thing to doodle – doodle-doo.”

“There,” said the Idiot, after a pause. “How is that for a first act?”

“It’s about as lucid as most of them,” said the Poet, “but, after all, you have got a story there, and you said you didn’t need one.”

“I said you didn’t need one to start with,” corrected the Idiot. “And I’ve proved it. I didn’t have that story in mind when I started. That’s where the easiness of the thing comes in. Why, I didn’t even have to think of a name for the heroine. The inspiration for that popped right out of Mr. Brief’s mouth as smoothly as though the name Drivelina had been written on his heart for centuries. Then the title – ‘The Isle of Piccolo’ – that’s a dandy, and I give you my word of honor, I’d never even thought of a title for the opera until that revealed itself like a flash from the blue; and as for the coon song, ‘My Baboon Baby,’ there’s a chance there for a Zanzibar act that will simply make Richard Wagner and Reginald de Koven writhe with jealousy. Can’t you imagine the lilt of it:

“My bab-boon – ba-habee,
My bab-boon – ba-habee —
I love you dee-her-lee
Yes dee-hee-hee-er-lee.
My baboon – ba-ha-bee,
My baboon – ba-ha-bee,
My baboon – ba-hay-hay-hay-hay-hay-hay-bee-bee.”

“And all those pink satin monkeys bumping their cocoanut-shells together in the green moonlight – ”

“Well, after the first act, what?” asked the Bibliomaniac.

“The usual intermission,” said the Idiot. “You don’t have to write that. The audience generally knows what to do.”

“But your second act?” asked the Poet.

“Oh, come off,” said the Idiot, rising. “We were to do this thing in collaboration. So far, I’ve done the whole blooming business. I’ll leave the second act to you. When you collaborate, Mr. Poet, you’ve got to do a little colabbing on your own account. What did you think you were to do – collect the royalties?”

“I’m told,” said the Lawyer, “that that is sometimes the hardest thing to do in a comic opera.”

“Well, I’ll be self-sacrificing,” said the Idiot, “and bear my full share of it.”

“It seems to me,” said the Bibliomaniac, “that that opera produced in the right place might stand a chance of a run.”

“Thank you,” said the Idiot. “After all, Mr. Bib, you are a man of some penetration. How long a run?”

“One consecutive night,” said the Bibliomaniac.

“Ah – and where?” demanded the Idiot, with a smile.

“At Bloomingdale,” answered the Bibliomaniac, severely.

“That’s a very good idea,” said the Idiot. “When you go back there, Mr. Bib, I wish you’d suggest it to the superintendent.”

VI
HE DISCUSSES FAME

”MR. POET,” said the Idiot, the other morning as his friend, the Rhymster, took his place beside him at the breakfast-table, “tell me: How long have you been writing poetry?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the Poet, modestly. “I don’t know that I’ve ever written any. I’ve turned out a lot of rhymes in my day, and have managed to make a fair living with them, but poetry is a different thing. The divine afflatus doesn’t come to every one, you know; and I doubt if anybody will be able to say whether my work has shown an occasional touch of inspiration, or not until I have been dead fifty or a hundred years.”

“Tut!” exclaimed the Idiot. “That’s all nonsense. I am able to say now whether or not your work shows the occasional touch of inspiration. It does. In fact, it shows more than that. It shows a semi-occasional touch of inspiration. How long have you been in the business?”

“Eighteen years,” sighed the Poet. “I began when I was twelve with a limerick. As I remember the thing, it went like this:

“There was a young man of Cohasset
Turned on the red-hot water-faucet.
When asked: ‘Is it hot?’
He answered, ‘Well, thot
Is a pretty mild way for to class it.’”

“Good!” said the Idiot. “That wasn’t a bad beginning for a boy of twelve.”

“So my family thought,” said the Poet. “My mother sent it to the Under the Evening Lamp Department of our town paper, and three weeks later I was launched. I’ve had the cacœthes scribendi ever since – but, alas! I got more fame in that brief hour of success than I have ever been able to win since. It is a mighty hard job, Mr. Idiot, making a name for yourself these days.”

“That’s the point I was getting at,” said the Idiot, “and I wanted to have a talk with you on the subject. I’ve read a lot of your stuff in the past eight or ten years, and, in my humble judgment, it is better than any of that rhymed nonsense of Henry Wintergreen Boggs, whose name appears in the newspapers every day in the year; of Susan Aldershot Spinks, whose portrait is almost as common an occurrence in the papers as that of Lydia Squinkham; of Circumflex Jones, the eminent sweet-singer of Arizona; or of Henderson Hartley MacFadd, the Canadian Browning, of whom the world is constantly hearing so much. I have wondered if you were going about it in the right way. What is your plan for winning fame?”

“Oh, I keep plodding away, doing the best I can all the while,” said the Poet. “If there’s any good in my stuff, or any stuff in my goods, I’ll get my reward some day.”

“Fifty or a hundred years after you’re dead, eh?” said the Idiot.

“Yes,” smiled the Poet.

“Well – your board-bills won’t be high then, anyhow,” said the Idiot. “That’s one satisfaction, I presume. They tell me Homer hasn’t eaten a thing for over twenty centuries. Seems to me, though, that if I were a poet I’d go in for a little fame while I was alive. It’s all very nice to work the skin off your knuckles, and to twist your gray matter inside out until it crocks and fades, so that your great-grandchildren can swell around the country sporting a name that has become a household word, but I’m blessed if I care for that sort of thing. I don’t believe in storing up caramels for some twenty-first-century baby that bears my name to cut his teeth on, when I have a sweet tooth of my own that is pining away for the lack of nourishment; and, if I were you, I’d go in for the new method. What if Browning and Tennyson and Longfellow and Poe did have to labor for years to win the laurel crown, that’s no reason why you should do it. You might just as well reason that because your forefathers went from one city to another in a stage-coach you should eschew railways.”

“I quite agree with you,” replied the Poet. “But in literature there is no royal road to fame that I know of.”

“What!” cried the Idiot. “No royal road to fame in letters! Why, where have you been living all these years, Mr. Poet? This is the age of the Get Fame-Quick Scheme. You can make a reputation in five minutes, if you only know the ropes. I know of at least two department stores where you can go and buy all you want of it, and in all its grades – from notoriety down to the straight goods.”

“Fame? At a department store!” put in Mr. Whitechoker, incredulously.

“Certainly,” said the Idiot. “Ready-made laurels on demand. Why not? It’s the easiest thing in the world. Fact is, between you and me, I am considering a plan now for the promoting of a corporation to be called the United States Fame Company, Limited, the main purpose of which shall be to earn money for its stockholders by making its customers famous at so much per head. It won’t make any difference whether the customer wishes to be famous as an actor, a novelist, or a poet, or any other old thing. We’ll turn the trick for him, and guarantee him more than a taste of immortality.”

“You may put me down for four dollars’ worth of notoriety,” said Mr. Brief, with a laugh.

“All right,” said the Idiot, dryly. “There’s a lot in your profession who like the cheap sort. But I warn you in advance that if you go in for cheap notoriety, you’ll find it a pretty hard job getting anybody to sell you any eighteen-karat distinction later.”

“Well,” said the Poet, “I don’t know that I can promise to be one of your customers until I know something of the quality of the fame you have to sell. Tell me of somebody you’ve made a name for, and I’ll take the matter into consideration if I like the style of laurel you have placed on his brow.”

“Lean over here and I’ll whisper,” said the Idiot. “I don’t mind telling you, but I don’t believe in giving away the secrets of the trade to the rest of these gentlemen.”

The Poet did as he was bade, and the Idiot whispered a certain great name in his ear.

“No!” cried the Poet, incredulously.

“Yes, sir. Fact!” said the Idiot. “He was made famous in a night. The first thing we did was to get him to elongate his signature. He was writing as – P. K. Dubbins we’ll call him, for the sake of the argument. Now a name like that couldn’t be made great under any circumstances whatsoever, so we made him write it out in full: Philander Kenilworth Dubbins – regular broadside, you see. P. K. Dubbins was a pop-shot, but Philander Kenilworth Dubbins spreads out like a dum-dum bullet or hits you like a blast from a Gatling gun. Printed, it takes up a whole line of a newspaper column; put at the top of an advertisement, it strikes the eye with the convincing force of a circus-poster. You can’t help seeing it, and it makes, when spoken, a mouthful that is nothing short of impressive and sonorous.”

“Still,” suggested Mr. Brief, with a wink at the Bibliomaniac, “you have only multiplied your difficulties by three. If it was hard for your friend Dubbins to make one name famous, I can’t see that he improves matters by trying to make three names famous.”

“On the modern business principle that to accomplish anything you must work on a large scale,” said the Idiot. “Philander Kenilworth Dubbins was a better proposition than P. K. Dubbins. The difference between them in the mere matter of potentialities is the difference between a corner grocery and a department store, or a kite with a tail and one without. Well, having created the name, the next thing to do was to exploit it, and we advertised Dubbins for all there was in him. We got Mr. William Jones Brickbat, the eminent novelist, to say that he had read Dubbins’s poems, and had not yet died; we got Edward Pinkham, the author of “The Man with the Watering-pot,” to send us a type-written letter, saying that Dubbins was a coming man, and that his latest book, Howls from Helicon, contained many inspired lines. But, best of all, we prevailed upon the manufacturers of celluloid soap to print a testimonial from Dubbins himself, saying that there was no other soap like it in the market. That brought his name prominently before every magazine-reader in the country, because the celluloid-soap people are among the biggest advertisers of the day, and everywhere that soap ad went, why, Dubbins’s testimonial went also, as faithfully as Mary’s Little Lamb. After that we paid a shirt-making concern down-town to put out a new collar called “The Helicon,” which they advertised widely with a picture of Dubbins’s head sticking up out of the middle of it; and, finally, as a crowning achievement, we leased Dubbins for a year to a five-cent cigar company, who have placarded the fences, barns, and chicken-coops from Maine to California with the name of Dubbins – ‘Flora Dubbins: The Best Five-Cent Smoke in the Market.’”

“And thus you made the name of Dubbins famous in letters!” sneered the Doctor.

“That was only the preliminary canter,” replied the Idiot. “So far, Dubbins’s greatness was confined to fences, barns, chicken-coops, and the advertising columns of the magazines. The next thing was to get him written up in the newspapers. That sort of thing can’t be bought, but you can acquire it by subtlety. Plan one was to make an after-dinner speaker out of Dubbins. This was easy. There are a million public dinners every year, but a limited supply of good speakers; so, with a little effort, we got Dubbins on five toast-cards, hired a humorist out in Wisconsin to write five breezy speeches for him, Dubbins committed them to memory, and they went off like hot-cakes. Morning papers would come out with Dubbins’s picture printed in between that of Bishop Potter and a member of the cabinet, who also spoke. Copies of Dubbins’s speeches were handed to the reporters before the dinner began, so that it didn’t make any difference whether Dubbins spoke them or not – the papers had ’em next morning just the same, and inside of six months you couldn’t read an account of any public banquet without running up against the name of Philander Kenilworth Dubbins.”

“Well, I declare!” ejaculated Mr. Whitechoker. “What a strange affair!”

“Then we got Dubbins’s publishers to take a hand,” said the Idiot. “They issued a monthly budget of gossip concerning their authors, which newspaper editors all over quoted in their interesting items of the day. From these paragraphs the public learned that Dubbins wrote between 4 A.M. and breakfast-time; that Dubbins never penned a line without having a tame rabbit, named Romola, sitting alongside of his ink-pot; that Dubbins got his ideas for his wonderful poem, ‘The Mystery of Life,’ from hearing a canary inadvertently whistle a bar of ‘Hiawatha;’ that Dubbins was the best-dressed author in the State of New York, affecting green plaid waistcoats, pink shirts, and red neckties; witty things that Dubbins’s boy had said about Dubbins’s work to Dubbins himself were also spread all over the land, until finally Philander Kenilworth Dubbins became a select series of household words in every town, city, and hamlet in the United States. And there he is to-day – a great man, bearing a great name, made for him by his friends. Howls from Helicon is full of bad poems, but Dubbins is a son of Parnassus just the same. Now we propose to do it for others. For five dollars down, Mr. Poet, I’ll make you conspicuous; for ten, I’ll make you notorious; for fifty, I’ll make you famous; for a hundred, I’ll give you immortality.”

“Good!” cried the Poet. “Immortality for a hundred dollars is cheap. I’ll take that.”

“You will?” said the Idiot, joyfully. “Put up your money.”

“All right,” laughed the Poet. “I’ll pay – C. O. D.”

“Another hundred gone!” moaned the Idiot, as the party broke up and its members went their several ways. “I think it’s abominable that this commercial spirit of the age should have affected even you poets. You ought to have gone into business, old man, and left the Muses alone. You’ve got too good a head for poetry.”