Inhuman Documents

— It is genial Robbie Burns who takes time from his merry war with Dame Fortune to lament over “man’s inhumanity to man,” but little did the handsome poet divine the refinement of cruelty to which that inhumanity was yet to be carried. Why does not some philanthropist incorporate a society for the protection of the gifted, an organization for the defense of poets, musicians, explorers, and inventors against patent devices for deliberate and protracted torture ?

Was it not enough that they should be pilloried in newspaper cuts ; that their most private and sacred affairs should be posted at the cross-roads, their fine frenzies of imagination accepted as a frank unveiling of inner life, and their triumphs of creative genius declared to he veritable autobiography ? Nay, verily, but modern journalism invents a new method of inquisition, digs down through the strata of history in search of paheozoic remains, and sets them up to show the hero in every stage of development.

Most of us have these specimens of early art hidden away in safe recesses of cabinets and bureau drawers, cherished in spite of their grotesqueness, and brought out occasionally at family festivals to the diversion of the youngsters.

It used to be a solemn thing to “ hev yer pieter took,” and solemnity hung like a pall over the finished result. Having survived the first stage of the process, you looked with trembling expectancy at the wet, glistening tiling carefully held for your inspection between the thumb and finger of the wizard, only to feel your heart sink to fathomless depths at the image which confronted you. An excellent likeness, the artist (!) assured you, — how could it be otherwise when it was simply a reflection of yourself ? — and with a shuddering recollection of what you had read about the mysterious power of the sunbeam to pierce beneath the surface and reveal the inner nature, you accepted the caricature and hid it away, hoping you might not be arrested on its evidence as a hypocrite and deceiver.

You even gathered courage to repeat the experiment, with better results, as the years went on and the processes of art were perfected ; but while you do not deny your antecedents, you are not proud of them ; you look upon them as a record of the development of art rather than of personal history.

The man may be able to smile at the goggle-eyed baby, whose pulpy figure is bolstered up for the occasion by the maternal arm, or the imbecile creature, with absurd pinafore and ruffles, staring blankly from his perch in the high-chair, but he would, like to blot even from his own memory that self-satisfied, unlicked cub of fourteen. Then why, after study and thought and achievement have shaped and chiseled his face into a dignity and character that make it the expression of the man himself, should these preliminary studies be put on exhibition, and an idle public called in to see how a poet was made ?

It is a clear case for the Anti-Vivisection Society, and they should take it up if only to protect us from the greater evils with which we are threatened. For does not one’s brain congeal at the thought of what may be waiting just around the turn of the century, when a great electrician sees — though “dimly,” thank Heaven ! — the possible perfection of a machine “ for the registration of unwritten, unspoken thought, and its reproduction at any indefinite time afterwards ” ? Forbid it, merciful powers ! What would become of trade and politics, of society and friendly intercourse ? Who but idiots and babies could safely venture abroad ? Nay, how would any one he sure, by day or by night, that he had not been surreptitiously attached to a machine, and was thinking into the city office of the Publie Investigator ? If the poet and the novelist choose to sit down and gossip before a phonograph, so letting us into the secrets of inspiration, we wall not complain. It is soothing to our irritated feelings to learn that the great promoter of hesitancy did not himself know whether it was the lady or the tiger. Put let us at least be able to keep our unspoken thoughts to ourselves, and guard the privacy of our own brains from the desolating foot of the interviewer and exhibitor.