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"How is your Muse these days, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Bibliomaniac one Sunday morning while the mush was being served.
"Flourishing," said the Idiot. "Just flourishing—and no more."
"I should think you'd be pleased if she is flourishing," said the Doctor.
"I'd rather she'd stop flourishing and do a little writing," said the Idiot. "She's a queer Muse, that one of mine. She has all the airs and graces of an ordinary type-writer with an unconquerable aversion to work."
"You look upon your Muse as you would upon your type-writer, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "That's all my Muse is, and she isn't even a capable type-writer. The general run of type-writers make sense of what you write, but my Muse won't. You may not believe it, but out of ten inspirations I had last week not one of them is fit for publication anywhere but in a magazine or a puzzle column. I don't know what is the matter with her, but when I sit down to dictate a comic sonnet she turns it into a serious jingle, and vice versa . We can't seem to get our moods to fit. When I want to be serious she's flippant, and when I become flippant she's serious."
"She must be very serious most of the time," said the Doctor.
"She is," said the Idiot, innocently. "But that's only because I'm flippant most of the time. I'm going to give her warning. If she doesn't brace up and take more interest in her work I'm going to get another Muse, that's all. I can't afford to have my income cut down fifty per cent. just because she happens to be fickle."
"Maybe she is flirting with somebody else," suggested the Poet. "My Muse does that occasionally."
"I doubt it," said the Idiot. "I haven't observed any other poet encroaching upon my particular province. Even you, good as you are, can't do it. But in any event I'm going to have a change. The day has gone by when a one-muse poet achieves greatness. I'm going to employ a half-dozen and try to corner the poetry market. Queer that in all these years that men have been writing poetry no one has thought of that. People get up grain corners, corners in railway stock, monopolies in gas and oil and everything else, about, but as yet no poet has cornered the market in his business."
"That's easily accounted for," said the Bibliomaniac. "The poet controls only his own work, and if he has any sense he doesn't want to monopolize that."
"That isn't my scheme at all," said the Idiot. "You have a monopoly of your own work always if you choose to avail yourself of it, and, as you say, a man would be crazy to do so. What I'd like to see established is a sort of Poetic Clearing-house Association. Supposing, for instance, that I opened an office in Wall Street—a Bank for Poets, in which all writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw against them just as they do in ordinary banks with their money. It would be fine. Take a man like Swinburne, for instance, or our friend here. Our poet could take a sonnet he had written, endorse it, and put it in the bank. He'd be credited with one sonnet, and wouldn't have to bother his head about it afterwards. He could draw against it. If the Clearing-house company could dispose of it to a magazine his draft would be honored in cash to its full value, less discount charges, which would include postage and commissions to the company."
"And suppose the company failed to dispose of it?" suggested the Poet.
"They'd do just as ordinary banks do with checks—stamp it 'Not Good,'" said the Idiot. "That, however, wouldn't happen very often if the concern had an intelligent receiving-teller to detect counterfeits. If the receiving-teller were a man fit for the position and a poet brought in a quatrain with five lines in it, he could detect it at once and hand it back. So with comic poems. I might go there with a poem I thought was comic, and proceed to deposit it with the usual deposit slip. The teller would look at it a second, scrutinize the humor carefully, and then if it was not what I thought it, would stamp it 'Not Comic' or 'Counterfeit.' It is perfectly simple."
"Very simple," said Mr. Pedagog. "Though I should have used a synonym of simple to describe it. It's idiotic."
"That's what people said of Columbus's idea that he could discover America," said the Idiot. "Everything that doesn't have dollars slathered all over it in plain view is idiotic."
"The word slathered is new to me," said the School-master; "but I fancy I know what you mean."
"The word slathered may be new to you," said the Idiot, "but it is a good word. I have used it with great effect several times. Whenever any one asks me that foolish question that is asked so often, 'What is the good word?' I always reply 'Slathered,' and the what's-the-good-word fiend goes off hurt in his mind. He doesn't know what I mean any more than I do, but it shuts him up completely, which is just so much gained."
"I must confess," said the Poet, "that I cannot myself see where there is any money for your Rhyme Clearing-house. Ordinarily I quite approve of your schemes, but in this instance I go over to the enemy."
"I don't say that it is a gold-mine," said the Idiot. "I doubt if I had every cent that is paid for poetry in a year by everybody to everybody that my income would reach one hundredth part of what I'd receive as a successful manufacturer of soap; but there would be more money in poetry than there is if by some pooling of our issues we could corner the market. Suppose every writer of a quatrain in America should send his whole product to us. We could say to the magazines, 'Gentlemen, quatrains are not quatraining as hard as they were. If you need a four-line bit of gloom and rhyme to finish off your thirty-second page, our price is twenty-five dollars instead of seventy-five cents, as of yore.' So with all other kinds of verse. We'd simply name our figure, force the editors to accept it, and unload. We might get caught on the last thirty or forty thousand, but our profits on the others would enable us to more than meet the losses."
"And would you pay the author the twenty-five dollars?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.
"Not if we were sane," replied the Idiot. "We'd pay the author two dollars and fifty cents, which is one dollar and seventy-five cents more than he gets now. He couldn't complain."
"And those that you couldn't sell?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"We'd simply mark 'Not Good' and return to the author. That's what happens to him now, so no objection could be raised to that. But there's still another side to this matter," said the Idiot. "Publishers would be quite as anxious to help it along as the poets. Dealing through us, they would be spared the necessity of interviewing poets, which I am informed is always painful because of the necessity which publishers labor under to give the poet to understand that they are in the business for profit, not for pleasure or mere love of sinking money in a magazine. So the publishers would keep a standing account of hard cash in our bank. Say a magazine used one hundred dollars' worth of verse in a month. The publisher at the beginning of the year would deposit twelve hundred dollars with us, and throughout the year would draw out sonnets, ballads, or pastels-in-metre just as he needed them. The checks would read something like this: 'The Poets' Clearing-house Association of the City of New York will pay to John Bluepencil, Editor, or Order, Ten Sonnets. (Signed) Blank Brothers & Co.' Or perhaps we'd receive a notice from a Southern publisher to this effect: 'Have drawn on you at sight for eight quatrains and a triolet.' Now, when you consider how many publishers there are who would always keep a cash balance in the treasury, you begin to get some notion as to how we could meet our running expenses and pay our quarterly dividends to our stockholders anyhow; and as for future dividends, I believe our loan department would net us a sufficient amount to make the stock gilt-edged."
"You would have a loan department, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog.
"That would be popular," said the Poet; "but there again I dispute the profit. You could find plenty of poets who would borrow your funds, but I doubt the security of the loans."
"All of your objections are based on misconceptions," said the Idiot. "The loan department would not lend money. It would lend poems for a consideration to those who are short and who need them to fulfil their obligations."
"Who on earth would want to borrow a poem, I'd like to know?" said the Bibliomaniac.
"Lovers, chiefly," said the Idiot. "Never having been a poet yourself, sir, you have no notion how far the mere faculty of being able to dash off a sonnet to a lady's eyebrow helps a man along in ultimately becoming the possessor of that eyebrow, together with the rest of the lady. I have seen women won, sir, by a rondeau. In fact, I have myself completely routed countless unpoetic rivals by exploding in their ranks burning quatrains to the fair objects of our affections. With woman the man who can write a hymn of thanksgiving that he is permitted to gaze into her cerulean orbs has a great advantage over the wight who has to tell her she has dandy blue eyes in commonplace prose. The commonplace-prose wight knows it, too, and he'd pay ten per cent. of his salary during courtship if he could devise a plan by means of which he could pass himself off as a poet. To meet this demand, our loan department would be established. An unimaginative lover could come in and describe the woman he adored; the loan clerk would fish out a sonnet to fit the girl, and the lover could borrow it for ten days, just as brokers borrow stock. Armed with this he could go up to Harlem, or wherever else the maiden lived, and carry consternation into the hearts of his rivals by spouting the sonnet as nonchalantly as though he had just thought of it. So it would go on. For the following call he could borrow a ballad singing the glories of her raven locks, likening them to the beautiful night, or, if the locks were red instead of black, to the aurora borealis."
"You'd have trouble finding a rhyme to borealis," said the Poet.
"Tutt!" said the Idiot. "What's the matter with 'Glory, Alice,' 'Listen to my story, Alice,' 'I'm going to war so gory, Alice,' 'I fear you are a Tory, Alice' (this for a Revolutionary poem), or 'Come rowing in my dory, Alice'? There's no end to 'em."
"If you'll write a rhyming dictionary I'll buy a copy," was the Poet's sole comment.
"That will come later," said the Idiot. "Once get our clearing-house established, we can branch out into a general Poetry Trust and Supply Company that will make millions. We'll make so much money, by Jove!" he added, slapping the table enthusiastically, "that we can afford to go into the publishing business ourselves and bring out volumes of verse for anybody and everybody. We can deal in Fame! A man that couldn't write his own name so that anybody could read it could come to us and say: 'Gentlemen, I've got everything but brains. I want to be an author and 'mongst the authors stand. I am told it is delightful to see one's book in print. I haven't a book, but I've got a dollar or two, and if you'll put out a first-class book of poems under my name I'll pay all expenses and give you a royalty of twenty per cent. on every copy I give away!' No money in it? Bah! You gentlemen don't know. If you say fortune would not wait upon this venture I say you are the kind of men who would sell government bonds for their value as mere engravings if you had the chance."
"You certainly do draw a roseate picture," said Mr. Whitechoker.
"I do indeed," said the Idiot, "and the paint is laid on thick."
"Well, I hope it goes," said the Poet. "I'll make a deposit the first day of three hundred and sixty-seven ballads, four hundred and twenty-three couplets, eighty-nine rondeaus, and one epic about ten yards in length, all of which I have in my desk at this moment."
"Very well," said the Idiot, rising, "With that encouragement from you I feel warranted in ordering the 'Not Good' stamp at least."