Seeing Things at Night. Heywood Hale Broun

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СКАЧАТЬ to jump for me as I went out the door," writes Conklin. "It had been done by blowing on his nose and then jumping back as you would play with a dog. It always made a great hit with the crowd, who supposed it had seen a lion try to eat a man and that I had had a very narrow escape. I worked it this way: After I had finished the rest of my act I would get George all stirred up and growling. Then I would fire my pistol two or three times and jump out of the cage as quickly as I could. At the same time George would give a big lunge and come up against the door which I had just shut behind me. George had learned the trick so well that I frequently had to turn on him once or twice and work him farther back from the door before I dared attempt getting out."

      Unfortunately the substitute had missed all this part of the act. He started out of the cage and George jumped at him and the man was not prepared to dodge. The moral seems to be that nobody should covet another man's job, not even that of lion taming.

      Some readers we suppose will find Mr. Conklin's lion stories unwelcome because they may tend to take away their illusions. It is not to be denied that he has to some extent rubbed the gilt off the gingerbread by writing that the record for all the lions he has known consists of one substitute trainer and a cow. His whole attitude toward lions is contemptuous in its calm and so is the attitude of practically everybody else in the book with the exception of the cow and the substitute trainer. Even they suffered a little, at first, from overconfidence.

      On the night down in Philadelphia when Wallace, the big lion, escaped from his cage in winter quarters nobody grew excited. O'Brien, the owner of the show, did not even get up, but called through the door "Go git Conklin!" The preparations of the trainer were simple. First he got an iron bar and then he found the lion and hit him on the end of the nose. "After a few minutes," he adds, "I had him safely locked in again."

      Lions, for all their air of authority, seem to be easily dominated. They're not so much wicked as weak. Anybody with a little firmness can twist them around a finger, possibly not the little finger, but any of the others. It is a great pity that lions should be like that. To be sure, the information ought not to come as a surprise to anybody who is familiar with the Bible. The condition we have mentioned has existed for a long time. As far as we know, Daniel had not so much as an iron bar when he went into the den. He overawed the lions with nothing more than faith.

      Perhaps it is not quite fair to go on as if lions were the only living creatures in all the world who are swayed and cowed by firmness and authority. The same weakness may be found now and then among men. All too many of us if hit on the nose with iron bars, either real ones or symbols, do little more than lions in similar circumstances. We may growl and roar a little, but we do not show resentment in any efficient way. And like the lions, we are singularly stupid in not making working alliances with our fellows against the man with the iron bar. By and by we begin to go through the hoops as if the procedure were inevitable. Having made a protest we feel that our duty is done.

      It is a great pity. Lions ought to know better. The man who stares you in the eye and squeezes hard in a handshake may come to the bad end which you wish him, but it is unlikely that he will ever be eaten by lions. Something else must be devised for him. Even outside the circus he is likely to go far. Anybody who can shake a little personality can be ringmaster in this world. And we, all of us who have none, do nothing about it except to obey him. Camels we can swallow easily enough, but we strain at the natty dresser.

      Still we did manage to find a few bits of information in The Ways of the Circus which were brand new to us. If, for instance, a rhinoceros escaped from his cage just what would you do to get him back again? That is, if he were the sort of rhinoceros you wanted back. At first glance it seems rather a problem, but any reader of Mr. Conklin's book could arrange it for you without difficulty. Nothing is needed but carrots and a stout heart. The carrots you scatter profusely about the floor of the cage, and when the rhinoceros returns to get them you slam down the door, and there he is.

      H. G. Wells of England

      H. G. Wells in his Outline of History seldom seems just an Englishman. He fights his battles and makes most of his judgments alone and generally in defiance of the traditions of his countrymen, but he is not bold enough to face Napoleon Bonaparte all by himself. The sight of the terrible little Corsican peeping over the edge of the thirty-eighth chapter sends Wells scurrying from his solitude into the center of a British square. It must be that when Wells was little and bad his nurse told him that if he did not eat his mush or go to bed, or perform some other necessary function in the daily life of a child, Old Bony would get him. And Wells is still scared. He takes it out, of course, by pretending that Napoleon has been vastly overrated and remarks that it was pretty lucky for him that he lost Trafalgar and never got to England, where troops would have made short work of him.

      Nelson, Wells holds, was just as great a figure in his own specialty as Napoleon in his, but if so it seems a pity that he did not rise to Wellsian heights of strategy and lose Trafalgar so that Napoleon might land and be defeated by British pluck and skill. Then, indeed, might Waterloo have been won upon the cricket fields of Eton.

      Not only does Wells insist on regarding Napoleon through national lenses but through moral ones also. Speaking of his accession as First Consul, Wells writes: "Now surely here was opportunity such as never came to man before. Here was a position in which a man might well bow himself in fear of himself, and search his heart and serve God and man to the utmost."

      That, of course, was not Napoleon's intent. His performance must be judged by his purpose, and it seems to us that Wells doesn't half appreciate how brilliant was the stunt which Napoleon achieved. "He tried to do the impossible and did it." Man was no better for him and neither was God, but he remains still the great bogy man of Europe, a bogy great enough to have frightened Mr. Wells and marked him. Here was a man who took life and made it theatrical. It was an achievement in popular æsthetics, if nothing else, but Wells doesn't care about æsthetics. Perhaps even a moral might be extracted from the life of Napoleon. He proved the magic quality of personality and the inspiration of gesture. Some day the same methods may be used to better advantage.

      The institution of the Legion of Honor Wells calls "A scheme for decorating Frenchmen with bits of ribbon which was admirably calculated to divert ambitious men from subversive proceedings." But these same bits of ribbon and the red and green ones of the Croix de Guerre and the yellow and green of the Médaille Militaire were later to save France from the onrush of the Germans. Without decorations, without phrases and without the brilliant and effective theatrical oratory of French officers, from marshals to sub-lieutenants, France would have lost the great war. Everybody who saw the French army in action realized that its morale was maintained during the worst days by colored ribbons and florid speeches. Even the stern and taciturn Pershing learned the lesson, and before he had been in France three months he was about making speeches to wounded men in which he told them that he wished that he, too, were lying in hospital with all their glory. Personally, it never seemed to me that Pershing actually convinced any wounded doughboy of his enthusiasm for such a change, but he did not use the gesture with much skill. He lacked the Napoleonic tradition.

      Another American officer, a younger one, said, "If I ever have anything to do with West Point I'm going to copy these Frenchmen. They do it naturally, but we've got to learn. I'm going to introduce a course in practical theatricalism. Now, if I were a general, as soon as I heard of some little trench raid in which Private Smith distinguished himself I'd send a staff officer down on the sly to find out what Smith looked like. Then I'd inspect that particular organization and when I got to Smith my aide would nudge me and I'd turn, as if instinctively, and say, 'Isn't that Private Smith who distinguished himself on the evening of January 18 at 8 o'clock? I want to shake your hand, Smith.' Why, man, the French army has been living and breathing on stuff like that for the last two years."

      It is an easy matter to satirize the heroic and theatrical gesture. The French themselves did it. Once in the Chamber of Deputies, late in the war, a Radical member, who didn't care much for the war, anyway, and still less for the Cabinet, arose and СКАЧАТЬ