A Plea for Old Cap Collier

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This Etext prepared by Kirk Pearson

A Plea For Old Cap Collier

by Irvin S. Cobb

To Will H. Hogg, Esquire

For a good many years now I have been carrying this idea round
with me. It was more or less of a loose and unformed idea, and
it wouldn't jell. What brought it round to the solidification
point was this: Here the other week, being half sick, I was laid
up over Sunday in a small hotel in a small seacoast town. I had
read all the newspapers and all the magazines I could get hold of.
The local bookstore, of course, was closed. They won't let the
oysters stay open on Sunday in that town. The only literature my
fellow guests seemed interested in was mailorder tabs and price
currents.

Finally, when despair was about to claim me for her own, I ran
across an ancient Fifth Reader, all tattered and stained and having
that smell of age which is common to old books and old sheep. I
took it up to bed with me, and I read it through from cover to
cover. Long before I was through the very idea which for so long
had been sloshing round inside of my head--this idea which, as one
might say, had been aged in the wood--took shape. Then and there
I decided that the very first chance I had I would sit me down and
write a plea for Old Cap Collier.

In my youth I was spanked freely and frequently for doing many
different things that were forbidden, and also for doing the same
thing many different times and getting caught doing it. That, of
course, was before the Boy Scout movement had come along to show
how easily and how sanely a boy's natural restlessness and a boy's
natural love for adventure may be directed into helpful channels;
that was when nearly everything a normal, active boy craved to do
was wrong and, therefore, held to be a spankable offense.

This was a general rule in our town. It did not especially apply
to any particular household, but it applied practically to all the
households with which I was in any way familiar. It was a community
where an old-fashioned brand of applied theology was most strictly
applied. Heaven was a place which went unanimously Democratic every
fall, because all the Republicans had gone elsewhere. Hell was a
place full of red-hot coals and clinkered sinners and unbaptized
babies and a smell like somebody cooking ham, with a deputy devil
coming in of a morning with an asbestos napkin draped over his arm
and flicking a fireproof cockroach off the table cloth and leaning
across the back of Satan's chair and saying: "Good mornin', boss.
How're you going to have your lost souls this mornin'--fried on
one side or turned over?" Sunday was three weeks long, and longer
than that if it rained. About all a fellow could do after he'd
come back from Sunday school was to sit round with his feet cramped
into the shoes and stockings which he never wore on week days and
with the rest of him incased in starchy, uncomfortable dress-up
clothes--just sit round and sit round and itch. You couldn't
scratch hard either. It was sinful to scratch audibly and with
good, broad, free strokes, which is the only satisfactory way to
scratch. In our town they didn't spend Sunday; they kept the
Sabbath, which is a very different thing.

Looking back on my juvenile years it seems to me that, generally
speaking, when spanked I deserved it. But always there were two
punishable things against which--being disciplined--my youthful
spirit revolted with a sort of inarticulate sense of injustice.
One was for violation of the Sunday code, which struck me as wrong
--the code, I mean, not the violation--without knowing exactly why
it was wrong; and the other, repeated times without number, was
when I had been caught reading nickul libruries, erroneously
referred to by our elders as dime novels.

I read them at every chance; so did every normal boy of my
acquaintance. We traded lesser treasures for them; we swapped
them on the basis of two old volumes for one new one; we maintained
a clandestine circulating-library system which had its branch
offices in every stable loft in our part of town. The more daring
among us read them in school behind the shelter of an open geography
propped up on the desk.

Shall you ever forget the horror of the moment when, carried away
on the wings of adventure with Nick Carter or Big-Foot Wallace or
Frank Reade or bully Old Cap, you forgot to flash occasional glances
of cautious inquiry forward in order to make sure the teacher was
where she properly should be, at her desk up in front, and read
on and on until that subtle sixth sense which comes to you when
a lot of people begin staring at you warned you something was amiss,
and you looked up and round you and found yourself all surrounded
by a ring of cruel, gloating eyes?

I say cruel advisedly, because up to a certain age children are
naturally more cruel than tigers. Civilization has provided them
with tools, as it were, for practicing cruelty, whereas the tiger
must rely only on his teeth and his bare claws. So you looked
round, feeling that the shadow of an impending doom encompassed
you, and then you realized that for no telling how long the teacher
had been standing just behind you, reading over your shoulder.

And at home were you caught in the act of reading them, or--what
from the parental standpoint was almost as bad--in the act of
harboring them? I was. Housecleaning times, when they found them
hidden under furniture or tucked away on the back shelves of
pantry closets, I was paddled until I had the feelings of a slice
of hot, buttered toast somewhat scorched on the under side. And
each time, having been paddled, I was admonished that boys who
read dime novels--only they weren't dime novels at all but cost
uniformly five cents a copy--always came to a bad end, growing up
to be criminals or Republicans or something equally abhorrent.
And I was urged to read books which would help me to shape my
career in a proper course. Such books were put into my hands,
and I loathed them. I know now why when I grew up my gorge rose
and my appetite turned against so-called classics. Their style
was so much like the style of the books which older people wanted
me to read when I was in my early teens.

Such were the specious statements advanced by the oldsters. And
we had no reply for their argument, or if we had one could not
find the language in which to couch it. Besides there was another
and a deeper reason. A boy, being what he is, the most sensitive
and the most secretive of living creatures regarding his innermost
emotions, rarely does bare his real thoughts to his elders, for
they, alas, are not young enough to have a fellow feeling, and
they are too old and they know too much to be really wise.

What we might have answered, had we had the verbal facility and
had we not feared further painful corporeal measures for talking
back--or what was worse, ridicule--was that reading Old Cap Collier
never yet sent a boy to a bad end. I never heard of a boy who ran
away from home and really made a go of it who was actuated at the
start by the nickul librury. Burning with a sense of injustice,
filled up with the realization that we were not appreciated at
home, we often talked of running away and going out West to fight
Indians, but we never did. I remember once two of us started for
the Far West, and got nearly as far as Oak Grove Cemetery, when--
the dusk of evening impending--we decided to turn back and give
our parents just one more chance to understand us.

What, also, we might have pointed out was that in a five-cent
story the villain was absolutely sure of receiving suitable and
adequate punishment for his misdeeds. Right then and there, on
the spot, he got his. And the heroine was always so pluperfectly
pure. And the hero always was a hero to his finger tips, never
doing anything unmanly or wrong or cowardly, and always using the
most respectful language in the presence of the opposite sex.
There was never any sex problem in a nickul librury. There were
never any smutty words or questionable phrases. If a villain said
"Curse you!" he was going pretty far. Any one of us might whet
up our natural instincts for cruelty on Fore's Book of Martyrs,
or read of all manner of unmentionable horrors in the Old Testament,
but except surreptitiously we couldn't walk with Nick Carter,
whose motives were ever pure and who never used the naughty word
even in the passion of the death grapple with the top-booted forces
of sinister evil.

We might have told our parents, had we had the words in which to
state the case and they but the patience to listen, that in a
nickul librury there was logic and the thrill of swift action and
the sharp spice of adventure. There, invariably virtue was rewarded
and villainy confounded; there, inevitably was the final triumph
for law and for justice and for the right; there embalmed in one
thin paper volume, was all that Sandford and Merton lacked; all
that the Rollo books never had. We might have told them that
though the Leatherstocking Tales and Robinson Crusoe and Two Years
Before the Mast and Ivanhoe were all well enough in their way, the
trouble with them was that they mainly were so long-winded. It
took so much time to get to where the first punch was, whereas Ned
Buntline or Col. Prentiss Ingraham would hand you an exciting jolt
on the very first page, and sometimes in the very first paragraph.

You take J. Fenimore Cooper now. He meant well and he had ideas,
but his Indians were so everlastingly slow about getting under way
with their scalping operations! Chapter after chapter there was
so much fashionable and difficult language that the plot was
smothered. You couldn't see the woods for the trees, But it was
the accidental finding of an ancient and reminiscent volume one
Sunday in a little hotel which gave me the cue to what really made
us such confirmed rebels against constituted authority, in a
literary way of speaking. The thing which inspired us with hatred
for the so-called juvenile classic was a thing which struck deeper
even than the sentiments I have been trying to describe.

The basic reason, the underlying motive, lay in the fact that in
the schoolbooks of our adolescence, and notably in the school
readers, our young mentalities were fed forcibly on a pap which
affronted our intelligence at the same time that it cloyed our
adolescent palates. It was not altogether the lack of action; it
was more the lack of plain common sense in the literary spoon
victuals which they ladled into us at school that caused our
youthful souls to revolt. In the final analysis it was this more
than any other cause which sent us up to the haymow for delicious,
forbidden hours in the company of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill
Hickok.

Midway of the old dog-eared reader which I picked up that day I
came across a typical example of the sort of stuff I mean. I
hadn't seen it before in twenty-five years; but now, seeing it,
I remembered it as clearly almost as though it had been the week
before instead of a quarter of a century before when for the first
time it had been brought to my attention. It was a piece entitled,
The Shipwreck, and it began as follows:

In the winter of 1824 Lieutenant G-----, of the United States
Navy, with his beautiful wife and child, embarked in a packet
at Norfolk bound to South Carolina.

So far so good. At least, here is a direct beginning. A family
group is going somewhere. There is an implied promise that before
they have traveled very far something of interest to the reader
will 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 job
as a trusted messenger in the large city store or in the city's
large store, if we are going to be purists about it, as the boy
in question undoubtedly was?

It seems that he had supported his widowed mother and a large
family of brothers and sisters by shoveling snow and, I think,
laying brick or something of that technical nature. After this
lapse of years I won't be sure about the bricklaying, but at any
rate, work was slack in his regular line, and so he went to the
proprietor of this vast retail establishment and procured a
responsible position on the strength of his easy and graceful
personal address and his employment of some of the most stylish
adjectives in the dictionary. At this time he was nearly seven
years old--yes, sir, actually nearly seven. We have the word of
the schoolbook for it. We should have had a second chapter on
this boy. Probably at nine he was being considered for president
of Yale--no, Harvard. He would know too much to be president of
Yale.

Then there was the familiar instance of the Spartan youth who
having stolen a fox and hidden it inside his robe calmly stood up
and let the animal gnaw his vitals rather than be caught with it
in his possession. But, why? I ask you, why? What was the good
of it all? What object was served? To begin with, the boy had
absconded with somebody else's fox, or with somebody's else fox,
which is undoubtedly the way a compiler of school readers would
phrase it. This, right at the beginning, makes the morality of
the transaction highly dubious. In the second place, he showed
poor taste. If he was going to swipe something, why should he
not have swiped a chicken or something else of practical value?

We waive that point, though, and come to the lack of discretion
shown by the fox. He starts eating his way out through the boy,
a messy and difficult procedure, when merely by biting an aperture
in the tunic he could have emerged by the front way with ease and
dispatch. And what is the final upshot of it all? The boy falls
dead, with a large unsightly gap in the middle of him. Probably,
too, he was a boy whose parents were raising him for their own
purposes. As it is, all gnawed up in this fashion and deceased
besides, he loses his attractions for everyone except the undertaker.
The fox presumably has an attack of acute indigestion. And there
you are! Compare the moral of this with the moral of any one of
the Old Cap Collier series, where virtue comes into its own and
sanity is prevalent throughout and vice gets what it deserves, and
all.

In McGuffey's Third Reader, I think it was, occurred that story
about the small boy who lived in Holland among the dikes and dams,
and one evening he went across the country to carry a few illustrated
post cards or some equally suitable gift to a poor blind man, and
on his way back home in the twilight he discovered a leak in the
sea wall. If he went for help the breach might widen while he was
gone and the whole structure give way, and then the sea would come
roaring in, carrying death and destruction and windmills and wooden
shoes and pineapple cheeses on its crest. At least, this is the
inference one gathers from reading Mr. McGuffey's account of the
affair.

So what does the quick-witted youngster do? He shoves his little
arm in the crevice on the inner side, where already the water is
trickling through, thus blocking the leak. All night long he
stands there, one small, half-frozen Dutch boy holding back the
entire North Atlantic. Not until centuries later, when Judge Alton
B. Parker runs for president against Colonel Roosevelt and is
defeated practically by acclamation is there to be presented so
historic and so magnificent an example of a contest against
tremendous odds. In the morning a peasant, going out to mow the
tulip beds, finds the little fellow crouched at the foot of the
dike and inquires what ails him. The lad, raising his weary
head--but wait, I shall quote the exact language of the book:

"I am hindering the sea from running in," was the simple reply
of the child.

Simple? I'll say it is! Positively nothing could be simpler unless
it be the stark simplicity of the mind of an author who figures
that when the Atlantic Ocean starts boring its way through a crack
in a sea wall you can stop it by plugging the hole on the inner
side of the sea wall with a small boy's arm. Ned Buntline may
never have enjoyed the vogue among parents and teachers that Mr.
McGuffey enjoyed, but I'll say this for him--he knew more about
the laws of hydraulics than McGuffey ever dreamed.

And there was Peter Hurdle, the ragged lad who engaged in a long
but tiresome conversation with the philanthropic and inquisitive
Mr. Lenox, during the course of which it developed that Peter
didn't want anything. When it came on to storm he got under a
tree. When he was hungry he ate a raw turnip. Raw turnips, it
would appear, grew all the year round in the fields of the favored
land where Peter resided. If the chill winds of autumn blew in
through one of the holes in Peter's trousers they blew right out
again through another hole. And he didn't care to accept the dime
which Mr. Lenox in an excess of generosity offered him, because,
it seemed, he already had a dime. When it came to being plumb
contented there probably never was a soul on this earth that was
the equal of Master Hurdle. He even was satisfied with his name
which I would regard as the ultimate test.

Likewise, there was the case of Hugh Idle and Mr. Toil. Perhaps
you recall that moving story? Hugh tries to dodge work; wherever
he goes he finds Mr. Toil in one guise or another but always with
the same harsh voice and the same frowning eyes, bossing some job
in a manner which would cost him his boss-ship right off the reel
in these times when union labor is so touchy. And what is the
moral to be drawn from this narrative? I know that all my life I
have been trying to get away from work, feeling that I was intended
for leisure, though never finding time somehow to take it up
seriously. But what was the use of trying to discourage me from
this agreeable idea back yonder in the formulative period of my
earlier years?

In Harper's Fourth Reader, edition of 1888, I found an article
entitled The Difference Between the Plants and Animals. It takes
up several pages and includes some of the fanciest language the
senior Mr. Harper could disinter from the Unabridged. In my own
case--and I think I was no more observant than the average urchin
of my age--I can scarcely remember a time when I could not readily
determine certain basic distinctions between such plants and such
animals as a child is likely to encounter in the temperate parts
of North America.

While emerging from infancy some of my contemporaries may have
fallen into the error of the little boy who came into the house
with a haunted look in his eye and asked his mother if mulberries
had six legs apiece and ran round in the dust of the road, and
when she told him that such was not the case with mulberries he
said: "Then, mother, I feel that I have made a mistake."

To the best of my recollection, I never made this mistake, or at
least if I did I am sure I made no inquiry afterward which might
tend further to increase my doubts; and in any event I am sure
that by the time I was old enough to stumble over Mr. Harper's
favorite big words I was old enough to tell the difference between
an ordinary animal--say, a house cat--and any one of the commoner
forms of plant life, such as, for example, the scaly-bark hickory
tree, practically at a glance. I'll add this too: Nick Carter
never wasted any of the golden moments which he and I spent together
in elucidating for me the radical points of difference between the
plants and the animals.

In the range of poetry selected by the compilers of the readers
for my especial benefit as I progressed onward from the primary
class into the grammar grades I find on examination of these
earlier American authorities an even greater array of chuckleheads
than appear in the prose divisions. I shall pass over the celebrated
instance--as read by us in class in a loud tone of voice and without
halt for inflection or the taking of breath--of the Turk who at
midnight in his guarded tent was dreaming of the hour when Greece
her knees in suppliance bent would tremble at his power. I remember
how vaguely I used to wonder who it was that was going to grease
her knees and why she should feel called upon to have them greased
at all. Also, I shall pass over the instance of Abou Ben Adhem,
whose name led all the rest in the golden book in which the angel
was writing. Why shouldn't it have led all the rest? A man whose
front name begins with Ab, whose middle initial is B, and whose
last name begins with Ad will be found leading all the rest in any
city directory or any telephone list anywhere. Alphabetically
organized as he was, Mr. Adhem just naturally had to lead; and
yet for hours on end my teaches consumed her energies and mine in
a more or less unsuccessful effort to cause me to memorize the
details as set forth by Mr. Leigh Hunt.

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