s poetry, it
exists because it is accidental or left over. There was a deep bass
steamer on the Mississippi once, with a very small head of steam,
which any one would have admitted had poetry in it--old-fashioned
poetry. Every time it whistled it stopped.

III

ON NOT SHOWING OFF

It is not true to say that the modern man does not care for poetry. He
does not care for poetry that bears on--or for eloquent poetry. He
cares for poetry in a new sense. In the old sense he does not care for
eloquence in anything. The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeks
to win votes by a show of eloquence is turned down. Votes are facts,
and if the votes are to be won, facts must be arranged to do it. The
doctor who stands best with the typical modern patient is not the most
agreeable, sociable, jogging-about man a town contains, like the
doctor of the days gone by. He talks less. He even prescribes less,
and the reason that it is hard to be a modern minister (already cut
down from two hours and a half to twenty or thirty minutes) is that
one has to practise more than one can preach.

To be modern is to be suggestive and symbolic, to stand for more than
one says or looks--the little girl with her loom clothing twelve
hundred people. People like it. They are used to it. All life around
them is filled with it. The old-fashioned prayer-meeting is dying out
in the modern church because it is a mere specialty in modern life.
The prayer-meeting recognizes but one way of praying, and people who
have a gift for praying that way go, but the majority of
people--people who have discovered that there are a thousand other
ways of praying, and who like them better--stay away.

When the telegraph machine was first thought of, the words all showed
on the outside. When it was improved it became inner and subtle. The
messages were read by sound. Everything we have which improves at all
improves in the same way. The exterior conception of righteousness of
a hundred years ago--namely, that a man must do right because it is
his duty--is displaced by the modern one, the morally thorough
one--namely, that a man must do right because he likes it--do it from
the inside. The more improved righteousness is, the less it shows on
the outside. The more modern righteousness is, the more it looks like
selfishness, the better the modern world likes it, and the more it
counts.

On the whole, it is against a thing rather than in its favor, in the
twentie