A Great Person and Certain Bores

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

I HAVE lately been private secretary and literary adviser to a Great Person. She is a woman known all over the world, loved, admired, and misunderstood by more kinds of people than drink tea. The world is so good to her that it is ungrateful to quarrel with its ways, but it has given me a hard time. What is more important, the Great Person has had a hard time too, and I hope for her sake that there will be among those who read this one or two who have been intending to give her trouble, and who will forthwith learn better.

The worst enemy to the Great Person is the autograph collector. Now, the collector who buys with good money autographs that are already on paper, or who begs from his friends, or who knows celebrities well enough to ask them to their faces for their signatures, may be, and I am sure is, a great nuisance. But he is not a foe to society. The collector who asks a person who has never heard of him for a letter or for a signature “ on the inclosed card ” is a selfish parasite. My Great Person works ten hours a day. Not to speak of the unknown petitioners who ask merely for a signature and those more cunning beggars who ask questions adroitly inviting her to write more than a bare autograph, — not to speak of the mob of strangers, — if she answered all the genuine friendly letters and the meritorious requests for help, she would not have time left to add anything to the greatness which causes her to be pestered now.

What hypocritical apologists these brazen collectors are! “You will no doubt be surprised to receive a request from one who is a perfect stranger to you.” No, not surprised, — the morning’s mail contains no surprises, — but wearied, sometimes angry. These are the emotions of the secretary, not of the Great Person. She is sweet, easily taken in by a false plea for help, and all too honest. She will not even keep the stamp inclosed for reply. I record with satisfaction that a wealthy beggar (she wrote on expensive paper gloriously embossed with a golden monogram) who asked for a photograph and inclosed two stamps got only one back on the outside of the reply I wrote. The other stamp is spoil more precious than its poor two cents’ worth ; it is the fine of justice, the prize of the hard-laboring secretary who must reply to these buzzing parasites.

How politely the secretary writes to the daily swarm of beggars who ask, not for bread, not for drink, nor for any necessary thing, but for a valuable curio, for one of the idle trumperies of life to grace a rich man’s cabinet. “— regrets her inability to comply with the many requests she receives for autographs, samples of her dress, books, pictures, locks of her hair, photographs, pens she has used, poems, belt-buckles, and shoe-strings.” The secretary signs this gracious and comprehensive refusal in dull patience. This is the letter he writes in his mind: —

“ If you are young, you still have a chance to learn that you have no right to take the time and the strength of one who is of service to the world, or to annoy her much respected and valuable secretary. You are trying to rob society. If you are grown up and hardened in evil ways, if you are a professional collector of great men’s letters and relics, you ought to be ” —

For another kind of bore who has cost me much labor, and all but soured my sweet temper, I have some pity. This kind of bore is born, not made. I mean the amateur poet, who writes execrable verse to the Great Person. I have burned a hundred and fifty of these poems in six months. None of them was funny enough to print. Most of them were simply bad. In some there was unconscious pathos, for through the crude limping phrases there shone, not the cold conceit of the amateur writer, but the sincerity of a great inarticulate affection. Most of the rest were written to win a reply, and in these the workmanship was usually better than in the more genuine tributes ; unhappily, good workmanship too often goes with conceit and selfishness, whereas he who would sing an honest hymn to his idol confounds the grammar of the English language.

These poor poets, like the autograph collectors, should be cured, not for the sake of the great people they annoy, but for their own sakes. Here, however, protest is in vain : nothing will cure the amateur poet.