The Quality of Wistfulness Is Strained

Revealing the Cash Value of an Expression of Pensive Yearning, With Guaranteed Results

HEYWOOD BROUN

GENE TUNNEY and I are suffering from the same complaint. But I am better off because I know what's wrong with me. For twenty minutes every day I practise to correct the fault. And out of friendliness I am quite willing to slip a tip to Tunney. He lacks, even as I do, the quality of wistfulness.

Without it no public performer ever will reach the land of heart's desire. Critics have said that Gene failed to arouse the plaudits of the multitude because he was a boxer, not a hitter. There is nothing in that. Fans in the past have worshipped many who could do no more than tap and dance away. There is ample power in the right hand smashes of Gene Tunney to make him a nation's darling. But he should not look so finished and efficient.

Surely in Chicago he had his chance. Anybody who goes down for a long count is well on the road to wistfulness. But not our Gene. Even on his back he was a picture of selfconfidence. Nobody could be sorry for him since he felt no pity for himself. Nor needed any.

Possibly it is not quite fair to suggest that wistfulness indicates some lack of capacity. After all it is the wistful who inherit the earth. Very probably they are not half so sorrowful as they seem. The wan expression and the eyes so close to tears constitute at best a trick. But it must be well done or the effect is useless. Only the other day they made some deserving man the president of a railroad. According to the newspaper accounts, he had been born of needy parents and lived in a little shack just to the left of this same road's right of way.

"Each morning," said the story, "he would toddle to the tracks and gaze wistfully at the great trains as they swept by." And now he's got them. Just because he looked wistful.

PART of my campaign of training has consisted of going down town every morning to look wistfully at the National City Bank but as yet nothing has happened.

I do not know just why it is that the world pays so vast a premium for wistfulness. Even less am I informed as to the thing the wistful want. It isn't money, nor fame nor adoration. Some of the most wistful expressions to be found in a day's journey are perched upon the countenances of great capitalists. Indeed that's almost the best place to search. After the sixth or seventh million a wistful look is all but inevitable.

But let us not fall into the error of accepting easy explanations. One is tempted to say that most of our self-made men missed the joys of childhood through the necessity of delivering newspapers, blacking boots, or growing up among the rigors of agricultural existence. The trouble with that is that next to millionaires the world's most wistful folk are children at play in parks or nurseries. Give a little girl the finest doll which can be bought for money and she will take it up and give you back nothing but wistfulness.

Most of the great ones of the world belong among the wistful. In that list should be set down the most popular actress of our day, the best loved playwright and the former heavyweight champion of the world. I need hardly say that I refer to Ethel Barrymore, James M. Barrie and Jack Dempsey. All arc members of the fraternity in good standing.

Miss Barrymore qualifies in a manner somewhat unusual. Most actresses want to be wistful and have a try at it. Some distressing results are achieved by various aggressive ingenues. These little ladies seem to labour under the delusion that wistfulness is something you do with your neck. Miss Barrymore belongs not because of any visual manifestation of yearning. It is her voice and particularly the notes of the lower register which make everyone within the theatre feel that there is something which Miss Barrymore desires and, furthermore, that she ought to have it.

THE charm of Barrie of which we hear so much, oh all too much, is made up in a large degree of wistfulness. I suppose there is a certain disarming element in this quality. Man is an envious animal. Few of us like people who are constantly laughing and carrying on with every indication of enjoyment. If folk across the restaurant frolic and make loud and happy noises they are set down at once as bounders and probably visitors from Kansas. Actually I think they have done nothing wrong. Our irritation is petty and depends upon jealousy. Since few of us are completely satisfied with life and all of its conditions it annoys us to think that there may be others who get more from it than we do. But the wistful person we love. The fact that he has millions and still seems pensive is ever so pleasing. It enables us to say, "Well, after all, money isn't everything," as we fish down into pockets almost empty.

Barrie and Miss Barrymore were born wistful I believe, but Dempsey first came into the clan in consequence of a mighty victory.

I am not referring now to the matches which Dempsey lost to Tunney but to an earlier afternoon on which the Manassa Mauler conquered Georges Carpentier. Eighty thousand fans were cheering "Dempsey! Dempsey! Dempsey!" and he stood by the ropes and acknowledged the applause with a look which went over the heads of the crowd and well beyond the rim of the big bowl. It even seemed as if the thing he was seeking lay entirely outside the thirty acres of Mr. Boyle. I don't know what the thing was and is. Probably Dempsey doesn't.

Wistful people ask for nothing and get everything. At least everything that can be wrapped up and labelled. The straightforward person who moves through the world speaking up in an audible voice to say, "I want that," will be greatly rebuffed. It seems to be more effective just to look longingly and say nothing.

On the covers of the Christmas and Thanksgiving numbers of the magazines there appears quite frequently a young and conventional wistfuler. He is a small boy. It is snowing and his nose is pressed against the window pane of a shop which displays a roast turkey, an electric train, some simple jewelry and a fur overcoat. The reader is supposed to weep for the small boy but I am not that reader. I know that if he continues to press his nose against the window pane and hold the proper expression for as long as half an hour somebody will happen along who will buy him not only the train and the turkey but the whole blame shop.

Wistfulness has always been in the world but it first achieved large scale production in Ireland. One might assume that overproduction would cause a slump. Since every man, woman and little child in Ireland is wistful you might think that they would become anaesthetized to each other. But they don't. The Irish have lived for years by being taken in by each other's wistfulness.

Just two things were conspicuously lacking in Irish life and so the psychologists reasoned that it must be either snakes or freedom for which this people pined. Freedom has come and the Irish still remain wistful. Give them the snakes and not a single quaver will straighten up and heave back its shoulders.

No, the thing is more complicated. The Irish are wistful about being wistful. That is, each one of them regrets the fact that he lacks any sort of monopoly in this respect. When all about are sad, that moonstruck pining look sets none apart from his fellows.

INDEED, George Bernard Shaw was smart enough to see this. By giving wistfulness the go-by he became the greatest Irishman of them all. But even in the case of Shaw I am afraid there has been a relapse. In the talking motion pictures he takes on vices never revealed to readers. He is quaint, and arch and whimsical. Yes, there is no denying the horrid fact, he is also just a little wistful.

While America does not precisely lead the world in furnishing examples of the cult, we have at least encouraged it. The music of our land has done a great deal for the promotion of wistfulness. Practically all the more popular ballads which come from Tin Pan Alley are sad songs. Something after the manner of the miss in the fairy tale from whose tongue diamonds dropped, Irving Berlin never gets to weeping without each tear chinking upon the pavement. For in the course of transit every manifestation of melancholy becomes a shining gold piece.

Few have worshipped the sun in popular harmonies. Ballads swing more to the moon because, I suppose, of its inconstancy. And, if one may be permitted to personify the planets, I rather suspect that it has one other quality which endears it to the heart of humans. Have you, for instance, ever gazed intently at the man in the moon upon a clear night? Quite right, the fellow has the familiar and appealing look. He, too, is wistful.