The Inventions of the Idiot

"You would have a loan department, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog. "That would be popular," said the Poet; "but there again I dispute the profit. You could find plenty of poets who would borrow your funds, but I doubt the security of the loans." "All of your objections are based on misconceptions," said the Idiot. "The loan department would not lend money. It would lend poems for a consideration to those who are short and who need them to fulfil their obligations." "Who on earth would want to borrow a poem, I'd like to know?" said the Bibliomaniac. "Lovers, chiefly," said the Idiot. "Never having been a poet yourself, sir, you have no notion how far the mere faculty of being able to dash off a sonnet to a lady's eyebrow helps a man along in ultimately becoming the possessor of that eyebrow, together with the rest of the lady. I have seen women won, sir, by a rondeau. In fact, I have myself completely routed countless unpoetic rivals by exploding in their ranks burning quatrains to the fair objects of our affections. With woman the man who can write a hymn of thanksgiving that he is permitted to gaze into her cerulean orbs has a great advantage over the wight who has to tell her she has dandy blue eyes in commonplace prose. The commonplace-prose wight knows it, too, and he'd pay ten per cent. of his salary during courtship if he could devise a plan by means of which he could pass himself off as a poet. To meet this demand, our loan department would be established. An unimaginative lover could come in and describe the woman he adored; the loan clerk would fish out a sonnet to fit the girl, and the lover could borrow it for ten days, just as brokers borrow stock. Armed with this he could go up to Harlem, or wherever else the maiden lived, and carry consternation into the hearts of his rivals by spouting the sonnet as nonchalantly as though he had just thought of it. So it would go on. For the following call he could borrow a ballad singing the glories of her raven locks, likening them to the beautiful night, or, if the locks were red instead of black, to the aurora borealis."