The So-called Human Race

“THE FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE.”

When we think of the countless thousands who peruse this Cro’-nest of Criticism, a feeling of responsibility weighs heavily upon us, and almost spoils our day. Frezzample, one writes from St. Paul: “We have twenty confirmed readers of the Line in this ‘house.’” The quotation marks disturb us. Can it be a sanitarium?

Most of the trouble in this world is caused by people who do not know when they are well off. The Germans did not know when they were well off. Your cook, who left last week, as little apprehended her good fortune. Nor will the Filipinos be happy till they get it.

Those who stand in awe of persons with logical minds will be reassured by Henry Adams’ pertinent reflection that the mind resorts to reason for want of training. His definition of philosophy is also reassuring: “Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”

Among those who have guessed at the meaning of “the freedom of the seas” was Cowper:

[p 155]
Maxwell Bodenheim has published a book of poems, and the critics allow that Max Boden’s brays are bonnie.

IF YOU MUST KISS, KISS THE DOCTOR.
[From “How to Avoid Influenza.”]

Avoid kissing, as this habit readily transmits influenza. If physician is available, it is best to consult him.

QUICK, WATSON, THE PLUMBER!
[From the Cedar Rapids Gazette.]

Mrs. T. M. Dripps gave a dinner Friday in honor of Mrs. D. L. Leek of South Dakota.

“Kind Captain, I’ve important information.” Mr. Honkavaarra runs an automobile livery in Palmer, Mich.

“The first child, Lord Blandford, was born in 1907; the second was born in 1898.”—Chicago American.

This so annoyed the Duke, that a reconciliation was never possible.

When your friend points with pride to a picture that, in your judgment, leaves something to be desired, or when he exhibits the latest addition to his family, you may be perplexed to voice an [p 156] />opinion that will satisfy both him and your conscience. An artist friend of ours is never at a loss. If it is a picture, he exclaims, “Extraordinary!” If it is an infant, he remarks, “There is a baby!”

He might add, with the English wit, “one more easily conceived than described.”

The advantages of a classical education are so obvious that the present-day battle in its behalf seems a waste of energy. Frezzample, without a classical education how could you appreciate the fact that Mr. Odessey is now running a Noah’s Ark candy kitchen in St. Peter, Wis.?

One may believe that the “gift of healing” is nothing more than the application of imaginary balm to non-existent disease, but if one says so he gets into a jolly row with people who consider an open mind synonymous with credulity. Our own state of mind was accurately described by Charles A. Dana: “I don’t believe in ghosts,” said he, “but I’ve been afraid of them all my life.”

The congregation will rise and sing:

The astronomer Hamilton “made an expedition to Dublin to substitute a semi-colon for a colon”; but, reports J. E. R., “my wife’s brother’s [p 157] />brother-in-law’s doctor charged him $600 for removing only part of a colon.”

Few readers realize how much time is expended in making certain that commas are properly distributed. Thomas Campbell walked six miles to a printer’s to have a comma in one of his poems changed to a semi-colon.

Following a bout with the gloves, a Seattle clubman is reported “in a state of comma.” A doctor writes us that infection by the colon bacillus can be excluded, but we should say that what the patient needs is not a doctor but a proof reader.

“She played Liszt’s Rhapsodie No. 2 with remarkable speed,” relates the Indianapolis News. In disposing of Liszt’s Rhapsodies it is all right to step on the accelerator, as the sooner they are finished the better.

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY CLIMATE, AND FORGIVE US OUR DROPS IN TEMPERATURE!
[From the Pasadena Star-News.]

To put it in another form of expression, Mother Nature maintains poise and evenness of temper in this state far better than in most regions on this terrestrial ball. If you haven’t thanked [p 158] God to-day that you are privileged to live in California it is not yet too late to do so. Make it a daily habit. The blessing is worth this frequent expression of gratitude to the All High.

VARIANT OF A MORE OR LESS WELL KNOWN STORY.
[From the Exeter, Neb., News.]

Whoever took the whole pumpkin pie from Mrs. W. H. Taylor’s kitchen the night of the party was welcome to it as the cat had stepped in it twice and it could not be used. Many thanks for the pan, she says.

THE WORLD’S GREATEST WINTER RESORT.

“Because of high temperatures and chinooks
Medicine Hat is menaced with an ice famine.”

According to the Milford Herald a young couple were married “under the strain of Mendelssohn’s wedding march.”

THE VILLAGE OMAR LOSES HIS OUTFIT.
[From the Fort Dodge Messenger.]

Lost—Grass rug and ukulele between Shady Oaks and Fort Dodge. Finder notify Messenger.

“Thelander-Eckblade Wedding Solomonized,” reports the Batavia Herald. Interesting and unusual.

[p 160]
“TWEET! TWEET!” GOES THE ENRAPTURED REPORTER.
[From the Sterling Gazette.]

The wedding party wended its way to the grove south of the river and there, in a lovely spot, where pleasant hours of courtship have been passed, the wedding ceremony was performed. No stately church edifice built by man, no gilded altar, no polished pews nor polished floors were there; no stately organ or trained choir; there was an absence of ushers, bridesmaids and parson heavily gowned. No curious crowd thronged without the portal. In place of this display and grandeur they were surrounded by an edifice of nature’s planting—the stately forest tree, while the green sward of the verdant grove furnished a velvety carpet. There, in this beautiful spot, where the Creator ordained such events to occur, the young couple, true lovers of the simple life, took upon themselves the vows which united them until “death itself should part.” The rustle of the leaves in the treetop murmured nature’s sweet benediction, while the bluebird, the robin, and the thrush sang a glorious doxology.

Wedded, in Clay county, Illinois, Emma Pickle and Gay Gerking. A wedding gift from Mr. Heinz or Squire Dingee would not be amiss.

[p 161]
A SPLENDID RECOVERY.
[Waukesha, Wis., item.]

Mr. and Mrs. J. Earl Stallard are the proud parents of an eight pound boy, born at the Municipal hospital this morning. Mr. Stallard will be able to resume his duties as county agricultural agent by tomorrow.

HOW FAST THE LEAVES ARE FALLING!
[From the Waterloo Courier.]

Frank Fuller, night operator at the Illinois Central telegraph office, has been kept more than busy to-day, all because of a ten pound boy who arrived at his home last evening. Mr. Fuller has decided that he will spend all of his evenings at his home in the future.

HOW SOON IT GETS DARK THESE DAYS!
[From the Pillager, Minn., Herald.]

That stork is a busy bird. It left a 10-lb baby girl at Ned Mickles last Thursday night. Ned is a neighbor of Cy Deaver.

UPON JULIA’S ARCTICS.

[p 162]
“We are all in the dark together,” says Anatole France; “the only difference is, the savant keeps knocking at the wall, while the ignoramus stays quietly in the middle of the room.” We used to be intensely interested in the knocking of the savants, but as nothing ever came of it, we have become satisfied with the middle of the room.

A GOOD MOTTO.

I was conversing with Mr. Carlton the Librarian, and he quoted from memory a line from Catulle Mendès that seemed to me uncommonly felicitous: “La vie est un jour de Mi-Carême. Quelques-uns se masquent; moi, je ris.”

In his declining years M. France has associated himself with the bunch called “Clarté,” a conscious group organized by Barbusse, the object of which is the “union of all partisans of the true right and the true liberty.” How wittily the Abbé Coignard would have discussed “Clarté,” and how wisely M. Bergeret would have considered it! Alas! it is sad to lose one’s hair, but it is a tragedy to lose one’s unbeliefs.

Chicago, as has been intimated, rather broadly, is a jay town; but it is coming on. A department store advertises “cigarette cases and [p 163] />holders for the gay sub-deb and her great-grandmother,” also “a diary for ‘her’ if she leads an exciting life.”

We infer from the reviews of John Burroughs’ “Accepting the Universe” that John has decided to accept it. One might as well. With the reservation that acceptance does not imply approval.

It is possible that Schopenhauer wrote his w. k. essay on woman after a visit to a bathing beach.

We heard a good definition of a bore. A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.

The sleeping sickness (not the African variety) is more mysterious than the flu. It will be remembered that two things were discovered about the flu: first, that it was caused by a certain bacillus, and, second, that it was not caused by that bacillus. But all that is known about the sleeping sickness is that it attacks, by preference, carpenters and plumbers.

Slangy and prophetic Mérimée, who wrote, in “Love Letters of a Genius”: “You may take it from me that … short dresses will be the order of the day, and those who are blessed with natural advantages will be at last distinguished from those whose advantages are artificial only.”

[p 164]
Happy above all other writing mortals we esteem him who, like Barrie, treads with sure feet the borderland ’twixt fact and faery, stepping now on this side, now on that. One must write with moist eyes many pages of such a fantasy as “A Kiss for Cinderella.” There are tears that are not laughter’s, nor grief’s, but beauty’s own. A lovely landscape may bring them, or a strain of music, or a written or a spoken line.

All we can get out of a Shaw play is two hours and a half of mental exhilaration. We are, inscrutably, denied the pleasure of wondering what Shaw means, or whether he is sincere.

WHY THE MAKE-UP FLED.
[From the Dodge Center Record.]

Mr. and Mrs. Umberhocker returned yesterday from an over Sunday visit with their son and family in Minneapolis.

They are in hopes to soon land them in jail as they did the hog thieves, who were to have a hearing but waved it and trial will be held later.

“It isn’t hard to sit up with a sick friend when he has a charming sister,” reports B. B. But if it were a sick horse, Venus herself would be in the way.

[p 165]
“Saving the penny is all right,” writes a vox-popper to the Menominee News, “but saving the dollar is 100 per cent better.” At least.

MUSIC HATH CHAHMS.

BRAHMS, OPUS 116.

[p 166]
A candid butcher in Battle Creek advertises “Terrible cuts.”

Another candid merchant in Ottumwa, Ia., advises: “Buy to-day and think to-morrow.”

MUSIC HINT.

Sir: P. A. Scholes, in his “Listener’s Guide to Music,” revives two good laughs—thus: “A fugue is a piece in which the voices one by one come in and the people one by one go out.” Also he quotes from Sam’l Butler’s Note Books: “I pleased Jones by saying that the hautbois was a clarinet with a cold in its head, and the bassoon the same with a cold in its chest.” The cor anglais suffers slightly from both symptoms. Some ambitious composer, by judicious use of the more diseased instruments, could achieve the most rheumy musical effects, particularly if, à la Scriabin, he should have the atmosphere of the concert hall heavily charged with eucalyptus. E. Pontifex.

“I will now sing for you,” announced a contralto to a woman’s club meeting in the Copley-Plaza, “a composition by one of Boston’s noted composers, Mr. Chadwick. ‘He loves me.’” And of course everybody thought George wrote it for her.

[p 167]
“Grand opera is, above all others, the high-brow form of entertainment.”—Chicago Journal.

Yes. In comparison, a concert of chamber music appears trifling and almost vulgar.

At a reception in San Francisco, Mrs. Wandazetta Fuller-Biers sang and Mrs. Mabel Boone-Sooey read. Cannot they be signed for an entertainment in the Academy?

We simply cannot understand why Dorothy Pound, pianist, and Isabelle Bellows, singer, of the American Conservatory, do not hitch up for a concert tour.

Richard Strauss has been defined as a musician who was once a genius. Now comes another felicitous definition—“Unitarian: a Retired Christian.”

Dr. Hyslop, the psychical research man, says that the spirit world is full of cranks. These, we take it, are not on the spirit level.

The present physical training instructor in the Waterloo, Ia., Y. W. C. A. is Miss Armstrong. Paradoxically, the position was formerly held by Miss Goodenough. These things appear to interest many readers.

[p 168]
THE HUNTING OF THE PACIFIST SNARK.
(With Mr. Ford as the Bellman.)

Concerning his reference to “Demosthenes’ lantern,” the distinguished culprit, Rupert Hughes, writes us that of course he meant Isosceles’ lantern. The slip was pardonable, he urges, as he read proof on the line only seven times—in manuscript, in typescript, in proof for the magazine, in the copy for the book, in galley, in page-proof, and finally in the printed book. And heaven only knows how many proofreaders let it through. “Be that as it may,” says Rupert, “I am like our famous humorist, Archibald Ward, who refused to be responsible for debts of his own contracting. And, anyway, I thank you for calling my attention to the blunder quietly and confidentially, instead of bawling me out in a public place where a lot of people might learn of it.”

SORRY WE MISSED YOU.

Sir: … There were several things I wanted to say to you, and I proposed also to crack you over the sconce for what you have been saying about us Sinn Feiners. I suppose you’re the sort that would laugh at this story:

He was Irish and badly wounded, unconscious [p 170] />when they got him back to the dressing station, in a ruined village. “Bad case,” said the docs. “When he comes out of his swoon he’ll need cheering up. Say something heartening to him, boys. Tell him he’s in Ireland.” When the lad came to he looked around (ruined church on one side, busted houses, etc., up stage, and all that): “Where am I?” sez he. “’S all right, Pat; you’re in Ireland, boy.” “Glory be to God!” sez he, looking around again. “How long have yez had Home Rule?” Tom Daly.

OUR BOYS.
[From the Sheridan, Wyo., Enterprise.]

The skies they were ashen and sober, and the leaves they were crispèd and sere, as I sat in the porch chair and regarded our neighbor’s patch of woodland; and I thought: The skies may be ashen and sober, and the leaves may be crispèd and sere, but in a maple wood we may dispense with the sun, such irradiation is there from the gold of the crispèd leaves. Jack Frost is as clever a wizard as the dwarf Rumpelstiltzkin, who [p 171] />taught the miller’s daughter the trick of spinning straw into gold. This young ash, robed all in yellow—what can the sun add to its splendor? And those farther tree-tops, that show against the sky like a tapestry, the slenderer branches and twigs, unstirred by wind, having the similitude of threads in a pattern—can the sun gild their refinèd gold? How delicate is the tinting of that cherry, the green of which is fading into yellow, each leaf between the two colors: this should be described in paint.

No, I said; in a hardwood thicket, in October, though it were the misty mid region of Weir, one would not know the sun was lost in clouds. At that moment the sun adventured forth, in blazing denial. It was as if the woodland had burst into flame.

As a variation of the story about the merchant who couldn’t keep a certain article because so many people asked for it, we submit the following: A lady entered the rural drugstore which we patronize and said, “Mr. Blank, I want a bath spray.” “I’m sorry, Mrs. Jones,” sezze, “but the bath spray is sold.”

IN A DEPARTMENT STORE.

Customer—“I want to look at some tunics.”

Irish Floorwalker—“We don’t carry musical instruments.”

[p 172]
That Tennessee congressman who was arrested charged with operating an automobile while pifflicated, would reply that when he voted for prohibition he was representing his constituents, not his private thirst. Have we not, many times, in the good old days in Vermont, seen representatives rise with difficulty from their seats to cast their vote for prohibition? One can be pretty drunk and still be able to articulate “Ay.”

A new drug, Dihydroxyphenylethylmethylamine, sounds as if all it needed was a raisin.

The Gluck aria, which Mme. Homer has made famous, was effectively cited by the critic Hanslick to show that in vocal music the subject is determined only by the words. He wrote:

“At a time when thousands (among whom there were men like Jean Jacques Rousseau) were moved to tears by the air from ‘Orpheus’—

Boyé, a contemporary of Gluck, observed that precisely the same melody would accord equally well, if not better, with words conveying exactly the reverse, thus—

“We, for our part, are not of the opinion that [p 173] />in this case the composer is quite free from blame, inasmuch as music most assuredly possesses accents which more truly express a feeling of profound sorrow. If however, from among innumerable instances, we selected the one quoted, we have done so because, in the first place, it affects the composer who is credited with the greatest dramatic accuracy; and, secondly, because several generations hailed this very melody as most correctly rendering the supreme grief which the words express.”

Arthur Shattuck sued for appreciation in Fond du Lac the other evening, playing, according to the Reporter, “a plaintiff melody with great tenderness.” The jury returned a verdict in his favor without leaving their seats.

Reports of famine in China have recalled a remark about its excessive population. If the Chinese people were to file one by one past a given point the procession would never come to an end. Before the last man of those living to-day had gone by another generation would have grown up.

“Say it with handkerchiefs,” advertises a merchant in Goshen, Ind. That is, if the idea you wish to convey is that you have a cold in your head.

[p 174]
THE SOIL OF KANSAS.
[From the Kansas Farmer.]

Formed by the polyps of a shallow, summer sea; fixed by the subtile chemistry of the air, and comminuted by the Æolian geology of the Great Plains, the soil of Kansas has been one of man’s richest possessions.

Why prose? The soil of Kansas, the Creator’s masterpiece, invites to song. Frinstance—

THE GOOD OLD DAYS.

Sir: An old stage hand at the Eau Claire opry house was talking. “No, sir, you don’t see the actors to-day like we used to. Why, when Booth and Barrett played here you could hear them breathe way up in the fly gallery.” E. C. M.

“WHAT THE LA HELLE!”
[From the Kankakee Republican.]

He helped tramp the old Hindenburg line, but this time, beating it on the strains of “Allons enfant de la Patrie le Jour de Gloire est de Triomphe et Arrivee!”

[p 175]
Here is a characteristic bit of Vermontese that we picked up. A native was besought to saw some wood, but he declined. The owner of the wood offered double price for the sawing, and still the native declined. He was pressed for a reason, and this was it: “Damned if I’ll humor a man.”

“It is not moral. It is immoral,” declared an editorial colleague; and a reader is reminded of Lex Iconles, the old Greek baker of Grammer’s Gap, Ark., who used to display in his window the enticing sign: “Doughnuts. Different and yet not the same.”

The mind of man is subject to many strange delusions, and one of these is that the stock market has a bottom.

The manufacturer of a certain automobile advertises that his vehicle “will hold five ordinary people.” And, as a matter of fact, it usually does.

The Westminster Gazette headlines “The Intolerable Dullness of Country Life in Ireland.” And Irene wonders what they would call excitement.

[p 176]
An advertisement of dolls mentions, superfluously, that “some may not last the day.” One does not expect them to.

The London Mendicity Society estimates that £100,000 is given away haphazard every year to street beggars, and that the average beggar probably earns more than the average working man. There is talk of the beggars forming a union. A beggars’ strike would be a fearsome thing.

[p 177]
The London Busman Story.

I.—As George Meredith might have related it.

“Stop!” she signalled.

The appeal was comprehensible, and the charioteer, assiduously obliging, fell to posture of checking none too volant steeds.

You are to suppose her past meridian, nearer the twilight of years, noteworthy rather for matter than manner; and her visage, comparable to the beef of England’s glory, well you wot. This one’s descent was mincing, hesitant, adumbrating dread of disclosures—these expectedly ample, columnar, massive. The day was gusty, the breeze prankant; petticoats, bandbox, umbrella were to be conciliated, managed if possible; no light task, you are to believe.

“’Urry, marm!”

The busman’s tone was patiently admonitory, dispassionate. A veteran in his calling, who had observed the ascending and descending of a myriad matrons, in playful gales.

“’Urry, marm!”

The fellow was without illusions; he had reviewed more twinkling columns than a sergeant of drill. Indifference his note, leaning to ennui. He said so, bluntly, piquantly, in half a dozen memorable words, fetching yawn for period.

The lady jerked an indignant exclamation, and [p 178] />completed, rosily precipitate, her passage to the pave.

II.—As Henry James might have written it.

We, let me ask, what are we, the choicer of spirits as well as the more frugal if not the undeservedly impoverished, what, I ask, are we to do now that the hansom has disappeared, as they say, from the London streets and the taxicab so wonderfully yet extravagantly taken its place? Is there, indeed, else left for us than the homely but hallowed ’bus, as we abbreviatedly yet all so affectionately term it—the ’bus of one’s earlier days, when London was new to the unjaded sensorium and “Europe” was so wonderfully, so beautifully dawning on one’s so avid and sensitive consciousness?

And fate, which has left us the ’bus—but oh, in what scant and shabby measure!—has left us, too, the weather that so densely yet so congruously “goes with it”—the weather adequately enough denoted by the thick atmosphere, the slimy pavements, the omnipresent unfurled umbrella and the stout, elderly woman intent upon gaining, at cost of whatever risk or struggle, her place and portion among the moist miscellany to whom the dear old ’bus— But perhaps I have lost the thread of my sentence.

Ah, yes—that “stout, elderly woman”; so [p 179] />superabundant whether as a type or as an individual; so prone—or “liable”—to impinge tyrannously upon the consciousness of her fellow-traveller, and in no less a degree upon that of the public servant, who, from his place aloft, guides, as it is phrased, the destinies of the conveyance. It was, indeed, one of the most notable of these—a humble friend of my own—who had the fortune to make the acute, recorded, historic observation which, with the hearty, pungent, cursory brevity and point of his class and métier—the envy of the painstaking, voluminous analyst and artist of our period— But again I stray.

She was climbing up, or climbing down, perplexed equally, as I gather, by the management of her parapluie and of her—enfin, her petticoats. The candid anxiety of her round, underdone face, as she so wonderfully writhed to maintain the standard of pudicity dear—even vital—to the matron of the British Isles appealed—vividly, though mutely—to the forbearance that, seeing, would still seem not to see, her foot, her ankle, her mollet—as I early learned to say in Paris, where, however, so exigent a modesty is scarcely … well, scarcely.

“Madam,” the gracious fellow said in effect, “ne vous gênez pas.” Then he went on to assure her briefly that he was an elderly man; that he had “held the ribbons,” as they phrase it, for several [p 180] />years; that many were the rainy days in London; that each of these placed numerous women—elderly or younger—in the same involuntary predicament as that from which she herself had suffered; and that so far as he personally was concerned he had long since ceased to take any extreme delight in the— Bref, he was charming; he renewed my fading belief—fading, as I had thought, disastrously but immitigably—in the capacity of the Anglo-Saxon for esprit; and I am glad indeed to have taken a line or so to record his mot.

III.—As finally elucidated by Arnold Bennett.

Maria Wickwyre, of the Five Towns, emerged from muddy Bombazine Lane and stood in the rain and wind at Pie Corner, eighty-four yards from the door of St. Jude’s chapel, in the Strand. She was in London! Yes, she was on that spot, she and none other. It might have been somewhere else; it might have been somebody else. But it wasn’t. Wonderful! The miracle of Life overcame her.

She had arms. Two of them. They were big and round, like herself. One held a large parcel (“package” for the American edition); the other, an umbrella. She also had two legs. She stood on them. If they had been absent, or if they had weakened, she would have collapsed. But they [p 181] />held her up. Ah, the mysteries of existence! More than ever was she conscious of her firm, strong underpinning. Maria waved her umbrella and her parcel and stopped a ’bus. The driver was elderly, wrinkled, weatherbeaten. Maria got in and rode six furlongs and some yards to Mooge Road, and then she stopped the ’bus to get out.

If she was conscious of her upper members and their charges, she was still more conscious of her lower ones. If she had her parcel and her umbrella to think about, she also had her stockings and petticoats to consider. The wind blew, the rain drizzled, the driver looked around, wondering why Maria didn’t get out and have done with it.

“If he should see them!” she gasped. (You know what she meant by “them.”) Her round, broad face mutely implored the ’busman to look the other way.

He wearily closed his eyes. He had been rumbling through the Strand for thirty years. “Lor’, mum,” he said, “legs ain’t no treat to me!”

Maria collapsed, after all, and took the 4:29 for home that same afternoon.