BUT WOULD IT NOT REQUIRE A GEOLOGIC PERIOD?
Sir: You are kind enough to refer to my lecture on “Literary Taste and How to Acquire It.” I venture to suggest that your summary—viz.: “It is to read only first-class stuff,” not only fails to meet the problem, but represents exactly the view that I am out to demolish. If, as I presume, you mean that the ambitious person who now reads Harold Bell Wright should sit down to the works of Shakespeare, I can tell you at once that the process will be a failure. My method is one of graduation from the worst to the best stuff. W. L. George.
[p 98]
]We do not wish to crab W. L. George’s act, “Literary Taste and How to Acquire It,” but we know the answer. It is to read only first-class stuff. Circumstances may oblige a man to write second-class books, but there is no reason why he should read such.
THE STORM.
(By a girl of ten years.)
It lightnings, it thunders
And I go under,
And where do I go,
I wonder.
I go, I go—
I know.
Under the covers,
That’s where I go.
The little poet of the foregoing knew where she was going, which is more than can be said for many modern bards.
THE EIGHTH VEIL.
(By J-mes Hun-k-r.)
There was a wedding under way. From the bright-lit mansion came the evocations of a loud bassoon. Ulick Guffle, in whom the thought of matrimony always produced a bitter nausea, glowered upon the house and spat acridly upon the [p 99] />]pave. “Imbeciles! Humbugs! Romantic rot!” he raged.
Three young men drew toward the scene. Ulick barred their way, but two of the trio slipped by him and escaped. The third was nailed by Guffle’s glittering eye. Ulick laid an ineluctable hand upon the stranger’s arm. “Listen!” he commanded. “Matrimony and Art are sworn and natural foes. Ingeborg Bunck was right; there are no illegitimate children; all children are valid. Sounds like Lope de Vega, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. It is Bunck. Whitman, too, divined the truth. Love is a germ; sunlight kills it. It needs l’obscurité and a high temperature. As Baudelaire said—or was it Maurice Barrès?—dans la nuit tous les chats sont gris. Remy de Gourmont …”
The wedding guest beat his shirtfront; he could hear the bassoon doubling the cello. But Ulick continued ineluctably. “Woman is a sink of iniquity. Only Gounod is more loathsome. That Ave Maria—Grand Dieu! But Frédéric Chopin, nuance, cadence, appoggiatura—there you have it. En amour, les vieux fous sont plus fous que les jeunes. Listen to Rochefoucauld! And Montaigne has said, C’est le jouir et non le posséder qui rend heureux. And Pascal has added, Les affaires sont les affaires. As for Stendhal, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Edgar Saltus, Balzac, Gautier, [p 100] />]Dostoievsky, Rabelais, Maupassant, Anatole France, Bourget, Turgenev, Verlaine, Renan, Walter Pater, Landor, Cardinal Newman and the Brothers Goncourt …”
Ulick seized his head with both hands, and the wedding guest seized the opportunity to beat it, as the saying is. “Swine!” Ulick flung after him. “Swine, before whom I have cast a hatful of pearls!” He spat even more acridly upon the pave and turned away. “After all,” he growled, “Stendhal was right. Or was it Huysmans? No, it was neither. It was Cambronne.”
Though there has been little enough to encourage it, the world is growing kinder; at least friendliness is increasing. Every other day we read of some woman living pleasantly in a well appointed apartment, supplied with fine raiment and an automobile, the fruit of Platonism. “No,” she testifies, “there was nothing between us. He was merely a friend.”
What heaven hath cleansed let no man put asunder. Emma Durdy and Raymond Bathe, of Nokomis, have been j. in the h. b. of w.