The last man who kept his colyum balanced between the high and low comic touch was Bert Leston Taylor. He was a very wise and humane person, wise and humane enough to appreciate and to publish fun of a sort differing by much from the humour he created. There was something unnervingly oblique in his vision of the world, perfectly illustrated by the captions he wrote for clippings from rustic journals. He would take an item, “Our popular telegraphist Frank Dane had a son presented to him last week. Frank says he is going to stay home nights hereafter,” and write over it, “How the Days Are Drawing In.” There was nothing incongruous in the appearance side by side of his own expert parodies and the horseplay humour of some of his contributors. Taylor’s touch made everything light, everything right. In his house there were indeed many mansions. After him—before his death even—the colyumists divided and went separate ways. The Chicago Tribune continues the Field-Taylor tradition indifferently well. Riq of the Chicago Evening Post comes near the golden mean, but his own character as a colyumist is jeopardized by his contributors; when he gets a good theme—such as the necessity for keeping the seam of a stocking straight, he can be counted on. Calverley indicated his difficulty—or almost: Themes are so scarce in this world of ours.
The colyumists are sophisticated, or faux-naïfs, or actually naïf. Of the first, F. P. A. of the New York World is the most notable and Baird Leonard of the Morning Telegraph the best. F. P. A. has all the virtues of the colyumist in the highest degree; unfortunately he has almost all the faults, in nearly the same measure. He is a defeated Calverley, writing the best light verse in America, and the best parodies in verse. His Persicos Odi, one of several (published in the quarterly “1910”), seems to me better than Field’s—which had the lines, “And as for roses, Holy Moses, they can’t be got at living prices.” Adams’, as I recall it, ran:
The pomp of the Persian I hold in aversion;
I hate all their gingerbread tricks;
Their garlicky wreathings and lindeny tree-things
Nix.
Boy, us for plain myrtle while under this fertile
Old grapevine myself I protrude
For your old bibacious Quintus Horatius
Stewed.