[LEIGH GORDON GILTNER]
Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner, poet and short-story writer, was born at Eminence, Kentucky, in 1875. She is the daughter of the Rev. W. S. Giltner, who was for many years president of Eminence College, from which the future writer was graduated. She later pursued a course in English at the University of Chicago, and studied Shakespeare and dramatic art with Hart Conway of the Chicago School of Acting. Miss Giltner's book of lyrics, The Path of Dreams (Chicago, 1900), brought her many kind words from the reviewers. This little book contained some very excellent verse, but, shortly after its appearance, the author abandoned poesy for the short-story. Her stories and sketches have appeared in the New England Magazine, The Century, Munsey's Overland Monthly, The Reader, The Era, and several other periodicals. Within the last year or so she has had quite a number of short-stories in Young's Magazine "of breezy stories." At the present time Miss Giltner has a Kentucky novel and a comedy in preparation, both of which should appear shortly. She is one of the most beautiful of Kentucky's writers: her frontispiece portrait in The Path of Dreams is said to have disarmed many carping critics who untied the little volume with malice aforethought. But back of her personal loveliness, is a mind of much power, cleverness, and originality.
Bibliography. The Nation (September 6, 1900); Munsey's Magazine (October, 1902); The Overland (October, 1910).
THE JESTING GODS[81]
[From Munsey's Magazine (July, 1904)].
From the first it had been, in the nature of things, perfectly patent to every member of the party gathered at Grantleigh for the shooting that Tompkins' bride cared not a whit for Tompkins—which, if one happened to know the man, was scarcely a matter for surprise.
Tompkins, though a good fellow on the whole, was an unmitigated idiot. Not a mere insignificant unit in the world's noble army of fools, but a fool so conspicuous and of so infinite a variety as to be at all times the cynosure of the general gaze.
When a man is a fool and knows it, his folly not infrequently attains the measure of wisdom. Let him but conceal his motley beneath a cloak of weighty silence and he will presently acquire a reputation for solid intelligence and a wise conservatism. But Tompkins was not one of these. He joyously jangled his bells and flourished his bauble, wholly unaware the while of the spectacle he was making of himself. If he could have been persuaded to take on a neutral tint and keep himself well in the background, inanity might, in time, have assumed the dignity of intellectuality: but he lacked the sense of proportion, of values. He was always in the foreground and always a more or less inharmonious element in the ensemble.
Tompkins had published an impossible volume of prose, followed by a yet more impossible volume of verse: his crudely impressionistic essays at art made the judicious grieve: he dabbled in music and posed as a lyric tenor, though he had neither voice nor ear. A temperament essentially histrionic kept him constantly in the centre of the stage. With no remote realization of his limitations, he aspired to play leads and heavies, when Fate had inexorably cast him for a line of low comedy. He contrived to make divers and sundry kinds and degrees of an idiot of himself on all possible occasions—and even when there was no possible occasion therefor. He had a faculty for doing the wrong thing which amounted to inspiration.
We had been wont to speculate at the Club as to whether Tompkins would ever find a woman the measure of whose folly should so far exceed his own as to impel her to marry him. We wondered much when we heard that he had at last achieved this feat. We wondered more when we saw the woman who had made it a possibility.