Bert Leston Taylor

“Fay ce que vouldras.”

TO B.L.T.
(Quintus Horatius Flaccus loquitur.)

Our compliments to Old Man Flaccus, whose witty message reminds us to entreat contribs to be patient, as we are snowed under with offerings. For a week or more we have been trying to horn into the column with some verses of our own composing.

BRIGHT SAYINGS OF MOTHER.

My respected father came to breakfast on New Year’s Day remarking that he had treated himself to a present by donning a new pair of suspenders, whereupon mother remarked: “Well braced for the New Year, as it were!” C.T.S.

After some years of editing stories of events in high society, a gentleman at an adjacent desk believes he has learned the chief duty of a butler. It is to call the police.

[p 217]
“THAT STRAIN AGAIN—IT HAD A DYING SNORT.”

Sir: Speaking of soft music and the pearly gates, S.T. Snortum is owner and demonstrator of the music store at St. Peter, Minnesota. S.W.E.

Warren, O., has acquired a lady barber, and dinged if her name isn’t Ethel Gillette.

No doubt the Manistee News-Advocate has its reason for running the “hogs received” news under the heading “Hotel Arrivals.”

“I see by an announcement by the Columbia Mills that window shades are down,” communicates W.H.B. “Can it be that the Columbia Mills people are ashamed of something?” Mebbe. Or perhaps they are fixing prices.

“For the lovamike,” requests the Head Scene-Shifter, “keep the Admirable Crichton out of the Column. We have twenty-five presses, and it takes a guard at each press to prevent it from appearing Admiral Crichton.”

Pittsburgh Shriners gave a minstrel show the other night, and the inspired reporter for the Post mentions that “an intermission separated the two parts and broke the monotony.”

[p 218]
A Bach chaconne is on the orchestra programme this week. Some one remarked that he did not care for chaconnes, which moved us to quote what some one else (we think it was Herman Devries) said: “Chaconne À son goÛt.”

“Pond and Pond Donate $500 to Union Pool Fund.”—Ann Arbor item.

Quite so.

If we had not been glancing through the real estate notes we should never have known that Mystical Schriek lives in Evansville, Ind.

From the Illinois Federal Reporter: “Village of Westville vs. Albert Rainwater. Mr. Rainwater is charged with violation of the ordinance in regard to the sale of soft drinks.” Can Al have added a little hard water to the mixture?

MEMORY TESTS FOR THE HOME.

Sir: Friend wife was naming authors of various well known novels, as I propounded their titles. Follows the result:

Me: “The Last Days of Pompeii.” She: “Dante.”

“Les Miserables.” “Huguenot.”

“Adam Bede.” “Henry George.”

[p 219]
“Vanity Fair.” “Why, that’s in Ecclesiastes.”

“Ben Hur.” “Rider Haggard.”

“The Pilgrim’s Progress.” “John Barleycorn.”

“Don Quixote.” (No reply.)

“Waverly.” “Oh, did Waverly write that?”

“Anna Karenina.” “Count Leon Trotsky.” J.C.

We see by the Fargo papers that Mrs. Bernt Wick gave a dinner recently, and we hope that Miss Candle, the w. k. night nurse, was among the guests.

LEVI BEIN’ A GOOD SPORT.

Sir: Levi Frost, the leading druggist of Milton Falls, Vt., set a big bottle of medicine in his show window with a sign sayin’ he’d give a phonograph to anybody who could tell how many spoonfuls there was in the bottle. Jed Ballard was comin’ downstreet, and when he seen the sign he went and he sez, sezzee, “Levi,” sezzee, “if you had a spoon big enough to hold it all, you’d have just one spoonful in that bottle.” And, by Judas Priest, Levi give him the phonograph right off. Hiram.

“Basing his sermon on the words of Gesta Romanorum, who in 1473 said, ‘What I spent I had, [p 220] />what I kept I lost, what I gave I have,’ the Rev. Albert H. Zimmerman,” etc.—Washington Post.

As students of the School of Journalism ought to know, the philosopher Gesta Romanorum was born in Sunny, Italy, although some historians claim Merry, England, and took his doctor’s degree at the University of Vivela, in Labelle, France. His Latin scholarship was nothing to brag of, but he was an ingenious writer. He is best known, perhaps, as the author of the saying, “Rome was not built in a day,” and the line which graced the flyleaf of his first edition, “Viae omniae in Romam adducunt.”

“It is a great misfortune,” says Lloyd George, “that the Irish and the English are never in the same temper at the same time.” Nor is that conjuncture encouragingly probable. But there is hope. Energy is required for strenuous rebellion, and energy is converted into heat and dissipated. If, or as, the solar system is running down, its stock of energy is constantly diminishing; and so the Irish Question will eventually settle itself, as will every other mess on this slightly flattened sphere.

Whenever you read about England crumbling, turn to its automobile Blue Book and observe [p 221] />this: “It must be remembered that in all countries except England and New Zealand automobiles travel on the wrong side of the road.”

The first sign of “crumbling” on the part of the British empire that we have observed is the welcome extended to the “quick lunch.” That may get ’em.

LOST AND FOUND.
[Song in the manner of Laura Blackburn.]

[p 222]
Would you mind contributing a small sum, say a dollar or two, to the Keats Memorial Fund. We thought not. It is a privilege and a pleasure. The object is to save the house in which the poet lived during his last years, and in which he did some of his best work. The names of all contributors will be preserved in the memorial house, so it would be a nice idea to send your dollar or two in the name of your small child or grandchild, who may visit Hampstead when he grows up. Still standing in the garden at Hampstead is the plum tree under which Keats wrote,

Americans who speak at French should confine their conversation to other Americans similarly talented. They should not practise on French people, whose delicate ear is no more proof against impure accent than a stone is proof against dripping water. The mistake which English speaking people make is assuming that French is merely a language, whereas, even in Paris, the speaking of it as much as accomplishment as singing, or painting on china. Many gifted Frenchmen, like M.Viviani, Anatole France, and some other Academicians, speak French extremely well, but even these live in hope of improvement, of some day mastering the finest [p 223] />shades of nasality and cadence, the violet rays of rhythm.

Mr. Masefield, the poet, does not believe that war times nourish the arts. The human brain does its best work, he says, when men are happy. How perfectly true! Look at ancient Greece. She was continually at war, and what did the Grecians do for art? A few poets, a few philosophers and statesmen, a few sculptors, and the story is told. On the other hand, look at England in Shakespeare’s time. The English people were inordinately happy, for there were no wars to depress them, barring a few little tiffs with the French and the Spanish, and one or two domestic brawls. The human brain does its best work when men are happy, indeed. There was Dante, a cheery old party. But why multiply instances?

Having read a third of H.M. Tomlinson’s “The Sea and the Jungle,” we pause to offer the uncritical opinion that this chap gets as good seawater into his copy as Conrad, and that, in the item of English, he can write rings around Joseph.

Like others who have traversed delectable landscapes and recorded their impressions, in [p 224] />memory or in notebooks, we have tried to communicate to other minds the “incommunicable thrill of things”: a pleasant if unsuccessful endeavor. When you are new at it, you ascribe your failure to want of skill, but you come to realize that skill will not help you very much. You will do well if you hold the reader’s interest in your narrative: you will not, except by accident, make him see the thing you have seen, or experience the emotion you experienced.

So vivid a word painter as Tomlinson acknowledges that the chance rewards which make travel worth while are seldom matters that a reader would care to hear about, for they have no substance. “They are no matter. They are untranslatable from the time and place. Such fair things cannot be taken from the magic moment. They are not provender for notebooks.”

He quotes what the Indian said to the missionary who had been talking to him of heaven. “Is it like the land of the musk-ox in summer, when the mist is on the lakes, and the loon cries very often?” These lakes are not charted, and the Indian heard the loon’s call in his memory; but we could not better describe the delectable lands through which we have roamed. “When the mist is on the lakes and the loon cries very often.” What traveler can better that?

[p 225]
Old Bill Taft pulled a good definition of a gentleman t’other day. A gentleman, said he, is a man who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.

Mr. Generous is the claim agent for the New Haven railroad at New Britain, Conn., but a farmer whose cow wandered upon the rails tells us that he lost money by the settlement.

William Benzine, who lives near Rio, Wis., was filling his flivver tank by the light of a lantern when— But need we continue?

Our notion of a person of wide tastes is one who likes almost everything that isn’t popular.

Speaking of the Naval Station, you may have forgotten the stirring ballad which we wrote about it during the war. If so—

YEO-HEAVE-HO!

The speaker of the House of Commons, who, “trembling slightly with emotion,” declared the sitting suspended, needs in his business the calm of the late Fred Hall. While Mr. Hall was city editor of this journal of civilization an irate subscriber came in and mixed it with a reporter. Mr. Hall approached the pair, who were rolling on the floor, and, peering near-sightedly at them, addressed the reporter: “Mr. Smith, when you have finished with this gentleman, there is a meeting at the Fourth Methodist church which I should like to have you cover.”

In his informing and stimulating collection of essays, “On Contemporary Literature,” recently published, Mr. Stuart P. Sherman squanders an entire chapter on Theodore Dreiser. It seems to us that he might have covered the ground and saved most of his space by quoting a single sentence from Anatole France, who, referring to [p 228] />Zola, wrote: “He has no taste, and I have come to believe that want of taste is that mysterious sin of which the Scripture speaks, the greatest of sins, the only one which will not be forgiven.”

“What is art?” asked jesting Pilate. And before he could beat it for his chariot someone answered: “Art is a pitcher that you can’t pour anything out of.”

It is much easier to die than it is to take a vacation. A man who is summoned to his last long voyage may set his house in order in an hour: a few words, written or dictated, will dispose of his possessions, and his heirs will gladly attend to the details. This done, he may fold his hands on his chest and depart this vexatious life in peace.

It is quite another matter to prepare for a few weeks away from town. There are bills to be paid; the iceman and the milkman and the laundryman must be choked off, and the daily paper restrained from littering the doorstep. There is hair to be cut, and teeth to be tinkered, and so on. In short, it takes days to stop the machinery of living for a fortnight, and days to start it going again. But, my dear, one must have a change.

[p 229]
JUST A REHEARSAL.
[From the Elgin News.]

Mr. and Mrs. Perce left immediately on a short honeymoon trip. The “real” honeymoon trip is soon to be made, into various parts of Virginia.

LAME IN BOTH REGISTERS?
[From the Decatur Review.]

Dr. O.E. Williams, who is conducting revival services in the First United Brethren church, spoke to a large audience on Friday night on “Lame in Both Feet.” Mrs. Williams sang a solo in keeping with the sermon.

FLORAL POME.
(Sign on Ashland Ave.: “Vlk the Florist.”)