In the Neighborhood of Murray Hill
Date: 1922-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Essays; Social Criticism; Literary Criticism
Description: Collected essays, sketches, and articles from various periodicals. Social and literary criticism, short sketches, and a bit of humor for spice.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public Domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

IN THE
NEIGHBORHOOD
OF MURRAY HILL

ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY

MobileRead Edition
2021

Robert Cortes Holliday (July 18, 1880 – January 1, 1947) was an American writer and literary editor. He published fifteen books, most of which were collections of essays and sketches that had been published in various periodicals, as well as volumes on Booth Tarkington and poet Joyce Kilmer.

Christopher Morley wrote of Holliday: “[he] has the genuine gift of the personal essay, mellow, fluent, and pleasantly eccentric.”

Originally published 1923. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- … Dedication
- … Preface
- An Exotic Fifth Avenue
- Hurdy-Gurdy Society

- A Couple of Clubs and a Gallery of Publishers

- The Greenwich Village of Real Life
- New Ways To Live
- The Beach at the Garden
- With the Compliments of the Author
- New Days in Toydom
- A Communicative World
- The Day of Atmosphere Advertising
- A Very Nice Tobacco for Young People
- Not Livery-Stable Literature
- Well, Goodby – Enjoy Yourself!

TO
A FRIEND OF MINE
FOR SOME TWO SCORE YEARS
MINERVA J. HOLLIDAY

A Word in Time

The irresistible, inimitable and irrepressible Oliver Herford entitles the prefatory remarks which he gracefully contributes to Edward Simmons’s volume of autobiography, “From Seven to Seventy,” an “Interruption.” And in the course of his wholly inviting, highly pertinent, and happily enlivening introductory remarks, he alludes to introductions to books in general as “matter that is essentially deterrent, wholly superfluous, and probably dull.”

A feeling of rather embarrassing self-consciousness seems to be common to authors when they sit down to compose a preface. Frequently they seek to carry off the matter by a spirit of banter. Hilaire Belloc most entertainingly pursues this mood in the little sheaf of pages preliminary to his gorgeous book, “The Path to Rome,” and gaily terms his bit of an account of how the volume came to be written “Praise of This Book.” He rollicks along thus:

And why (you will say) is all this put by itself in what Anglo-Saxons call a Foreword, but gentlemen a Preface? Why, it is because I have noticed that no book can appear without some such thing tied on before it; and as it is folly to neglect the fashion, be certain that I read some eight or nine thousand of them to be sure of how they were written and to be safe from generalizing on too frail a basis.

At the outset of his brief preface to his volume, “Pieces of Hate; And Other Enthusiasms,” Heywood Broun observes; “The trouble with prefaces is that they are partial and so we have decided to offer instead an unbiased review of ‘Pieces of Hate.’ The publishers have kindly furnished us advance proofs for this purpose.” Forthwith Mr. Broun launches into a bit of playfulness which at the same time is not at all an inperspicacious trifle of criticism.

In glancing at what might be called the literature of prefaces, one notes that H. L. Mencken has termed a volume of his essays “A Book of Prefaces;” and in the preface to the collection he designates the “prefaces” which follow as criticisms each designed to prepare “an approach to a definite man.” The noble Don Marquis has performed a service of which the world stood in need by the production of his erudite work “Prefaces,” wherein he supplies very able prefaces for a number of valuable books which it has been the custom woefully to neglect in this matter, such, for instance, as a book of cigarette papers, and a book of fish hooks.

Anyone who, like Mr. Belloc, should sit down and read eight or nine thousand prefaces would long before the day was out be struck by the prevalence of the conviction among preface writers in general that nobody reads prefaces. It is probably true that preface-reading is not practiced widely. I myself acquired the habit of looking into prefaces in the days when I was a much over-worked book reviewer; I discovered that it was a very considerable aid to me in the accomplishment of my duties. Not infrequently I found a preface a life-saver – when I had read the preface I did not have to read the book. I knew well enough for my purpose what the book was all about.

Now this particular preface is not tied on before the book merely in accordance with a custom. It is not written in a humorous vein in consciousness of superfluity. It is intended to be what it is called – “A Word in Time.” It may, if consulted on the verge of purchase, save someone here and there the price of this volume. The author indulges in the satisfaction of taking pains not to deceive his potential customer. And it may be, too, that someone glancing disdainfully into this preface (while awaiting a friend, or something like that) will be unexpectedly induced to go on with the book, and find there material not without interest to him.

The articles, originally written for magazines, which are gathered into this volume are presented as primarily conscientious pieces of reporting. The aim has been the same when the subject was Tex Rickard’s swimming pool and when the theme was autobiographical literature. The idea has been, not to essay flights of humorous, philosophical, or whimsical fancy, but to reflect as clearly as he could the scene before the writer. Information (which has little part in the purer form of the essay) has been sought with diligence. The chapter “Hurdy-Gurdy Society,” for instance, the author submits as the definitive article on the subject. And the compliment of which he is most vain was paid him by no less a critic than Professor Stuart P. Sherman when he remarked that he (this author) had “been around a good deal.”

A few of these pieces are here printed for the first time. Several of the articles have been considerably elaborated since their original appearance elsewhere. For permission to gather material into this book acknowledgment is gratefully made to the editors and proprietors of the following named publications: The Bookman, Leslie’s Weekly, The Literary Review of the New York Evening Post and the New York Tribune; and (in the case of a couple of the shorter papers) to The McNaught Syndicate.

R. C. H.

New York, 1923.

An Exotic Fifth Avenue

I

“Kerrige?… Kerrige, sir?… Drive?” I He is a humorous and a quaint figure that invites me. Venerable, with the polished manners of an ancient, highly respectable, fatherly servitor; smoking a pipe, garbed in a coachman’s coat with large silver buttons and a voluminous skirt; crowned with a very squat sort of top-hat, very much curving outward at the lid and curling upward about the brim. Suggests a monkey hat. He stands in a limply, bow-legged fashion, as though not altogether at home on the ground. A being oddly out of the past.

Behind him, in the long line of somnolent taxi cabs awaiting fares along the curb at Madison Square one of those delightful, open, low-swung, horse-drawn vehicles – victorias – which were the fashionable thing at the period named by Mrs. Wharton “The Age of Innocence.” The shaves come forward with a florid curve like the flourish of old-time penmanship. A very tall whip rises like a towering, growing stem from beside the coachman’s elevated seat, and droops gracefully over at the top. The bony horse dozes.

It had been years and years since I had ridden in such a craft as this. The midsummer evening was very warm. This seemed a pleasant way to take the air. Also there was a suggestion of adventure about the idea of such an amusing perambulation. If you get into a taxi you simply go somewhere right off. If you embark in such an affair as this you cast yourself upon the waters, so to say, and await developments. So I got in. And at a funny jog-trot we started off, up Fifth Avenue.

Rolling along in a victoria in the poetry of the evening, I discovered, is very likely to put one into a mood of reverie. One is alone, in a manner of speaking, with the city. And I thought, dreamily, of a number of things.

II

Once upon a time two young men journeyed out of the rolling stretches of the Middle West and advanced upon the metropolis. Young, oh, very young men they were! And, even in the classic way, were they bent upon the ancient quest of conscious talent. I don’t know so much about that talent of theirs now, but it was plainly visible to them then.

Alphonse Daudet, was it not, who, having no shoes, came up to Paris, to seek at the age of twenty his literary fortunes, in a pair of India-rubbers? These two young men whom I recall were adequately equipped with shoes, but they were as innocent of any knowledge of the world as any tender shoot who ever came to town…. Though they would not have been thought so for the world!

As was the homely and pleasant custom in those days in their part of the world when one went from home on a journey, their mothers had put up for each of them a toothsome dinner, of fried chicken, in a discarded cardboard shoe-box. But these youths had advanced, in their spirit, far beyond such simplicity. The public humiliation which they felt would be theirs in eating a meal of this character before a sophisticated and cosmopolitan audience of persons in a car bound for New York was not to be put upon them. When the last scattering outposts of their native town had been safely left behind they raised their car window and slyly cast their tenderly freighted shoe-boxes from them. Then they proudly went right into the “diner” and each had a dollar table d ’hôte dinner – which was the smart, though rather expensive, thing in those days.

Very nearly got off the train at Newark, they did, as they had never heard that word before, and mistook it for the name of the city of their destination. In this they were blessed; it was some years before the Hudson tubes, and they entered the gates of Manhattan (dominated then by the Pulitzer Building) by means of the Jersey City ferry.

Very young, and very “provincial” indeed, they were. For all of this, you must know, was twenty and some years ago. Before Indianapolis and Kansas City and St. Louis and Denver and Omaha, and town and hamlet in between, became as they are today – in habit and thought and feeling a family of first-rate cities, no less modern than any other. So it was that our two young arrivals in that New York of yesterday had never seen a hansom cab. “Hacks,” of course, were not altogether unfamiliar at home. You went, chiefly, to funerals in them. But “hansoms,” and fabled unicorns, what were they?

“See,” said one of our new blown travelers to the other, “that funny looking buggy coming along!” That, a “buggy,” you recall, was the name given by our sires to a light, domestic vehicle, usually with a hood.

Now one of these two beguiling young men, as doubtless you have discerned, was (“God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed!”) myself. The other, the gentleman to accompany whose pictures I originally wrote this article for a magazine. Henry, in that highly entertaining book, Samuel Merwin’s “Temperamental Henry” – Henry upon his arrival in “li’l ol’ New York,” a thorough man of the world, after traveling on the most exclusive and expensive vestibuled train in the world, wanted to see at once the Navy Yard and Central Park and Dead Man’s Curve and the Bowery and Doctor Parkhurst’s church. We wanted to see Coney Island and – Fifth Avenue. When, in those brave days of something under twenty-one, we went forth arm in arm to view the great city, and actually stood opposite that dingy pile the Waldorf, and asked a passerby if that was the Waldorf, and he said “Yes,” we could hardly believe that we actually did stand opposite to the Waldorf. Well, I suppose the thought in my mind behind this rigmarole of reminiscence was that I have in my time known many Fifth Avenues.

Many Fifth Avenues! Suppose I should make chance acquaintance with a man in Khorasan, or some such place as that. And suppose he said to me: “Ah, yes! I have been on your Fifth Avenue.” Suppose he said no more of this than that. Would I have any distinct idea of the picture in his mind? I’d not. And yet I usually turn up and down “the Avenue” at least a couple of times a day…. Though if, instead, at one time I had “spent” a couple of weeks in New York very probably I should feel that both this gentleman and I had “seen” Fifth Avenue – that glamorous national possession of ours, the most gorgeous and imposing show-street in the land.

He might, this gentleman in Khorasan, have come upon the Avenue when first I did. When, then, Twenty-third Street was the very acme of fashionable shopping thoroughfares. Indeed, this was the period when the Charles Dana Gibson heroes of Richard Harding Davis in their globe-trotting ever sighed for a sight of Madison Square – to their mind (as the Café de la Paix is to the Parisian) the center of the inhabited world. The Avenue then wore its most opulent effect below Thirty-fourth Street. Where the New York Public Library now is, with the surge of glittering life about it, you walked in a lightly tenanted landscape around the grim granitic walls of the “old Reservoir.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, instead of being as it is today one of the great museums of the world, was a rather small red brick building far out; and within was (as I recall it) mainly a chamber of horrors, chiefly given over to the housing of remarkably mediocre marble Cleopatras, and other such worse than worthless works of the school of W. W. Story. Down town, in the almost unbroken stretch of period domestic architecture below Fourteenth Street, cheerful red brick houses of the elegance of simplicity and fine proportions, with the old-world spires of the First Presbyterian Church and the Episcopal Church of the Ascension rising above them, basked almost disturbed the spirit of the Knickerbockers.

My recollections do not extend as far back as those of the venerable Don Marquis, who remembers “when the Battery was far uptown.” But I am glad that my spirit is sufficiently rich as to have felt grief at the passing of the old Fifth Avenue Hotel, which was new and stately when “Victoria’s Royal Son” came to visit it. And that in that other Avenue of my youth often I rode in the real, the authentic Fifth Avenue bus. No upper, or “hurricane,” decks then. A lumbering, stuffy, two-horse vehicle, driver’s solitary figure rising above. A third horse in wait at the foot of Murray Hill, to be attached in front of the team, and assist in the slow climb. No such frills then as a conductor. Instead, a long box hanging against the front of the interior, with a naive sign beneath reading; “No one allowed to ride free. Passengers will please see that all fares are dropped into the box.”

The physical character of the Fifth Avenue of that yesterday conveyed much more consistently an idea than the multifarious Avenue of today. It connoted something aristocratic without alloy. Suppose our Khorasan friend’s recollection of it dated from that period. Could he readily visualize the Avenue as we know it now? The long march of recent “loft” buildings, extending up almost to where fashionable traffic used to thin, the medley of multitudinous business signs all ending in “berg” or “stein” or “sky.” Near to the illustrious Holland House that he remembers – now the “Fairyland Cafeteria.” The frequent furniture auctioneers, “premium parlors,” “chain stores,” “buffet lunches,” “self-service” and “automat” restaurants. That mammoth spectacle of frowsiness at the noon hour: the dense promenade of hordes and hordes of unkempt, alien-tongued garment workers on this once patrician pavement!

Above this polyglot scene, up the slope and extending far beyond the crest of Murray, Hill, an Avenue populous, vivacious, fair, majestic, ornate beyond any conception of our Khorasanian’s fancy. And below, reaching from about Twelfth Street down to Washington arch, a stretch of the Avenue which even now has changed mysteriously little (in architectural effect) since 1845.

The literature of Fifth Avenue, I recall, is (naturally) far from meager. Every appreciable historical fact relating to Fifth Avenue and the neighborhood of its route is readily accessible in print. For dates, legends and anecdotes the most thorough and comprehensive work. on the subject is the volume by Arthur Bartlett Maurice, “Fifth Avenue.” Most admirable descriptive and historical monographs, “Fifth Avenue” and “Fifth Avenue Events,” are issued by the Fifth Avenue Bank. The surest guide to the aesthetic appreciation of the art and architectural treasures of the Avenue is the chapter on the subject in Miss Helen W. Henderson’s beautifully and lavishly illustrated book “A Loiterer in New York.”

The social life of Fifth Avenue, through its changing periods, has been abundantly portrayed in fiction. Who does not remember that personification of a popular conception of the Avenue – Cortland Van Bibber? Henry James it was who probably in “Washington Square” and “Daisy Miller”) first invested Fifth Avenue with a spirit in literature. Fictional tales of drama in the stately blocks of the more recent Avenue we have enjoyed as told by many popular novelists, Robert Chambers, Rupert Hughes, Owen Johnson, Gouverneur Morris and Rex Beach most prominent perhaps among them. And every once in awhile somebody writes a very pleasant impressionistic essay about the Avenue One recalls with especial pleasure Simeon Strunsky’s excellent article, in Harper’s Magazine (later reprinted in an enlarged edition of “Belshazzar Court”), “The Lane That Has No Turning,” and further back) Jesse Lynch Williams’s sprightly piece, in Scribner’s, “The Walk Uptown.”

But there is a curious oversight in nearly all that has been written about Fifth Avenue. It is this; The Avenue has been considered as changing only with the years, through the march of commerce, and by the hand of man. And thus much sense of its deep fascination and surpassing beauty is lost.

No account, or very little account, has been taken of its intensely varied appeal through the seasons. How many Fifth Avenues are there in a year? There is that Fifth Avenue the approach of which haunts you with the realization that you ought to get something new to wear. The Fifth Avenue of Easter morning, I mean. The “Easter parade,” of course, is a spectacle which has become a national institution, and is featured in the picture sections of the newspapers. A pageant of color, a decree of the season’s fashions, and a scene symbolic of the traditions of our civilization. Though everybody in it, I suspect, is not an arbiter of the mode; and doubtless many present do not deeply ponder it as a rite of Christendom. Anyhow, it is universally understood to be something unusual, a show to be apprehended for its seasonable effect.

Fifth Avenue in December – the enspiriting scene of the hurly-burly “Christmas rush.” A ceaseless cinema of hurrying, rosy, happy faces. Then, suddenly, what another Fifth Avenue on Christmas day! Still. A figure, or a couple, only here and there, crossing the empty street very likely between blocks. A good white Christmas it should be. Fifth Avenue is wholly beautiful under snow, its architectural detail lost in a simple scheme of delicate coloring, its buildings flowing together as if hewn from one piece by some Titanic Rodinesque sculptor. A sculptor, by the way, who frequently plays pleasant, little, humorous tricks with man’s little sculptures, tilting tall, white, sugar-loaf hats over the eyes of the Library lions, and so on. On such a day what charming painter’s or etcher’s accents nature creates in light and shadow; the little, dark, animated silhouettes!

Fifth Avenue is a weird spectacle, usually, on the Fourth of July. Uncanny, in fact; so start ling empty is it of human life. What is that story of Conan Doyle’s, “The Poison Belt” – or something like that? The one in which two men move through a great modern city of which the entire population has suddenly perished within doors. Comes into your mind, that story. Also, slight sounds ring loud; the Avenue seems to stretch a great way; and you have distinctly an impression of seeing in a glare the faces of the buildings now for the first time.

But not that Fourth a couple of summers passed, which was probably the most humorous day the Avenue has ever known, the occasion of the “personal liberty,” anti-Volstead, “We-are Tired-of-Home-Brew” parade. An avalanche of motley marchers, male and female, white, black and mulatto, in a most miscellaneous variety of uniforms and costumes, with a quite general absence of coats and collars. Many bands. Humanity-laden trucks and automobiles. Frequent cat-calls and hilarious banterings. Comical “floats” designed to be impressive. American flags galore. Placards, banners and streamers carrying no mealy-mouthed slogans and mottos.

The Dempsey-Carpentier entertainment turned out a very notable crowd of human beings over at the historic Thirty Acres, but the greatest and densest crowd I (a student of crowds) ever saw was on Fifth Avenue, the day Theodore Roosevelt made his triumphal procession up the Avenue on his return from Africa; when humanity hung upon the face of the buildings (how, I do not know) like moss or ivy. Then there was that historic Avenue of the Allies, a pictorial part of the great war; its vista of fluttering flags brilliantly and poetically fixed upon canvas by Childe Hassam.

Early spring (as George Moore says it is in London) is more “winsome” on Fifth Avenue (I think) than in the country. The peeping greenery of its squares and Plaza is shy and tender, like a flower caught in a crevice of stone. There is a Fifth Avenue fine and distinct from any other time, more swirling, when the Avenue is sheeted in rain, kaleidoscopic with reflections. After lull of summer, when that fine spanking breeze whips up across Manhattan Island, and skirts go all awhirl,… who knows anything in the world more tonic than the Avenue in the fall? And there is that Fifth Avenue, of San Francisco skies, of Indian Summer. Fifth Avenue is curious on Sunday afternoons. Then a company which you never see there at any other time very largely prevails. Numerous Italian families, presumably come out of their own quarter, appear to consider that they have a particular proprietorship in the Avenue at this time. There are many mothers with their broods, and prospective mothers, generally bare-headed. So, lightly indicated, the moods, a number of them, of Fifth Avenue through the cycle of the year. But there are, further, many Fifth Avenues in a single day. Claude Monet, we know, painted a long series of pictures of a single hayrick, each painting done under different atmospheric conditions, and each painting different from all the others to so considerable a degree as to be in general effect a picture of a different thing. I do not know why a writer with an alert mind and a wide-open eye could not walk up Fifth Avenue a couple of dozen times (choosing well his hours of going) and come back from each trip with a story of a pretty different scene.

If you have chanced upon Fifth Avenue at six o’clock in the morning you have seen it when in its human scene it looks very like Ninth Avenue at that hour. Pale early workers hurrying to their long day’s toil. Janitors, elevator men, cleaners, perhaps. Between eight and nine certainly a different population is abroad there than between ten and eleven. The throng at noon is not the throng of the Avenue’s most grandiose hour, between three and four. Then, from a bus top coming down from the neighborhood of St. Patrick’s Cathedral at the height of the season in town, swaying like a ship’s voyager above a solid sea of gleaming traffic flowing on as far as the eye can go – whose soul so dead that it does not turn somersaults of exultation in the gloriousness of the spectacle! At five, the mighty rivers of pedestrian humanity pouring across town homeward. At seven, the frequent flying taxis bearing fortune’s favored to the gay evenings “five parties deep,” as Henry James has said. And in the dead of night a rich purple mystery punctuated by a policeman with a long nightstick.

And along about eight and nine, what? That it is I am coming to. Something new is happening to Fifth Avenue. Something very jolly indeed. Maybe it is just summer that is happening again, after another year’s round, to Fifth Avenue. But was summer here ever before so jocund as this? I wonder. No, there is something very novel about this picture. Let me see what it is.

III

“I wonder how he makes enough to keep his beast,” I had been thinking of my coachman. In the days of the three-horse bus up Murray Hill, the Avenue, of course, was a scene of twinkling hansoms. And the “cabbies” very much such Dickensesque creatures as my coachman now…. The skirts of his shabby coat were loosely bulged open at the seat and I saw that the garment was very handsomely lined with light-colored silk. Private vehicles were landaus, or here and there carriages like this. Then, almost suddenly it seems to me, swept in our era of motor-cars and taxi-cabs. Occasionally a victoria continued to roll along the Avenue or through Central Park, suggesting, when a brilliant private equipage, a spirit of affectation, “swank.” And the ghost of a rickety hansom might continue to be seen now and then prowling about, with the effect of a creature that had not spunk enough to crawl off somewhere after its vanished and obsolete kind and die.

But the coachman and cabman (becoming rarer all the while) that one did continue to see, were survivals, something like museum pieces. In came a new race of men. The highly ornamental figure in top-hat, with rosette, white breeches and varnished red-top boots was succeeded by the highly efficient looking mechanician, the smart chauffeur of the private “car.” And in place of the mellow rascal of a cabman came a curious type. Not long ago I served the “People” as a juror in a murder trial. In any attempt to describe the defendant I should say that he looked like a New York taxi driver. And in any attempt to describe that character I should say that he looks very much like my conception of a New York gunman. Why does he in stature always have a sawed-off look, the taxi driver? A consequence, perhaps, of the need to fit him into his box. But why always of stocky build? Cabmen used frequently to be majestically tall, and angular, as is this chap whose “kerrige” I not long ago got into.

And, by the way, I don’t seem to be quite so singular as I might have expected to be jogging up the Avenue in this contraption. Several young couples, I note, have had the humor to take “kerriges” this evening. And there are a number more standing awaiting fares here and there along the curb. Of course, down around that ancient frame hostelry of largely foreign clientele, the Brevoort, a small cluster of these leisurely vehicles have always lingered on. In summer, perpetually (as I thought) awaiting hire beneath the pleasant greenery of the drooping trees along the sidewalk, they have given a sort of continental touch there to the scene.

But, I declare! I don’t remember ever before to have noticed such a swarm of these quaint conveyances gathered about the Waldorf. The evening dies, “million tinted.” Though it is something after eight, New York daylight saving time, it is only something after seven standard time. The buses pass and come; their upper decks masses of summer femininity. They seem in the dusk like great floats heaped high with flowers. The Avenue is “lamp-bestarr’d.” And the rise and dip of the lines of lamps dwindling away in perspective have curiously the effect of lanterns on a string. Now, too, there is a quite new and opulent note in the Avenue; the decorative, new, bronze traffic towers (which have just supplanted the Zebra-painted, temporary towers of a little while ago), winking their huge vivid colored eyes, in the middle of the street, add considerably to the scene an idea of festivity.

Out from around the Hotel Plaza comes a regular shoal of these victorias, followed by, upon my soul! a couple of hansom cabs. Rather trim-looking hansoms, too. The occupants of a number of these vehicles are, quite without disguise, lovers. The merry sound of hoofs tinkles along the pavement. We turn and drive down again.

Rather, we seem to float. The street is alive with these gondola-like carriages. The air carries a ripple of soft laughter. And a spirit of languor. It is a world of flitting couples reclining in amorous indolence. In indolent revelry. A world of dreamy carnival. One almost hears in fancy the strum of mandolins. One feels that from the necks of these carriage horses should dangle bells, as in Havana.

On the sidewalks, too, are lovers, strolling in greater and greater numbers. Arms about necks and waists entwined. Oblivious to observation. Isn’t this custom, at least in its present prevalency, somewhat recent in the heart of the city? When one first went to Paris years ago wasn’t one somewhat startled to find it no unconventional thing for youth there to be like this as sentimental as it pleased in public?

The night, deepening into a purple veil, is very, very warm. Numerous of the coachmen about us are “colored,” a number of them wearing Panama hats. Frequent figures on the sidewalks are clothed in Palm Beach suits. Sense of the great commercial city on either side falls away. This novel Fifth Avenue is the thing, like the Board walk at Atlantic City. Whatever lies beyond is merely subsidiary to the romantic spectacle.

Yes; as in Havana, perhaps. On the Prado. For this would not seem to be America. It is exotic. Latin. Some South American capital, it might be. Or maybe Spain.

I dismiss my coachman. As at Fortieth Street I pause before Mr. Woolworth’s brightly lighted bazaar I chance to overhear this; “Don’t they have any bands playing in any of the parks here?” Out-of-towners evidently.

I have it! This quaint, picturesque, glamorous July-night Fifth Avenue is among the great summer resorts of the world.

Hurdy-Gurdy Society

I don’t know whether the place where hurdy-gurdies go at night would rightly be called a livery stable or a garage or a hangar. How ever, if you go down behind the vast, gleaming white, semi-circular Municipal Building in New York you will come upon a dingy little street of a couple of blocks in length called City Hall Place. This frowsy little alley-like way goes at an incline down-hill in the general direction of the Bowery. You are very likely to see disappearing into it a picturesque shapeless female figure balancing a load of kindling wood on her head. At the corner of Duane Street, facing you as you enter City Hall Place, is a curious structure looking much as though it had been constructed of chocolate cake, which is St. Andrews Catholic Church. An iron saint whose anguished expression of countenance would indicate that he is suffering considerable pain stands beside it. Across the way is a shabby cigar store whose ecclesiastical windows of stained glass are a bit puzzling, until you discover that the rest of the building housing the cigar store is St. Andrews Parish House and Rectory. Several fire-escapes beyond fly heavily laden lines of “wash.”

In the afternoon this little by-way is a busy place, filled with chugging automobile trucks being loaded by strenuous, brawny characters, and amid much hubbub, with great bales of newspapers, copies of the New York Evening Mail, hot from the building of that newspaper here on City Hall Place. A few steps along the sidewalk is the establishment of a firm of “fresco painters and designers, and manufacturers of statues and altar pieces of all descriptions.” Around about are various gritty warehouses, the place of a firm of electrotypers, the shop of a small undertaker, of a locksmith, with a large key before the door as a sign, and of a manufacturer of coffee-roasters. Across from the Mail building (at one side of it a one-story schoolhouse, which looks most decidedly like a miniature Tombs prison, with a flagpole on top and one window broken, and on the other side a depot for flour) is a ramshackle brick tenement with double doors like a stable. Closed and locked with a big padlock, most of the time, these doors. Place looks to be deserted within.

But if you should happen to be passing through City Hall Place after dark (as it is highly improbable that you would be) you might notice a very faint light coming from a lantern hung behind the very dirty window beside these doors. The narrow, crooked, down-hill street is dark, eerie looking, and filled with echoes. The only touches of life a domestic group, probably the younger members of his family, gathered about the undertaker’s stoop, and at the far end of the street a gang of rowdy boys engaged in some horse-play. It is, say, about ten o’clock, or a little after. From around the corner comes a queer, shadowy apparition, moving rapidly. As it approaches it makes a great rattle over the cobblestones of the street. It looks like a little hearse, shrouded in a tarpaulin, the figures of a man and a woman bending far over forward straining abreast at the shaves. A peasant team of rustic Europe. As in the heavy dusk this bizarre vehicle bounds up the curb of the sidewalk, one of the cavorting boys races about the rear of it, is seen to twist a crank there, and a tinkle of tin music cuts the air.

As the exotic team halt their machine before the tenement with the bleary lantern eye and the man unlocks the double doors you notice that he has but one arm. You make so bold as to trail in after the caravan. And a weird interior you find yourself in. All around the shadowy walls are rows of dark splotches. Even before you know what they are it strikes you that there is something Italian-looking about them. Then you perceive that they are hats hanging on pegs. At the rear of the long room rises a phalanx of dark shapes which you recognize to be rows and rows of hurdy-gurdies. Here and there is some other kind of a wheeled object. The man has turned up the light a bit. Ah, yes; one of these contraptions mounts an umbrella. The body of it contains a large can, and in front of that a little wooden case with a glass lid. On its side are the words: “Louis. Ice Cold Lemonade, 2¢ and 3¢ a glass. Hot Frankfurters, 5¢ each.” On the umbrella is painted the legend: “Wear Young’s Hats. None better made.” So this is where they, too, go at night, these traveling refreshment carts!

By way of apology for your intrusion you ask the man, with green flannel shirt, blue and white bandanna about his neck, where the person is who has charge of this place. “You wanta find?” he asks, throwing his palms outward in a gesture to indicate that, as the phrase is, you can search him. Well, how is business? “Oh! Can’t kick.” And another gesture which implies that, so to say, he washes his hands of destiny, and accepts without murmur what the gods provide. How long has he been in the hurdy-gurdy business? “Fifteen years.” Makes a gesture which you interpret to mean that thus is life. What did he do before that? He motions toward his stump of an arm as though the answer to that were obvious. Says: “Work in shop.” Where does he live? “Baxter Street.”

His consort here enters into the conversation. A much more lively and communicative person than her stoic philosopher. She clinks her tambourine now and then as she talks. A rosy cheek, full bodied figure, snapping black eyes, a crimson scarf as a headdress. She is a Genoese, you learn; most (shall we say?) organists are, particularly the women. Yes; they mostly live on Baxter Street. They start out at seven, eight, nine in the morning. Go, oh, everywhere! Up in the Bronx, Riverside Drive. Thirty miles a day sometimes. Five dollars a year is the license, good for all Boroughs. No; no regular beats. Come back about half past nine or half past ten o’clock. That is about the hour, you gather, that the authorities desire that they stop playing. No; they don’t work on Sunday. Sure; there are other places around here where organs are stored; one on Pearl Street, just off the Bowery. Two dollars and a half a month they pay here to put up the organ at night. He is never around, the boss, except on the first of the month, when he is here all day, to collect rent. In the winter? Oh, they go out then, too! When it isn’t too cold. Yes; they own the organ themselves. In Brooklyn they are sold, big factory there. It is difficult for you to catch exactly the name of this concern. Sounds as though it began with “Mule.” No; business is not what it was, nothing like. Used to sometimes get nickels, and even occasionally dimes and quarters. But now, people no working; what can you expect? You feel some delicacy about asking the lady point-blank the amount of her income.

But as you go away you recall some of those highly romantic newspaper stories you have read. There was one Pietro, aged sixty-two, who a number of years ago was reported to have sailed on the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, going first to Hamburg, thence to Paris, thence to Italy; with $40,000 he had saved in fifty years as an organ grinder throughout the United States, Canada and England. He ate one meal a day six days a week, it was told; never ate nor worked on Sundays; and had acquired a habitual backward tilt of his head from perpetual squinting for pennies from upper windows. Then some time ago there was that building sold, near the corner of Park and Mulberry streets, for $85,000; man who bought it, it was stated, had ground an organ in New York for twenty-five years. You decide, perhaps, to further pursue your studies of the hurdy-gurdy world.

The other day I saw in the neighborhood of Washington Square a hurdy-gurdy which didn’t look right at all. At first I couldn’t make out what it was that was odd about it. The peculiarity was this: Nearly all of the hurdy-gurdies now to be seen on the streets of our cities are of the style of architecture of an upright piano, and ride on wagon wheels. This one was much smaller than usual, was low in height, like a chest, and was trundled along on a sort of wheelbarrow, one little wheel in front. It was rather thick, stumpy and awkward in line. It was, however, apparently of distinguished manufacture. I caught a glint of something on its battered side, and looking closely saw affixed there the face and reverse of two medals; between them could be deciphered the maker’s name: “Frafi and Co., Berlin.” Something falling from above hit me on the hat-brim, which bounding off was revealed to be a wad of paper freighted with a cent. I asked the one-legged, bespectacled companion of the grinder, who retrieved this largess, if he would not tell me where they had got their organ. His teeth were very few, and his English, if I may put it so, still fewer. He was most cheerful and amiable, however, and over and over again made a sound something like “Mullino,” as well as I could get it.

’Twas one of those cross streets wherein MayorHylan has declared They Shall Not Pass, that is, it was fenced off from traffic by the sign: “Mayor Hylan’s Committee of Recreations and Playgrounds. Street Closed.” Beyond the sentinel board as I happened to be going by, two juvenile clans were met and mixed in violent combat. Yells, missiles and shrieks filled the air. Kicking legs and striking arms littered the field, or (more literally speaking) pavement. Down the main thoroughfare at a jog-trot came a festive-looking vehicle. Suspended from the horse’s neck a tinkling bell. A circular awning with gayly scalloped edge above the craft, and rising from this, poles floating pennants. Cries the burly driver to his boy companion, “Here’s our chance!” and pulls up to a halt alongside the raging battle. He leaps down, lowers a ladder of three steps between the back wheels, the boy begins with much spirit to crank a wheezy organ just behind the seat in front, and the hurdy-gurdy merry-go-round begins to revolve. The bevies of combatants suddenly cease to combat, turn an array of surprised and frequently some what damaged faces toward the gala spectacle, countenances which electrically fill with delight, and then the youthful multitude begins to come helter-skelter toward the carnival of peace. In reply to my inquiries the proprietor of this grandiose outfit informed me that new it cost $1,650, and that his expenses to stable it at night together with feed for his horse are sixty dollars a month. His charges to customers are one cent a ride.

II

Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote Il Trovatore did you dream

Of the City when the sun sinks low,

Of the organ and the monkey and the many-colored stream

On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem

To be litten for a moment with a wild Italian gleam

As A che la morte parodies the world’s eternal theme

And pulses with the sunset glow?

So Alfred Noyes in his piece “The Barrel-Organ.” But if Jocko is still along Piccadilly he has, alas! long since vanished from Manhattan. What a delicious star comedian he was when, in the days of yesteryear, whole neighborhoods came out to relish seeing him in his gorgeous ruffled and be-frogged jacket receive with a flamboyant bow the pennies in his pointed velvet hat! And when he would shin up the side of a house to welcomers at upper windows what a hilarious cheer! The reasons for his passing from the metropoli tan scene and whither he has gone I did not learn until I had got to that celebrated “factory” in Brooklyn.

According to the address stenciled below the maker’s name on the sides of the hurdy-gurdies to be seen about town it is in the famous Five Points district of Manhattan, on Elizabeth Street. If, however, you go through Elizabeth Street you will be very likely to see a number of highly colorful funerals, a splendid array of patriarchal beards, a carpet of wondrously besmeared infant humanity (through which you walk being careful to step in the holes) and a variety of other things of educational advantage, but no hurdy-gurdy factory. The site where, on a time, it was is now a frowsy yard devoted to the husbanding of scrap-iron.

One may at length find it, with persistence and by luck, in the somewhat squalid neighborhood of the ferries on the Brooklyn shore. Woolworth-tower-ian yellow chimneys near by. On a short little street paved with brick. A leaning lamp-post and a badly dented ashcan before the door, to which you mount by a flight of wooden steps. A three story brick building, with a broken window, and rather prettily overgrown with ivy. On the front was once painted: “G. Molinari & Sons, Man’f’rs of Carousal Organs, Acting Pianos.” On one of the walls within the large dusty workroom covering the first floor hangs the picture of the ingenious Gaviole, the Italian cabinet-maker and music master, who, the visitor is told, some seventy-five or more years ago, made the first single-pipe, seven-tune hand-organ ever put on the streets. An Italian immigrant at work on cases for stereopticon views and light carpenter work in New York took up the idea, experimented with it at odd times, and eventually, about thirty-five years ago, established the first American industry of manufacturing instruments of this kind. His sons, strikingly American in speech and ideas, now cater to the descendants of their father’s first customers.

The cost of a hurdy-gurdy, new, is $350. It is something of a weight to trundle throughout the day, weighing, wagon and all rigged up, about 400 pounds. It carries ten or twelve tunes. Responsible parties may rent one for from twenty-five to thirty dollars a week. The Salvation Army a couple of times or so a year hires about seven or eight for use in its “drives,” in which (I was told at the National Headquarters on Fourteenth Street) they are pretty effective. Hurdy-gurdies, as you have noticed, (rented ones) are also employed by the publishers of the latest jazz and sob-stuff songs, to advertise their wares. Children’s “homes,” such as that of the Christian Herald, occasionally purchase a hurdy-gurdy. The purchaser or the renter may select his own tunes; if what he wants is not in stock he may order it made for him.

But they don’t make ’em any more, hurdy-gurdies. Demand became too small. What they make now, my cicerone said, is the “little ones,” that is the “monkey organs,” those mounted on a stick and carried on the back. Very shiny, and twenty pounds lighter than the old-fashioned ones. New, cost $150, though some may be obtained for as low a price as twenty-five dollars. It is a sad thing, but the organ-grinder business no longer flourishes in New York. A hurdy-gurdy couple are doing well nowadays to take in as much as three dollars in a day. And a permit for a monkey cannot now be obtained in New York. Reason; well, for one thing, organ monkeys had sometimes come to the attention of the police department as having in some way acquired a good deal of skill in stealing things from apartments which they entered by upper windows. And then, also, it has not been found profitable to keep them in this climate; in winter Jocko is very liable to take cold and die, when all the time and trouble spent in training him is lost.

But the pleasant life, nevertheless, for one of a roving instinct and an acquisitive disposition is that of a monkey-organ grinder. The monkey organs being manufactured right along are sold to traveling grinders, who commonly make, my authority affirms, as much as fifteen and twenty dollars a day. They get their monkeys very young and train them themselves. Where? Why, there is a place near by here. And who are the talented men that are hatters and tailors to organ monkeys? The grinders themselves; each suits his own fancy as to handsome dress for a monkey. These modern minstrels carry their own skillets for bite and sup. When the first breath of chill arrives in this climate of rigorous winters, and pennied people begin to be concerned with indoor affairs, they may make Charleston a starting-point, going thither in the steerage of a coast-liner, and from there make a grand tour, turning up as far north as Buffalo when Spring arrives. Some organ souls with a spirit in their feet wander from town to town as far as the orange groves of California.

My friend raised the lid of a monkey-organ to show me the mechanism within. On the under side of the lid was pasted this “program” of tunes with which this instrument was fitted:

Program

Waltz

GOOD-BY, GOOD LUCK, GOD BLESS YOU

BEAUTIFUL OHIO

ALWAYS BLOWING BUBBLES

TILL WE MEET AGAIN

Song

EVERYTHING IS PEACHES DOWN IN GEORGIA

MY MAMMY

BRIGHT EYES

Formerly songs called Il pianto della Lucia and Santa Lucia had been included in this list, but the two songs last named in the list above had been substituted for them.

A hurdy-gurdy is operated by means of hammers and strings, a monkey-organ has little pipes and a bellows. The principle is similar to that employed in a Victrola. Gross on gross of tiny, barbed pins, brass or steel, according to the grade of the machine they are meant for, are used in affixing the tunes on the music cylinders of the organs. The pins are planted upright at intervals in the lined score of the cylinder, those used for the little cheap machines being driven in by hand, and those for the larger instrument, where the roll affords more space for work, being fixed by machinery. The very amiable young man explaining these matters to me hitched up, so, to say, a carousal organ in order for me to see it work. A carousal organ, as you know, is a large stationary instrument, with a big drum accompaniment at one end, which is run by means of a heavy belt attached to the wheel of a motor. They are employed at amusement parks, such as Coney Island. This particular one, I happened to notice, had been made in Berlin; but no instruments had been imported from Germany by this house since the beginning of the war. The business of dealing in carousal organs, hurdy-gurdies and monkey-organs is, as one would suspect, limited to something like a couple of months in the year.

III

Most of us, I think, are inclined to regard the instrument variously known as a barrel-organ, grinder-organ, street-organ, hand-organ or monkey-organ as very much the same sort of an animal in its “innerds” as the hurdy-gurdy. In fact, the pedigrees of the two instruments appear to be quite different. The encyclopedias instruct us, in substance, as follows:

The barrel-organ, or hand-organ and so forth, is defined as a musical instrument, generally portable, in which the music is produced by a revolving barrel or cylinder, set with pins and staples, which open valves for admitting wind to pipes from a bellows worked by the same revolving cylinder. The pieces are played with an harmonic accompaniment. Elaborate instruments of this kind were early used in churches and chapels, and were in great demand for playing hymns, chants and voluntaries during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The origin of the barrel-organ, it seems, is clearly established, and is found in the Netherlands as early as the middle of the fifteenth century. Accurate and detailed diagrams of every part of the mechanism for a large stationary barrel-organ worked by hydraulic power were published in 1615.

In England these organs were also known as “Dutch organs,” and the name clung to the instrument even in its diminutive form of the hand organ of the itinerant musician. An illustration of the hand-organ of that period is given in Knight’s “London,” a collection of street views published in 1789. In a description of Bartholomew Fair, as held at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is a further reference to the Dutch origin of the barrel-organ. A Mr. Stephens, described as a “Poultry author,” sometime proposed to parliament for any one that should presume to keep an organ in a Publik House to be fined twenty pounds and make incapable of being an “ale-draper” for the future. In 1737, Horace Walpole wrote of “a thing that will play eight tunes, Handel and all the great musicians say that it is beyond anything they can do, and this may be performed by the most ignorant person, and when you are weary of those eight tunes, you may have them changed for any other that you like.” The organ was put in a lottery and fetched 1,000 pounds. There was a very small barrel-organ in use during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries known as the bird organ. Mozart wrote an Andante for a small barrel organ.

The hurdy-gurdy, whose name is now loosely used as a synonym for any grinding organ, you will find is strictly a medieval drone instrument with strings set in vibration by the friction of a wheel, being a development of the organistrum reduced in size so that it could be conveniently played by one person instead of two. It consisted of a box or sound-chest, sometimes rectangular, but more generally having the outline of the guitar; inside it had a wheel, covered with leather and rosined, and worked by means of a crank at the tail end of the instrument. The hurdy-gurdy originated in France at the time when the Paris School or Old French School was laying the foundations of counterpoint and polyphony. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was known by the name of Symphonia or Chyfonie, and in Germany Lira or Leyer. Its popularity remained undiminished in France until late in the eighteenth century. Although the hurdy-gurdy never obtained recognition among serious musicians in Germany, we are told that the idea embodied in the mechanism stimulated ingenuity, the result being divers musical curiosities.

At the Bureau of Licenses in New York you would have been told, if you had asked concerning the matter, that only seventy-three licenses for hurdy-gurdies were issued that year, late in 1921. There has been a steady decline in the number for the past dozen years. In 1914 a hundred and nineteen licenses were issued for the city.

A Couple of Clubs
and a
Gallery of Publishers

I

My mother did not raise me to be a publisher. I was thinking the other day how the devil it came about that what George Moore (or is it Stevenson?) calls “the romance of destiny” cast me into the publishing business, where I have knocked about these many years. And, musing on, I surveyed in retrospection the several famous publishers I have had the opportunity of knowing. It had not, somehow, occurred to me before what an exceedingly piquant contrast they are one to another, these gentlemen, leading figures in the business in this country, personages who shape the character of the nation’s reading. I found that I entertained my self very well with reviewing in my mind divers matters related to my connection with in succession four great American publishing houses.

When the world was young Brentano’s was on Union Square, at the corner of Broadway and Fourteenth Street. Scribner’s was just below Twenty-second Street on Fifth Avenue. Dodd, Mead just below Scribner’s, Putnam’s and Dutton’s next door to each other half a block west of the Avenue on the uptown side of Twenty-third Street – a rich pageant of fashionable shopping then. The Flatiron building was among the wonders of the world. It was the thing to dine at Martin’s, on Broadway at Twenty-sixth Street. And a youth could raise a thirst.

That was the piping time when I struck the “town.” I wore a heavy black tape to my glasses and the best suit of clothes I had been able to get in Indiana. I had a good deal of extra heavy underwear in my trunk, as my family expected it would in the winter be pretty cold along the Atlantic seaboard. I had never seen anything of the kind that approached in lavish magnificence the “free lunch” of the metropolis. Nor had I ever conceived of such a paradise of periodicals as the magazine department of Brentano’s. There I gorged my mind with the rich novelty of the illustrations in the German journals Jugend and Simplicissimus.

I was an “art student.” The kernel of life was the classes at “the League” (the Art Students’ League of New York), in the Fine Arts Building on west Fifty-seventh Street. The most illustrious man in the world was, of course, James McNeil Whistler. The most glamorous figure in America certainly was John H. Twachtman. The most enviable young man in the country perhaps was Walter Appleton Clark. The uppermost tip of “the Great White Way” was the Pabst Building, on the site of the Times Building of today. One never went out from one’s boarding house after six o’clock in the evening in those days without being “dressed.” It simply wasn’t done, one understood, in New York. The quintessence of feminine charm, also an art student (from Ohio), lived in the winters on Thirty-third Street a few steps from the Waldorf. James J. Corbett had a “place” on Herald Square. When the world was young.

The art student business was a very pleasant and not at all an onerous occupation. And a very superior and very jolly place indeed to be of an afternoon was the Hotel Grenoble, on Seventh Avenue across from Carnegie Hall. You always mentioned in referring to it to the uninitiated that that was the place where Kipling stopped. The part of the hotel of course where one so frequently was of an afternoon was the room called the café. It was there that the “3 Club” held its meetings, on the days (Tuesday and Friday of each week) that Mr. Twachtman came up from his quarters in town at The Players to give a criticism to his class at the League.

The place of Twachtman in American painting is now quite secure. He is, in the literary term, a classic. His works, none disputes, do honor to our best museums. In the auction rooms his canvases, when they appear, now claim a golden price. Not uncommon is it today to hear him spoken of in quarters of authority as the finest landscape painter we have had. Indeed, in all reference to him in critical writing, increasing deference is paid to his name. His career has become a legend. And, with poetic truth it may be said, snow is more beautiful now upon the bosom of the earth than before he lived and painted it. And more beautiful to many must be the sight of fair New England hills, white houses in a cluster, small boats upon the water, and frozen pools.

A little man of about fifty, sharply pointed Van Dyke beard, graying hair worn in a bang, always a white cravat, a bit brusque in movement, somewhat (gleefully I suspect) Mephistophelian in general effect. A paragraph purporting to be an advertisement printed in the “cart-a-log” of the 1899 exhibition of the Society of American Fakirs “takes off” very well the humorous savagery of the most animating instructor ever it may fairly be held) at the League. This reads:

FOR SALE. – The entire outfit of a very young art student. Includes 1 portfolio (nearly new), several sheets of clean Michelet paper, clothes pins, kneaded rubber, plumb bob, 12 in. ruler, piece of clean chamois and a box of charcoal (only one stick used). Can have entire lot very cheap. Good reasons for selling (see J. H. Twachtman). Inquire at office of League or Plumber Shop on Ninth Ave. near 312 St., between 12 and 12, on any day but Saturday.

Adv. 12 t.

“First student stand up,” was the way Mr. Twachtman was wont to begin his criticism. “Very bad!” most likely was his criticism of that palpitating student’s drawing. “Second student stand up,” he would say. “Worse,” probably his comment. “Third student. Still worse! No improvement whatever! Everybody go back to a block hand.” (“Block hand,” a plaster cast of a human hand with all detail eliminated; the simplest subject for beginners to draw.) Then Mr. Twachtman would quickly pass into the tobacco smoke of the next alcove. Sometimes young ladies of delicate sensibility would be left in tears. There was, in truth, I remember, one very pretty young person who was kept at a block hand for so long a time, and who wept so much, that at length in despair she married an automobile manufacturer, and divorced Art forever.

He was known (behind his back) as “Johnnie” to the 3 Club. We called ourselves that, we three bosom cronies, one J. Flagler MacRae (whither has the wind blown him away?), Walter Jack Duncan and I. We decorated (by hand) our stationery with a letter-head design, a sort of coat of arms, a red stein beside the figure three – such rollicking lads were we. Somehow the group of us had found singular favor with the master. In due form and by unanimous vote we elected him honorary member of the Club.

From quarters of distinction has come abundant testimony of the quaint, human qualities of this American master. But in the memoir of John Twachtman that ought to be written a page should be the story of the obscure and humble Club which he honored and charmed, rapturously inspired, and in dark hours sustained in spirit, and which has found no way to place in reverence and affection a little wreath to his memory. Had this little conceit, the idea of such a page, been introduced at one of the meetings of the Club our honorary member, I think, would have pointed upward his Mephistophelian beard and over it have twinkled down with glee at the Club. And than this little jest in his life, his honorary membership in the 3 Club, perhaps nothing better could be adduced to illustrate the simple, boyish character of his nature. In order for a member to buy a drink at a meeting of the Club, when the honorary member was present, it was necessary that a motion to that effect be formally proposed, seconded and unanimously carried. He would not countenance any offhand procedure in the matter. Such a motion, however, invariably was unanimously carried.

Some people do not remember this. Where the big Brunswick Building now is, with Brentano’s in one corner of it, extending the length of the block on the east side of Fifth Avenue between Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Streets, was in the days of which I write a row of brick structures of three stories or so, containing on the ground floor tiny shops. One of these was a book shop, in which frequently exhibitions of drawings were held. I found in one of my scrapbooks the other day a card issued by this little place, which read:

YOU ARE INVITED TO AN EXHIBITION OF POSTER DRAWINGS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN AND ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY, PUPILS OF THE LATE JOHN H. TWACHTMAN.

THE BOOK SHOP OF
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
219 FIFTH AVE.
NEW YORK.

TILL APRIL 30, 1903.

II

Where are the literary journals of yesteryear? Out of the number of monthly periodicals that used to be devoted wholly to the field of books, only The Bookman has survived. There, among others, was the Putnam magazine The Critic, edited for long by Jeanette Gilder. And The Reader, published by Bobbs-Merrill. Scribner’s had The Book Buyer, which later became The Lamp. It was by way of The Lamp that a certain “artist” became a bookseller.

Joseph H. Chapin was then, as now, art editor of Scribner’s Magazine. He had done a number of very discerning things in the service of American periodical illustration. He it was who first “discovered” Walter Appleton Clark, one of the most gifted and technically accomplished of American illustrators. Walter Jack Duncan and Robert Cortes Holliday were thinking it was about time that so perspicacious an art editor discovered us – J. Flagler MacRae was a painter, and thus above magazines. And so one day I dropped in on Mr. Chapin with a portfolio of our wares. The upshot of the interview was that a set of our drawings was selected for reproduction in The Lamp. That evening two young men went forth arm in arm to patronizingly look over the great city they had conquered.

The blow was terrible. We nearly sank down upon the floor of the Scribner store. We had counted all the minutes of all the days up to the date of publication of that issue of the magazine, the epochal number of The Lamp. We had made a triumphal march to Scribner’s to buy a number of copies, copies for ourselves and copies to send “home.” Trembling with exultation we opened the pages…. Under Duncan’s drawings it was stated that I had drawn them; under mine that they had been drawn by him. Someone in Mr. Chapin’s department in making up the magazine had made an awful slip. Life was poisoned.

Well, time went by. I saw Mr. Chapin occasionally, and he seemed like a man who suffered deeply from a consciousness that he had done me a criminal wrong. But I had far other worries now. I no longer “dressed” for the evening. Indeed, those evening clothes were in the keeping of a gentleman who conducted an establishment on lower Eighth Avenue and who described himself on his signboard as “Uncle Ben.” I refreshed myself not at Martin’s nor the Grenoble but from a domestic tin bucket. A philanthropist invited me for a weekend in the country; upon my return to my lodgings I found my things in the hall.

And so one day I dropped in again on Mr. Chapin. The upshot of this interview was that I obtained a position as retail salesman in the Scribner store. I had, you see, been bred to no business; I certainly could not say that I had cultivated “business habits”; but I knew a good deal about books – I thought. I knew Lamb, and Hazlitt, and Sterne, and Thackeray and – that sort of thing. The first book I dealt with in the way of business was a copy of “The Care and Feeding of Children.” It was to be a stop-gap job I had thought, a thing of perhaps a few months; I remained a book clerk for about six years. And I unlearned a great deal about books.

The life of a book clerk is not what it was in my day. Pretty soft now, it seems to me. Stores, the fashionable stores, at any rate, closed on Saturdays throughout the summer, not merely half a day but all day. Five o’clock closing all the year round. And where is the “Christmas rush,” so celebrated in my time? It used to begin toward the end of November, and steadily increase in volume and violence until the evening of December twenty-fourth. During the last week another customer could hardly have been fitted into the store with a shoehorn, until one inside had got out. “Can’t you wait on me next, please?” for weeks afterward the sound of this would ring in my ears like a species of delirium tremens. You were “open” until nine at night; you got a dollar “supper money”; and then you stayed until eleven or so laboring at a reconstruction of the stock laid in devastation. I was reminded at a recent convention of booksellers of a highly entertaining incident (as the raconteur says) of the last night of my last “Christmas rush.” When it was over I invited an exhausted fellow worker around the corner to have some refreshment. He was an estimable young man whose life happily had not much acquainted him with the etiquette of the bar-room, but he had evidently picked up some knowledge of this from hearsay and reading. Doubtless amid the din of the place he did not hear me distinctly. I raised my glass. “To hell,” I said, “with Christmas!” He bowed gravely and in a very polite voice replied; “The same to you.” All in all, however, it was a pleasant life enough. I am glad I was a bookseller then. The old booksellers are like the old actors: they learned their trade in a hard school.

I had a very interesting view from the sidelines of the literary world. The late Edward L. Burlingame (whose death has occurred since these lines were first written), who had been editor of Scribner’s since its beginning in 1887, was then editor of the magazine. Portly, ruddy, a rich blue-black beard, gracious, immaculate in attire, I do not think I have ever seen a more highly polished figure of a gentleman. I viewed him with deep admiration as a spectacle of consummate “finish.” His presence evoked a pleasing thought of Castilione’s “Book of the Courtier.” One day, having come down from his office above for only a moment, he was crossing the store on his way back to the elevator. He moved magnificently. His wearing no hat doubtless it was which gave rise to the idea in the mind of the shabby figure that reeled in just then that he “belonged” in the retail department. The scarecrow that had entered certainly didn’t belong there. He swayed about on his feet for an instant and then staggered across the floor and confronted Mr. Burlingame. “You,” he quavered, “you th’ floor-walker here?”

The first literary adviser to a publishing house I ever beheld was W. C. Brownell. I regarded him as omniscient. The calm, unconscious nobility of his presence, the classic sculpture of his head and graying beard, the philosophic detachment of his bearing suggested to my mind a somewhat confused blend of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius. His volumes “Victorian Prose Masters” and “American Prose Masters” I read as the stone tablets of the law. And I have not ceased to read them – now as the very wise commentary on human life of a full, disciplined and beautiful mind. Innumerable times a day he would stroll in and out. He would move up and down the sidewalk to smoke – smoking being outlawed in the building. Or stand for long periods of time gazing in at the window display. But I do not believe that at the end of the day he could have told you a thing that was in the window. I felt the distance between us to be so vast that it would be something almost blasphemous for me to attempt to speak to him. Until one sultry afternoon he was sitting on the elevator-man’s stool waiting for the car to descend when a small messenger boy came up en route for upstairs with a telegram. “Hot day,” remarked Mr. Brownell to him very pleasantly. So a bit later I ventured to ask him if he had read a new book which had interested me greatly. “No, is it good?” he asked with as much simplicity as a stenographer. And the friendly relationship between us which developed has been to me something like the spiritual support of always having access to a set, let’s say, of Montaigne.

Coming down the flight of marble steps at the rear of the store leading from the august sanctums above, I see (in memory) a group of figures. Charles Scribner, Arthur Scribner, Mr. Brownell, Mr. Burlingame and Robert Bridges, then associate editor, now editor of the magazine. On their way out to luncheon. At the Century Club, usually. As a rule, back methodically at the end of an hour exactly. A noble avenue between neat book-laden tables stretches to the front door of the store. Down this wide aisle they come very slowly, rather solemnly. Suggests somewhat to the impish fancy, this spectacle, some sort of a ceremonial procession. Uniform expression on their countenances of contemplative detachment from their surroundings. Very quietly, very neatly dressed, all. Charles Scribner, head of the house, a man (then) of about well, in the neighborhood of fifty, I should say. Of medium size, gray mustache cropped short, fine aquiline nose drooping slightly over it. The face of a finely bred New Yorker and man of the world. Manner decidedly reserved. General effect that of a cultivated, traveled, conservative, substantial, effective (perhaps shrewd) man of affairs, might have something to do in a directing way with banks or railroads. The five gentlemen before me are all men of middle age or a bit more. If I were held to three words in an attempt at rendering a succinct impression of the group I should say that the effect in general was that of very high respectability.

Mr. Scribner pauses at the end of one of the tables and asks a near-by clerk, who immediately springs to immensely respectful attention, for a copy of a recent book which he names. The clerk returns, with somewhat the manner of a culprit about to be sentenced, and reports that that book is at present out of stock. Again, and still a third time, Mr. Scribner asks for a book – a book which by some chance happens at the moment not to be in hand. (Though don’t I know how large that stock is!) George Whitworth, the buyer, appears looking very distrait. Mr. Scribner says nothing for a moment. Is an Olympian whirlwind about to burst with destruction upon the staff? Then, with a flicker of amiable cynicism playing across his features, Mr. Scribner remarks: “This is a deuce of a book store.”

III

Then, on a day, I went out from that book store and did a little of this and a little of that. Librarian, professional philanthropist (with the Russell Sage Foundation), trade journalist, book reviewer, literary editor, traveler in foreign parts by turns I was. And at length found myself asking Harry E. Maule how was the book publishing business out at the Country Life Press at Garden City. It happened that at the moment they were rather in need of somebody to do a little publicity and other editorial chores.

At the desk in front of mine was a very large, very round, barrel-like young man, of ruddy hue and with the instantly friendly manner of a Newfoundland dog. His jovial bulk was further emphasized by the pronounced bagginess of his English-cut clothes. He sometimes arose while dictating to his stenographer and stood with one foot planted upon the seat of his chair. In this position it was observable that his trousers had been repaired. I felt it a very amiable service when this burly and rather humorous looking young character took me in charge at half past twelve and guided me to the lunchroom for employees, over a garage a short distance away on the Doubleday grounds. He said his name was Morley. He had been a Rhodes scholar. This was his first job. He was very much excited over a novel that in the form of English sheets had just been submitted to the house for American publication. Its title was “Casuals of the Sea,” and the author one William McFee. He, this Morley, smoked a pipe continually.

After lunch, before returning to our desks, he showed me over the grounds, the Italian pool, the sun dial, the three hundred and more varieties of peony, the evergreen garden, tennis courts, potato farm, and then through the plant. He dilated upon all these exhibits with the facility of a sight-seeing guide at the Capitol. Later I observed that among his duties apparently was the matter of acting as cicerone to parties visiting the plant. He was a young man with an immense gusto for literature and an infectious good fellowship. He had the wholesome and stimulating quality of a clean strong breeze. We quickly got into the way of together walking over after the day to the neighboring town of Hempstead, where we both lived. And of stopping in for an evening glass at the place of George D. Smith, whose front room was lined with noble barrels and casks, on the main street of the village: quarters given over now, alas! to dealing in agricultural implements. It was a romantic, and somehow altogether fitting thing that George D. Smith was the name also of the champion dealer at that time in rare books. I became a member of another very exclusive club, a very exclusive club indeed, the Porrier’s Corner Club. We two were the only members. Porrier’s Corner was a public house opposite one corner of the Doubleday property. Chris sold a poem now and then to a magazine. He also had a slender manuscript story about a book caravan written some time before. He submitted it to his employers. The house felt, I understood, that it need not lose very much on a small edition of the book, and published it. The bagatelle was called “Parnassus on Wheels.”

Who is that tall, loosely swinging figure, wearing a large black slouch hat, I see entering in the morning? There are some rings, or something like that, swinging by cords from the ceiling (for what purpose I do not know). As he comes along, this mustached gentleman boyishly punches at them with the tip of his rolled umbrella. It is Russell Doubleday, head of the editorial department. In the course of the day I see two gentlemen skipping and romping in effect across the floor. One is “F. N. D.,” otherwise Frank Nelson Doubleday, founder and head of the firm. Large, hearty, jovial, very broad shoulders, darkish drooping mustache, complexion much sun tanned. Somewhere around fifty, but in outstanding effect suggesting an overgrown, bouncing boy. Having more fun than anybody. Laughing much, and as a man laughs who is accustomed to laugh in the open air. Has his arm around the other figure – Ernest Thompson Seton. Radiating an air of jestful enjoyment of old-time countryside sociability kind of thing. And a spirit such as this, of democratical youthfulness, seems to pervade the atmosphere of Doubleday, Page and Company.

“F. N. Doubleday,” he signs himself; “Frank Doubleday,” he is to those who were associated with him in the days when, for eighteen years (beginning in 1877), he was a member of the publishing staff of Charles Scribner’s Sons; “F. N. D.,” generally to the no inconsiderable army of workers at the Doubleday plant; and “Effendi” to those who refer to him with the affectionate intimacy of personal friendship begun in his Garden City days. The Letter of Dedication to Morley’s “Tales From a Rolltop Desk,” you may recall, begins “Dear Effendi.” And what may be the meaning of that strange name?

An effendi, I gather, is some kind of an Arabian potentate. On a time (how long ago I do not know), Mr. Doubleday, it would seem, palled around over their way more or less with such dignitaries. There is an entertaining photograph in one of the nooks in the Tudor pile out at Garden City of Mr. Doubleday arrayed as one of those. And very probably in a spirit of endearing banter the name came to be applied to him. The pleasantry evidently engaged his humor; his estate at Oyster Bay bears the named “Effendi Hill.”

Well I remember those desks out there at “D. P. and Co.,” each topped with a shimmering slab of glass. When you left for the day the deck of your desk was supposed to present a surface swept of any particle of litter. There was a legend of a young man who had one time been there, in a position of no considerable consequence, whose habitual untidiness in this matter at length provoked the attention of F. N. D. So one afternoon Mr. Doubleday invited into his office the offender against the prevailing ideas of immaculateness in business habits, and in a genial gesture waved the young man’s gaze toward his own desk – after the momentous executive traffic of the business hours as speckless as the rifle of a West Point cadet. The young man noticed the difference in sightliness between this piece of office furniture and his own. “But, Mr. Doubleday,” he said, very earnestly, “you don’t realize the amount of work that passes across my desk in the course of a day.”

Another entertaining legend there was. Mr. Doubleday had at one time had a private secretary whose services he felt were not irreplaceable; in fact, he believed they could be considerably improved upon. He decided to let the young man go. He wanted to present to him as pleasantly as he could the idea of his leaving. So in a sportive way he dictated to his secretary a letter to his secretary, beginning in the conventional way, “My dear Mr. So-and-So,” and going on to state that he (Mr. Doubleday) regretted exceedingly but – and so on. He made no comment upon the subject of the letter after dictating it, but passed on directly to other correspondence.

The young man quite in his usual business-like fashion addressed an envelope to himself for the letter to himself and despatched it together with the other letters dictated at the time in the regular channels leading to delivery by post. At home, upon receipt of the letter, he answered it and mailed his reply in the ordinary way to Mr. Doubleday. In his letter he said that he was sorry indeed not to be able to agree with Mr. Doubleday in every particular, but he felt he must take issue with him upon the matter raised, and (in effect) he could not consider that his resignation was justifiably called for; in short, he much preferred to remain where he was, and he besought Mr. Doubleday to reconsider his attitude. Without any allusion at all to this letter, and quite as though it had been written to him by someone outside of the house, Mr. Doubleday dictated a reply to it, restating, with just a trifle more firmness than before, his position. To this communication the young man replied by another letter through the post, extending a bit his arguments for retaining his position. And so the singular correspondence continued back and forth for some considerable time. Though finally the young man’s resistance succumbed; he gravely sent in by mail his resignation as secretary to Mr. Doubleday, and Mr. Doubleday solemnly dictated to him as secretary a friendly letter accepting his resignation.

A number of years after I had left employment at Garden City, at a dinner given at The Coffee House by Mr. Doubleday to Sydney S. Pawling, who had become his English partner by the connection established between Doubleday, Page and Company and the London firm of William Heinemann, I heard for the first time the story of how Christopher Darlington Morley landed a job at The Country Life Press. Mr. Doubleday described how this young fellow walked in on him and applied for a position. “What job would you like,” Mr. Doubleday asked him. “Yours,” he jovially came back. “Well, come on and go after it,” was Effendi’s answer.

IV

A thunderstorm, I remember, was coming up that afternoon; Morley and I had parted at the door of Brown’s Chop House. He had fared from Garden City, decorated with a presentation copy (so to say) of a gold watch and chain as a parting token of esteem from the firm, to become an editor of The Ladies’ Home Journal; I had [ 82 ]A GALLERY OF PUBLISHERS fared to Indiana and back, and was for the present on my own. Among his activities at that time at the Home Journal, I believe, was the assembling of the department at the back of the magazine called “The Office Dog.” He had just told me at luncheon that I ought to go round to see George H. Doran. I stepped into a hallway to avoid the torrent of rain. Should I go round there and see about that job? I wasn’t particularly impelled to. But I had said I would; and if I didn’t, then Chris would be nagging me as to why I hadn’t.

Mr. Doran was in but seemed to be exceedingly busy. After three years’ association with him I should now be astounded to hear anybody say that Mr. Doran was in but did not seem to be exceedingly busy. Finally the door of the corner office was flung open and a very striking gentleman swept toward me. I was somewhat startled to be received with so much dash. He looked at me with such a beaming brightness of eye that he appeared to be all lighted up inside like a cathedral, and invited me in. Tall, straight as a rod, athletic in effect, every line of his face and figure speaking a most pronounced electric vigor, dapper, Norfolk suit sharply pressed, spats, neatly barbered shock of grayish (rather than gray) hair, gray mustache cropped almost flat with his lip, a bit of an imperial. A sports hat hung on his hat-rack and several sticks stood beneath. He was smoking a gold-tipped cigarette. I stated my business. He sat for a time looking straight at me without speaking. For such a length of time indeed that I began to feel that there was little danger of my obtaining a job here, and I shouldn’t have to go to work right away after all. Then very suddenly he said: “When can you begin? Let’s begin! Let’s begin!”

I turned up in the morning rather ahead of office hours. But two persons I observed were before me; one a colored gentleman who was doing a little dusting, the other, Mr. Doran. I stayed somewhat late that evening attempting to get a hold on things. As I passed out through the deserted and darkened floor I saw through the frosted glass in his door a light going full tilt in the office of Mr. Doran. Well, he remarked one day, when I had spoken apologetically of my being a little late that morning, of course he did not expect me to keep the hours that he did. For a time he did not look to be as well as ordinarily. No, he observed, for several days he had not been “taking the hurdles of life” as well as usual. Certainly some man, to use a frequent expression of his own, to “train with!”

V

I had been going every once in awhile with Joyce Kilmer up to dinner at the Authors’ Club. I enjoyed particularly there the ceremony of Watch Night, held on New Year’s Eve. And the meeting which opened with a program of reminiscent talks. And the charming spirit of * boyish larkishness which prevailed among the old time members of the Club. Among the historic figures of literary history which gathered at these meetings none took my fancy so much as the veteran publisher Henry Holt. Always among the first to arrive. Always beautiful in evening dress. Always smoking an excellent cigar. Always the center of sociability. And as the morning crept on, the throng thinned to a half dozen or so incorrigible Authors-Clubians, and the number of lights began to be reduced, among the last to go home. Delightful indeed were the pleasantries of his speeches. I remember his pausing in one of his talks to ask the gentleman who had preceded him if he remembered when he was sixty years old. “No,” Mr. Holt remarked, “I don’t suppose you can remember that far back.”

I had played again the rolling stone. A friend of mine invited me to the Harvard Club for lunch, where I met a very tall and aristocratic looking young man who appeared to know all there was to know about smart boats, horse racing, boxing contests and duck shooting, and who seemed to be very active as best man at weddings, Elliot Holt, referred to by his father in the “Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor” as his “sporting son.” And it fell out that shortly after this I joined the staff of Henry Holt and Company.

Here in the heart of New York’s theatrical district, at the center of the smartest dressed swirl of life in town, a gentleman of eighty-two, the most scholarly of our publishers mounts every day or so to his offices on Forty-fourth Street. Tall and erect, a figure of charming dignity, his highly distinguished countenance bearing the impress of long, long years of intellectual thought and association with the very best of society, his silver hair parted in the back in the fashion of a vanished day, crowned by a large, quaint derby hat with a flat top, comes Mr. Holt. Editor for the last seven years of his life of the Unpopular, later the Unpartizan Review, and (in all that that mellow term used at its best implies) a man of letters. The founder of this venerable, sterling house. Now only lightly active in the business of his firm, which is vigorously carried on into the spirit of a new time by younger men. Roland Holt, the elder son, goes forth happily to greet him, saying: “There is my dear old gentleman.” It is thus every day that he comes. And he pauses at the door of his office to receive an affectionate salute on the cheek from his youngest son, Elliot.

The Greenwich Village
of Real Life

I

RAID FAKE STUDIOS,
IS PLEA OF ARTISTS

District Attorney Asked to Act Against Places That Just Cloak Loose Living.

LEAGUE ASSAILS LANDLORDS

Declares They Stress “Free Life” and “No Questions” to Get Higher Rents.

POOR ARTISTS DRIVEN OUT

Many Quitting Manhattan for Brooklyn and Bronx – Investigation Is Begun.
— — —

The invasion of New York’s artistic colonies by persons renting studios for improper purposes is forcing artists out of their old quarters and compelling them to leave Manhattan by the hundreds for Brooklyn, the Bronx and the country, according to Julian Bowes, Chairman of the Rent Committee of the League of American Artists, Inc.

The Rent Committee has appealed to the District Attorney’s office to aid the artists by raiding some of the wilder establishments that used to be workshops of painters and sculptors. Mr. Bowes said that land lords, deliberately catering to those seeking to cloak loose living by the glamor of art, have forced rents up to many times the old prices. He asserted that in one case a studio which rented for $35 a few years ago had been raised to $150 by a landlord who boasted that his motto was “No questions asked.”

“Real estate agents are booming the studio idea,” said Mr. Bowes, “and stressing the so-called ‘free life’ of artists to such an extent that bona-fide artists are being denied renewals of leases and are unable to obtain suitable studio quarters.

Result of Profiteering.

“This is the direct result of profiteering on the part of landlords and real estate men. Our investigation has shown that 70 per cent. of the studios in Manhattan are being occupied by persons of questionable character.

“In many instances the members of the committee, when being shown studios for rent, were informed by real estate agents that “No questions were asked and one did not have to show a marriage certificate.” “Conditions in the Greenwich Village section surpass the wildest happenings in the Montmartre section of Paris. The majority of the studios in this section are occupied by pseudo artists and loose living persons.”

From a leading New York newspaper of September 17, 1922.

There was a good deal about it in all of the papers, and much talk on the subject everywhere. It was as good, almost, as a murder case, in the way of a public stir. The fact that the Columbus Circle studio district and various other sections of the city were equally involved in the salacious newspaper reports was practically forgotten.

And then, a little later than this, there was a spectacular little period of public raids on certain places for eating and dancing in this quarter of the town which left more deeply dyed than ever before the fantastically mottled reputation of that fabled land, Greenwich Village.

A surprising thing, shortly before the energetic newspaper hue-and-cry, about the rent business was that the magazine journalists suddenly began again to write about Greenwich Village. There was a regular revelry of it. Articles appeared in quick succession around the autumn of 1921 in a number of popular magazines: in The Saturday Evening Post, by Frank Ward O’Malley: in Vanity Fair, by George S. Chappell; in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times, by Benjamin De Cassares, and, somebody told me, somewhere else. You might at that moment have thought that the far famed Village had been pretty much “done”; that there was no longer journalistic point in the subject. Indeed, if all the words that have been written in the last several years about New York’s “Latin Quarter” were placed end to end they would extend how many miles, goodness knows! But that isn’t it.

No, it was not surprising (to one who wanders much there) that there should be a revival of writing about Greenwich Village. It was time that somebody should take up the theme again. The subject was dropped awhile back by fiction and feature writers at just about the time when Greenwich Village began to be most substantially interesting. But it was altogether surprising that the writers of the articles of the season mentioned were writing in much the same old way.

The fame of Greenwich Village is entertaining to contemplate. Every once in awhile when I meet in Indiana or in Iowa or in some other State of the Union a good jump away from Manhattan Island a young man of twenty-two or forty-five or something like that who tells me that he has just got back from New York, what do I not now and then discover? Why, that he has not been to New York at all, or, perhaps I should put it, that he has been to New York, so to say, only slightly, incidentally – he has been rather in Greenwich Village, chiefly. Well, after all, New York City is not today fundamentally so unlike St. Louis or Denver. But Greenwich Village is.

Romantic young people, I have discovered, are not scarce in the land within whose minds the old saw we used to hear about Paris has altered to “See Greenwich Village and die.” Who has not heard of its bizarrerie? That popularly relished picture “The Greenwich Village Follies” has flourished through season after season. And life there is so thrillingly “free.” It is our own Montmartre.

A picturesque national possession, it “belongs” in an amusing and quite intimate way to impressionable people all over the continent. One frequently meets vivacious young women from as far away as the Pacific Coast who have hardly more than arrived for the first time in New York before they begin to chatter gaily of “the Village.” Like calling Charles Chaplin just “Charlie,” you know.

And there, on the other hand, is the conception of wide currency among the self-consciously sophisticated. What a stock joke it has for some considerable time been, the Village! The ridiculous abode, in their ever handy bromidium, of “long haired men and short haired women.” And where, so the newspaper comic “artist” has for long enjoyed depicting it, in backyard Italian restaurants parties of visitors to the Village from Harlem greedily observe covertly parties of visitors to town from Nebraska or Ohio, who covertly as greedily observe them, each party under the stimulating impression that the other is a group of very “Bohemian” artists, its several members probably each a celebrity.

Well, there must be something that is so about Greenwich Village, one way or another; what is it?

The way to get at the truth of that is by a little spin around in the diverting history of the place. For when a person tells you that he is well acquainted with Greenwich Village you should, to discover the picture in his mind, ask him exactly when he was last there. The Village has been a fast worker.

II

Some fifteen years ago…. But let us for an instant or two flit back to the storyful dawn of Greenwich Village. I suppose you know that the first name for the place was “Sappokanican.” At least, the first mention of the location occurs in Dutch records, in which reference is made to the Indian village of that name, where Hudson is supposed to have stopped for supplies. The site of this tiny village is identified as lying east of the Gansevoort Market, just below Fourteenth Street between Ninth Avenue and the North River.

To skip along; Peter Stuyvesant’s predecessor, Wouter Van Twiller, the second Dutch governor, conceived the pleasant idea of appropriating to himself, amongst other perquisites of his governorship, the Company Farm called “number three” and covering the whole of the future ninth ward to be his own private tobacco plantation. In Colonial times the English called the place Greenwich, and because of its healthfulness and fertility it became a popular place of residence for well-to-do New Yorkers of that period. In 1822 the whole of the population of New York City (some 135, 000 souls) in a couple of days or so moved up to Greenwich Village. That is all that could get away. Because of the great yellow fever epidemic. Such a fast worker was Greenwich Village at that particular point of its career that a Reverend gentleman of the time is quoted as reporting that he had seen corn growing at the present intersection of West Eleventh and Fourth Streets on a Saturday morning, and on the following Monday a house had been erected there capable of accommodating three hundred boarders. This fabled hotel was on the site where Will Irwin among other widely eminent Villagers now have their houses. After six months some of the New Yorkers went back to the city. In the impetus which at a bound carried the place of more or less remote country residence to a thriving suburban village resulted the twisting streets of Greenwich Village today, suddenly developed from cow-paths, lanes and alleys.

When business left New York City for a period of half a year all the banking for the metropolis of America was done during that time in Bank Street, the banks being housed in little wooden shacks. Thus one hundred years ago the financial center of the western world was Greenwich Village. And that, The Greenwich Villager quoted someone as remarking, is “a good thing to know.” Art came to dwell in Greenwich Village something more than a generation ago. Exactly when the Village first definitely became the home of a “community” of painters I find no record. There, however, on West Fourth Street near Sixth Avenue lingers that now dingy and seldom observed pile, the “Old Studios.” It certainly was built longer ago than three quarters of a century. And though amusingly antiquated today in contrast to the modern studio building, it must in its prime have stood out nobly among the little brick dwellings about it. There were giants in Greenwich Village in those days. (Though, doubtless, the aesthetic of much of the Village today would be far from confirming them as such.) John La Farge had his studio here. And here, within a stone’s throw of that edifice of 1840 for which it was designed, the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street, he produced his chef d’ouvre, the great “Ascension.” Royal Cortissoz, art and literary critic for three decades of the New York Tribune, and biographer of Whitelaw Reid, who took up residence on West Eleventh Street thirty years ago, speaks reminiscently of various members of the group of very able elder painters who did their work in this old building. “Billy” Chase (known to the history of art as William M. Chase) he mentions had “a famous studio” there.

Something like fifteen years ago (as I was at the point of saying a little further back) that section of New York lying just off Fifth Avenue, a bit to the east and several blocks to the west, bounded on the north by Fourteenth Street and extending as far down town as, say, little known Spring Street, was a slumbering part of town. The outstanding effect of the whole neighborhood was the surprising way in which the authentic old village of Greenwich placidly continued to resist dissolution. The architecture was mostly domestic, and of red brick. The sincere little dwellings of the last century, of three stories, or sometimes of two stories and a half with gable roof, dormer windowed. Between Fifth and Sixth Avenues they were neatly groomed, and breathed an air of quiet distinction. To the west-ward, though shabby had become the estate of the Village generally, now and then a shining old white door or maybe a fine dull black one, an ancient polished brass knocker, a carefully preserved, tall, hammered iron newel (as these old grill posts beside the doorstep are called), a restored fanlight, a bright new red front with door and windows picked out in white or an ivied wall, spoke a consciousness of character. There were a great many rooms to let, announced by little white stickers of paper pasted onto the door frame. Some of Mr. Whistler’s etchings of Old Chelsea give an excellent suggestion of bits of the place then; some of its rear views and its more tumbledown aspect. Here and there an exceedingly cheap looking apartment house was to be seen. It was invariably hideously ugly. Its inhabitants were for the most part good burghers who proudly considered that they lived in the “Old Ninth Ward.” You frequently heard one of these citizens declare, as though that fact settled any argument in which he might be engaged, that he had been born in the Old Ninth Ward. O’Connor, McGuire, Donnelly, Meyer, such were their names. They did not use art in any form. Then a sprinkling of Englishmen seemed to settle in this section, as in their natural home in New York, probably because it was quiet. These included an occasional old gentleman of a decidedly English cast, with buff trousers, very round in the legs. The mellow architecture, perhaps, and the soothing spirit of the place, seemed to attract as lodgers a number of derelict wastrels, who still considered themselves gentlemen, but who had wearied of the garishness of uptown, and sought seclusion. And lodgings were very “reasonable.” I myself had for a season at this period a neat (but not spacious) “furnished room” on Fourth Street above Eleventh at a rental of a dollar and seventy-five cents a week. If you gave your address uptown as Charles Street, or Jane Street, or most anywhere roundabout, people smiled at you, because, they considered, you had had to confess that you were rather down and out.

Paper covered joke books, dream books and volumes on phrenology and how to tell fortunes with cards, these, amid a queer medley of worn tomes, were displayed in the window of the only book shop of that day which I remember; an old fashioned, second-hand book store on Sixth Avenue; within, a large, miscellaneous, quite orthodox stock.

The dominant kind of restaurant was the sort represented by Kleinschmidt’s, an establishment now long vanished, across from Jefferson Market Court, which specialized in thirty cent steaks. Tucked away here and there were a few Italian places of the variety later known as “red ink” restaurants. They served a table d’hôte at forty cents; the menu was the same, as far as I can make out, as that such places provide today. Perhaps the best known of these was The Black Cat, on North Broadway just below Bleeker Street, and which, remodeled, is still going on. But the one I liked best was on West Tenth Street, one where you went through a very steaming kitchen first – an arrangement which to those brought to visit the place for the first time was a very amusing novelty then. To many newcomers, too, it was odd to see women there smoking. Set here and there in the walls of the eating room as panels were a number of sketches in oil, obviously the work of art students. But these affairs were not at all weird and radical art, were rather humdrum, indeed. And I do not recall anything particularly “arty” in effect about the patrons of the place. They seemed rather humdrum, in fact.

Over South Washington Square way a number of young artists had begun to settle themselves in garrets. They were quite un-ostentatious, however, about the matter of living in garrets, such quarters being chosen for the very practical reason that they were the only sort of quarters their tenants could afford. And here and there in this quarter of the town an artist of established reputation had his home. Robert Blum, whose highly distinguished and delightful pen drawings in the magazines will be remembered with pleasure by persons of middle age, had had a quaint and charming old house facing Grove Street Park, as I believe that tiny triangular bit of greenery was then called – when anybody called it anything. At this date the house was occupied by Jules Guerin, veteran illustrator and mural painter, among whose recent work of serene and dignified beauty are the panels in the great Lincoln Memorial just opened at Washington. George Luks, who takes as his master the old master Frans Hals, also lived in Greenwich Village at about this time. And others of solid caliber.

Artists of sincerity who sought to pass laborious days found the Greenwich Village of then a congenial spot. It was a place within the means of modest earnings. As a back-eddy of the town, it provided that most necessary of things for the artist: an atmosphere of peace and freedom from interruption.

Among the venerable landmarks of the neighborhood was a tavern of ancient days, the Old Grape Vine. A sagging, soiled white, two-story frame structure, with great iron grill lamps before the door, it had stood on this site, Sixth Avenue at Eleventh Street, since Sixth Avenue was little more than a country road. Behind it a tiny triangular remnant, wedged in between houses, of a Jewish burying ground established early in the nineteenth century. Within, the main room was somewhat reminiscent of London’s Olde Cheshire Cheese. But its effect was not “got up”; it was authentic. Here frequently used to gather, as at a club, a group of painters, illustrators and journalists. The art critic of the New York Evening Post and the art critic of the New York Sun at that time, I remember, were frequent habitués here. But there was nothing stagey about this group. They came here to drink a mug of ale and to see each other because the ale was better than elsewhere and it was a more gentlemanly looking place than the ordinary saloon. The place has long been gone.

There were a good many saloons altogether, most of them sordid enough, each with its “back room.” In one or two cases these rear apartments were of such considerable size as to be called “gardens,” and were not dissimilar in character from the more sumptuous assignation halls in the heart of New York’s tenderloin of the day. Here at night dancing went on. A very different party from “the dancing in Greenwich Village” which has since become the subject of so much moral discussion.

There was a feature of the streets then, too, of some of the back streets, which the coming into existence of the much attacked dance restaurants of a later date have had much to do with doing away with. Sheridan Square is now a bright and bustling place, the heart of Greenwich Village gaiety. Its night throngs, going to and from the restaurants and the Greenwich Village Theatre, are the cleanly youthful throngs of the age to be found almost anywhere bent upon an evening’s amusement, and the darksome and sordid stalker of the night finds no place with them. But before this spot put on its later aspect it was in general a dingy scene, and one or two artists who at an earlier date had made their homes there were compelled in the interests of their families to move away.

Such matters need to be noted but should not be stressed. In its many restful, pleasant streets it was a comfortable place for one to live inconspicuously, that Greenwich Village of something over fifteen years ago, and most conveniently handy to the centers of the city both uptown and down. There was something sterling, as opposed to the fanfaronade of much of New York, about its air. There were houses here and there which sheltered the third or fourth generation of a family of fixed residents. It had, for the mind in touch with such things, a charm in its traditions. Barrow Street was first called Reason Street, in compliment to the author of “The Age of Reason,” Tom Paine, who passed his closing years in a small house in Bleeker Street near by. Aaron Burr went forth from his patrician residence at Macdougal and Spring Streets to his appointment with Alexander Hamilton on the heights of the Jersey shore. And Hamilton was carried dying to a house on Jane Street. Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James and Artemas Ward all lived in the Village at one time or another. As an instance of the marrow of the place, there were various notable business establishments. There is still, on Sixth Avenue, perhaps the largest retail drug store in New York operated by an individual, and which old Knickerbocker families over Fifth Avenue way, and many prominent physicians, have patronized since 1838. There is still, on Eighth Avenue, that large, illustrious pawn-shop, established in the early seventies, and probably the honestest in New York. But, that number of years ago, there was not a tea-room, nor a batik shop, in all Greenwich Village.

III

Then somewhere around twelve years ago Mrs. Whitney set up a studio in Macdougal Alley. Some people say this started it – the cult of Greenwich Village. At any rate, such a novel move as this was then by a woman of wealth and distinction was a harbinger of publicity. Greenwich Village was “discovered.” Artists began to move down there in numbers, and rents there began to move up considerably. The earlier exodus of artists in noticeable numbers into Greenwich Village had a distinctly fashionable and well-to-do air. A consciously quaint and picturesque development was the converting around 1914 by Sailors’ Snug Harbor Corporation, owners of a large tract of property thereabout, of the old Washington Mews, behind the row of stately mansions so happily intact along the north of Washington Square, into a sort of Pomander Walk of studios, let at a rental not at all that of simon-pure garreteers. An amusing show place for visitors.

One of the pertinent facts which has not been reported so that anybody could notice it is that when the hullabaloo of the “nut” and “bug” and “rubberneck” period came into swing numerous artists of an altogether unbogus character moved away from the Greenwich Village of notoriety. For them an attractive part of the world had been ruined, and they squirmed inwardly at the suggestion of their having got mixed up with the joke of the Village. A good many others, however, kept right on in their even way, quite undisturbed by the eddies of pother starting up around them. The Salmagundi Club, for instance, though not exactly within the heart of what is popularly known as the Village, still properly within its confines, and which by the way is one of the largest and most influential clubs of artists in the world, removed to more commodious quarters and a house of its own in the same neighborhood.

All in all, however, the flocks of queer birds of effervescent nature whose influx brought about the Greenwich Village of legend were probably doing more good than anyone (anyone else) supposed. They were of various species not particularly related. The youthful “radicals,” anti everything in the least established, who early began to turn up, and tune up, in the more foreign and squalid section below Washington Square. The bevies of quite well to do femininity with an itch for the kind of aestheticism which means an exotically furnished “studio” in which to entertain friends. The divers phoney souls whose inability to pursue any tangible business leads them to present an illusion that they are engaged upon works of literature. The devotee of bachelordom, the essence of which “dom” is the avoidance of admitting that another has a moral claim on him. The ultra-modern couple satirically presented a number of years ago in the Unpopular Review, where the writer describes the breakdown of a young bride, who, living with her husband in Greenwich Village, had finally to confide her honorable state to relieve her feelings, but under pledge of secrecy, and weepingly; “For,” said she, “if the Freedom Club knew that we were really married, they would – would think we were narrow.” And so on. Probably the most graphic picture of the Greenwich Village of legend is Samuel Merwin’s novel, The Trufflers, a story of some who pose, many who merely talk, and a few who put their anarchic creed into deed, published in 1916.

In the wake of this conglomeration followed the great buzz of bizarre business activity in the Village. The innumerable shops and tea-rooms of Pagan-Porcupine nomenclature and delirious post-futurist decoration designed as haunts of the neo-Epicurean and the ultra-Hedonist and what not. The displays in the new book shops of the Village of The Liberator, The Birth Control Review and everything going on psycho-this and psycho-that. The wondrous collection of down-the-alley and over-the-roof holes-in-the wall of eating places. The multitude of “jazz joints,” where the weird wail of syncopated suggested nothing so much as that cat which nightly, visits the back yard of Don Marquis – “One of those 2 a.m. cats which have just come from Hell, and have to be back in Hell by 4 o’clock, and wish to put in the two hours telling the world about it.” The throngs of “sight-seers.” And the steady renovation and reconstruction of old buildings, and a continual construction of new and very attractive “studio apartments.”

IV

Then, about four years ago, the West Side subway was extended down beneath Seventh Avenue, with a large station at Sheridan Square. Seventh Avenue itself at the same time was carried in a direct line across the tangle of Village streets, as though a great knife had cut neatly through, from its former terminus at the upper end of Greenwich Village to a route leading clear down town. Many quaint old houses went by the board in the process; but the potent result was that a formerly shabby and superannuated section acquired a broad and airy thoroughfare, which was a link in what soon became one of the main arteries of rapidly moving vehicular traffic up and down Manhattan Island. And from about that date Greenwich Village definitely began to enter upon what it appears will be its enduring phase henceforth. It is rapidly moving in the direction of its little recognized new character.

In the eighteenth century the “road to Greenwich” left the Post Road (the Bowery of days later on) at the present Astor Place (round behind John Wanamaker’s), came across past the Potter’s Field (the Washington Square of today), and passed criss-cross through Greenwich Village along the route of the Greenwich Avenue there now. Fifteen years ago innumerable people calling themselves New Yorkers doubtless had never heard of Greenwich Avenue, and would have been hard put to it to find it. Then at the upper end of the intersection of Greenwich and Seventh Avenues was a romantic looking, tumbledown, wooden affair – perhaps the last active blacksmith shop in the heart of New York City. Now, in the full of the day, this corner, manned by two ceaselessly busy traffic policemen, is one of the most dangerous in New York. And on the site of the old blacksmith shop stands the latest temple to the arts in new Old Greenwich Village, the Sheridan Theatre, one of the largest, handsomest and most modern cinema theaters going. Handsome cinema theaters are elsewhere, but only in new Old Greenwich Village are there such taking ushers as here. These comely young women are most ornamentally got up in velvet smocks, Beau Brummel breeches strapped under the instep and Poilu tams.

From very early days the Village has gone in strong for the theater. Indeed, the blacksmith shop just mentioned was, before it became a blacksmith shop, itself a theater. The excellent Greenwich Village Theatre of today, on Sheridan Square, is too well known to require mention. Everybody knows about the barn of The Provincetown Players on Macdougal Street, their “experimental stage.” “In the region of Greenwich Village,” William Archer, noted English critic, has commented, “we must look for the real birthplace of the New American Drama.” Then there is the Neighborhood Playhouse. Everybody knows about Tony Sarg and his marionettes from the Village. I recently was highly entertained by a performance of the portable Marionette Theatre of Remo Bufano, of Macdougal Street. “The Emperor Jones” had its première in the Village. Eugene O’Neill (the Village claims) wrote his “best plays” within the confines of the village. John Barrymore quite recently had a house in the Village. Miss Lillian Booth, who played the lead in “It Pays to Advertise” and “The Servant in the House,” and Frank Conroy of “The Bad Man,” live there. And a good many more.

As for authors of genuine consequence, one must take a short cut to that. On the final vote a year or so ago of the booksellers of America on the forty most distinguished living writers seven decided upon were Villagers, and about twenty were (as they say there) “visiting Villagers.”

The Greenwich Villager, an eight page weekly newspaper, one of the liveliest publications I know of, should be listed as an interesting escapade in American Journalism. It was born July 9, 1921. Decidedly literary in character, it devoted its attention mainly to chronicling in a jocund way the doings of those dwellers and visitors in its quarter of the town to whom it referred as “Villagers,” as distinct from those it humorously regarded as merely “Ninth Warders.” And it reflected in a very fragrant way the intimate, friendly social life and buoyant and good-natured camaraderie of its circle. One remarkable thing about it was that it was the only coterie journal I ever heard of to have an abundance of solid advertising. Conspicuous among the advertisers in this lightsome affair were the real estate men of the neighborhood. And a very frequent item among its “Personals” was a paragraph like this: “Ludwig Lewisohn has purchased No. 6 Jane Street where after making extensive alterations he will reside.” Indeed, doubtless in no section of any other large city are anything like so many residents buying their own modest homes as in Greenwich Village. The Greenwich Villager, alas! succumbed (from a complaint common to young publications – financial trouble) on April 26, 1921, after a useful and active life of nine months. There is also published in the Village an amusing little monthly literary magazine, The Quill.

What has come to be the Main Street of Greenwich Village is a twisting affair. It may be said to begin at Eighth Street and University Place, then, to follow it, you go along Eighth Street to Sixth Avenue, thence down Christopher Street to the theater, where you turn into West Fourth Street, and go along to Macdougal Street, and along that to West Third. An excellent institution which has recently spread over the United States began in Greenwich Village – the little specialty book shop. The wide vogue of these places has occurred only within the last two or three years. But the first one (of which I have any knowledge) was the Washington Square Book Shop, opened ten years ago. Now their prevalence on this Main Street testifies to the habit of reading in the village, and if you want to buy anything but a first rate book I think you will have to go outside of Greenwich Village to find it. One of these shops (Oh, wild Greenwich Village of legend!) features children’s books. Another, by the way, happens to be quartered in what was formerly the back room of the saloon where John Masefield one time tended bar.

Along this Main Street you may be taught weaving and spinning, or Chinese; you may have a silhouette of you made; buy rare old violins, or quite new ukuleles made out of cigar boxes; find beautiful ware from Czechoslovakia, pottery from India, and bits of embroidery from Hungary; get Russian cigarettes from a lady with the most wonderful bob in America; patronize “beauty studios”; view “antiques” without end; and do ever so many other things. But the purely freak shop you will not frequently find.

The thing you may do most of all, of course, is to have tea, in a great variety of playful settings in the way of mural decoration. In one of the most recent tea rooms to appear the decorations are done in what might be called Australian motifs – frivolous kangaroos and, so to say, allied animals. Or you may dine at a new place every night for weeks on end. Two kinds of people are active in Greenwich Village. There are the exploiters. But another kind are trying to do something halfway artistic in atmosphere. In a number of the restaurants, and in some of the tiniest, the food is delicious – honest to God cooking at real prices.

“Every little shop has a personality all its own,” is a slogan in the Village. It certainly is remarkable the variety of “personalities” presented by the various restaurants. There are the huge, palatial, and really beautiful white stone establishments, whose patrons come from all parts of town, and where the company is no more “Village” in character than it used to be at, say, Pabst’s Harlem. There are the dingy cubbyholes in the more squalid section which strike you merely as rather foolish imitations of Paris’s Latin Quarter. Here and there is a bit of a place affecting the quaint with about it a good deal of the atmosphere of a New England tea room in, say, Lenox, Massachusetts. Now and then you come upon a dance restaurant with an atmosphere of gaiety as sad and dreary as the spectacle used to be at the dive of Kid McCoy’s. There are the numerous chummy little places which have a good deal the air of a neighborhood club. And there are the widely heralded show places of clever picturesqueness, with cutlass wearing waiters, and rollicking piratical horseplay all wholesome enough. Night brings numerous limousines into Greenwich Village.

But the spirit of the Greenwich Village of real life today is perhaps as well expressed as anywhere in its trim little gardens, which are more numerous and charming than in any other part of New York. It is as flowery as England.

New Ways To Live

I

We don’t say so much about one of the most interesting phenomena of our day as we do about a lot of others.

If the celebrated Mr. Van Winkle should turn up again today, after another nap of twenty years in the “Kaatskills,” it is probable that his first problem would be considerably more complicated than it was on the occasion of his earlier home-coming. That is, it is likely that he would have a good deal of difficulty in discovering the place where he used to live.

Suppose he had been a janitor in New York City, and, in a very modest way, had lived in a basement. With, perhaps, a somewhat faulty recollection of his former address in mind, he would seek out the quarters which had been his residence. And, not improbably, meet with the fact very confusing to his understanding that nowadays to live in a “basement apartment” is frequently a highly fashionable and expensive thing to do.

Let us in fancy follow him in his quest for Dame Van Winkle. He consults the telephone directory, and makes a list of the addresses of ladies of the name of Van Winkle.

One number to which he goes turns out to be in an alley and looks like a very much dressed up stable – which actually it is. The lady living there, our friend is told, is a “Miss Van Winkle” whose husband is an artist. Oh, yes! insists the maid answering his ring, that is correct.

Our friend’s next trip leads him to the roof of a thirty-story office building. There, set in a rose garden, he finds a log bungalow. But again it’s the wrong lady. And so on he goes, to a variety of places very novel and puzzling to his mind.

At length, let us say, he finds her who had been his spouse. He had formerly lived, when a janitor, in a region of the city respectable enough. But the former Mrs. Van Winkle, you are to imagine, had sometime after Rip’s disappearance become very wealthy. And so had recently moved to a spot of very shabby environment over by the East River. “Ridiculous, such a topsy-turvy state of affairs!” might at first very likely think such a character as Rip. But wait until he’ d get on to things generally. All the fabric of life is new. Van has to assimilate the idea of subways, airplanes, radios, victrolas, flivvers, jazz, flappers, Prom-girls, and so on. In a little while he “makes” the point (as the “Forty-second Street set” now says) that civilization has stepped on the gas and goes with a lot more zest than it used to in the good old days. He discovers that being somewhat elderly (as he was some twenty years back) has gone out. He has himself manicured, gets into a dinner jacket, and turns in for an evening at “The Hairy Ape.” So much for Van; he’s on the way to live long and prosper.

II

The heartening thing is that there is a lot of wholesome enlightenment in our liveliness today. We have thrown away such preposterous discomforts as the silk hat. And such unhygienic contraptions as the trailing street skirt. We have gone in for soft shirts, turn-down collars, sports clothes, “common-sense” shoes, and the vogue of fun out of doors. Young women of breeding joyously dive, leap and run bare-legged through athletic games as a simple, honest matter of course.

The former drudgery of housework is now largely performed by electricity. It has become the fashion to make over attics, which of old were universally places of darkness, dust, spiders, germs and discarded rubbish, into chambers of charm, light and daily usefulness. The erstwhile popular conception (or misconception of furniture as ornament has undergone a revolution with the general advance in the perception of the science of decoration. The cult of gardening has made many a one-time desert spot of property to blossom like the rose. There has come into our diet a “feeling for food” and its properties altogether absent from any general consideration a short span ago.

The recent advance in popular taste in reading is, when one pauses a moment to consider it, very striking indeed. Librarians report that the small boy is avid now, not for Nick Carter and narratives of the exploits of Jesse James, but for. Dumas, Stevenson, and for history. Compare. the “best-sellers” of today with those of yesteryear. “Babbitt” has supplanted “When Knighthood Was in Flower.” Leading publishers agree that the vast success of “Main Street” could not have been possible a few years ago. And, ferociously as many of their critics attack them, it is a fact that enormous progress has within the past few years been made in motion pictures. Remember, just as an instance, that crude and hideous travesty of “Trilby,” of not so long aforetime, in contrast with the recent consummate production of “Robin Hood.”

All of this, of course, is very contrary to current published criticism of affairs generally. It is the tack of the moment for the commentator to beat his breast in anguish at the plight of the world. His picture of this land is a catalogue of griefs. Our manners and morals have gone plumb to pot. Our architecture is an abomination. Our taste in all things execrable. Our politics and our journalism beyond the range of printable epithet. In a country where there is neither character nor opinion worthy of a civilized being’s attention, it is intimated, there is nothing for an intelligent man to do but to pack up and go elsewhere. This slant on us now prevalent is sometimes a bit discomforting to those of us who prefer to stay here.

Happily, however, the American scene itself reveals (to an open mind) a new national consciousness of beauty in living….

And even, for the matter of that, in dying. Our grandfathers were buried in “coffins,” and by “undertakers.” And with a lot of bizarre mummery. We needn’t, though, get overmuch upset about that now. Such was the common lot of all in those days. But we wouldn’t plan such a grotesque spectacle in the way of a funeral for ourselves now any more than we would think of having our teeth pulled with agonizing pain, or drawing a “wash-boiler” full of “rain water” for a Saturday night bath, or living surrounded by some of the hideous wallpaper which was a standard thing three or four decades ago. The modern “mortician” attends to our final scene with a healthful absence of gruesomeness and the exercise of thorough good taste.

And in the selection of wallpaper almost anybody today recognizes the effect of various colors and designs on his nerves and chooses with some more or less enlightened regard for the health of his brain. Indeed, the fact that health and beauty are associated has been a good deal of a factor in remodeling so much of late our architectural aspect.

We have been getting rid of any number of old bogies. And frequently with the passing of some old bogy or other has come some charming new feature into the design of the house. You will remember that in Mr. Tarkington’s Pulitzer prize novel of American life, “Alice Adams,” the story opens with the complaint of the invalid, Mr. Adams, about his being exposed to the “night air.” That complaint “dates” the gentleman perfectly. When the “night air” superstition went out the sleeping porch blessing came in.

III

There was a day (well within the memory of the moderately middle aged) when in cities of very fair size it was not quite respectable for anyone to live in a “block,” the forerunner of the modern apartment house. A structure housing many families was then called the “Willard Block,” or something like that; not, as today, “Belshazzar Court,” or something like that. And it certainly was a ghastly thing to see.

Indeed, it should be remembered, after considerable development, and until pretty recently, the apartment house usually was a forbidding-looking structure, resembling what it was frequently called, a “packing case.” And it seemed a very sad place in which to bring up a child. While, as we know, it is becoming so now that “an apartment house child” may have a perfectly gorgeous time, in the purest sort of air. For, along with “tenant ownership,” noiseless floors, and radio apparatus, a feature of the up-to-date apartment house is an elaborate playground on the roof, including a grand sand-pile.

It is highly amusing to compare New York real estate notices today with those of something over a generation ago. On the plot on Bleeker Street where stands the Mills Hotel an old notice states that an “elegant” house then newly erected there was to be sold. A “pump of excellent water and two cisterns” were in the “yard.” The house had “folding doors” and was “equipped with gas fixtures.” “Every convenience for a large and genteel family.”

The roof has come to be one of the pleasantest institutions of modern American life. The hotel “roof garden” has, of course, been a familiar affair for some time. More recently the idea of the domestic roof garden has been spreading widely. Not long ago I sat under an awning, in a wicker chair, drinking lemonade, on the roof of a home at the peak of Russian Hill, overlooking San Francisco Bay. And vines trail from trellises atop most of the recently remodeled houses in Greenwich Village.

The man first to carry out the idea of building a dwelling on the top of a skyscraper, as well as I can learn, was Sir Ashley Sparkes, president of the Cunard Line, who not very long ago constructed a place of residence on the roof of the towering Cunard Building at the nose of Manhattan Island, where he spends several months of the year. The gardens of skyscraper bungalows are apt to be sylvan with fountains and flowers. Among New Yorkers who have such dwellings are Thomas Hastings, of Carrere and Hastings, architects, Bertram Goodhue, architect, and Earl Carroll, artist.

Mr. Hastings’ city summer home is twenty stories up in the air. The letterhead of Mrs. Hastings’ stationery reads “The Pent House.” A pent house, you’ll recall, is commonly the name applied by builders to the frame structure through which one passes out on to the roof of an ordinary house.

A third function, by the way, has come to roofs in the metropolis. They have been adapted to the purposes of education. Most of the work of the aspiring mariners who are students in the Nautical Academy is done on a roof-top at Battery Park. Roofs are employed by public schools for children whose physical condition makes study possible only in the open air. Others are features of private schools whose pupils find them an entertaining variant of the daily routine.

To come down to the ground, is it not true that many dwellers in apartment houses in great cities today look out from their back windows on to a far more beautiful view than ever before – and than many others who in the fastness of their individual dwellings in smaller communities scorn the idea of being “cliff dwellers”? For now all about the great city, even in some highly congested quarters, flourish “garden apartments,” where in between structures of “tapestry” brick fronting on two streets are little parks laid out with walks, shrubs and flowers. And in the interesting evolution of our metropolitan life the occupant of five rooms three flights up may today be as much a “freeman” as any “landed gentry” of English soil. Under the rapidly spreading plan of “tenant-ownership” the building in which he has his home is a corporation. The tenants own all the stock in proportion to the number of rooms occupied. A tenant may sell his stock to anyone at any time at his own price. Though the sale of stock does not carry with it the right to occupy the apartment if the other tenants deem the purchaser objectionable.

The idea imported perhaps a dozen years ago of English “town planning” has very much altered the face of divers of our metropolitan suburbs. An outcome altogether unexpected by the promoters has resulted in a number of these enterprises. Two such suburban developments on Long Island, which were among the earliest of their kind, may be cited. Those behind these projects at the beginning were impressed with the need of more housing facilities in the suburbs for people who could pay from twenty-five dollars per month upward to purchase a home. In one sense the success of these projects was their own undoing as far as their semi-altruistic purpose was concerned. More well-to-do folk were attracted, prices soared, and the promoters of these “model communities” found themselves in the real estate business on a scale which they had not intended nor foreseen.

IV

A novel idea in more attractive living more recently developed is the suburban scheme in the heart of the great city. One colony of highly urban folk who are very far from being “packed like sardines” may be found in the shadow of Broadway between Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth Streets. They tenant the quaint little affair known as Pomander Walk, the project of a celebrated restaurateur. It looks at first glance less like something real than the stage setting out of that delightful comedy which was one of the last and sweetest memories of Wallack’s Theatre, and which considerably later was revived as a gentle musical romance.

There are twenty-eight little houses, of the English town type of architecture, in this picturesque settlement. The landscape work has been so arranged as to allow a twenty-foot private “walk” directly through the center of the plot, on either side grassy lawns, adorned with fountains, shrubbery and trees and private flower gardens. Each house is capable of accommodating two families, and is a complete unit, with its own private stairway to the second story apartment. The fronts of the houses are treated in a variety of design and finish, some of rough brick, some of cement-stucco and some of stucco and half timber. Massive and ornate iron gates, after the period of 1710, when the original Pomander Walk was built, surrounded by the insignia of the Crowing Cock, ornament and guard either entrance to the Walk, and are presided over by massive and ornate lackeys.

The original Pomander Walk, close by the banks of the Thames, was a quiet and contented little community charming and quaint in its hideaway exclusiveness, and one of the prettiest nooks to be found near London. The architect of the little houses, built in the sober and staid style introduced during the reign of her gracious Majesty, Queen Anne, had taken a slyly humorous delight in making them miniature copies of much more pretentious town houses.

Another American architectural reminiscence of eighteenth century London has received a good deal of publicity, at least locally. But the idea which prompted this essay in residential development does not seem to have been very well understood. The newspaper stories have dwelt with some amusement on Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt’s move not long ago in leading a “millionaires’ colony” in a “thrifty immigration” to dwell in a shabby environment on a site overlooking the East River, and the City Prison on Blackwell’s Island.

The houses here on the stretch of two or three blocks known as Sutton Place, not originally great mansions, have been remodeled in the American Georgian style of architecture, more commonly called Colonial. With their picturesque roofs, quaint doorways, brass knockers, iron lanterns, small-paned windows, brass-tipped iron railings and, at the back, terraced gardens, they make a bright array. Among Mrs. Vanderbilt’s immediate neighbors are Miss Anne Morgan, Miss Elsie de Wolff, Joseph E. Willard, former Ambassador to Spain, and Chauncey Olcott.

Hideous, towering yellow chimneys and vast gas tanks overlook the scene. The Williamsburg Bridge looms at just one side against the sky. Across the street a dingy grocery store. In the murky waters below coal barges and other decidedly plebeian craft. And yet the setting is to some considerable extent analogous to that of one of the most stately and historic residential quarters in London, Cheyne Walk, overlooking the smuttier barges and murkier waters of the Thames, and on the opposite shore the shoddy suburb of Battersea. Cheyne Walk, Mrs. Vanderbilt’s architect asserts, was the inspiration for the development of Sutton Place. Whistler would have thought its odd surroundings more beautiful than Fifth Avenue. And the gaiety with which members of the “social colony” there take matters about them was illustrated by a luncheon at which more or less recently they assembled within the firebox of a 4,000 horsepower boiler nearby, the largest in Manhattan.

The movement Eastward away from Fifth Avenue started, however, something like six years ago. And it did not have its spring in a whim for novelty so much as is generally supposed. Business has been going up “the Avenue” at a rate which makes residence there increasingly difficult. The West Side of town is cut off by Central Park. The elect cannot live when in town miles out. Where are the poor millionaires to go but East? And so storybook rows of architecture are now come upon every here and there. One of the quaintest is old-fashioned Beekman Place, where John Barrymore and his wife, whose pen name is Michael Strange, have recently set up studios.

But it was about ten years ago, before the wealthy took up the idea, that the movement began of turning dull and mediocre city houses into dwellings of charm and healthfulness. The start was made with the tenements on East Nineteenth Street, which were remodeled, for the benefit of economical authors and artists, in a Venetian treatment which has since become a prevailing note in our city vistas.

Then think of the physical aspect of an American small city or town something over a score of years ago. You remember Clamatis, the canine in Mr. Tarkington’s “Seventeen.” “He was not a special breed of dog – though there was something rather houndlike about him – he was just a dog.” The “frame” house of that period was usually not any special breed of house – though there was, indeed (so to say), something rather houndlike about it – it was just a house. It was the time of the scroll-saw and turning-lathe school of architectural ornament. And most houses you identified more or less by the variations in “fret-work” around the porches.

Today what do we find? Large sections of practically every American town and city suggest an exhibition on an enlarged scale at The Architectural League of New York.

The Beach at the Garden

I

Walked in upon directly from the stifling, dejected city street, it was a rousing spectacle. A hugely gala, highly hilarious, stunningly electric scene. Kind of unbelievable like, it was. I had something of a sensation that I had been whisked through some kind of a modern Arabian Nights’ door. Immediately, too, I felt that exhilaration you get when you are moved to cheer. But I began, instead, to laugh. For it all was, in a way, decidedly comical, too.

I had come across, in the oppressive dusk of the mid-July evening, a very scorched-looking Madison Square, thickly populated along its curving aisles of benches by a very depressed and depressing rag-tag and bob-tail of coatless and collarless humanity. The frankly penurious, suffering as stoically as might be the torrid temperature. High above, against the purpling sky, and a little below the dainty blur which I knew to be Diana on her tower, shone out in large letters of yellow light the words:

SWIMMING POOL

I crossed the empty roadway of Madison Avenue, empty except for the flocks of pigeons (which have their habitat here) promenading about, and whose unconcern as to danger weirdly emphasized its emptiness. At the other side the dingying Spanish arches of Madison Square Garden. Beyond the pillars of the portico a shadowy throng flowing along the wall of the building. Half way up the block the crowd sharply silhouetted before the tall entrance ablaze with light. From around the Twenty-sixth Street corner numerous groups hurrying forward, many of the youthful figures with a Boston bag in hand.

I fell in at the tail of the long queue – the tail when I fell in, but only for a moment afterward; and lock-stepped rather briskly toward the entrance. As we edged smoothly along we passed, affixed to the wall, an enormous poster: “World’s Largest and Most Costly Indoor Swimming Pool” … a dauby representation in colors of the giant pool, with at each side of this a lithographic rendering of a full-bodied young woman of mathematically symmetrical figure ensconced for a short distance above and below the abdomen in a snug and brightly hued garment purporting to be a bathing suit.

Had I been round to “the Garden” yet? That’s what everybody, it seemed to me, that I had met recently had asked me. Once it was the War that filled the air, then for a space the Fight held the world, and no wholesome person much cared to talk about anything else; and now, it appeared, the prime topic was this new thing at the Garden, brought about by the epical “Tex” Rickard, demigod of entertainment enterprise. This, you remember, was in the summer of 1921.

II

For years we of pleasure loving nature all over the land have periodically been saddened by reports in the papers that our Garden was shortly to be torn down. A monstrous thing! Here on ground hallowed by thirty years of Sport to erect a pile of office buildings! A sky-scraping jail to take the joy of life out of thousands of souls imprisoned there daily from nine to five! The romantic tower born of the combined genius of Saint Gaudens and Stanford White, a bit of old Seville in Manhattan, to be no more. And gone the vast and mellowed edifice which to untold thousands for a generation has meant the liveliest things in life – the Arion Ball, the French Students’ Ball, the Horse Show, Dog Show, Cat Show, Poultry Show, Automobile Show, Sportsman’s Show, the Cake-Walk, the Six Day Bicycle Race, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show, and the circus, alias the Greatest Show on Earth. And historic events of the prize-ring from the days of the fabled John L. When Dempsey knocked out Bill Brennan here a couple of years ago it is recorded that the Garden was packed from pit to dome with perhaps the finest crowd that had then ever attended a championship glove contest. An arena, too, for dramatic political oratory, the Garden, in which Presidents and candidates for president through the words directed immediately at the thousands that fought their way within the walls have sent ringing utterance throughout the land. This consecrated tabernacle to be scrapped!

Well, it didn’t look tonight as though there was any thought of that. In the blaze of the Garden entrance was a scene as tumultuous almost as that of evening at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. A rather curious and distinctive effect to the throng. Highly metropolitan. A predominating number of the male youths surging about wore caps, of the pattern advertised as “the Dempsey.” Active, stocky figures, most of them. With an air and a physiognomy which did not incline one to pick a fight with them. And an atmosphere suggesting that in their less strenuous moments they gathered for social intercourse in “parlors” devoted to the game of pool. There seemed to be present a considerable number of noses of the style of architecture described as “pug.” Now and then a taxi rolled up. And, in a number of instances, the escort who alighted to hand out his lady looked surprisingly like an occupant of a taxi-driver’s seat rather than a “fare.” Here and there in the throng was a taller, though no less muscular, figure of romantic distinction, suggesting a master at high gaming. Handsomely dressed, immaculately pressed, cane, linen of delicate pink stripes, heavy jowls, flashing rays from cravat, shirt-bosom and fingers.

At the ticket-window a neat rakish youth, coatless, with an eggshell-like dome and a cigarette drooping from his lips, sold me with most commendable despatch a ticket for “general admission,” and with the current I swept through the shining brass turnstile and passed into the inner division of the lobby, which in jolly outstanding effect fantastically suggested the thronged anteroom of a popular costume dance. Or rather a dance which was so very chic that most of the guests elected to appear in all the natural grace of hardly any costume at all. A great many couples appeared to be, figuratively speaking, “sitting out” the number. Frequent bathing suits were of vivid orange, or purple, or crimson, or of brilliant stripes. Against the foil of incoming figures fully clothed feminine limbs sang with a creamy whiteness. There were flip-pant skirtlets, and no skirtlets. Some wore smart beach slippers. Some affected the dashing effect of stockings rolled below the knee. Some scorned the impediment of any garment to encroach even to the thigh. Bathing caps ranged in decorative effect from simple oilskins to boudoiresque creations of wedding-cake ornamentation. Fashions in hair dressing ranging from the natural, flowing-back-over-the-shoulders mermaid effect, to the bobbed haircut. The coconut bob in the case of brunettes, and with blondes the fluffy-curl bob. Mostly lasses, the feminine members of this company, some plump, some lithe, most all solid of flesh, and very taking in outline. Though more than a few sturdy matrons to be seen, also. And here and there a waddling creature, with no perceptible neck and in general of bizarre anatomical structure.

At the left of this crowded lobby a windowed structure labeled “Valuable Room.” Beyond, the sign “Gents’ Suit Room.” Still further on, a wide doorway leading to the men’s quarters, through which you saw at the foot of a short flight of steps a huge wooden screen covered with rules of the establishment; top command being that, “All bathers are obliged to take shower before entering pool.” At the right another wide door way, with just within another big screen bearing the words “Ladies’ Department.” And a little further along on this side another queue, com posed altogether of flappers very fetchingly attired, leading up to a ticket booth on which was painted the admonishment, “Girls learn to Swim. 6 lessons $ 5.00.”

Then pushing my way through the jam I passed on into the great auditorium of the Garden. “Nature,” observed Mr. Whistler, “is always wrong.” He meant, of course, that to obtain the harmony of perfect beauty the artist has to rearrange matters upon his canvas. In other ways, too, Nature sometimes seems to be very perverse. She puts the seashore, for instance, an unhandy and expensive distance from where most people live. I had not myself felt that I could have endured the journey to any of the beaches tonight.

Mr. Rickard, like Whistler, takes Nature in hand. He brings the seashore, or at any rate a wondrous approximation to it, into the heart of the great town. A spectacular scene of thousands of bobbing heads stretched away for the distance of the width and length of a city block before me. Great splashes of dancing silver moonlight on the expanse of water. In the far distance an alluring background: a cascade of iridescent waterfall like a distant Niagara pouring into the region of water below, a glimpse beyond of the greenery of trees peeping over it, and at either end of the cascade a group of smart seashore cottages. Near the center of the amazing scene a rowboat with a brawny oarsman rocks up and down. Down long “slippery-slides” far away near the ends of the cascade shoots swimmer after swimmer, some headlong, some feet first, into the joyous bath. High in the air at the water’s edge on each side at the middle of the spectacle rises a skeleton steel tower from which divers one after another take off to turn gracefully in the air and disappear in a splash of foam far below. Around the edge of the huge auditorium on three sides remain the open boxes of the old Garden, they and the aisle before them dark with figures, and rising beyond them several tiers of spectators blending in the distance like vegetation on a wall. Upward straight above the water the twinkle of stars. And ringing through all the great place a rousing fanfare of sound merged together in one vibrating wave, calls, whistles, cheers, laughter, applause, squeals, yells, with the swish of the cascade adding to the rest a good deal the effect of the voice of the surf.

A pistol shot. A general movement toward the strip of darker water across the middle of the great pool, the diving space. It’s a race. Four male swimmers plunge off from the natatorium retaining wall and once across this deeper section and back again flash four rapidly revolving arms in surrounding foam. Then a hubbub of applause. I had been here before, this afternoon, but there was not then such a crowd as this. Even though a “swimming meet” had been presented, the girls; of “Selwyn’s Snapshots vs. The Broadway Whirl.” Most picturesque and entertaining it was, too. The bevy of damsels did not dive off in regulation manner. They ranged themselves in a long line one close behind another astride the coping of the retaining wall, the legs and arms of each (except of course the one in front) wound around the one before her. Then at the crack of the pistol the line tumbled sidewise into the water in one body. After this performance an aquatic hero from the Panama Canal gave an exhibition of exceedingly fancy diving. In the forenoons, I understand, special attention is devoted to young children whose parents desire them taught the proper methods of swimming, floating and diving, and for whom special instructors are provided.

I moved along the promenade before the blue-painted boxes, being careful not to step on anybody’s bare toes. Thus close to the water you see the fun more in detail. I pass, amid the crush of spectators circulating about, a policeman and a Catholic priest. A very small child clad only in a chemise darts in and out ahead of me attempting as it goes to refresh itself from a nursing bottle. An attendant who looks like a picture in Judge of a janitor is mopping the aisle. There is a little screech from one of the young women bathers seated facing the pool on the coping. A humorously inclined masculine friend has just attempted to put something cold down her shapely back. Then he waggishly seeks to twist her arm behind her. She squirms and giggles and topples into the water. Down in the pool you occasionally see instead of a bobbing head and shoulders a pair of flashing legs waving in the air. A jolly burly bather is taking an infant in wee trunks for a ride on the back of his neck. Here standing on the wall coping and scrutinizing the pool is a figure in white duck trousers and with the arms and shoulders of a champion super-heavyweight wrestler, across the front of his white bathing shirt the words “Life Guard.” The oarsman in that boat out in the center you observe now is also a life guard. There in the pool two gleeful youths are “ducking” a yelling girl, her luxuriant ear-buns flapping out from beneath her bathing cap. Yonder in the water a slender feminine bather is climbing up a sturdy fellow as though he were the trunk of a tree. Out near the center close by the diving section rises on stilts a short distance above the water a platform, from one corner of the rail about it hangs like a giant white doughnut a life belt, and on the platform is stationed another observant life guard.

I mount the steps leading up past the boxes and take a seat, a very damp seat, as it turns out – and as, you soon discover, most of them are likely to be. A short way down in front of me is seated an enormously corpulent man, coat off, palm-leaf fan gently waving in hand, cigar tilted upward in one corner of his mouth, hugely en joying the spectacle. Looked strikingly like a Gibson drawing, this gentleman, of an inveterate baseball fan on the bleachers. A few seats along, a couple of fresh-faced, silver-haired, curiously shapen, bespectacled old ladies, very much suggesting visitors from afar. Passing up the aisle, a portly, very dignified, very prosperous looking gentleman of New York broker type, in an immaculate Palm Beach suit, and accompanied by a fashionably dressed lady wearing a white satin picture hat. In a nearby seat a young woman in a one-piece bathing suit and shell spectacles, her knees drawn up and feet on the chair-top in front of her, smoking a cigarette. Her companion a well-favored youth wearing his hair in that brushed-flat-back-from-the-forehead style. Not far away, a severe looking, spinsterish female, presumably a reporter, taking notes. Strolling about here and there a dapper young man, cane hooked over arm, Vanity Fair type of mustache, Cluett-Peabody-collar-advertisement cast of features. Along the broad aisle back of the seats smoking, chattering groups of mixed sex at refreshment tables, some in street costume, some in bathing costume, others arrayed in a combination of both costumes.

A more leisurely attention to the particulars of the scene discloses a number of unimportant facts. Such as that the trees beyond the waterfall are painted upon canvas, the smart seashore cottages are stage properties, being only fronts of cottages, the silver moonlight on the water comes from large chandeliers high aloft. The stars above, however, are quite authentic. A central portion of the roof is open to the sky. And through this open place you now observe a very curious yellow moon looking down – a brightly lighted office window across the way.

III

As I passed out of the auditorium into the lobby again I came upon a fellow in an alpaca coat and without a hat. Yes, he was connected with the place. And he obligingly told me a number of things. Cost $250,000 to establish the pool. Largest and most hygienic fresh water swimming pool ever installed within a permanent roofed structure. Covers an area of more than 300,000 square feet. Contains 1,500,000 gallons of water when filled. Floor of pool has a graduated slope toward the center. At the Madison Avenue end an initial depth of three feet. The Fourth Avenue end, a portion reserved for, as he put it, “ladies and kiddies,” starts with a depth of about two feet. An existing tunnel transversing the center of the Garden had been utilized in the development of the diving and water polo pool, fifteen and a half feet deep. The latest adaptation of the Ultra Violet Ray was used in filtering and sterilizing the water. A system of vacuum cleaners was provided for the cleaning of the walls and floor of the pool while still full of water. Some 3,000 private dressing rooms; 2,000 steel lockers in the general dressing rooms; 6,000 bathing suits for both sexes provided, 1,000 more for children. A special electrical washing and drying machine for cleansing them. Open until after midnight in order that parties may enjoy a plunge after the theater. On the box fronts – he took me back to show me: on the box fronts along the entire circumference of the arena a duplicate of the Thorwalden frieze depicting the triumphant entry of Alexander into Babylon. He suggested that I see Mr. Dorgan upstairs for further information. “What is his name?” I inquired. “He’s Tad’s brother,” he explained. “Please to meet you,” he said in parting.

“Executive Office – Madison Square Garden Sporting Club – Madison Square Garden Corporation – G. L. Rickard.” Thus read the board on the wall beside the Twenty-sixth Street entrance. I had re-arrived the next morning to see Mr. Dorgan, publicity man for the Garden. I found him at a desk in an office on the second floor.

Madison Square Garden, as everybody knows, had never paid. Particularly has it been a white elephant in the summer. Mr. Rickard and his partner Mr. Ringling had taken a ten year lease from the August before. The first six-day bicycle race under the new management had broken all box office records for races at the Garden. During the first season of boxing contests promoted by the present lessees – twenty-six contests given between September 17 and March 21 – the gate receipts had totaled over a million and three hundred thousand dollars. Roller skating and all sorts of things had formerly been tried in the summer. Former managements had contemplated the idea of a swimming pool. But when the cost of such an enterprise had been considered they had dropped the matter. The pool now going would be continued until about the first of October, after which the Garden would revert to its customary usages. It could be drained of water in six hours. No structural change had been made in the building except in the floor. And the pool floor with its firm sloping foundation would afford a graduating base for seats for all contests requiring only a small section of the area for competition purposes.

A man of medium height and build passed with an alert step through the office. He was smooth shaven, smiling, with a network of crows-feet about the corners of his eyes indicative of a quick humor. Probably about fifty years of age, though might pass for forty-eight. Close-cropped hair. Rather jaunty straw hat. Low turn-down collar. Dark bow tie. Clear white shirt bosom of narrow pleats. Light gray suit. Corner of handkerchief protruding from breast pocket. Mr. Rickard, I learned, sometime of Texas, Alaska and Nevada, partner in a 4,000,000 acre stock-raising ranch in South America, on his way to his office in the tower. “Nothing ever upsets him,” remarked Mr. Dorgan, “when he had the fight and the pool both getting under way at the same time he ought to have been in bed – with appendicitis. Saw a million people every day about all kinds of things. Said he didn’t have time to be sick.”

With the Compliments
of the Author

“Why not make it a book?” … “Give Books!” … “Buy a book a week.” … “Have you a little library in your home?” … “A home without books is like a house without windows.” … “A good book is the best gift.” And so on.

The most casual observer must have noted, by its recently revealed flair for “slogans” if by nothing else, that there is blood in the eye of the book trade. The bookseller, it should be apparent, has with some suddenness become a distinctly more potent leaven in the social compound than ever before. The classic picture of him, long cherished, is a sentimental conception of a retiring soul waiting passively in his corner for the lettered few to find the pathway to his door – a romantic figure that has gone the way of the ancient ferryman, the town crier and other such legendary beings. Today, the bookseller, skillfully and energetically seconded by organized activity among the publishers, is carrying a campaign for the greater and wider distribution of books into the center of the ring.

The point I am trying here to make is that the character of the bookseller is rapidly tending to become that of an energizing institution. He is taking a part in life somewhat analogous to that of the publicist. And, a good deal more than probably he is commonly reckoned to be, he has become a force in molding the destinies of literature. No one perhaps is more fully aware of what is going on in the field of book selling than Frederic G. Melcher, managing editor of The Publishers’ Weekly. A recent letter of his contains this paragraph, fraught with interesting suggestion:

My interests have always been largely in the distribution of books, and it is rather exhilarating to see what strides are being made in this field in this country of ours. If great audiences create greater writers, there should be increasing inspiration to the writers and increasing interest in the career of writing.

Well, one gathers, the booksellers feel that they have reason to look for this Christmas to be a “book year.” More by thousands upon thousands than ever before, let us hope, will be the number of volumes given as presents. Here this article makes a sudden turn. Among the multitudes of books given as presents will probably be a fairly populous company of “presentation copies.” Now, concerning “inscribed volumes” there are several things which have not been given much attention in print.

II

First, let us be as elementary as we can, and make sure that we have our definitions quite right. The dealer in rare books, first editions, and other such “items,” has a nomenclature of technical terms. A “reading copy” of a book is a copy of the regular “trade edition,” and in his eyes has no value whatever. People whose shelves are laden with reading copies he regards as morons. When a book has (not as literature but as a book) something special or peculiar about it then it may be a “collector’s volume,” and, as a piece of property of some value, worthy of respect. An “association volume” is a book (it may be by any author) which has acquired evidence of some connection with a personage. It may, for instance, contain the library label of Swinburne; or it may be described in the dealer’s catalogue as “Leigh Hunt’s copy.” “Presentation copy” and “inscribed copy” usually mean a book which has been presented by the author to a friend, with an autograph inscription indicating this. Though sometimes a book is listed thus when it has not been given as a present by the author himself. For example, a book may be regarded as a presentation copy when it has an inscription by the author’s wife, written, say, after the death of her husband. An “author’s inscribed copy,” or an “author’s autograph book” is not necessarily a presentation copy. Someone only slightly or not at all acquainted with the author may have bought the book and upon request have obtained his autograph upon the flyleaf. Then there are limited, “autograph editions” of the works of an author, such as the recently issued “Seawood Edition” of the books of Booth Tarkington, wherein volume one of each set is signed by the publishers and is enriched by the signature of the author before the edition is offered for sale.

Now we come to a very singular matter. If one should be asked to state in three words the business of an author one might with fair accuracy say; To be articulate. And yet (so far as I know) no author has yet given voice in print to one of the most constant of his tribulations. The matter is this – and any author, I think, will be glad to see it published: Practically no one not in some way connected with the production of books seems to be in the least aware that an author does not have supplied to him quite free of cost an unlimited quantity of his own books to hand out here and there all day long. Not a bit of it. He has to buy ’em, just like anyone else.

True, it is provided in the contract between an author and his publisher for the publication of a book that “the Author shall be entitled to receive on the day of publication of said book” as many as perhaps six or eight “free copies.” Anyone who has a mother, father, wife, child, brother, sister, and a neighbor or two can figure out about how long it would take him to give away half a dozen copies of a book of his. This clause of a publisher’s contract usually continues: “and to purchase any other copies at the ordinary trade discount.” This discount ordinarily is about one third off the retail price.

Needles and pins, needles and pins; when a young person publishes a book (often times) his trouble begins. What customarily happens? The great event is approaching. The entire family connection is on tiptoe. Yes, indeed; the remotest cousins of the Author, each and every one, has been promised an “autographed” copy of what is abundantly alluded to throughout the immediate neighborhood as his “first book.” That a long line of succeeding volumes is directly to follow is, of course, generally understood.

Then there are all the author’s friends among his contemporaries, and those elders to whom he is in some way beholden. He makes a list of them. My, what a number! Perhaps he can drop a few names. But this seems pretty difficult to do. Everyone he has down, he feels, has in one way or another a part in his life, or has had a part in his life. Each one, as you might say, deserves a copy of this BOOK, no one of them, in a manner of speaking, should be deprived of his reward for being a relative or friend of the Author. And then there are those (not a few, indeed!) who merit a copy in a somewhat back-handed way – persons who (he suspects) have rather failed to be aware of what he was destined to amount to. This is his hour of triumphal reckoning with them!

A first child is an august thing. Superbly symbolic of paternal pride was Mr. Meeks. No one should altogether forget Mr. Meeks; a slight and youthful Dickens’ sketch, he is (happily) preserved (in the Gadshill Edition) in the volume, “Reprinted Pieces,” page seventy, title of chapter, “Births, Mrs. Meeks, of a Son.” He is contemplating an announcement in the Times: “I had put it in, myself, and paid for it, but it looked so noble that it overpowered me.” That is the proclamation of the arrival of Augustus Meeks.

We read the review of our child, several times, with feelings of the strongest emotion; and I sent the boy who cleans the boots and shoes, to the office for fifteen copies. No reduction was made on taking that quantity.

The Author would broadcast copies of his first book with a generosity akin to that of Mr. Meeks’ with his newspapers.

Books of young authors are not commonly published in numbers like the sands of the sea. To issue a book by an author little known is for the publisher no inconsiderable business hazard. He prints an edition, say, of fifteen hundred or a couple of thousand copies. Seventy-five or a hundred of these, or something like that, are given away (as the contract phrases it) “for the purpose of aiding the sale,” to newspapers and to persons of influence in the book world; and on these copies the publisher has provided that he “shall be free from any liability to pay royalty.”

Suppose the young author buys and gives away twenty-five or fifty. Young authors have been known to feel twice as magnanimous as that. The author’s royalty, maybe, is fifteen cents a copy on the first thousand sold, after that perhaps twenty cents – a good royalty. His book sells, say, for two dollars. Suppose (for good measure) his publisher gives him a particularly liberal discount of one half off on copies purchased for his own use. Now we see that for every copy he buys and gives away six and two-thirds copies will need to be sold through the trade to make up for it. The other day the author of a slender and inexpensive volume of verse, a young man who works in a famous book store, and whose publishers are also owners of this store in which he is a member of the staff, remarked that so far his bill for copies given away was forty dollars. Fifteen hundred copies of his book had been printed.

The author of a first book not infrequently suggests a resemblance, in the glowing warmth of his generosity, to the hospitable soul, exhilarated and expanded by another intoxicant, standing treat again and again to the company. He is likely at this season of his career to give away more of his books than he will throughout the rest of his life. And the deuce of that is, that when a person has been favored by a copy of one of an author’s books he is naturally led to expect a copy of the next one, and is inclined to feel slighted and aggrieved if he does not receive it.

“A funny thing,” as the expression goes, is that it is the “budding author,” whose book has a very modest sale, who more than any other author has a sense of being “called upon” to give his books away. Not unusually, the whole world of the author of a book which sells maybe a thousand or so seems to expect the book as a gift, “cleverly” inscribed. But lots of people who are pretty good friends with Mr. Lewis, or Mr. Tarkington, or Mr. Hergesheimer, never presume to have a thought of receiving a presentation copy of a book from any one of them. If Charles Hanson Towne, by the by, should give copies of his novel to all of his friends it’s likely that he would distribute in that way volumes to the number of a very fair sized edition. There is this entertaining thing about the matter, too; Mr. Tarkington (we’ll say) feeling an impulse to bestow a token of his good-will upon someone would be much more likely to think of a handsome tin of special cigarettes than of a copy of a book of his.

On the other hand, I’ve known of authors who would have gladdened much more the objects of their attention by the present of a tin of any kind of cigarettes than by the solemnly inscribed books which they conferred.

I have known of quite well-bred young women (of the literary hero worshiping type) who having by the most casual of introductions met but the day before (oh, my! fifteen minutes before) an author of the day, asking him, with glowing eyes, if he hadn’t a “spare” copy of his book that she might have. As lightly as though one should say to another: “You haven’t a loose match about you, have you?” And as though the person asked might reply: “Why, yes; here’s a bunch of ’em; I’ve plenty more.” Yes; it would seem that in many minds an author is pictured as having large stores of his own books under his desk, probably a whole room full of them at home, like a publisher’s stock room. Whereas, in fact, I’ve known authors who didn’t happen to have a complete set of their own books. I knew an author who had only one copy of his first book, a rather famous book published several years ago. A rather bumptious young woman connected with an office where he went several times a week so remorselessly plagued him to let her “see” that great book of his, that one day he took off his shelf the copy he had and, as he supposed, loaned it to her. She rashly assumed it was a gift and never returned it. The book had been many times reprinted and this volume was a copy of the first edition. And “first editions” of this book had gone up in value, though the author didn’t know this until one day he sought to duplicate his former copy. The publishers, of course, had long been out of that printing, the book was listed as “scarce” by the dealers in collector’s books, and the author was obliged to pay considerably more to obtain a copy of his own book such as he wanted than the full price of the book as originally published.

There was an author who lamented one day that he didn’t write text-books, dour lesson-books, instead of the very entertaining and popular volumes which he did write. Hearts would not beat faster all around, eyes would not brighten with covetous expectancy, every time that he appeared. Aged ladies of his acquaintance and bottle companions by the score would not smile upon him with arch and jovial meaning. He would not feel that he was expected to board the morning train for town loaded down with copies of his new book for disbursement. And such a state of peace, this distraught being conceived of, as indeed felicity.

Pretty querulous talk, that, isn’t it? Well, a service to the world has now been performed. Now, that what has been said has been said, a good many people will know what awful things they have done. Many a young person will melt in her tracks from shame to think that she has asked an illustrious stranger to go and buy something for her. And many who didn’t know that anything in particular had been given them will be aware that they have been made regular presents. So let us now turn to the other side of the picture.

III

One of the pleasures of authorship is that the author has something to give away which is unlike anything that anyone else has – something peculiarly his own. He gives of himself. In the satisfaction that he obtains in giving where the heart listeth he blesses himself as well as him that receives. And being an author is a great convenience on occasions when gifts are required of one. Instead of finding it necessary to go forth to shop, to obtain gloves (or something like that) for this one, and something else for that one, and so on, the author may merely sit down and inscribe some of his books all round. There is just one difficulty about the situation; that is in the case of infants. What is the author of, say “Gargoyles” going to do about a cousin of, perhaps, five and a half? Maybe, as is not infrequently the way with writing people, he has never if he could help it given anything as presents but books; since he became an author, generally and perhaps preferably, his own books. This habit has so unaccustomed him to selecting little remembrances that he doesn’t at all know his way about in the matter, and has come to feel a very decided repugnance to it. I don’t know what the scientific name of it is, but that is a horrible disease that sometimes creeps over authors; an aversion (amounting to a mania) to buying anything as presents but books, preferably, perhaps, his own books.

There is one class of people that can always be counted on to appreciate enormously inscribed presentation books from authors, and that is the unlettered, the illiterate. An author puts up at a hotel, or there is only one barber that can cut his hair right, or something like that. The hotel clerk has been very attentive and much interested in him. He takes a liking to him, entertaining, sound-hearted fellow; gives him a book; inscribes it. “To my friend” So-and-So. Ever afterward owns the hotel; clerk entranced. So with barber.

There was once an author who couldn’t get his hair cut for a long time. He had written a book in which there was a sketch of a barber, drawn more or less from the barber on whom he depended to keep his head properly in shape. He told the man about this one day, to his immense elation, and promised him a copy of the book the next time he should come in. But he didn’t think to provide himself with the book the next time he called in. And so it went – very much to the barber’s chagrin. Nor could he remember to send him a copy any time he was at his publisher’s. Though the matter would occur to him, with a pang of remorse, sometimes when he was riding in the subway; and after a while he came to think of it on waking in the middle of the night. So at length, surreptitiously, he began to patronize another shop.

An author should be careful to re-read his book before he makes a present of it. Sometimes dreadful things have happened as a result of not doing this. An author has forgotten a good deal that was in his book; as an expression of his esteem, and in a spirit of the greatest friendliness, he has a copy of it sent to someone. That person has fancied that he recognized (or worse still, that she recognized) a lampoon of himself, or of herself, in the volume – and has taken the gift as a deliberate and diabolical slam.

Authors sometimes feel aggrieved when they find in second-hand book stores copies of their own books which they have inscribed (with sentiments of “affection”) and presented to friends of theirs. Inscribing a copy of his book for a lady may give an author a very neat opportunity to convey with delicate point a chivalrous feeling. There are times, too, when an author finds it prudent in inscribing a copy of his book to disguise the full warmth of his regard; a bons-mottist of the age of Watteau might have remarked that an author’s inscription was made to conceal love.

One time there was a very simple minded author, of considerable celebrity, who deliberately wrote his name in the copies that he owned of all of his own books so that, he observed, “nobody would want to steal them.” One season Oliver Herford and Berton Braley had the same publisher. They came into his place together one day, each asked for a copy of his own book, inscribed it and presented it to the other. Then as, apparently, they were about to ask that the books be charged to them they paused, as though confronted by a problem which required some cogitation. And then (the effect was as if they did this simultaneously) their faces suddenly cleared, and they murmured (as though as one) : “Oh, yes; we don’t owe anything, as it was an even exchange.” I have an idea that at first each one of them felt that he was going to have to pay for both books.

Persons who seek by post to have books autographed by the author frequently are commendable in their thought for his convenience. The most considerate caper is that where the package is so fixed that when the author has unwrapped the book he finds the inside of the sheet of paper which has been used to wrap it already addressed and stamped for returning, only requiring to be turned inside out in re-wrapping.

When authors’ autographed and inscribed books for one reason or another come upon the market they are usually, of course, enhanced in value by reason of the autograph or inscription, not infrequently considerably, sometimes vastly; but not always: it depends upon the author. Now and then you perceive a sad spectacle. An author has had a little vogue, or has thought he was having a vogue, and has gone about inditing autographs and inscriptions galore. Then, pretty soon, you find ’em in bunches on the fifty-cent counter. A sad thing, too, in another way, is this: there are bogus inscriptions. Dealers in collector’s volumes must be on the lookout for counterfeit “autographs.” For example, an item in a rare book catalogue at hand reads thus:

105. BUTLER, Samuel. “Luck or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification?” Cr. 8vo, cloth, as issued. London, 1887.

$15.00

First edition. Very fine copy and very scarce. Written on the front fly leaf, “From the author,” in what on comparison with other specimens is undoubtedly Butler’s own handwriting.

IV

There is a class of near autograph books which is perfectly legitimate and exceedingly interesting. The books of this class are mainly volumes which the author himself has not signed but which have been enriched by another owner who has, as the term is, “laid in” an autograph letter of the author’s. Such letters not infrequently have a gossipy spice not common in inscriptions. Here is a portion of one found in an Ambrose Bierce item, written by Bierce to his publisher:

Doubtless Mrs. McCracken is worrying a good deal. She is old, very poor and of the worrying sex. (They are commonly worrying us.) Nothing that you can do will, I suppose, materially reduce her age, abolish her poverty, or modify her sex, but maybe a word from you will stabilize her mind and keep her out of the Asylum for expectant authors.

Sometimes a check endorsed by the author is laid in. A particularly pleasant touch is given to an autograph book when the author has a habit of making a little sketch or “mark” together with or in lieu of his signature. A copy of “Thomas Nast’s Almanac for 1874” is described in a rare book catalogue before me as containing “A deception by ‘Mark Twain.’” Merely the author’s bookplate pasted in, of course, makes an association volume.

Some authors in their inscriptions give an interesting comment on the composition of the book. An inscription in a copy of Gertrude Atherton’s book “The Valiant Runaways” reads; “This is the only book I ever wrote with difficulty and perhaps that is the reason it missed fire.” In a copy of her “American Wives and English Husbands” Mrs. Atherton wrote; “The subject – an international marriage – suggested by Dr. Robertson Nicoll – the only suggestion from another that I have ever been able to work upon.” The comment of some authors in their inscriptions takes the form of a note in exposition of their philosophy or a statement of their artistic credo. Mr. Galsworthy goes in a great deal for this. A copy of his book “The Country House” he inscribed thus:

I temperamentally desire that works of Art, whether they be novels, plays or pictures, should have a philosophic core, a temper of mind, a spiritual bias. But this is not to say that I desire such essence implanted within them by other than negative means. It should distil from them as fragrance from a flower, or as the flavor of fruits, bitter or sweet.

Henry James, curiously enough, was fond of terse, epigrammatic instructions. In a copy of “Confidence” he wrote this line: “Every man has a right to little flowerbeds, a life is not all bare kitchen gardening.” In a copy of “The Portrait of a Lady” this; “You can’t always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people.” In a copy of “Portraits of Places”; “The best thing therefore is not to go back.” Every now and then authors convey the point of their inscriptions obliquely by penning a quotation from a classic writer. Maeterlinck frequently does this. In quoting from an English author he displays an excellent pen-command of English, in rather striking contrast to his vocal difficulties with the language.

Just as Mr. Herford likes to give a little fillip to his inscription in a copy of “The Geometrical Giraffe” by an intimate portrait of a giraffe, and Du Maurier was inclined to round out his autograph by a small sketch, so the scholarly author finds a bit of play in an inscription for his erudition. What more appropriate in a copy of Andrew Lang’s “Old Friends; Essays in Epistolary Parody” than a tracing of a couplet from Homer, in Greek? In a set of Georg Brandes’ “Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century,” Professor Brandes has written a short sentiment in French in one volume and one in German in the other. And Padraic Colum now and then inscribes a book of his verses in Gaelic.

One of the most entertaining and prolific inscribers of books is Mr. Chesterton. Here are a couple of his playfully serious inscriptions. In a copy of “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”:

This is a bad book on a good subject; and that is a pathetic sight. The tragedy is that now I have once done the thing badly I cannot do it again well. I can only ask the reader when he has waded through all the weary melodrama and elephantine irrelevance of the writing to pause a little on the central idea and reflect how much better he would have expressed it. Then he will see with the eye of vision what I saw: the return of primal things, the village waking suddenly in the midst of the corrupt city.

In a copy of “What’s Wrong with the World,” a most characteristic specimen:

Somewhere in this badly written book the truth is really imbedded. I know it is there, because I put it there, but in going through it again I can’t find it.

Kipling, dealers in collector’s books report, has been found by autograph hunters the hardest of celebrities to succumb to their wiles. Presentation books of his are almost unknown. Mrs. Kipling has for many years retained every scrap of her husband’s manuscripts. As to autograph letters, he has not written many during the last twenty years. In 1903, however, the owner of a set of Kipling, and a person of appalling temerity, prevailed upon the author to inscribe the books. He did this in each volume, and in addition penned verses on the flyleaves of three of the volumes. Poets more or less often write their inscriptions in verse, generally transcribing a stanza of a poem printed in the volume, or a portion of one; though occasionally a poet composes impromptu a bit of verse or doggerel in his inscription. Among the poems about children written by Eugene Field his “Little Willie” is perhaps as well known as any, though his publishers have never allowed this facetious piece to appear in any collection of his work. Numerous copies of it have been printed in separate form. A rare book catalogue describes as “a superb association volume” a copy of “Love Songs of Childhood” in which this composition, five stanzas of eight lines each, has been inscribed on the blank pages at the end in Field’s beautiful handwriting.

Presentation copies of books by Theodore Dreiser are rare. A rare book catalogue lists a first edition copy of “The Financier” with this inscription in the hand of the author: “To Nannie Hatton For Value to be received, From Theodore Dreiser, New York, June 21st, 1913. And not too big.”

Sometimes when inscribing a book, authors make interesting alterations in the text. In a presentation set of William Ernest Henley’s “Recreations of the Rabelais Club,” only one hundred sets printed, three small quarto volumes, Henley in his “Villon’s Good-Night” changed the penultimate line, “I do not care one little damn,” to read “bloudy” instead of “damn.”

Authors with well-known pseudonyms sometimes use them as their autographs. A first edition copy of “The Voice of the City” now on the shelves of a rare book dealer bears merely the inscription “O. Henry” on the flyleaf. As far as the knowledge of this dealer goes, and he is well-informed in first editions and autograph material of O. Henry, this is one of the only two books by Porter similarly inscribed. He asserts that he knows the story of how Porter came to write his pseudonym in this volume, and guarantees the authenticity of the inscription.

V

In 1916 there was dispersed at The Anderson Galleries, in New York, the largest and most important collection of inscribed books in the world, made by James Carleton Young, F. R. G. S., LLD., L.H.D. Mr. Young was a member of nearly all the important book clubs in the United States; the only American member of the Société des Amis des Livres, the most exclusive book club in the world, and enrolled in many other organizations abroad. In 1902 the Paris Figaro spoke of him as “Le Roi des Livres,” a title by which he was well known in Europe. When a young man Mr. Young resolved to devote his life to the collection of modern works of literature in all languages, and he particularly desired that each book should be inscribed by its author. The work progressed rapidly in America, but as it is unusual for the writers of any language other than English to inscribe their books, very little could be accomplished by correspondence with foreign authors.

Mr. Young, therefore, resolved to travel around the world. Most of his time for twenty years was devoted to his pursuit. In time the collection reached such proportions as to require the attention not only of the collector but that of a librarian and eight assistants, including cataloguers and translators. With rare exceptions Mr. Young bought all of his books, and then sent them to the authors to be inscribed, after having received permission to do so. His correspondence in the matter reached 5,000 letters a year.

The books of Count Tolstoy illustrate the difficulties Mr. Young encountered. The first books sent to Russia were lost at sea. A second set was purchased and some of these were confiscated by the Russian Government. A third set was then sent at large expense by a special messenger who succeeded in reaching the Count’s home. In this case there was an additional reward, for Mr. Young secured the original of the famous letter that Tolstoy wrote to the Czar of Russia on the massacre of the Jews at Kishinev. It was a corrected copy that was sent to the Czar.

The sale was conducted in a number of sections of several sections each. The catalogue was printed in six parts, Part 1 contained 1,078 numbers. A selection follows:

ANDERSEN, Hans Christian. “Fairy Tales and Stories.” Illustrated. 12mo, cloth. | N. Y., n. d.

On the flyleaf is pasted a sheet containing the following autograph inscription: “Life is the most beautiful fairy tale! Hans Christian Andersen.”

BENSON, Arthur C. “Poems.” 12mo, boards, uncut. Lond. 1893

First Edition, limited to 550 copies. Inscribed: “Oh, I have tried,’ said one, ‘to hitch my wagon to a star!’ And the other replied, but not unkindly, ‘Then you must be prepared for a good deal of jolting.’ Arthur Christopher Benson.”

BIRRELL, Augustine. “Essays About Men, Women, and Books.” 16mo, cloth, uncut. Lond. 1894

Inscribed: “If it be asked – What do the general public know of Johnson’s nine volumes octavo? I reply – Beshrew the general public! What in the name of the Bodleian has the general public got to do with literature? Augustine Birrell.”

CARNEGIE, Andrew. “Round the World.” First Edition. 8vo, cloth. N. Y. 1884

With autograph inscription by the author: “Yours for the Brotherhood of Man. Andrew Carnegie.”

CHESTERTON, G. K. “Robert Browning.” 16mo, cloth. Lond. 1906

Inscribed: “As a life of Browning, this is ridiculous; but as a blast against other lives of Browning, it may still do some good, etc. G. K. Chesterton.”

CHESTERTON, G. K. “Charles Dickens.” 2 portraits. 8vo, cloth. Lond. 1907

Inscribed: “This is the one book I most seriously wish I had written better…. G. K. Chesterton.”

CHESTERTON, G. K. “Heretics.” 12mo, cloth. N. Y., 1908

Inscribed; “This was meant to make a sort of rough arena for the stray ideals of our time to collide and crash in…. G. K. Chesterton.”

D’ANNUNZIO, Gabriele. “La Citta Morta, tragedia.” 12mo, half morocco, gilt top. Milan, 1900

Inscribed on the half-title; “To watch the stars, which are not seen by the eyes. Gabriele d’Annunzio.”

FRANCE, Anatole. “Abeille, Cinte.” Numerous colored plates by Gehrts, 4to, original cloth (somewhat shaken). Paris; Charavay Frères, 1883

Presentation copy from the author, with autograph inscription; “This story was written to show the happy people of this world that they must not despise the little, innocent and laboring people who live on the earth. A. France.” Translation.

FRANCE, Anatole. “L’Affaire Crainquebille.” 62 compositions de Steinlen gravées par Deloche, Florian, etc. 4to, original wrappers, uncut. Paris, 1901

One of 400 copies issued. Presentation from the author with autograph inscription; “The victory of the proletarian is certain. It will be methodical, reasonable, harmonious. It has already left its mark on the world – with the inflexible rigor of a geometrical construction. Anatole France.” (Translation.)

GARLAND, Hamlin. “The Spirit of Sweetwater.” Portrait. 16mo, cloth. N. Y. 1898

Presentation copy. “To R. F. Pick with the well wishes of a western farmer who writes books to make a living. Hamlin Garland.”

GLASGOW, Ellen. “The Ancient Law.” 12mo, cloth. N. Y. 1908

First Edition, inscribed: “To live at all one must live with a dream, for the Dream and the Real are one, and beyond this there is merely a shadow and an illusion. Ellen Glasgow.”

GOSSE, Edmund. “Gossip in a Library.” 12mo, cloth, uncut. Lond. 1891

First Edition. Inscribed; “There is a jingle in this title and my name; but I swear I did not perceive it till too late, and now – I rather like it. Edmund Gosse.”

HARDY, Thomas. “The Well-Beloved.” Map and etching. Crown 8vo, cloth, uncut. Lond. 1897

First Edition, inscribed; “The interest aimed at in this novel being of an ideal or subjective kind, external events have been used as ancillary to that aim merely. Thomas Hardy.”

HENLEY, William Ernest. “A Book of Verse.” First Edition. With etched vignette on title. 16mo, original limp boards, uncut. Lond. 1888

With an autographed inscription by the author; “My first book. I do not hold it my best. But opinions differ. In any case it did much for me, in that it made me many friends and some enemies. W. E. Henley.”

HEWLETT, Maurice. “The Stooping Lady.” Portrait. 12mo, cloth. N. Y. 1907

With an inscription by Maurice Hewlett reading; “She was the Divinity who submitted to a man – for us men.”

HOWELLS, William D. “Literature and Life.” Illustrated. First Edition. 8vo, cloth, uncut. N. Y. 1902

Inscribed; “I have never been able to see much difference between Literature and Life. W. D. Howells.”

HUGO, Victor. “Les Burgraves, trilogie.” 8vo, half calf. Paris, 1843

First Edition. With the autograph inscription; “Au grand Homaire, au noble ami, a David. Victor H.”

JAMES, Henry. “The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina’s Reasons, & c.” First Collected Edition. 12mo, cloth. Bost. 1885

With signed inscription by the author; “I may be a pagan, but I don’t like the name; it sounds sectarian.”

LE GALLIENNE, Richard. “George Meredith. Some Characteristics”; with a bibliography by John Lane. Portrait. Crown 8vo, cloth, uncut. Lond. 1890

Inscribed; “I was once brave enough to write this book at the age of 23 but I have never since been brave enough to read it. Richard Le Gallienne, Nov. 21, 1900.”

MAETERLINCK, Maurice. “The Double Garden.” 12mo, cloth, uncut. N. Y. 1904

Inscribed; “James Carleton Young, Son ami M. Maetertinck. By proceeding at the first to the most distant and highest ideal, we have the greater chance of afterward discovering the best. Maeterlinck, x x Paris, 20 Nov. 1904.”

ROOSEVELT, Theodore. “Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail.” Illustrated by Frederick Remington. Royal 8vo, cloth, uncut. N. Y. 1899

Inscribed; “It seems to me that, so far from the love of nature, even in its wildest forms, and the love of books being incompatible, neither can exist to the fullest extent without the other. Theodore Roosevelt.”

TOLSTOI, Lyof N. “The Novels and other Works of Tolstoï,” including Essays, Letters, and Miscellanies. 24 vols. 8vo, half black morocco, gilt tops, uncut. N. Y. 1904

A remarkable set, each volume being signed by the author on the flyleaf. In volume two of the Essays appears a full-page signed inscription in English entirely in the handwriting of Tolstoï, reading in part: “You believe that your well-being consists in riches and honours, we believe in something else. Our belief shows us that our advantage is not in violence but in submissiveness; not in wealth but in giving everything away, and we, like plants in the light, cannot help striving in the direction where we see our advantage. 21 July, 1906. Leo Tolstoï.”

WELLS, H. G. “The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents.” First Edition. 12mo, cloth, uncut. Lond. 1902

Inscribed: “The Temptation of Harringay, the first story I wrote (so far as I can remember) was done in 1889. H. G. Wells.”

ZOLA, Émile. “Thérèse Raquin.” 12mo, half red levant morocco, gilt back, gilt top, original covers bound in. Paris, 1868

Presentation copy from the author, with inscription on half-title; “To Miss Dica-Petit. The acknowledgments of the author, waiting for the applause of the public. Émile Zola.” (Translation.)

There is an event in the way of inscribed volumes which comes about every quarter of a century. The idea of organizing The Authors Club (New York) was born on October 21, 1882, at the house of Richard Watson Gilder. In 1891, Rossiter Johnson laid before the Council of the Club the project of the “Liber Scriptorum; The First Book of the Authors Club” to be made up of contributions from each member and signed by them in each copy; the edition to be limited to two hundred and fifty-one copies and sold at a subscription price of one hundred dollars. The book was printed at the De Vinne Press and published by the Club in 1893. The profits to the Club of this enterprise amounted to over ten thousand five hundred dollars. The success of that work determined the Club to produce additional volumes at intervals of twenty-five years, when presumably the corps of contributors would be largely different. The price of the second book was advanced to one hundred and twenty-five dollars.

Among the men who contributed to and autographed the “Liber Scriptorum” of 1893 were; Henry Mills Alden, Noah Brooks, George William Curtis, Edward Eggleston, Richard Watson Gilder, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, Parke Godwin, Laurence Hutton, Hamilton W. Mabie, Brander Matthews, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Charles de Kay, Richard Henry Stoddard, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Henry James, Charles Dudley Warner and Samuel L. Clemens.

New Days in Toydom

I

Reindeers doubtless will soon be as little seen as the mules which in times past used to draw street cars. Indeed, in a few years it is likely that only children pretty well along in life will be able to recall what a reindeer looks like. Recently the sainted Mr. Claus in making his rounds through the Middle West arrived in Muncie, Indiana, by airplane. He announced in the papers of that city that he would come that way. Sometime after leaving Dayton, Ohio, he apparently experienced engine trouble, or some other mishap. The papers for three consecutive days ran headings of “No Word from Santa Claus Yet,” “Wonder What Has Become of Santa Claus,” “No Message from Santa.” Then in Sunday’s paper; “Hurrah! Santa Arrives Monday,” with a large picture of the airplane landing. The youthful population of Muncie turned out to see the epoch-making event. And a little later his airplane was reported on the roof of a department store in Los Angeles. Excitement was immense. And everybody (everybody of an enthusiastic age) had to pile downstairs to the toy floor to examine airplane engines, aerial cameras, wireless telephones and all the other wonders of this tremendous age for little people.

What, indeed, would a Santa Claus bringing things of that kind in his pack want with an old team of reindeers! Things have vastly changed since the Raggedy Man who worked for Pa made a “little bow-n’-arry” for you and me. Now your infant son has his own little rolltop desk, his “baby Ford,” his “junior chemist” laboratory, his toy automatic repeater, a replica of the famous firearm, his miniature motor boat. The only things that a round of the toy-shops today discloses that he may not have are a pocket flask and a cocktail set.

Or maybe you were a little girl and had a doll with its body stuffed with sawdust and a China head. Or perhaps even a wax doll whose nose was liable to melt in the summer and who in the winter was subject to being frozen and cracking open. Certain it is that it never learned to walk and you probably would have been considerably startled if it suddenly had called you “Mama,” as dolls do today. Some ultra-modern dolls are such very advanced specimens of femininity that one almost expects to hear them declare that they are going “to live their own lives.” At any rate, they have what the toy trade terms “flirting eyes.”

There was a dish very popular in juvenile society years ago known as a “mud pie.” They were pleasant to make, I recall, but their preparation did not advance one appreciably in the culinary art. Today housekeeping play has become such a sure enough thing that it seems to me the grown-up housewife needn’t have much to do but watch the children enjoy the work. Their sweepers are almost as good as mother’s sweepers, only smaller. Do not their toy ranges bake and cook just like mother’s range? And their social life is impressively elaborate. Juvenile stationery, you note, is coming more and more into vogue. There are old-fashioned colonial ladies who invite so-and-so to their party at such-and-such address, these things, together with the time, to be filled in by the hostess. And following the trend of stationery for grown-ups, one is told by the toy trade, the child of today “demands” that her stationery be lined with gay colored tissue, upon which birds flit, ducks waddle, flowers grow, and so on.

Very interesting is the increasing movement toward their having their own shops. It is easier now in some cities to be a parent than it used to be, particularly when you want to have your small son’s hair cut. Instead of having to lead his reluctant feet to a severe environment most uncongenial to him, the youngster gladly goes to his own kind of a barber shop where he is happily shorn while he rides away on a brightly spotted wooden pony. Several department stores in New York City, and probably a number elsewhere, now have such barber shops in connection with their toy sections. In some of these places (there is a shop of such diplomatic devices at Albany) when occasionally the barber meets with resistance in the form of a frightened youngster who for some reason or another decides quite definitely that he is not to be sheared, an attendant turns on a miniature Victrola, playing toy records, to divert the child’s mind so that the barber may proceed with his work. And, by the way, I wish somebody would invent a new kind of a barber shop which would make it as pleasant for me to get my hair cut.

A juvenile bookstore is not a twentieth century, or even a United States project. John Newberry, of London, whose business career began in 1740, had “Juvenile Library” in the place of honor over his door. By 1800 there were at least three other “juvenile libraries” in London. Charles and Mary Lamb wrote their “Tales from Shakespeare” and “Poetry for Children” for a “Juvenile and School Library” kept by the wife of William Godwin, best known as the father of Mary Shelley. In Philadelphia there were several juvenile bookstores very early in the nineteenth century. But there is a new spirit in the character and in the increase in numbers of the modern bookshops for children. They appeal to parents, as bookshops have for years, but they are more and more making an effort to reach the children directly.

The first of the modern children’s bookshops was opened in Boston in 1915 by the Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union. It is called “The Bookshop for Boys and Girls.” The stock comprises toy books for little children, including foreign ones; books on all subjects for boys and girls; and attractive standard editions for young men and women – together with some books of special interest to parents or teachers. To help in the selection of books for purchase the Bookshop Director prepares illustrated catalogues from the examination of the books themselves. And a special service is extended to persons applying by letter for information relating to books. A couple of years ago The Children’s Bookshop, with its amusing dwarf chairs and tables, was opened on Forty-seventh Street, New York. There, one is told, a frequent remark of visiting Englishmen is that we are doing so much more for children over here than is being done in England, and that people are continually coming in asking how to start a shop like it. There are excellent children’s bookshops, among other places, in Chicago and in Seattle. And not very long ago John Martin, well-known publisher of “John Martin’s Book,” enlarged the scope of his work by opening in New York a “Book House” for children. You walk west from Fifth Avenue on Forty-ninth Street until you come to the “fifth little tree,” and where the quaint little lantern hangs out in front you go in. Within, the atmosphere is that of a very handsome private library; white woodwork and walls of Chinese gold; furniture of Chinese teak and really old and beautiful mahogany. “Wise Owl” – that wizard known to John Martin children every where – presides in state over the mantel. Here you may get the latest toy book or a copy of a first edition of Kate Greenaway.

Another new development in the matter of children’s books and one significant of our new day in the world’s history is the recently largely increased trade in toy books in French. One of the best known of Fifth Avenue toy shops lately established a department for such books, quite separate from books in the Boutet de Monvel class, and it is flourishing. The old-time washable rag books carry on as of old. The trend of the day in books for what someone has called “middle aged children” is in the wonderful array of occupational or “things-to-do” books.

Every season or so sees some very simple toy spring into a widespread fad. Those of us not quite so young as we were can recall the rage for a marble game called “Pigs in Clover.” Then there was the “Ping-Pong” affair. Less distant was the immense vogue of the Teddy Bear, which, by the way, has far from passed from the toy-land scene. Numerous factories manufacture nothing else. The “Billiken,” the first of the indestructible composition dolls, had its hour. Today all the world is up and doing in athletic exercise, and a season or so ago the toy which was being featured as news in the principal newspapers of several countries was a jumping stick. “Pogo” was a riot. In Paris, in London, and later here. Did you try it? It’s a trick stick with a coil spring in it, made in various lengths to suit different heights and with different strength springs to best serve persons of various weights. You “mount” the “Pogo” by hopping upon the foot rests, and get very busy hopping up and down like a kangaroo – if you don’t, off you go. Accomplished Pogoers can go up six stair steps at a clip. As a reducer of weight the sport is declared to have horseback riding backed off the boards.

“Pogo” was said to have been suggested by an animated or jumping stick used by the Dyak natives of Central Borneo in connection with the sacrificial ceremonies taking place at each full moon. And the wild men were said to have been so wild about the jumping stick that the high priests had to hide them till another ceremony took place. An order for a million of the toys was placed in London shortly after their first appearance there. “Pogo” was also soon taken up by the stage; prominent vaudevillians introducing it in their acts; and Ziegfeld’s “Sixteenth Midnight Frolic” presented it in a turn, “Bouncing All Over Town,” which gave the young women a chance to appear in snappy gymnasium costumes, I am not familiar myself with the rites and customs of the wild men of Borneo, and so “Pogo” reminded me most of a much more primitive affair called “stilts” which were used without any religious association by the young savages who used to gather in my father’s back yard.

There were the days when the perfection of juvenile indoor entertainment was the “magic lantern” show. How utterly stupid that sort of a performance would seem to an alert child of today, accustomed to mechanically correct toy motion picture machines, toy piano players and phonographs, modern puppet shows, and marionettes. There are marionettes of every degree. The celebrated Tony Sarg, you know, about a year ago, got out a book all about how a child can make the lifelike string marionettes for himself. The Marionette Theatre, designed by Remo Bufano, of Provincetown Theatre, is portable and may be set up in any hall or living room at any time of day or night. Then there are, for almost nothing, little lithographed cardboard marionettes exported by an English firm. An interesting revival is a miniature old-fashioned Punch and Judy show. Among the new things in performing toys is a “record dancing doll,” an oriental looking maiden, indeed rather haremish in aspect, whose dancing floor is a revolving music record.

There is no one toy for boys that corresponds in popularity to dolls for girls. Several dolls more than one hundred years old, and a doll bed made more than a hundred and fifty years ago, were exhibited a little while back at a doll and doll furniture show in Lexington, Kentucky. In celebrating in 1921 the semi-centennial of the great Chicago fire of 1871, Marshall Field Company issued a “Fire Number” of The Juvenile World, in which one color page amusingly contrasted the old-fashioned dolls, Noah’s Arks, trains, curious looking wooden animals, and box-like dolls’ trunks with the up-to-date train sets, stuffed animals, airplanes and wardrobe trunks of modern days. Also was presented “A Doll’s Story of the Great Fire,” purporting to be told by the doll herself. This doll, which actually did go through the experience described, was on exhibition, its china head and sewed leather fingers in a remarkably good state of preservation. A doll’s house of the period of ’71, with doll garments and accessories also attracted much interest. And in contrast to such quaint exhibits, the elite of Dolldom today participated in a fashion exposition in the toy department, when the latest models in frocks, furs, coats, shoes, and so on, were displayed on the most modern doll models.

Now all these years, dolls of all kinds always looked like dolls. We speak of a “doll face.” Only within the last year or so was it discovered that a doll might as well look like a child. Then there were perfected dolls modeled from live children, with strikingly lifelike dimples in arms and legs. The naturalness of their movement in walking might very readily deceive a bachelor. They not only look like a baby but a point which has been very successfully striven for is to have them feel like a baby. Just hold one. The doll industry in the United States some toy dealers thought would go to smash during the war; instead it increased enormously; and these American-made dolls, made to suit all classes of the trade, have superseded all foreign makes. They say “Mama” or “Papa,” and close their eyes when reclining.

There are immensely patrician “period” dolls of wax, various mechanical dolls, shimmie dolls, Hula dolls, Jackie Coogan dolls; dolls deriving their character from well-known story books, such as Pollyana dolls, Bed Time Story dolls, Raggedy Ann dolls, and altogether more kinds of dolls than anybody could remember. Dolls are effectively used by the American Red Cross to illustrate health principles; and the doll theaters made out of shoe boxes, employed in this work present an idea so simple that any child could copy the models. The toy trade journals report a revival of interest in paper dolls.

Then there is the sudden and immense vogue of the manikin dolls which are now all about in every kind of a show-window, and which have come to add a fillip to the boudoir, ornament candy-box lids, conceal telephones, and in divers other ways serve as a chic touch of decoration to the social scene. But they are somewhat outside of the scope of this survey, as they are not toys for children.

Only the business in “wheel goods,” the toy trade will tell you, is comparable to the doll trade. Toy wagons, velocipedes, “scooters,” “foot racers,” “Bye-Bye-Bykes,” “coasters,” “pedal cars,” juvenile automobiles, and the other species of juvenile rolling stock, are, aside from dolls, the life of the toy trade. Our forefathers, who in beaver hat, tail coat and tight trousers strapped about the instep, appeared on the first model of bicycle, that then marvelous contrivance of wood which the rider ran by running along the ground himself, probably would have considered it wicked to have allowed the children to possess playthings as beautifully made and conveniently appointed as a vehicle they would buy for themselves. The parents of our decade are inclined to feel wicked if they don’t. The happy youngster of today rides on a velocipede with a tubular frame and pneumatic tires. One of the deductions by toy dealers for the popularity of “wheel goods” among parents is that, in addition to keeping the child in happy exercise out in the air, they enable him to run errands quicker. The new “rider toys” for tiny tots are utilities, too, in that they teach the baby to walk in a safe, natural way.

As with dolls so with toy drums. They, too, have become, so to say, altogether lifelike. The old toy drum was a gimcrack, barrel-like noise-maker; the new juvenile drum is a real instrument which should develop the rhythm and musical talent of the boy.

Toys now reflect all the activities of the world, and mirror, too, its political movements. There is a very large toy armament. The submarine arm of the toy navy, in particular, has been remarkably perfected. There are toy submarines that act exactly like a government U. boat, that can be sent to the bottom prow foremost describing exactly the same movements as a U. boat in action, or that can be sunk to any depth desired and floated there. Would the Washington arms conference scrap toy armament? Some toy men spoke of the possibility of such a result, in a degree. There will always be national defense, it was by others said, and no boy would or should be content to play with woolly sheep. The juvenile constructive instinct which used to find vent in such activities as whittling a shingle to a point and calling it a boat is now provided for in the great variety of “knock down” toys, that is, toys to be put together by the child according to a picture diagram, and which may be taken apart afterward. A familiar picture in old stories was the ancient seaman carving out of a block a boat’s hull for an enrapt little friend who stood by. Kind ancient seamen, however, are not handy to everybody’s boy. And there are boats which any boy may himself construct today which would make any ancient seaman green with envy.

You remember that dog in the pages of Anatole France, that declared he was not like anything else; because, he had noticed, whenever he approached anything else it increased in size, and as he withdrew from it it grew smaller; but, he said, he remained the same size everywhere and all the time. Well, hobby-horses used to be like that dog – the same size continually. But now there are hobby-horses so constructed that they grow along with the growth of their owners.

And as with dolls so with toy bugs. Some of the series of “animate” toys of today are splendid courses in natural history, of high usefulness, it seems to me, in inspiring a child with a sense of the beauty of various creeping and flying fellow inhabitants of the world. Some very lovely toy moths were hatched from their cocoons for Christmas a year or so ago.

II

The largest hobby-horse in the world, doubtless, was that one at ancient Troy. The largest one I know of anywhere around today is about seventy miles from Boston, at Winchendon, Massachusetts, frequently called “Toytown.” It is perhaps fifteen feet high and stands in the turn-around of the railroad station, where it glares down fiercely at flivvers. You may also see there trains loaded with dolls and drums; and if you walk about a bit you are likely to come upon a. regular house size Noah’s Ark, into which you may go and purchase toys. This town itself is about a hundred and fifty years old; for perhaps fifty years its leading industry has been the manufacture of toys. There are three factories there now; and the summer hotel is called “Toytown Tavern.” You do not, however, see “Made in Winchendom” on the bottom of all toys. Toys are made all over the United States, from New York to California, as well as abroad.

Toy making more or less recently has in some degree been taken up in a rather picturesque fashion as an occupation. Soldiers disabled in the war for heavier work have here and there gone into it. The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor has in New York an interesting workshop for the making of toys, where anyone who needs the employment may apply and be admitted. About forty or fifty old women and something like the same number of old men are now engaged there. They represent a variety of former occupations, from bookkeepers to seamen. Among the company recently was a sailor of seventy-three who for forty years had followed the sea. No machinery is used. The toys made are painted animals cut out of wood, school bags decorated with gay-colored beasts, calico dolls, and so on. The very pleasant product of these needy workers is sold at a shop on West Fifty-first Street. Here and there toys of considerable distinction are made and marketed locally. A couple of maiden ladies in Kentucky, for instance, devote themselves to making accurate reproductions of antique furniture, which sell for from forty to fifty dollars apiece. And, it seems, every once in awhile there is to be found a man successful in some altogether different business playing around in his office with the idea of some toy he has under way. Such colorful matters as these are occasionally written up in the papers; but they are hardly a drop in the bucket in the toy industry.

As we have looked to England for styles in men’s dress, and to France for styles in women’s dress, so before 1914 we looked to Germany very largely for our toys. If we turn to the records of imports from Germany into the United States and arrange them according to value, for the ten years prior to 1914 toys stand second on the list, and a close second. The United States was Germany’s largest customer in the purchase of toys. About a third or more of all the German toys exported were sent to the American market. The American toy industry as it exists today, is essentially a war industry, because the cutting off of German imports was what enabled our manufacturers to make many kinds of toys which could never have been produced here in the face of German competition with the existing tariff protection. An illustration is the development of the American doll industry. In 1913 there were not more than fourteen firms making dolls in the United States. Early in 1921 there were 142 doll factories here. A great many of those have since gone out of business. The first boat over to Germany after the war carried two hundred buyers in the toy trade.

The greatly expanded American toy industry is further put to it now because of the low value of the German mark, and its extremely fluctuating situation. And a large association of American toy manufacturers are petitioning the House of Representatives for protection against low foreign production costs, undervaluation, home labor and child labor. Many of our American made toys now are far superior to anything of the kind ever made on the other side, most notably our newly invented dolls, mechanical toys, stamped steel and cast iron toys. Small dolls, Noah’s Arks, and tree ornaments will probably always remain standard German productions.

Japan in 1914 manufactured practically no toys. The import figures for 1920 show Japan just ahead of Germany in volume of imports into the United States. Her toy business is almost entirely for export. And, though her prices are considerably higher than Germany’s, her commodity is the cheaper grade of perishable toys. The imports of toys from all other countries besides these two is negligible.

The nations of Europe which formerly imported practically all of their toys from Germany recognized shortly after the war started the need to develop home toy industries. Official aid was rendered the industry in England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and Canada, annual fairs established, exhibits arranged, and money advanced.

Don’t hang back on buying toys this coming Christmas. Nobody else will; even though the skies should not be all fair. The trade has found that even when mothers and fathers must be willing to do without some things for themselves they are not going to deprive their children of the usual Christmas toys. One of the organs of the toy trade declares that “Christmas 1923 will be a memorable one to the kiddies.”

A Communicative World

I

Lloyd George not long ago, addressing the Nonconformists of England in Whitefield’s Tabernacle, spoke of two eminent English divines, John Wesley and George Whitefield. The latter of these two founders of Methodism who kindled the hearts of our ancestors, it was recalled by a New York newspaper at the time of the wide publication of the address, lies buried in the graveyard of Old South Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Probably very few people, however, recalled the fact that this eighteenth century preacher was an autobiographer with a remarkable flair for his title. Nothing in his case could have been happier than this: “A Short Account of God’s Dealings with George Whitefield.”

And that title leads one, with at the moment nothing better to do, into a little byway of reflection upon the subject of the autobiography – now (to paraphrase Mr. Whistler) upon the town. You wouldn’t be likely to see today a volume entitled, let us say, “A Short Account of God’s Dealings with John Farrar.” Our present slant on human existence is somewhat reversed; piquantly reflected in Harry Kemp’s title, “Tramping on Life.”

There was a time when you didn’t write your autobiography unless you were somebody; your motive, indeed, was pride; probably, in the days when to be one “born” was a matter of prime account, pride of birth. Witness the title of the autobiography of Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle: “A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life.” Those (of aristocratic tendency) who have sought to poke fun at the memoir writing craze have often said that the last word would be reached when the autobiography of an English butler was written. Their forebodings as to the ultimate descent of the autobiography have been justified; a little while ago an announcement came from London of the publication of the record of “A Lady’s Maid in Downing Street.” But as to that, some time ago, away back indeed in the infant nineteen-hundreds, there was published in Rome the memoirs of an old waiter, who scrupulously set down the relative liberality of prominent persons whom he served.

When his eye fell upon this bit of news, a gentleman (wearing spats) in a club put down his newspaper, and, with a dreadful sneer, exclaimed: “What are we coming to? Next thing, I suppose, will be the confessions of a garbage collector!” And probable enough. Why not? One of our leading American magazines the other day bought the memoirs of a bootlegger, a work which in conversation the editor spoke of very highly. And the work, I hear, is scheduled by an enthusiastic publisher for appearance before long in book form.

Rich man … Poor man … Beggar man … Thief; … Doctor … Lawyer … Merchant … Chief – that’s a bibliography, a bibliography (in effect) of the heterogenious literature of confession. It is not infrequent spirits, impelled by the torture of genius to self-utterance, that cry alone in the wilderness. The literature of confession is like a mammoth, motley fair. The great are there, and the prophets preaching amid the din of countless hawkers. And the acrobats are turning, there is love-making, and drinking, and soldiers are marching. All the world is there in the grand autobiographical Comédie Humaine, in nobody knows how many volumes.

Let us stroll a little way through this Fair and read the signs. Here are the gates we go through, the “United States Catalogue” and the “Periodical Index” – two of the most entertaining and instructive literary works in the world. Here, in our list, is the Confession’s pleasance. We may, if we take enough time, note the Confessions of:

AN AMERICAN CITIZEN

AN APOSTATE

A BARBARIAN

A BEACH-COMBER

BEST-SELLER

BROWNING LOVER

CARICATURIST

CHILD

CHORUS GIRL

CLARIONET PLAYER

CLERGYMAN

CLUBWOMAN

COMMERCIAL SENATOR

CON-MAN

THE CZARINA

DETECTIVE

DADDY

DRONE

DRUNKARD

ENGAGED COUPLE

ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER

FOOL

FRIVOLOUS GIRL

GRASS WIDOW

HEATHEN IDOL

HUSBAND

A LITTLE MAN DURING GREAT DAYS

HYPHENATED AMERICAN

MACEDONIAN BANDIT

M. D.

MONOPOLIST

NEURASTHENIC

NUN

OBSCURE TEACHER

OLD MAID

PALMIST

PARASITE

PRIEST

PHYSICIAN

PRINCESS

PUBLISHER

QUILL DRIVER

RAILROAD MAN

RAILROAD SIGNALMAN

REBELLIOUS WIFE

SCHOOLMASTER

SEAFARING BLACK-MAILER

SINNER

SOCIAL SECRETARY

SOMETIME KINDERGARTNER

SPECTATOR

THUG

TWO BROTHERS

UNDERTAKER

VIOLINIST

WIFE

WIFE FORCED TO MAKE HER OWN LIVING

YOUNG MOTHER

YOUNG MAN

YOUNG WIFE

OLDER WIFE

WAR CORRESPONDENT

If you do not find the show that you are particularly interested in, let us turn over to the Memoir’s Midway. Here are the personal memoirs of:

A COW PONY

BABY

DOLL

GUARDIAN ANGEL

HUGUENOT FAMILY

LITTLE GIRL

ROYAL CHAPLAIN

ARABIAN PRINCESS

CHARMING WOMAN

RUSSIAN GOVERNOR

SENATE PAGE

AMERICAN LADY

MAN OF THE WORLD

PROTESTANT CONDEMNED TO THE GALLOWS

PHYSICIAN

REVOLUTIONIST

SERAPH

CAVALIER

FAILURE

WHITE ELEPHANT

This phenomenon, the autobiography, rises under a variety of titles. There are the Recollections of:

A CALIFORNIA PIONEER

A CONFEDERATE STAFF OFFICER

ADMIRAL’S WIFE

ALIENIST

GOLD CURE GRADUATE

LUCKNOW VETERAN

IRISH PATRIOT

FIRE INSURANCE MAN

49’ER

HAPPY LIFE

ROYAL GOVERNESS

SCOTTISH NOVELIST

SPINSTER AUNT

OLD MOUNTAINEER

NEW ENGLAND EDUCATOR

DIPLOMATIST

MISSIONARY IN THE GREAT WEST

PLAYER

ROYAL ACADEMICIAN

RUNAWAY BOY

TOWNBOY AT WESTMINSTER

DRUMMER BOY

NAVAL OFFICER

MID AND LATE VICTORIAN

NONAGENARIAN

NEW YORK SURGEON

PRIVATE SOLDIER

REBEL REEFER

RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT

SUPERANNUATE

NEWSPAPER MAN

OLD MUSICIAN

Those who have contributed Reminiscences are:

MUSICAL AMATEUR

MISSIONARY BISHOP

MOSBY GUERILLA

SOLDIER’S WIFE

SPORTSMAN

EX-CONFEDERATE SOLDIER

INVALID

A K. C.

PIONEER IN THE ROCK RIVER COUNTRY

RANCHMAN

REVOLUTIONIST

PRISONER OF WAR

BOY IN BLUE

DRAMATIC CRITIC

ASTRONOMER

NURSE

BACHELOR

FRANCO-AMERICAN

MISSISSIPPIAN

PULLMAN CONDUCTOR

PORTRAIT PAINTER

TEACHER

RADICAL PARSON

WAR-TIME STATESMAN AND DIPLOMAT

Autobiographies have been given us, among others, of a farm boy, a navvy, an androgyne and of a super-tramp. Almost anyone by a moment’s thought can recall a little list of racy authors of autobiographies. Then there is an affair, some times highly interesting, which you might call the oblique autobiography, such a volume, for instance, as a book published a number of years ago called “The Autobiography of a Race Horse.” “The Memoirs of a London Doll,” a very quaint little contraption, first brought out in England in 1857, was in 1922 issued in a new edition in the same size as the original. There is, too, the type of “autobiography” which reprehensibly pretends to be what it is not, the memoir of the patently spurious class, its most typical specimens of scandalous character. The literature of roguery is full of the spurious confession. Innumerable were the literary forgeries of one the ingenious Courtilz de Sandraz st de Vergé, to whom also the world owes the immortal d’Artagnan. Among the more weird curiosities in the realm of the perverted memoir is the work of that ingenious lunatic who, in 1857, published the “Autobiography of Jesus Christ.”

Then there are curiously interesting and altogether authentic autobiographies of the inner life of the men who wrote them, oblique autobiographies which superficially appear to be something not autobiography at all. Of the books of this class a distinguished recent example is Joseph Hergesheimer’s volume “San Cristóbal de la Habana,” commonly listed in libraries and catalogues under “travel.” Of course, you cannot say that it is not travel at all; but it is much more interesting and important as the other thing. I have now and then had occasion to look up certain facts about Mr. Hergesheimer, such, for instance, as the religious belief in which he was bred, and his position at present in this matter; and I have gone straight to this volume to find there what I wanted; but “San Cristóbal de la Habana” would be far from the first book I should seek out in gathering material on Havana.

The intimate essay is, of course, the quintessence of autobiographical writing. Among those who have practiced that most debonair of all the arts, “the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing” (in the ingenious phrase of Lord Shaftsbury), is a line of autobiographers of the gods anointed; Montaigne, Elia, Hazlitt – to name (for the sake of the thrill) these three alone. William McFee (who has for a volume of his essays a title of perfection for a book of autobiographical flavor by a veteran of the sea, “Harbours of Memory”) prints on a flyleaf of his novel, “Command,” recently published, this “Prefatory Note”:

This tale is an original invention. It is not founded upon fact, nor are the characters herein described portraits of actual persons. The incidents and topography are imaginary.

Probably very few readers of the book noticed this note. It is, however, a pointed commentary (or may be taken as such) on the fiction of the period. Very few of our novelists of today could truthfully make such a statement concerning their work. Indeed, most of our contemporary novels are not, strictly speaking, novels at all; they are, in the main, autobiographical narratives carried along into something like a story by a more or less slender infusion of invention. One need reflect but for an instant to recall that this has been the receipt for some of the noblest monuments in the field of fiction; it is sufficient to remember “Tom Jones” and “David Copperfield”; although there is a wealth of authentic literature in this genre. One of the most notable modern novels patently of this field is Somerset Maugham’s book “Of Human Bondage.” At the moment, one of the most interesting performances of the kind is the soul’s record of a famous sports writer who became a litterateur, Heywood Broun’s story “The Boy Grew Older.”

Under the head of biography pure and simple marches another little army; humorous, racy, startling; tinkers, tailors, ambassadors, Rajahs, candlestick-makers – and today in the sun’s hot eye, erstwhile war-lords and ex-Kaisers. Then there is the large body of the literature of confession of multifarious designation; “Up From Slavery,” “Astir,” “Marie Claire,” “My Mamie Rose,” “Education Sentimentale,” “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” “The Record of Nicholas Freydon,” “John Barleycorn,” “The Education of Henry Adams,” “Steeplejack,” “The Ocean Echoes,” “The Americanization of Edward Bok,” and (to name no more) Theodore Dreiser’s recently published volume, “A Book About Myself” – as a specimen list.

“There are few more delightful books in the world than Casanova’s Mémoires,” remarks Havelock Ellis at the outset of one of his studies in the volume, “Affirmations,” and he immediately adds; “That is a statement I have long vainly sought to see in print.” Though we know that various eminent literary personages have cherished a high regard for this autobiography, “a confession,” as the author declared, “if ever there was one.” The unrivaled memoirist, the self-ennobled Jacques Casanova Chevalier de Seingalt, lived in an age with a genius for spontaneous revelation of human nature in literature. It was the period in which the novel reached full development, and an age of diaries and autobiographies. Though Pepys had finished his work some time before, during Casanova’s lifetime, Boswell was writing that biography which, as Mr. Ellis observes, “is so wonderful largely because it is so nearly an autobiography,” Rousseau’s “Confessions” only preceded Casanova’s by a few years, and a little later Madame Roland wrote her Mémoires Particulières. What is probably the first real edition in English of Casanova has recently been privately published.

It has for some time been the fashion to speak of another illustrious autobiographer as one of the world’s greatest liars, Benvenuto Cellini. The book, however, which the great Goethe thought worthy of translating into German with the pen of Faust and Wilhelm Meister remains, as its most distinguished English translator, John Addington Symonds, remarks, “an imperishable document for the student of human nature.” It is an indispensable picture of the Italian Renaissance. In addition to its solid merits, Horace Walpole found it “more amusing than any novel.”

Both Casanova and Cellini wrote out of the fullness of garnered years; they were men who in their prime had packed more than the heightened living of many a lifetime into a single day, and had drunk yet deeper of life on the morrow; they knew all that the world had to show. In the year 1873 a girl of twelve wrote on a page the word “January,” and began the self-revelation of a unique individuality, a record which Gladstone called “a book without a parallel.” Marie Bashkirtseff’s “Journal,” an amazing compound of the cynicism of a Machiavelli and the naivete of an intensely ardent girl, was stopped by death when the author was twenty four.

There are (to number the types) the immortal confessions, the Vita Nuevo; the spiritual confession, Newman’s Apologia; the religious confession, St. Augustine; the confession of elaborate art “Memoirs of My Dead Life”; the confession of sheer, vibrant egoism, Mary MacLane; the burlesque confession, “The Cruise of the Kawa” (a book, by the way, ridiculously successful beyond the cheapness of its merits); the fabricated confession (to name an amusing instance now largely forgotten) Dr. Cook’s, and, related to this type, the imaginative confession, “Robinson Crusoe,” though here perhaps we stray too far afield, and confuse the genre with what is more properly the art of purely creative literature. The latest word, perhaps, at the moment, in this most universal literature, the hum of a communicative world, is “How I Fly.”

II

The Book Review of the New York Times in its issue of July 23, 1922, published an admirable article of some length on Amiel, by Junius B. Remensnyder. DD, LLD. Dr. Joseph Collins, eminent American neurologist (and charming man of letters), promises us a study of the nervous mechanism of the inspiration to literary confession, which should be highly illuminating, and with which he has been tinkering for some time. He ranks high among the works of self-revelation the volumes of W. N. P. Barbellion, whose “Journal of a Disappointed Man” (the diary of an intensely egotistical young naturalist tragically caught by the creeping approach of death) H. G. Wells regards as “one of the most moving records of the youthful aspects of our universal struggle.” Mrs. May Lamberton Becker has included in the “Lamberton Lectures” which she has prepared a talk (which I wish I might hear) on “The Literature of Confession.”

But the literature of confession has not attracted anything like the amount of orderly analysis which the subject deserves. In 1909 the author of a most excellent book, “The Autobiography; A Critical and Comparative Study,” Anna Robeson Burr, was able to speak of the “unmapped field of autobiography.” At about the time of the publication of this native essay into the subject the voluminous work of Professor Georg Misch, “Geschichte der Autobiographien,” was issued in its first volume – an edifice of immense erudition, doubtless, for those who have the key to it.

“No man,” declared Dr. Johnson, “can be written down except by himself.” The exact truth of that dictum is, perhaps, a bit problematical. It is difficult, however, to gainsay Mrs. Burr’s remark that “there is no friend like your autobiographer.” In one of the appendices of her volume she has a most interesting list of “reasons for writing”: Self-Study and Science … Request of Friends … No One Else Likely To Do It or To Do It So Well … Money … Pride of Birth … Study of Insanity … “To Emblazon the Power of Opium” … To Revive His Latin … Use of Children or Descendants … Religious Witness … Purely Apologetic … For Amusement, or to Recall the Past … No Reason Given. The memories of some (few) autobiographers go back to the age of one year. Others (Bunyan, Darwin, Rousseau and Ruskin among them) confess to, or give evidence of, weak memories.

The autobiographical instinct apparently is particularly awakened by any convulsion in the social order, when, naturally, strong is the call in the land to the “event memoirs”; and in times of searching political disturbance come forth floods of the “apologetic memoirs.” Since the development of the autobiography it has flourished most lavishly in the wake of great wars. Witness the vast Napoleonic literature, the entire libraries begot of the French Revolution, the streams of volumes flowing from our Civil War – and the avalanche of today.

The Day of
Atmosphere Advertising

I regret very much that I did not pay more attention to my studies when I was supposed to be engaged in the matter of obtaining an education. My parents and teachers, I penitently recollect, persistently admonished me that this would be the case. They were conscientious and assiduous, I remember, in pointing out reasons why later on in life I should come to deplore the folly of my wasted early years.

But even they, distraught concerning me and earnest as they were, did not, I am sure, foresee the imperative necessity for everyone for a very high degree of culture today. The world has, almost suddenly, within the last several years, got prodigiously cultured. I am ashamed the way things go over my head. I don’t see how everybody else got that way so quickly.

I am shamed every time I open a magazine, even the most popular of magazines. Not by the magazine proper part of the magazine. The stories and articles I can get along with all right, when they are interesting, and when they are not they don’t bother me. It’s the advertising pages that embarrass me, reveal to me my ignorance and uncouthness.

“‘Enfin!’ cries Brunetière, ‘to write as M. Swinburne writes, it is necessary to understand as M. Swinburne understands.’” That’s the way a full-page advertisement I have just looked at starts. You’ve probably seen it. I know that I’m pretty vague about both enfin and Brunetière. I don’t say anything out loud as some of the family are in the room. But I read along a little in this advertisement to see what it is about. It doesn’t say anything more about M. Swinburne (I am supposed, I fear, to know all about him) but it develops that the advertisement is an advertisement for men’s hats. “This intimate understanding it is,” it says, “that one finds in Headson’s sure interpretation of style in their offering of Hats.”

There I am in trouble again, because the highly literary style of this copy writer is so subtle and elegant that I am unable to penetrate to any idea of what sort of a hat it is that Mr. Headson makes. I do not remember M. Brunetière’s hat, but I am somewhat suspicious that if these hats are anything like M. Swinburne’s they may not do for me.

I turn a page, and see a drawing of a profile which I have an uncomfortable feeling I ought to recognize, but don’t. These illustrations to advertisements nowadays are as bad as Edison’s questionnaire questions. Who the deuce is that, now? Sheepishly I begin to read. The ad begins: “For many years it was the custom of the London Company of cloth-workers to drink to the memory of Samuel Pepys” – Pepys, Pepys! oh! yes; fellow who writes like F. P. A. The ad was about men’s clothes, but I have forgotten the make. That didn’t seem important to it. The main thing was to show off about Pepys. And, personally, trying to recall what I know about Pepys has never excited me to the buying of a suit of clothes.

On the page following, a picture of Benjamin Franklin. Ordinarily you might suppose that the head of Franklin would be a symbol used to caution you to save your money. But in the New Advertising we find that he does just as appropriately as an exhortation to “Think about your underwear.” We are told that an interesting “brochure” on underwear will be sent upon request.

A little further on an advertiser is determined that the world shall recall that “It was in his ‘Sartor Resartus,’ (‘The Tailor Done Over,’ the title of an old song) that Thomas Carlyle” … etc. I think it was sox that he manufactured. I have an unpleasant impression, however, that Thomas Carlyle’s sox were very thick and woolenly and didn’t stay up very well. And there, at the other side of the page, I declare! is a condensation of Charles Lamb’s “dissertation” upon Bo-bo, and how while playing with sparks he burned down the hut of his father, the swine-herd, and so accidentally discovered roast pig – and consequently you can obtain delicious ham and eggs at Child’s restaurant.

Ahah! Here is something else that I remember. That shows you the happiness you have in reading poetry. I have not forgotten Allan Seager. The headline of the next advertisement asks me: “Have you a rendezvous with Spring?” I am so pleased with myself for my acquaintance with poetry that I fear I don’t pay much attention to the next remark, which is that I will “want some light shoes when I keep that rendezvous.”

And there, at the top of another page, was a large picture reproduced in colors from one by Rembrandt. It was very handsome and commanding. But I didn’t want to buy any Rembrandts just then, and, naturally, I turned the page. Next day or so, though, it occurred to me that I’ d cut out the picture and pin it up on the wall. I asked my wife if she remembered that advertisement with the Rembrandt picture in it. She was very provoking. Said, no, what was the advertisement about? “What has that got to do with it?” I answered, I am afraid somewhat testily. “You can’t tell anything about what an advertisement is about nowadays by the picture in it!”

However, she looked the thing up. And found it had to do with varnish, which, the ad said, “is both the enhancement and the preservative of beauty in pigment.” I thought it a bit odd if so many people were buying varnish with which to slick up Rembrandts. And so I read a little further, and learned that this varnish “preserves for us the mellow richness of the old masters; and maintains in its pristine charm the attractiveness of the home” – that is, to speak with somewhat crass directness, is good for floors and woodwork.

Suppose you did want to buy something. Wouldn’t you get fooled sometimes. Here is an ad which starts off all about watches – “Would you buy a key-wind watch?” No, you are interested in the very latest kind of a watch. This ad writer tells you an appealing story about an old-fashioned watch he has in a drawer at home which he used to ask his “Dad” to take out so that he could hear the “tick tock.” But, he declares, he would no more think of carrying it today than he would think of wearing any other kind of – CUFF LINKS, than the ones he is advertising Cuff links! Goodness! You’ve got cuff links to burn!

But, on the other hand, as I didn’t get cultured up when I was young, if I pitch in now and work hard and faithfully at reading our astonishingly cultural advertising in the magazines I see a way of attaining to a very fair amount of polish within a reasonably short time.

I learned the other day all about “the genesis of the modern drawing room” through an advertisement for silks. I spoke casually that night out at dinner of the Salon de la Famille, with immense effect. I followed this up with a mot “murmured by an audacious courtier to Madame Pompadour in 1752” which I had just got out of a jewelry advertisement. And, of course, if you keep your eyes open to current ads you can pick up an endless amount of facts, as to who invented the cotton-gin, when the first top-hat was worn in England, how fast the first steam train traveled, the name of the chef to Louis XV, and things like that.

Then, too, you can get hold of a lot of queer words not used by unrefined and uneducated people, and find out elegant ways of using them not practiced by anybody – except advertisement writers. You can’t possibly read contemporary advertisements very long without beginning to use the word “contour” right and left. And “distinctive” and “synonym,” and I don’t know what all.

You may learn to say, with an impressive effect of cosmopolitanism and consummate politeness, of a hotel that the service there is “enhanced by a finesse – an unobtrusive refinement that is gratifying.” Or of a motor car that “its attractive lines will compel admiration long after the extreme and bizarre fancies of the day become obsolete.” That would be some talking, too, if anybody could do it right out.

There is one thing which puzzles me a good deal about our present school of advertisement writing, and that thing is this; You will have noticed that it is apparently considered the smartest way of doing in an advertisement of the day to describe anything in the terms of something else. For example, a suit used to be tailored and a motor car to be built. Now all suits are “built,” and motor cars are “tailored in such good taste,” etc. Or tailors, or what used to be called tailors, are now frequently “architects of fine clothes.” Sundry manufacturers of men’s hats have now become “originators” of men’s hats. An ad speaks of the “mileage endurance” of certain hosiery, as though it were an automobile. An automobile, with nobody whatever in it, has its “portrait” painted. And so on. It is not, evidently, “chic” for anything to be as it was.

And certainly it is most clearly not good form for an expensive advertisement today to give you any gross and practical information about anything advertised. What you are offered for sale “adds a note of harmony to the charm of the Summer landscape,” “its graceful lines sweep easily off into and blend with nature’s background.” Or it expresses supremely your distinctive personality.

For this is the day of “atmosphere advertising.”

A Very Nice Tobacco
for Young People

There’s a pleasant fellow in this town who has a way of saying of a thing that excites his interest that, it is an odd, strange, peculiar, queer, funny, comical, humorous, singular, unusual, bizarre, extraordinary, remarkable thing.

So much for him.

Now, there is in this town, also, (and in the neighborhood of Murray Hill) a tobacco shop – it is not far, not a great way, that is, from where you stand as you reflect upon the human scene at the point where Forty-second Street crosses Broadway – which certainly is, without any doubt at all, an odd, strange, peculiar, eccentric, queer, funny, comical, humorous, singular, bizarre, unusual, extraordinary, entertaining, diverting, fascinating, remarkable, uncommon tobacco shop. You may easily put in an hour, any day of the week, just looking in at the window of this tobacco shop.

There was, before the world storm, a young poet, his name of such renown that it need not be told, who wrote a poem about a delicatessen shop. He said in this poem – he said:

Here is a shop of wonderment.

From every land has come a prize;

Rich spices from the Orient,

And fruit that knew Italian skies.

And figs that ripened by the sea

In Smyrna, nuts from hot Brazil,

Strange pungent meats from Germany,

And currants from a Grecian hill.

Well, this tobacco shop (I have in my eye) is just such a tobacco shop as that was a delicatessen shop. Here, in its window, you will see all sorts of tobacco that you never dreamed of – tobacco in packages which look like parcels of tea from India, Ceylon, Japan; tobacco in packages which look like fire-crackers from China; twists of tobacco which look like tarred ropes’ ends; tobacco like seaweed; silken tobacco looking like strands of dried human hair; flake tobacco like cereal foods; tobacco in tiny pellets like bird-shot; nuggets of tobacco like red gold; bricks of tobacco; tobacco in sheets like rich metal; powdered tobacco in colors of the rainbow, gay as Easter eggs; tobacco like the queues of ancient Chinamen.

And here are cigars – long thin cigars such as Cubans smoke; large, round, fat, black cigars, such as dark villains smoke in fearsome plays and fine stories, and such as are smoked by those who are politicians; mammoth cigars, each in a bottle, to be given by jokers to friends at Christmas time; wee cigars to be smoked when time is short; twisted cigars are here; and beautiful cigars in handsome boxes for fine gentlemen.

Here are delicate cigarettes with gold tips for ladies; long, thin cigarettes, one-half empty, from Russia; fat Turkish cigarettes freighted with exotic perfumes; dark green cigarettes from tropical climes; mammoth cigarettes for goodness knows who; cigarettes in boxes written over in Japanese; cigarettes from Piccadilly; cigarettes upon cigarettes upon cigarettes of tobacco grown in Virginia.

Pipes! What pipes are here! There are pipes fantastically carved from whole elephant tusks; pipes with long porcelain bowls painted with scenes; little black pipes with claws to enable them to stand upright; long churchwardens such as our great-grandsires used; short “clays” such as are given away to customers of English public houses; deep-colored hookahs wound with tubes like the arms of an octopus; corncob pipes from (no doubt) Missouri; bowls of Italian bruyère, French briars, briars from Pall Mall; German meerschaums; pipes shaped like revolvers; pipes of scientific sanitary design, containing intricate machinery to catch the nicotine and so preserve the health of the smoker; pipes to be loaded with cartridges of tobacco; pipes made like tomahawks; pipes that look like flutes. Pipes, pipes, pipes!

And there in full display) are bottles of startling suggestion – but charged with snuff. And, also containing snuff, a row of curiously flask-shapen crocks.

And humidors of every conceivable shape and size, “individual” humidors, and what might be called community humidors; wampum pouches, pouches of rubber, and of leather, square and round, and some shaped like a half moon; shining nickle cases and cases of gun-metal and cases of silver and of gold, for pipe tobacco and for cigarettes; and plates for use as ash receivers, and brass bowls of a countless number of sizes, some on tall legs. And there are little scissors for cutting a proper chew from a plug of tobacco. And rubber necks to fit on over the mouths of cloth tobacco bags. And complicated tools for cleaning pipes, looking like some kind of a manicure set all on one handle. And of all the kinds of matches that there are, wax and pine and paper. And everything and everything, from all lands and all ages, and at all prices up to heaven knows how much, that is, or has to do with, TOBACCO.

And anything that you buy in this shop, you may be sure, will suit you to a Tee. The man who runs it (he recently made a tour around the world just from running this tobacco shop) has a hard name to pronounce, but he knows your taste exactly by merely looking at you. He is sensitive to the qualities of his wares to such a degree that you can but marvel at him, and filled with the romance of their history.

“Is this a strong tobacco?” you ask, concerning some that you are about to purchase.

“Oh, no!” says this tobacconist. “It is not a strong tobacco at all. On the contrary, it is a very mild, sweet tobacco.”

“But I rather like tobacco somewhat strong,” you say.

“Oh!” exclaims the tobacconist, spreading his hands. “I do not say that that tobacco has not strength. It is not a bad strong tobacco; it is not a mild tobacco; it is a mild strong tobacco; it is a very nice tobacco, a very nice tobacco, indeed.

“That tobacco,” continues this tobacconist (and this is an absolutely veracious report) “is grown on the shaded side of the hills of Virginia. It is plucked at dawn, with the dew upon it, by virgins. It is a very fine tobacco.

“It is a very nice tobacco for young people,” he says, resting his eyes perhaps upon your trim mustache.

Not Livery-Stable Literature

Mr. Tarkington had come down from his summer home, “Seawood,” Kennebunkport, Maine, to town for a day. He was lunching at The Players. His companion at the table had also been born and had lived his youth in Indianapolis. Mr. Tarkington was discoursing on the subject of livery-stables.

The livery-stable (he said) had a distinctive atmosphere; there was a special smell about a livery-stable that you found nowhere else. In the old days back in Indianapolis a livery-stable was the prime ornament of any alley. Something definite went out of American civilization with the passing of the livery-stable. The garage, of course, was quite another thing. The livery-stable had a redolent social life; it was a sort of community center for racy types of the town; colored men were naturally drawn to livery-stables; and a confirmed livery-stable colored man was a rich and peculiar product, an orchid (so to say) among his kind. A livery stable was, in a manner, a salon. Conversation went on there which you didn’t find exactly reproduced in any other place. A livery-stable story was a distinct thing.

“All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.” As the institution that it was the livery-stable has passed from the scene. Is there nothing to fill its place in our social life? Well, though the livery-stable itself has gone, its spirit lives on, Mr. Tarkington submitted, in our art and literature. He had the night before gone to a play. Had on the first occasion in something like six months come down on this expedition from Maine, had put up for his brief stay at a hotel, and rejoicing in the opportunity which his journey had afforded him for this had gone to a play, a play widely acclaimed. And the story told in this play – somewhat dressed up, to be sure – turned out to be an old friend; it was a regular livery-stable story. How those old-time livery-stable colored men would have with peal upon peal of merriment taken up every humorously wanton point made in this play! Would they not have made the alley ring! The alley has been translated to the theater. And its soul goes marching on in contemporary fiction.

Well (it may be a not uninteresting, casual reflection), Mr. Tarkington has now been writing published books for something over twenty-three years, books from the first of wide popularity, but he has never even implied so much as a livery-stable anecdote.

II

One day in 1899 a somewhat elderly little gentleman, very dapper, was sitting at his desk in Fletcher’s National Bank in Indianapolis surrounded by towering piles of books, which looked curiously like novels, and all exactly alike. He radiated high good humor; indeed, he seemed almost to be about to burst from sheer good humor; and he was merrily intent upon carefully inscribing this overflowing stock of books, one volume after another.

“Well, well, Tarkington! I declare! What’s all this?” said a fellow burgher coming in just then. “It’s Booth’s book,” said the sparkling gentleman with the gray mustache at the high laden desk; and (I remember hearing, in the general excitement at the time) nobody ever had seen a father really set up about his son who had not seen “Judge” Tarkington (as the Honorable John Stephenson Tarkington was familiarly known) at this time. “Booth’s book” was “The Gentleman from Indiana.” Booth was thirty. He was generally regarded in the community as a good deal of a boy. In the light of this event I do not know that he was not generally esteemed something in the nature of a youthful phenomenon. Tarkington had begun to tinker with an apprenticeship in writing before he went to college; he was active in “practicing the literary scales,” as Stevenson puts it, throughout his college career; during the seven years between his leaving Princeton and the publication of his first book his sole occupation had been exercise in the “gymnastics” (to quote again R. L. S.) of writing. Times change.

In 1917, five years ago, Mr. Tarkington’s publishers were bothered. Mr. Tarkington was one of the most popular of authors. He was a “best-seller.” That was the trouble. In those days a stigma attached to the term “best-seller”; it was spoken in a tone of scorn by the “discriminating.” And when anyone (a real person, I mean) said of a writer, “Oh, yes; he is one of our popular authors,” it was a way of disdaining him; the implication very clearly was that he was not anything else – it did not take much to be a popular novelist. Mr. Tarkington’s publishers chafed under the current assumption that he was little more than a popular novelist, not perhaps as bad as some of the others. Their concern in this matter led them to rather daring lengths – after all, their affair was business. They sought an essay in criticism, which in 1918 they issued for sale as a bound volume of 218 pages, which imputed genuine value to Mr. Tarkington’s books as literature. Now you must recollect that in those days, four and five years ago, just as popularity connoted (to the reader of “worth while books”) “trash,” or something near it, so to the cheerful and innocent audience for best-sellers nothing about a book could be more prejudicial than a suspicion that it was esteemed by the class of persons popularly known at that period as “high-brow.” If at that time you said that a book was a serious criticism of life, or something like that, you naturally went on to say that “of course, it could appeal to only a limited audience”; it was “meet for the few,” and so on. Well, well; how times do change!

In 1919 “The Magnificent Ambersons” was awarded the Pulitzer prize of $1,000 for the American novel of the preceding year, “which best represents the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the higher standards of American manners and manhood.” For about twenty years Mr. Tarkington had been cast by news articles and personal sketches in the role of a “young writer” heralded as “an American of tomorrow.” He now began to be something of a representative American institution. In 1920 he was the author elected to membership in The American Academy of Arts and Letters, vacancies having occurred in the membership limited to fifty upon the death of William Dean Howells, two distinguished painters and a composer. At a meeting of The Writers’ Club in 1920, in a vote taken as to the six best novelists in the United States, the standard being literary achievement and not popularity, Mr. Tarkington was given fourth place. In 1921 The Outlook sent out one thousand ballots to as many readers selected at random, asking each to name his ten favorite living authors; the first choice was Rudyard Kipling, the second Booth Tarkington. In the same year The Publishers’ Weekly published a list of “the most significant American authors” ranked in the order of votes that each received from booksellers throughout the United States; number one was Mr. Tarkington; the list contained forty names. The publication remarked editorially that the bookseller gives an opinion which is “almost a consensus of opinion from his community.”

In 1922 Mr. Tarkington won the Pulitzer prize for the second time, the award going to “Alice Adams,” the choice of the jury from among the American novels published in the previous year. The honorary degree of Litt. D. was conferred upon the author by DePauw University. Mr. Tarkington was made president of the American P. E. N. club, recently organized in this country after the manner of the original one in England; this being the third center; the second one in France, with Anatole France as its president. Mr. Tarkington had for a number of years been vice-president of The Authors’ League of America. Since the publication of “The Turmoil,” in 1915, the degree of unanimity in praise of the reviewers has been remarkable. As a best-seller Mr. Tarkington continues among the very first amid the changing fashions of the new day. In the poll taken in 1922 by the New York Times from a list of fairly representative men and women asked to name the ten “greatest” Americans of our time Mr. Tarkington was the one author who received any number of votes, appearing in so many of the lists submitted that from a cursory survey he appeared to be in all of them. In making his choice Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborne, President of the Museum of Natural History, said: “I include Booth Tarkington for the most truthful portrayal of contemporary life in literature.” An interesting bibliography of Tarkington first editions was prepared for The Publishers Weekly of September 9, 1922. And in the unfortunate matter in 1922 of the remarks attributed to Rudyard Kipling concerning America and the war, Mr. Tarkington was the American author invited by the New York World to make a reply in its columns, the presumption being that to the mind of that newspaper, he among our men of letters was logically the spokesman for America.

An artist, of course, may not always be known by his public honors. Solemn, black-coated mummeries of that sort, in the view of the Menckenian mind, simply show to what lengths boobery will go, or something like that. The foregoing facts concerning Mr. Tarkington have been assembled here merely for the purpose of seeing how they would frame up all in a bunch. Though such things are not the material of literary criticism, they do claim cognizance as literary history. And by this reckoning Mr. Tarkington certainly would seem to be the predominant figure now among us.

It is funny, too, to think of Mr. Tarkington as a pontiff. What from the first of his fictions to the latest has been the character of his closest preoccupation? He has assiduously presented the sympathetic portrait of (as he terms it) an “outsider,” one not an accepted member of the established order – John Harkless, Beaucaire, Penrod, Bibbs, George Amberson Minafer, Alice Adams, and, in “Gentle Julia,” the unheroic Noble Dill of all Miss Atwater’s suitors is limned with the fondest caress. Look up the others, if you care to. Mr. Tarkington himself would walk a mile any day (and he is not over-fond of walking) to keep from making a speech – and when he has been trapped into an attempt at one it has always been a flivver. He “ducks” (as he says) every time he hears the word “literature” mentioned at a dinner or other occasion. The idea of him delivering a “lecture” is inconceivable. He has never been related to any artistic “circle”; vigorously declares that “nothing was ever done in cliques.” Makes his city home in Indianapolis rather than in New York largely for the reason, he explains, that there he sits down at his club with perhaps the owner of a department store on one side of him and his family physician on the other, while in the metropolis he would probably “train with” writers and actors all the while. And so on much more.

The likeness of Mr. Tarkington’s entertaining features has been broadcast abundantly in the course of the years; his picture is probably as well-known as that of W. L. Douglas. But he appears, nevertheless, to be quite lacking in personal vanity. Nothing would content his publishers, but for him, in autographing the Seawood Edition of his books, recently published, to inscribe the frontispiece portrait to volume one. Never again, he said when the job was done, did he want to see or hear of a picture of himself. “Ugly enough, to begin with,” his “mug”; and now his “face was slipping.”

Not at all an unprofitable thing to do for one absorbed in the freshness of the novel of today would be for him to turn back some evening to the dim and antiquated past of some twenty years ago and look over one, in particular, of the now very much retired novels of that time, “The Gentleman from Indiana.” There is something decidedly familiar about the recipe of the story of a young man universally held to be of brilliant promise at a great eastern university who goes back, figuratively speaking, to sit on a fence rail in Indiana, by a young man who had universally been held at a great eastern university to be of brilliant promise and who had gone back, figuratively speaking, to sit on a fence rail in Indiana. Sounds a good deal like our very modern friend, all around these days, the autobiographical novel – that is, a piquant criticism of contemporary manners, by an intelligence just awakened to new values, carried along by an infusion of autobiographic imagination. Precisely that is what “The Gentleman from Indiana” set out to be, and throughout something like two thirds of the book very successfully was; though the author’s authentic inspiration got somewhat lost in the shuffle in the later course of his “story.” Same thing happened with what started as another admirable genre picture, “The Conquest of Canaan” (1905).

Mr. Tarkington began his career as a novelist as a sentimental realist; that is, he put down the things that he saw about him, and what he thought about the things that he saw, but he saw about everything, including his “villains,” with a kind of humorous affection, and the clash of action in his story tripped him into the boisterous sentimentality of melodrama. As to that last, melodrama was very much around in those days (many of our present young realists probably have never even seen one) and it was generally considered as essential for a novelist to have a deeply laid “plot” as for a lady to wear a bustle. A striking example of an inherently fine thing upset by the bugaboo of a framed up plot contraption is that searing study of a case of incipient Narcissism, “The Flirt” (1913).

“Devastating novels” have recently burst about here and there upon the scene. But they also have been known before in American fiction, and in Mr. Tarkington’s own career. The book, “In the Arena” (1905), the result in writing of his spin in Indiana practical politics, is as driving in indignation and vehemence, as mordant, as anything you please – and also has the merit, in its sharp, smashing style, of being perfectly coherent. And here Mr. Tarkington first definitely revealed his power as a satirist, a critic – which was at length to be cultivated as his vocation.

There are still persons about who when you happen to say “Tarkington” pronounce the word “Beaucaire” – the name, indeed, of an indubitable classic in our literature (1900). As late as 1911 or so there were any number of people, and professional critics among them, who did this right along. The author (later on) of “Alice Adams” was (with reason enough) written down in the books as a confirmed romanticist.

Back in his college days Mr. Tarkington was having his fling at verses announcing that “I ’tend My Lady’s Drum,” one-act comedies having to do with such swashbuckling blades as Light Horse Lee and his connection with the kisses of one Marjorie, and was contributing to the mail of Richard Mansfield bulky envelopes containing plays especially written for that ornament of the stage. So came about the exquisite tale of “gamblist” barber and the Beauty of Bath. “Beaucaire” had the lot of being turned down by a magazine in 1897. Then the cape and plume came into a tremendous stir in literature, and “Monsieur” (in 1900) rode into immense and instantaneous favor on the crest of the great wave of romanticism. Gone are the rest of the glittering throng of costume romances of that time; but “Monsieur Beaucaire” remains today a precious bibilot, unassailable in its kind of thing.

Mr. Tarkington’s highly distinctive flair for the debonair has given us several altogether charming things. “The Beautiful Lady,” for one, surpassing in its whimsically tender humor, is a book to be liked the more, I think, the more often one reads it. The brilliance, clarity, compactness and finish of the style of sundry of these earlier shorter pieces is comparable to the genius of French literature. Of his earlier shorter pieces Mr. Tarkington himself sets considerable store by “Beauty and the Jacobin” (1912), as marking a “turning point” in his writing, a breaking away from “write-y” writing, and his first consistent effort to work from the inside of his characters outward.

A quality early displayed in Mr. Tarkington’s writing dealing with the life about him was a homely, horse-sense philosophy, an instinct that is not to be bamboozled by meretricious standards of civilization, a tang racy of our native soil: Mark Twain, Riley, Howells, Miss Fanchon, that grown-up little girl of New York, Long Shore, and Paris, who made this criticism of Penrod, would probably find him a bit “boorjaw.” His foreign stories point a very homespun moral as to the wholesome things back home. The attraction of simple, joyous domestic life is a sentiment abundantly felt in his books.

Mr. Tarkington has always had great luck with his minor characters. Indeed, this sometimes was one of his failings as an artist: the inconsequential figure was not unlikely to be more human than one playing a more important part. I suspect that this fact by chance led to the birth of “Penrod” and “Seventeen.” Cora Madison (in “The Flirt”) had a small brother, aged about thirteen, Hedrick the Pest, domestic savage. And Hedrick, descendant of Tom Sawyer, probably grew and grew until he fathered a progeny: Penrod Schofield, Sam Williams, William Baxter, et al.; and thus made the world far and away a merrier place than it had been before. Mr. Tarkington’s boys are amazing studies in primeval man.

In his boy stories Mr. Tarkington made a decisive jump in his style. He very decidedly began to get rid of the “ink” as he puts it. It is largely because the style of these stories is, so to say, no style at all, no costume in which the thought is dressed, that it is so fine merely as style. It imposes no film of consciousness of it self between the mind of the reader and that of the writer. (I have found no other way but to repeat here, in trying to comment on this style, what I one time wrote in another place.) And keeping away from being “literary,” “getting rid of the ink,” is now one of Mr. Tarkington’s major obsessions.

Among Mr. Tarkington’s minor personages which no reader would willingly let die are, of course, his dogs, cats, and colored people. They form a Comédie Humaine in themselves.

Whether or not some of our autobiographical novelists are going to continue on to becoming genuine novelists is a question. From John Harkless to Alice Adamswas a long journey, at which we have glanced. Something of the autobiographical note remained with Mr. Tarkington down through “The Turmoil,” but that he is no longer dependent upon it is now quite clear. He has continually been sloughing off from his art the extraneous. It is now very clean and sure. “Alice Adams” went much deeper than it seemed. It consummately concealed thirty years of toil. There is more in that than is now commonly thought to be.

And there is another thing. In many of Mr. Tarkington’s books, as the reviewers used to be fond of pointing out, he gave his characters a certain whole-souled quality which made them a little bit too good to be true. He had a strong vein of liking for people. That’s somewhat out of the first literary fashion today. But fashions in these matters change, sometimes quickly. What in Mr. Tarkington was undoubtedly (for a painter of the scene about him) an excess of friendly sentiment has been duly moderated. He can display quite enough malice now on occasion to be distinctly penetrating. But he retains, too, throughout his fiber an ample amount of the rich human sympathy which has woven into the hearts of men the figments of the fathers of the English novel.

Well, Goodby –
Enjoy Yourself!

“I hope you enjoy yourself.” … “Well, goodby, enjoy yourself.”

The pleasant season of the year approaches with jocund summertime when we hear on every hand such an amiable adieu addressed to one off for any kind of a holiday. It expresses the kindliest thought we know – one person’s desire for another’s happiness. And the universal conception of the ends of life, you might say, is – to enjoy oneself.

Yet very few people, indeed (you might add), have any conception at all of the simple (yet esoteric) process of one’s enjoying oneself. What is really meant by the amicable au revoir is that it is wished that the departing one may have what is popularly termed “a good time.”

And though one capable of such experience may have a very good time indeed enjoying oneself, one who declares that he did have a good time does not necessarily communicate the intelligence that the way in which he did this was to enjoy himself.

Indeed, left high and dry with nothing but ourselves to enjoy, most of us would have, and would declare with some vigor that we had had, the very devil of a miserable time. A story in a recent number of a prodigiously popular magazine presents an unfortunate gentleman whose deuce of a plight will readily be recognized by multitudes. He is discovered, in evening dress, seated at a table in his home. The discerning author says of him: “The expression of his face is some what marred by discontent, as of a man left too much alone.”

Poor dog! His evening clothes indicate his capacity for the relish of a good time; and there he is, by a table, with nothing but himself to enjoy.

Now the surpassingly lucky thing about the fellow who has acquired the rare conjuring trick of enjoying himself, and the reason he has the drop, so to speak, on all those without it, is this: he always has himself with him. He can’t mislay himself. Or have himself stolen from him. Or taken from him by process of law. No accident of the weather can separate him from himself. No ticket of admission to the performance within himself is required of him. No train, nor taxi, nor motor car, subject to mishap and delay, is necessary to get him there. He always has a capital seat at the show. He is beyond all vicissitudes of fortune. Invulnerable.

Of course, when a man enjoys the society of his friends, or the spectacle of a prize fight, or the admiration of his associates, or the discomfiture of his enemy, or any highly agreeable thing like that, he may quite fairly be said to be at the same time enjoying himself after a fashion. And, certainly, in order to get the fullest enjoyment out of his life it is an excellent thing for a man to see as many prize fights, and have as many friends, and enemies, as possible. This is highly advisable for two reasons. First, naturally, a man enjoys these experiences when they are present with him.

But, alas! at length it may be our enemies are taken, friendships fall through, prize fights (and all entertainments of a joyful nature) become prohibited, and a man who has lived abundantly is left alone. Maybe, if he has lived very abundantly indeed, cast into jail. What happens to him then? One of two things.

He whose habit is to depend upon contact with external things leans upon a reed. When the reed is broken he is done for, and is more wretched than if he had never had anything.

Some persons (to change the figure from the reed) suspend the comfort of their minds by a hair. I went not long ago with a friend of mine for a few days down at a seaside resort. He was supposed to benefit by having what is called “a complete change.” He was supposed to have his mind distracted; and his mind became distracted, all right. It developed that he was dependent upon his mail. When he got up in the morning and didn’t find his customary batch of letters he was apparently bewildered, then depressed, then haunted by the sensation of being somehow sadly frustrated. He could not get further than a couple of hours away from the hotel. He had to be coming back at intervals to see if any mail had come for him yet, though (he admitted) he was not expecting anything in particular nor of especial importance. His outing was ruined. He could not enjoy himself. Didn’t know how.

A man, I should say, should be continually keeping himself conscious of the multitudinous enjoyable elements of his life. He should forever be reminding himself that he is enjoying the warmth of a fire, or the taste of a pie, or the play of wind on his face, or the sounds of the night, or reflections in the water, or the absurdity of his companion, or any such thing.

I knew a young fellow who had immense zest of life. He came to see me one time when I was exceedingly ill, unable to get out of bed, all my affairs going to ruin, and in a very despondent frame of mind. I was somewhat startled to discover that he apparently expected me to accept the situation as some sort of lark. “You must find it highly amusing,” he gaily remarked, “to be laid up helpless this way, no control over anything, other people having to do everything for you.” Then I realized that indeed he was the sort of person who himself would contrive to find some philosophic amusement in such a state of affairs. Would be a kind of novelty to him. And so in the course of a little time by his genius for living he got me into a much more cheerful point of view. I really did begin to see myself as one in rather a romantic predicament. He was more good to me than all the condoling friends taken together. And I remember with much enjoyment now his jaunty way of taking my misfortune.

Everybody remembers the story of Dr. Johnson being discovered one day sitting solitarily eating an apple and entertaining himself by reading a history of Manchester. He confessed that the volume was a little dull, but it was the only book he had at hand and he was a man who could read anything with some enjoyment. A man who has read much, of course always has one entertaining thought to rub against another in his mind. And the books you enjoy now are like so many dollars laid away as a kind of old age insurance against the time when, maybe, you lose your taste for reading, or are removed from books for a period, or go blind, or some other perverse turn of fortune comes upon you.

So also, it should be, of all the other things you consciously enjoy – sunsets and paintings and people you meet.

But chiefest of all, it behooves one who would continually taste the inner enjoyment of his life so to deal in his affairs as always in Stevenson’s phrase) to keep friends with himself.

Well, goodby; old friend – enjoy yourself!