Bert Leston Taylor

“ It is like some finely wrought Greek idyl, the apotheosis of the pastoral, perfect in detail, without apparent effort, gently, tenderly emotional, without a trace of passionate intensity or restless agitation, innocent and depending, as a mere babe. It is the mood of a bright, cloudless day on the upland pastures, where happy shepherds watch their peaceful flocks, untroubled by the storm and stress of our modern life, a mood so foreign to the hearts and environment of most present day human beings, that it is rarely understood by player or hearer, and still more rarely enjoyed. ”

“ When one consults what he is pleased to call his mind, this planet seems the saddest and maddest of possible worlds. And when one walks homeward under a waning moon, through Suburbia’s deserted lanes, between hedges that exhale the breath of lilac and honeysuckle, the world seems a very satisfactory half-way house on the road to the Unknown. Shall we trust our intelligence or our senses? ”

“ Rime, that exquisite echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rime, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of material beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain ”

“ I do not fancy the elevated parts of New Mexico and Arizona; and as there was no thought of pleasing me when they were created, I feel free to express a modified rapture in their contemplation. I should have remembered enough geology to know that granite is not found in this section, except at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The hills I like are made of old-fashioned stuff, not young upstart tufa and sandstone that was not thought of when the Laurentians were built. One really cannot have much respect for a rock that he can kick to pieces. ”

“ Whenever we animadvert on the human race we include ourself. We share its imperfections, and we hope we are tinctured with its few virtues. As a race it impresses us as a flivver; we feel as you, perhaps, feel in your club when, looking over the members, you wonder how the dickens most of them got in. ”

“ People who are naturally kind of heart, and of less than average selfishness, wish that the impossible might be compassed, but, unless they are half-witted, or are paid agitators, they recognize that the impossible is well named. Self-interest is the core of human nature, and before that core could be appreciably modified, if ever, the supply of heat from the sun would be so reduced that the noblest enthusiasm would be chilled. The utmost achievable in this sad world is an enlightened self-interest. This we expect of the United States when the peace makers gather. ”

“ The gadder takes a bunch of toothpicks after each meal and pouches them; the farmer takes only one, and when he is finished with it he puts it back.
If Plato were writing to-day he would have no occasion to revise his notion of democracy—“a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike.”
The older we grow the more impressed we are by the amount of bias in the world. Thank heaven, the only prejudices we have are religious, racial, and social prejudices. In other respects we are open to reason. ”

“ Two or three hundred yards has been the limit of the view ahead, as the stream swerves gracefully from the slightest rise of land, and flows now east, now north, now east, now south again. So long a stretch of navigable water is not common on the Delectable River, and we make the most of it, moving leisurely, and prisoning the everchanging picture with the imperfect camera of the eyes. ”

“ The funny thing about climbers is that they never deceive anybody; every one knows just what they are up to. As Jack had inherited the climbing passion he began without hesitation to ascend the beanstalk, and when he reached the top he was as tired as if he had spent the day laying bricks or selling goods behind a counter ”

“ We were engaged in dropping newly-minted double-eagles into the Christmas stockings of our contributors when an auto truck got mired near our chamber window, and the roar of it woke us up.
Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, and other Orientals are disliked, not because of race or color, but because they are willing to work. Anyone who is willing to work in these times is, like the needy knife-grinder, a wretch whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to vengeance. ”

“ You do not have to exclaim, when a fresh locomotive is violently attached, “Well, I see we got an engine”—there is always somebody to say it for you. And you write your orders in the dining car. There is, of course, the chance of being accosted in the club car, but since this went dry the danger has been slight. And conversation can always be averted by absorption in a book, or, in a crisis, by pretending to be dumb.
Not everybody can travel three or four days without exchanging words with a fellow traveler. Mr. George Moore, for example, would be quite wretched. ”

“ It is a great pleasure to be free, for a time, from the practice of expressing opinion; free to read the newspapers with no thought of commenting on the contents; free to glance at a few hectic headlines, and then bite into a book that you have meant to get to for a long time past, to read it slowly, without skipping, to read over an especially well done page and to put the book aside and meditate on the moral which it pointed, or left you to point. ”

“ Even Percival and Melisande were impressed. One door stood invitingly open and the children sprang into the machine. They were accustomed to helping themselves to everything that took their fancy; they had inherited the instinct.
Percival turned on the gas. “Hang on to your hair, sis!” he cried, and he burnt up the road all the way home, capsizing the outfit in front of the mansion and wrecking the automobile.
Their mamma came slowly down the veranda steps with a strange gentleman by her side. “These are the children, Edward,” she said, picking them up, uninjured by the spill. ”

“ Democracy has the greatest inducement to elect representatives who are representative, who, in the first place, resemble it as closely as possible, who, in the second place, have no individuality of their own, who, finally, having no fortune of their own, have no sort of independence. ”

“ His prejudices will be, at first, by a feeble sort of conviction, afterward, by reason of his own interest, identical with those of the crowd; and lastly, his poverty and the impossibility of his getting a living outside of politics make it certain that he will never break out of the narrow circle where his political employers have confined him; his imperative mandate is the material necessity which obliges him to obey; his imperative mandate is his inability to quarrel with his bread and butter. ”

“ Music like Brahms’ Second Symphony is peculiarly satisfying to the listener. The first few measures disclose that the composer is in complete control of his ideas and his expression of them. He has something to say, and he says it without uncertainty or redundancy. Only a man who has something to say may dare to say it only once. ”

“ Fairies don’t get bored until they grow old, or at least middle-aged.”
“It’s a wonder,” said Jack, “that the Giant doesn’t bore himself to death some day.”
“He might,” said the Fairy, “if it were not for his wonderful talking harp, which keeps harping upon Socialism, and the single tax, and the rights of labor, and a lot of other mush; but you see it keeps Ennui stirred up, so that he is never bored entirely stiff.”
“Well,” said Jack, “me for that harp, if I die for it!” ”

“ As my friend the Librarian observed, the difference between George Moore and Baron Munchausen is that Moore’s lies are interesting.
Travelers must carry their own reading matter under government ownership. The club car library now consists of time-tables, maps, and pamphlets setting forth the never to be forgotten attractions of the show places along the way. These are all written by the celebrated prose poet Ibid, and, with a bottle of pseudo beer or lemon pop, help to make the club car as gay a place as a mortician’s parlor on a rainy afternoon. ”

“ And so you are to imagine a marshy, brushy open, circular in shape, from which the hills and forest recede for a considerable distance, and into which a lazy brook comes to merge with the Delectable River; a place to which the moose travel in great numbers, as hoofmarks and cropped vegetation bear witness; a wild place, that must be wonderful in mist and moonlight. ”

“ She had an only son, Jack—a giddy, thoughtless boy, but very kindhearted, as many a hard-working chorus girl had reason to remember. Jack was an idle fellow, whose single accomplishment was driving an automobile, in which he displayed remarkable skill and recklessness; there was hardly a day he did not run over something or somebody. One day he bumped a very heavy workingman, whose remains messed up the car so badly that Jack’s mother lost patience with him. “My dear,” she said, “why don’t you put your skill and energy to some use? ”

“ The fact that Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and other great departed whose names are taken in vain every day by small-bore politicians, do not return and whack these persons over the heads with a tambourine, is almost—as Anatole France remarked in an essay on Flaubert—is almost an argument against the immortality of the soul. ”

“ In one romantic open, where the stream flows thinly over a long stretch of sand, the bed is of an almost luminous amber, as if its particles had imprisoned a little of the sunlight that had fallen on them through the unnumbered years. ”

“ Our cub reporter friend, W. H. D., who expects to run a column presently, should not overlook the sure-fire wheeze, “Shoes shined on the inside.”
Still undiscouraged by the failure of his “shoes shined on the inside” wheeze to get by, the new contrib hopefully sends us the laundry slogan: “Don’t kill your wife. Let us do the dirty work.”
When all the world is safe for democracy, only the aristocracy of taste will remain, and this will cover the world. There is hardly a town so small that it does not contain at least one member. ”

“ Americans who speak at French should confine their conversation to other Americans similarly talented. They should not practise on French people, whose delicate ear is no more proof against impure accent than a stone is proof against dripping water. ”

“ Since the so-called working classes are unable or unwilling to do so simple a sum as dividing the total wealth of a nation by the number of its inhabitants; since they cannot or will not understand that if the profits of an industry are exceeded by the wages paid, the industry must stop; since they only reason a posteriori when that is well kicked, and by themselves—it is fortunate that the United States has the opportunity to watch the progress of the experiment now making in England.
Nowadays the buying and dispatching of Christmas gifts is scientifically made. ”

“ Instantly a mosquito sings in your ear, and as you still his song you recall a recent statement by the scientist Klein, that an insect’s wings flap four hundred times in a second. The mind does not readily grasp so rapid a motion, but you accept the figures on trust, as you accept the distances of interstellar spaces. ”

“ Trails there are that one remembers from their beginnings to their ends, because of the variety and charm of the pictures offered along the way. Monotony marks the trails that fade from memory; they represent hours of marching through timber of a second growth, or skirting hills where dead sticks stand forlorn and only the fireweed blooms. ”

“ Naturally, or not, we are better amused by the wheezes of contributors. Frexample the following evoked a smile:
“On the train running into Tulsa,” wrote a gadder, “a native was fooling with the roller curtain, when suddenly it flew up with a snap. He looked bewildered, stuck his head out of the window, and finally said to himself, ‘Well, I reckon that’s the last they’ll see of that derned thing!’”
As we have been informed, and as we repeat for the benefit of the School of Journalism, there is nothing to running a column except the knack of writing more or less apt headlines. ”

“ No sooner had blundering man accomplished the ruin of Halifax than Mother Nature sent a blizzard with a foot or two of snow. A kindly dame—as kindly as the old lady of Endor. She has her gentle, her amorous moods, in which we adore her, and write ballads to her beauty ”

“ Referring to the persons who are given to the making of sonnets, Norman Douglas wrote: “I have a sneaking fondness for some of the worst of these bards.... And it is by no means a despicable class of folks who perpetrate such stuff; the third rate sonneteer, a priori, is a gentleman, and this is more than can be said of some of our crude fiction writers who have never yielded themselves to the chastening discipline of verse composition, nor warmed their hearts, for a single instant, at the altar of some generous ideal.” ”

“ Ten or twenty years ago people dismissed as lightly the fear that Prohibition would be saddled on the country. On his way to the compulsory Wednesday-evening prayer meeting, a few years hence, the editor of the News will recall his cheerful and baseless prediction in 1920.
Fired by liquor, men maltreat their wives. These wretches deserve public flogging; hanging were a compliment to some of them. On the other hand, men made emotional by liquor have conceived an extravagant fondness for their wives. ”

“ Eminent educators who are also damn fools are hypermorons, who are intellectual but not truly intelligent. He says of these queer beings:
“The hypermoron may laugh in imitation of others, but he has no original humor and very little original wit. The cause for this is that original wit and humor require unusual combinations of factors; but the very nature of the hypermoron is that he does not arrange and perceive such combinations. When the hypermoron does cause laughter from some speech or action, usually he resents it. ”

“ Ingeborg Bunck was right; there are no illegitimate children; all children are valid. Sounds like Lope de Vega, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. It is Bunck. Whitman, too, divined the truth. Love is a germ; sunlight kills it. ”

“ What is it to hate poetry? It is to have no little dreams and fancies, no holy memories of golden days, to be unmoved by serene midsummer evenings or dawn over wild lands, singing or sunshine, little tales told by the fire a long while since, glow-worms and briar rose ”

“ Alice had never seen paper caps before.
“They’re worn by the laboring man,” said the Hatter; “but you never see them outside of Cartoonland. The plug hats are for Capitalists. I also keep whiskers; siders for Capital and ordinary for Labor.” ”

“ My habitation is as complete as I can wish; I have all the clothing to my need; and my subjects—my man Friday and his father, and the Spaniard—keep me abundantly supplied with food. When I was alone the necessity of husbandry gave me plenty to do, but now I am oppressed by a great lack of matter for occupation, both physical and mental. Questioning myself, I put the blame upon an evil state of mind into which I have fallen, in no longer finding profit in reading my bible and other books, or in meditating on this life and that which is to come. ”

“ But in the second half we have Berlioz and program music.”
“I thought program music was music suitable for programs,” said Mrs. Givu A. Payne.
“Berlioz,” continued Dr. Dubbe, “instituted the ‘musical reform’ in Germany—the new German school of Liszt and Wagner. Berlioz’s music is all on the surface, while Brahms’ music sounds the depths. He uses the contra-bassoon in about all of his orchestral compositions (you will hear it to-day) , and most of his piano works take the last A on the piano. If his bass seems at times muddy it is because he goes so deep that he stirs up the bottom.” ”