Meredith Nicholson

“ The fiction magazines also have cut into the sale of ephemeral novels. For the price of one novel the uncritical reader may fortify himself with enough reading matter to keep him diverted for a month. Nowadays the hurrying citizen approaches the magazine counter in much the same spirit in which he attacks the help-yourself lunch-trough—grabs what he likes and retires for hurried consumption. It must, however, be said for the much-execrated magazine editors that with all their faults and defaults they are at least alive to the importance and value of American material. ”

“ An increasing number of American citizens are unfit to be seen at the breakfast hour; and a man, woman, or child who cannot present a cheery countenance at breakfast is living an unhealthy life upon the brink of disaster. A hasty visit to the table, the gulping of coffee, the vicious snapping of teeth upon food scarcely looked at, and a wild rush to keep the first appointment noted on the calendar, is the poorest possible preparation for a day of honest work. The man who follows this practice is a terror to his business associates. ”

“ This is no time to lose confidence in democracy; it is too soon to chant the recessional of the race. Much too insistently we have sought to reform, to improve, to plant the seeds of culture, to create moral perfection by act of Congress. If Main Street knows what America is all about, and bathes itself and is kind and considerate of its neighbors, why not leave the rest on the knees of the gods? ”

“ The zest of a fine morning in London, the deliberation of a gentleman taking his ease in his club and fortifying himself against the day’s events with a satisfying breakfast, are communicated to the reader in a manner that at once inspires confidence and arouses the liveliest expectations. I shall not go the length of saying that all novels should begin with breakfast, but where the disclosures are to be of moment, and we are to be urged upon adventures calculated to tax our emotions or our staying powers, a breakfast table serves admirably as a point of departure. ”

“ Already too many forces are operating to beat down the imagination. I charge this monstrosity upon the propagandists of realism; certainly no romanticist in the full possession of his powers would tolerate a thing so deadly to the play of fancy. I want neither the No. 7 nor the No. 9 prescribed on the card; and the waiter’s index finger wabbling down the margin in an attempt to assist me is an affront, an impudence. Breakfast should be an affair between man and his own soul; a business for the initiative, not the referendum. ”

“ We became slightly cynical at times, in the way of Americans who talk politics heart-to-heart. The national convention, where there is a thrill in the sonority of the very names of the far-flung commonwealths as they are recited on roll-call, is, on the face of it, a glorious expression of democracy at work. But in actual operation every one knows that a national convention is only nominally representative. The delegates in their appointed places are not free and independent American citizens, assembled, as we would believe, to exercise their best judgment as trustees of the “folks back home.” ”

“ In such towns, it is quite possible, if you are an amiable being, to know well-nigh every one. The main thoroughfare is a place of fascinations, the stage for a continuing drama. Carrier delivery destroys the old joy of meeting all the folks at the post-office, but most of the citizens, male and female, find some excuse for a daily visit to Main Street. They are bound together by dear and close ties. You’ve got to know your neighbors whether you want to or not, and it’s well for the health of your soul to know them and be of use to them when you can. ”

“ A breakfast must be planned with greatest care. It should never be resorted to as a means of paying social debts, but arranged with the utmost independence. Where a wife is a desirable guest and the husband is not, there is no reason why a plate should be wasted. On the other hand, I should as rigidly exclude the [86] wife who is socially a non-conductor. The talk at a breakfast table must be spirited, and it will not be otherwise if the company is well chosen. It’s an absurd idea that candle-light is essential to sociability and that wit will not sparkle in the early morning. ”

“ There is something finely spiritual about corn that grows like a forest in Kansas and Nebraska. And Democracy is like unto it—the plowing, and the sowing, and the tending to keep the weeds out. We can’t scratch a single acre and say all the soil’s bad;—it may be wonderfully rich in the next township!
It is the way of nature to be perverse and to fashion the good and great out of the least promising clay. Country men and small-town men have preponderated in our national counsels and all things considered they haven’t done so badly. Greatness has a way of unfolding itself ”

“ If I am right—or only half right—in my assertion that we are governed very largely by second-rate men and that public business is confided chiefly to the unfit, then here is a matter that cannot be ignored by those who look forward hopefully to the future of American democracy. There are more dangers within than without, and our tame acceptance of incompetence in civil office would certainly bring calamity if suffered in a military establishment. The reluctance of first-rate men to accept or seek office is more disquieting than the slow enlistments in the army and navy. ”

“ It is only a superstition that night alone affords the proper atmosphere for romance, and that the curtain must fall upon the first scene with the dead face of the king’s messenger upturned to the moon and the landlord bawling from an upper window to know what it’s all about. Morning is the beginning of all things. Its hours breathe life and hope. “Pistols and coffee!” The phrase whets the appetite both for the encounter and the cheering cup. The duel, to be sure, is no longer in favor, and it is not for me to lament its passing ”

“ It would seem that no one could or would wantonly ruin an egg, a thing so useful, so inoffensive; and yet the proper cooking of an egg is one of the most difficult of all culinary arts. Millions of eggs are ruined every year in American kitchens. Better that the whole annual output should be cast into the sea than that one egg should offend the eye and the palate of the expectant breakfaster.
It grieves me to be obliged to confess that in hotels and on dining-cars, particularly west of Pittsburgh, many of my fellow citizens are weak before the temptation of hot cakes, drenched in syrup. ”

“ Old age rises early and calls for breakfast and the day’s news. Grandfather is entitled to his breakfast at any hour he demands it. He is at an age when every hour stolen from the night is fairly plucked from oblivion, and to offer him breakfast in bed as more convenient to the household, or with a well-meant intention of easing the day for him, is merely to wound his feelings. ”

“ Perhaps I answer the riddles of the earnest critics of education the more cheerfully from the very fact of my benightedness. When the doors are closed and the potent, grave, and reverend signiors go into committee of the whole to determine why education does not indeed educate—there, in such a company, I am not only an eager listener but, with the slightest encouragement, I announce and defend my opinions.
Millions are expended every year for the public enlightenment, and yet no one is satisfied either with the method or the result. Some one is always trying to do something for culture. ”

“ As a people we are strongly aroused and our imagination quickened by anything that may be viewed in a glow of spirituality; and a scheme of peace insurance already in operation would have proved a dangerous thing to attack. But the league’s moral and spiritual aspects have been marred or lost. The patience of the people has been exhausted by the long debate about it, and the pettiness and insincerity, the contemptible evasion and hair-splitting, that have marked the controversy over what is, in its purpose and aim, a crystallization of the hope of mankind in all the ages. ”

“ Ancestry and environment are not negligible factors, yet if Lincoln had been born in New York and Roosevelt in a Kentucky log cabin, both would have reached the White House. In the common phrase, you can’t keep a good man down. The distinguishing achievement of Drinkwater’s Lincoln is not merely his superb realization of a great character, but the sense so happily communicated, of a wisdom deep-planted in the general heart of man. It isn’t all just luck, the workings of our democracy. If there’s any manifestation on earth of a divine ordering of things, it is here in America. ”

“ When I hear of an addition to the long list, I fly at once to the grocer to obtain one of the crisp packages, and [81] hurry home to deposit it with the cook for early experiment. The adventurous sense is roused not only by the seductive advertisement but by the neatness of the container, the ears of corn or the wheat sheaf so vividly depicted on the wrapper, or the contagious smile of a radiant child brandishing a spoon and demanding more.
Only a slouchy and unimaginative housewife will repeat monotonously a breakfast schedule. ”

“ I shall not undertake to depict the horror and chagrin of the assembled citizens when they beheld, instead of the statue of Follonsby, which they were prepared to see, or a symbolic representation of the city itself as a flower-crowned maiden, the familiar pudgy figure, reproduced with the most cruel fidelity, of Mike O’Grady, known as “Silent Mike,” a big bipartisan boss who had for years dominated municipal affairs, and who had but lately gone to his reward. ”

“ Snobbishness must not enter into this matter of breakfast reform; rich and poor alike must be persuaded that the morning meal is deserving of all respect, that it is the first act of the day’s drama, not to be performed in a slipshod fashion to spoil the rest of the play. It is the first chapter of a story, and every one who has dallied with the art of fiction knows that not merely the first chapter but the first line must stir the reader’s imagination. ”

“ But those of us who are able to ponder “the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world” in the spirit of that period must reflect, a little ruefully, that the new schemes and devices of education to which we pointed with pride have not turned the trick. The machinery of enlightenment has, of course, greatly multiplied. The flag waves on innumerable schoolhouses; literature, art, music are nowhere friendless. The women of America make war ceaselessly upon [20] philistinism, and no one attentive to their labors can question their sincerity or their intelligence. ”

“ Nothing in history supports a blind faith in numbers or in the wisdom of majorities. America’s hope lies in the multiplication of the fit—the saving remnant of Isaiah’s prophecies and Plato’s philosophy—a doctrine applied to America by Matthew Arnold, who remains one of the shrewdest and most penetrating of all our critics. Mr. Arnold distrusted numbers and had no confidence in majorities. He said:
To be a voice outside the state, speaking to mankind or to the future, perhaps shaking the actual state to pieces in doing so, one man will suffice. ”

“ In sending from the homebound ship an invitation to the august Foreign Relations committee to gather at the White House at an hour appointed and hear the good news that a league was in prospect, the President once more displayed a lamentable ignorance of human nature. His attitude was a trifle too much like that of a parent returning from a journey and piquing the curiosity of his household by a message conveying the glad tidings that he was bringing presents for their delight. There are one hundred millions of us, and we are not to be managed in this way. ”