Meredith Nicholson

“ November is still young when we are dragged upon the threshold of another year. The leisurely dismissal of the old year is no longer possible; we may indulge in no lingering good-bye, but the old fellow hustles out in haste, with apologetic, shrinking step and we slam the door upon him. It is off with the old love and on with the new, whether we will or no. I solemnly protest against the invasion of the calendar. In an age that boasts of freedom, I rebel against a tyrant who comes merely to warn us of the fugitive character of Time ”

“ There you would have a critic who could view our world with fresh eyes. What we were yesterday would mean nothing to him, and what we are to-day he might judge honestly from a standpoint of utility or beauty. Not what was old or new, but what was good, would interest him—not whether our morals are better than those of our ancestors, but whether they are of any use at all. ”

“ If Milwaukee wishes to try socialism, the rest of us need not complain. Democracy will cease to be democracy when all its problems are solved and everybody votes the same ticket.
States that produce the most cranks are prodigal of the corn that pays the dividends on the railroads the cranks despise. Indiana’s amiable feeling toward New York is not altered by her sister’s rejection or acceptance of the direct primary, a benevolent device of noblest intention, under which, not long ago, in my own commonwealth, my fellow citizens expressed their distrust of me with unmistakable emphasis. ”

“ A Boston newspaper which I greatly admire once published an editorial in which I was pilloried as a type of writer who basely commercializes his talent. It was a cruel stab; for, unlike my heroes, I do not wear a mail-shirt under my dress-coat. Once, wandering into a church in my own city, at a time when a dramatized version of one of my stories was offered at a local theatre, I listened to a sermon that dealt in the harshest terms with such fiction and drama.
Extravagant or ignorant praise is, to most of us, as disheartening as stupid and unjust criticism. ”

“ Verily in experience lies our hope. In learning what to do and what not to do, in stumbling, falling to rise again and faring ever upward and onward. Yes, in and through experience lies our hope, but not, O brother, a wisdom gained vicariously,—not yours for me nor mine for [106] you,—nor from enduring books, charm they never so wisely,—but every one of us, old and young, for himself.
Literature is rich in advice that is utterly worthless. ”

“ The youth of a world that never grows old is in Fanny’s heart. She is to Smith as a Goddess of Liberty in short skirt and sweater, come down from her pedestal to lead the way to green pastures beside waters of comfort. She has become to him not merely the spirit of youth but of life, and his dependence upon her is complete. ”

“ To be old and to know ten thousand things—there is something august and majestic in the thought; but to be young and ignorant, to see yesterday pass, a shining ripple on the flood of oblivion, and then to buckle down to the day’s business,—there’s a better thing than being old and wise! We are forever praising the unconscious ease of great literature ”

“ No American really wants to be a child again. It was with a distinct shock that I heard recently a child of five telephoning for an automobile in a town that had been threatened by hostile Indians not more than thirty years ago. Our children avail themselves with the coolest condescension of all the apparatus of our complex [179] modern life: they are a thousand years old the day they are born.
The farmer who once welcomed the lightning-rod salesman as a friend of mankind is moving to town now and languidly supervising the tilling of his acres from an automobile. ”

“ I confess to a persistent need in my own life for the support, the stimulus, the hope, that is inherent in the teachings of Christianity; nevertheless the church—that is to say, the Protestantism with which I am familiar—has seemed to me increasingly a wholly inadequate medium for communicating to men such as Smith and myself the help and inspiration of the vision of Christ. There are far too many Smiths who do not care particularly whether the churches prosper or die. And I urge that Smith is worthy of the church’s best consideration. ”

“ Nothing in our political system could be wiser than our dispersion into provinces. Sweep from the map the lines that divide the States and we should huddle like sheep suddenly deprived of the protection of known walls and flung upon the open prairie. State lines and local pride are in themselves a pledge of stability. The elasticity of our system makes possible a variety of governmental experiments by which the whole country profits. We should all rejoice that the parochial mind is so open, so eager, so earnest, so tolerant. ”

“ Booth Tarkington, the most cosmopolitan of Hoosiers, has lifted the banner anew for a younger generation through his successful essays in fiction and the drama.
If you do not in this provincial capital meet an author at every corner, you are at least never safe from men and women who read books. In many Missouri River towns a stranger must still listen to the old wail against the railroads; at Indianapolis he must listen to politics, and possibly some one will ask his opinion of a sonnet, just as though it were a cigar. ”

“ It is a legitimate part of their nefarious game: you and I are their natural prey, and if they can accent for us the mortality of the flesh by holding up before us, in compact form, the slight round of the year, they are doing much to impress upon us the appalling brevity of our most reasonable expectancy. How weak we are to suffer the intimidation of these soulless corporations, who thrust their wares upon us as much as to say, “Here’s a new year, and you’d better make the most of it, for there’s no saying when you will get another.” ”

“ If left to itself, the old Indianapolis would never have known a horse show or a carnival,—would never have strewn itself with confetti, or boasted the greatest [70] automobile speedway in the world; but the invading time-spirit has rapidly destroyed the walls of the city of tradition. Business men no longer go home to dinner at twelve o’clock and take a nap before returning to work; and the old amiable habit of visiting for an hour in an office where ten minutes of business was to be transacted has passed. ”

“ I find with joy that I am freeing myself of the tyrant’s thrall. I am never quite sure of the day of the week; I date my letters yesterday or to-morrow with equal indifference. June usually thrusts her roses into my windows before I change the year in dating my letters. The magazines seem leagued with the calendar for man’s undoing. I sometimes rush home from an inspection of a magazine counter in mad haste to get where Oblivion cannot stretch forth a long, lean arm and pluck me into the eternal shades ”

“ If life were an agreed state of facts and not a joyful experiment, then we might lean upon biography as final; but in this and in all matters, let us deal squarely with Youth. Boswell’s “Johnson” is only gossip raised to the highest power; the reading of it will make Septimus cheerfuler, but it will not keep him from wearing a dinner coat to a five o’clock tea or teach him how to earn more than four dollars a week.
We have brought existence to an ideal state when at every breakfast table we face a new world with no more use for yesterday than for the grounds of yesterday’s coffee. ”

“ A panacea for the ills of the church is something no one expects to find; and those who are satisfied with the church as it stands, and believe it to be unmenaced by danger,—who see the Will of God manifested even in Smith’s disaffection, will not be interested in my opinion that, of all the suggestions that have been made for the renewal of the church’s life, church union, upon the broadest lines, directed to the increase of the church’s efficiency in spiritual and social service, is the one most likely to bring Smith back to the fold. ”

“ No American boy born during or immediately after the Civil War can have escaped in those years the vivid impressions derived from the sight and speech of men who had fought its battles, or women who had known its terror and grief. ”

“ We are old enough now—we of the West—to have built up in ourselves a species of wisdom, founded upon experience, which is a part of the continuing, unwritten law of democracy. We are less likely these days to “wobble right” than we are to stand fast or march forward like an army with banners. ”

“ And in all these places some particular Smith is always moving to Chicago or Boston or New York on his way to a sanatorium or Bad Neuheim and a German specialist! Innumerable Smiths, not yet so prosperous as the old friend I encountered in Berlin, are abandoning their flower-gardens and the cozy verandas (sacred to neighborhood confidences on the long summer evenings) and their gusty registers for compact and steam-heated apartments with only the roof-garden overhead as a breathing-place.
There seems to be no field in which the weary Smith is not exercising a baneful influence. ”

“ Surely Homer is respectable; and the Iliad, the most strenuous, the most glorious and sublime of fictions, with the very gods drawn into the [230] moving scenes, has, by reason of its tremendous energy and its tumultuous drama, not less than for its majesty as literature, established its right to be called the longest-selling fiction of the ages.
All the world loves a story; the regret is that the great novelists—great in penetration and sincerity and style—do not always have the story-telling knack. ”

“ The reliance of the Hebrews on the beneficence of Jehovah, the testimony of Jesus to the enduring worth of charity, mercy, and love, have in nowise been injured by textual criticism. The Old Testament, fancifully imagined as the Word of God given by dictation to specially chosen amanuenses, appeals to me no more strongly than a Bible recognized as the vision of brooding spirits, who, in a time when the world was young, and earth was nearer heaven than now, were conscious of longings and dreams that were wonderfully realized in their own hearts and lives. ”

“ A March magazine flung into the teeth of a February blizzard does not fool the daffodils a particle. This stamping of months that have not arrived upon our current literature is nothing more or less than counterfeiting;—or rather, the issuing of false currency by the old Tyrant who stands behind the counter of the Bank of Time. ”

“ I recall, with shame, having averaged a dozen books an afternoon; and some of my critics have clearly averaged two dozen, with my poor candidates for oblivion at the bottom of the heap! Much American criticism is stupid or ignorant; but the most depressing, from my standpoint, is the flippant sort of thing which many newspapers print habitually. The stage, also, suffers like treatment, even in some of the more reputable metropolitan journals. Unless your book affords a text for a cynical newspaper “story,” it is quite likely to be ignored. ”

“ Realism, with the same agreed state of facts, recognizes the girl immediately—and spoils the story. Or I might put it thus: in realism, much or all is obvious in the first act; in romance, nothing is quite clear until the third. This is why romance is more popular than realism, for we are all children and want to be surprised. Why villains should always be so stupid, and why heroines should so perversely misunderstand the noble motives of heroes, are questions I cannot answer. ”

“ This contact between town and country tends to stimulate a state feeling, and as the capital grows this intimacy will have an increasing value.
There is something neighborly and cozy about Indianapolis. The man across the street or next door will share any good thing he has with you, whether it be a cure for rheumatism, a new book, or the garden hose. It is a town where doing as one likes is not a mere possibility, but an inherent right. The woman of Indianapolis is not afraid to venture abroad with her market-basket, albeit she may carry it in an automobile. ”

“ I know well the insinuating smile of the friend who, dropping in on a peaceful morning, when Time, as far as I am concerned, has paused in the hay-field to dream upon his scythe handle, walks coolly to the calendar and brings me up to date with a fine air of rebuke, as though he were conferring the greatest favor in the world. I am sure that I should have no standing with my neighbors if they knew that I rarely wind my watch and that the clocks in my house, save [110] one or two that are kept going merely to avoid explanations, are never wound. ”

“ The church is either the repository of the Christian religion on earth, the divinely inspired and blessed tabernacle of the faith of Christ, or it is a stupendous fraud. There is no sound reason why the church should not be required to give an account of its stewardship. If it no longer attracts men and women in our strenuous and impatient America, then it is manifestly unjust to deny to outsiders the right of criticism. Smith is far from being a fool, and if by his test of “What’s in it for me?” ”

“ This busy, helpful, institutional church, welcoming under one roof men of all degrees, to broaden, sweeten, and enlighten their lives, need ask no more of those who accept its service than that they believe in a God who ever lives and loves, and in Christ, who appeared on earth in His name to preach justice, mercy, charity, and kindness. ”