Oliver Herford

“ Could the savage rite, described by Strabo, depressing as it must have been, by any possibility be as gloomy as the Testimonial Banquet of today? Is the Guest of Honor, sitting at the High Table feigning unconsciousness, the miserable target for asphyxiating bombs of wit, of anecdote, and of reminiscence—is he any less to be pitied than the deceased relative of the Ivernian dinner? Yet we call ourselves civilized; we think it barbaric to hang a fellow being for anything short of murder. ”

“ There is no profit to be made out of a change in the geography of a trouser-crease. It is purely a matter of self-determination on the part of the inhabitant of the trousers.
If there were no more financial profit to be gained by the remaking of the creases in the map of Europe than is to be got out of changing the trouser-crease, there would be no call for a League of Nations.
Should some inventive tailor (inventive tailor!) devise a crease that could be woven into the very being of the Trouser, then it would be a very different matter. ”

“ Finchsifter was a mental rest cure, his talk was soothing as a verbal brain massage. I conceived that one might form the Finchsifter habit, in time even become a slave to it as men become slaves to cocaine, Psychoanalysis, or Taxicabs. ”

“ With a moon and a mariner’s compass and a good road map or chart, the traveler by land or sea can get along very well without the stars, but in the trackless mazes of literature and art, how would the wandering Philistine fare without Asterisks? ”

“ MR. CHESTERTON AND THE SOLILOQUY “I often talk to myself,” says Mr. G. K. Chesterton, speaking in defense of the stage soliloquy. “If a man does not talk to himself it is because he is not worth talking to.”
The deduction is obvious, but it is based upon false premises. If Mr. Chesterton is worth talking to, it is certainly not because he talks to himself. It is impossible to imagine a more foolish waste of energy than that expended in talking to one’s self. The man who talks to himself is twice damned (as a fool) . ”

“ Unquestionably the fame of Columbus rests upon his impudent pretense of balancing an egg by crushing it violently upon the table. To be sure, Columbus also discovered America, but in that he was only one of a multitude. At that moment in the world’s history the discovering of America was, like golf, something between a sport and an obsession, everybody was discovering America. So common was it, that only a few of the discoverers are remembered by name, and had it not been for his famous egg-balancing fraud the name of Christopher Columbus would surely be among the forgotten ones. ”

“ The Art of Conversation is no longer even a subject for conversation. No one so much as remembers of what it died. Did it languish and fade away into an Eternal Pause as such a dignified gentleman of the old school as the Art of Conversation would be expected to do—or was it murdered? ”

“ One amiable gentleman in particular I always look for and hail with delight when I find myself sitting opposite to him. He is an Italian, I take it, from his appearance, and from Naples, to judge by his accent, which, though I have never heard his voice, is depicted as plainly as the nose on his face.
Neither do I know his name, but I call him Signor Pizzicato, for it is quite evident that nature intended him for an Operatic career. How he ever came to be a barber, I cannot imagine. ”

“ I told him what the magazines pay me.
“What! A dollar a line! Gott in Himmel! we make a fortune! That’s what I tell Rebecca—If we corner all the free verse in the United States and sell it for no more [132] as five cents a line—we make our fortune! but a dollar a line!—Himmel!”—he fairly danced for ecstasy and then it was I made the discovery, by which I lost if not a Fortune at least a Finchsifter. ”

“ O’Brien’s collection, nor will it be necessary; one specimen of the deadly Amonita Bulbosa in a mess of mushrooms is enough to justify the partaker thereof in damning the whole dish, if he live to express any opinion at all; so, if in a collection that claims to be composed of “Best Short Stories” I find one that is very bad in both Substance and Form, indeed so bad in Substance that it hardly deserves to be called a Story at all, I may surely, with perfect justice, damn the whole book as being false to its title and not what it pretends to be. ”

“ Millions of electric volts are pumped into him every day, but he still lives—the more electricity we give him the livelier he grows. He is the Telephone, and the Telephone is the murderer of the Art of Calling. ”

“ As Foreman O’Brien warms up to his subject he will describe in vitally pulsating phrases that would drive a movie writer mad with envy, the convulsion of Nature that attended the birth of the American Short Story. “The ever-widening seething maelstrom of cross currents thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the contributory elements brought to a new American culture by the dynamic creative [151] energies, physical and spiritual, of many races.” ”

“ On certain days when the diamond Lake is still, and the Pine and Laurel corsage is untroubled by a tremor, the starch-white company is doubled by five ghostly “understudies” who reflect their whiteness curve for curve and feather for feather with a fidelity of inversion that may find its match only in the art of a Shaw or a Chesterton. ”

“ If the rabbits are people, cats are people.
Long lives to the cat!
[56]
MLLE. FAUTEUIL It is harder for a table or chair to behave naturally on the stage than for a camel to be free and easy in a needle’s eye, or for Mr. Rockefeller to get into Heaven (or Hell?) with the money.
What can be more pathetic than the spectacle of a helpless young chair or table or settee starting on a stage career shining with gilt varnish and high ambition to reflect in art’s mirror the drawing-room manners of the furniture of real life. ”

“ The terrific scent-energy hurled forth from the seemingly inexhaustible storage battery of an Onion or a Tuberose is more of a mystery to our men of science than is the composition of the crooked light waves from the planet Mars or the height of the flames of the Corona, measured in a solar eclipse. ”

“ The butterfly-winged statue of Femininity that, for three happy leapless years, he worshiped from a safe distance (at the foot of its pedestal) , has come to life, has climbed down from its vestal perch, changed fearfully from cool quiet marble to something of the consistency of warm india rubber—from an adorable image to—the female of the species. ”

“ The behavior of the man of Fortitude is due to the poverty of cerebral tissue in that part of the brain whose function it is to stimulate the activity known as imagination. That is to say, he faces the cannon without the least concern, because he can not imagine what it will be like to have a cannon explode right in his face.
What then are the pathological conditions in the brain of the Dancing man that cause him to dance? Unfortunately for the cause of Science, the brain of the true Dancing man is almost as rare a commodity as Radium. ”

“ In no English-speaking country is the Short Story such a recognized feature of everyday social intercourse as it is in America.
It is almost impossible for two Americans to meet anywhere or at any time of the day or night without an exchange of Short Stories. Sometimes the form of the telling is good, sometimes bad. More often it is very bad form indeed, but two things the Story must have—to “get over”—substance and brevity.
The same two things are demanded in the written story. I do not include Form, because Form is essential to Brevity. Artistic Brevity cannot be achieved without Form. ”

“ Without knowing it, Hesiod uttered a scientific truth.
That Fortitude and a Disposition to Dance are gifts of the gods is just as true physiologically as it is poetically speaking.
The Dancing man dances, the man of Fortitude faces a cannon—or a musical comedy—because he is built that way. ”

“ He doesn’t explain exactly how a thing so completely lacking in the elements of design as a chaos [152] should be “set up” to get the best results. All he tells us is that fresh chaos is good material for American literature, and that our Mr. Anderson and others are very busy in a half unconscious way, trying to make “worlds” out of it.
By “worlds” I take it Mr. O’Brien means something vast and vague and “vitally compelling” and “organic” that our Mr. Anderson and others will fuse into American Fiction “in artistic crucibles of their own devising.” ”

“ The Foreign Chaos differs from the Domestic variety in that it is “an end rather than a beginning, a Chaos in which the Tower of Babel had fallen.”
Once more, to translate the O’Brien speechifying into speech—for the benefit of readers who are not movie fans—the American [154] brand of Chaos is fresh and the European Chaos is stale.
The elemental principles underlying all forms of creation are the same, whether you are creating a short story or a buckwheat cake. The same dynamic laws must be obeyed. ”

“ PERNICIOUS PEACHES The Pernicious Peaches whereof we speak are never out of season. They may be seen almost any month of the year on the covers of magazines, devoted to the moral and social uplift of young girls in general, and the American young girl in particular.
The February magazine peach crop is usually most abundant—All through the merry month of Saint Valentine they hang on the news-stands, singly or in clusters, and Peaches they are to be sure—Peaches in the stupidest, cheapest, slangiest nonsense of the word. ”

“ It is so old that Mr. G. K. Chesterton any moment may rise to dispute it, and announce to an astonished London that it is Art that imitates Nature; nevertheless, Nature does imitate Art.
Is it possible that there is method in all this magazine madness? Is it possible that these magazines being devoted (among other devotions) to ladies’ attire, fear that too great an improvement in the female of [104] our species would divert her thoughts from the imbecilities of dress to higher—and less profitable—things? ”

“ With his air of well-bred taciturnity, his love of sport, of rest, of nature, and his belief in a happy Hereafter, the noble Red Man was in every respect his hateful opposite, yet if any Pilgrim brother had dared even to hint that the Indian might have points of superiority it would have been the flaming woodpile for him, or something equally disagreeable in the purifying way. ”

“ At least one of the stories has no fabric at all, but the weaver—like the Weaver in the Fairy Tales—has gone through the motions of weaving so plausibly, not to say impudently, that many, like Mr. O’Brien, are deceived by it.
Mr. O’Brien, defining Substance, tells us that it amounts to nothing unless it be organic substance “in which the pulse of life is beating.” Thereby he admits that Substance is Stuff, but insists that it must be Live Stuff!
Mr. O’Brien is mistaken; in one of the finest Short Stories ever written the Substance of the Story is a Shadow!
The Story is by “Anderson.” ”

“ However pleasing the countenance of the living Galatea might be under normal conditions its expression of mingled bewilderment, rage and physical anguish must have been disconcerting, not to say terrifying, to the sensitive soul of the sculptor, and anything but consoling for the loss of his hard-won and cherished handiwork. ”

“ The law has never been considered by Parliament, for even the most radical House of Commons would balk at legislation so subversive of individual freedom, but by word of mouth, by courier, by post, by cable, by wireless, by airplane the edict has passed through all the nations and all the tribes to the trousermost ends of the earth. ”

“ To see a statue come to life must be a terrifying spectacle. Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion and Galatea is only for those who get their ideas about artists from magazines to the vacuity of whose contents the face of the girl on the cover may well serve as an index. ”

“ And now, just as far out of reach as ever, in the display-window of the advertising page, the grown-up child gazes at the miraculous Motor-Car gliding, velvet shod, through palmy solitudes reflecting the rays of the setting sun with a splendor out-Solomoning Solomon. ”

“ Einstein asserts, our planet has been receiving crooked light-rays all this time, it is a very serious matter and there is no knowing what may come of it; certainly the Cosmic Light Company ought to be investigated. But don’t be down-hearted, dear Reader, some day the Einstein Amendment [108] to the Law of Gravitation may be repealed, and made retroactive into the bargain; it is all a matter of Relativity and it may turn out that the Relativity-shoe is on the other foot and that it is the Earth’s orbit that is on the blink and not the light rays at all. ”

“ The slightest variation in the location of the crease would cause an upheaval in the (I’m tired of the word Trouser) —in the “Pant” market that would mean millions of dollars to the trade.
As it is there is no money in it.
The other explanation is that the story of [66] King Edward or King George creasing the Royal Pants in any but the usual place is made out of whole cloth.
But let us suppose for a moment (just for the fun of the thing) that in some possible scheme or caprice of creation there were such a thing as an inventive tailor. ”