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THE CHICAGO EVENING POST, FRIDAY, APRIL 30, 1909.
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MAGAZINE CRITIQUE
The various conduct of men and women when their deepest emotions come into conflict with convention and law, forms a theme of irresistible fascination—and real stories are much more interesting than made-up ones. Two of the most interesting of the real stories are recounted by writers in the current Munsey Magazine. Thackeray's love affair with Mrs. Brookfield and that of Cosima, wife of Von Buelow, for Richard Wagner, illustrate the rich possibilities of action in complex and difficult cases. That husbands need not necessarily in a certain banding transform themselves into medieval or barbaric figures of revenge, but may settle their difficulties by both civilized gentleman is shown by both tales. Thackeray, of whom Lyndon Orr tells in his article in a series on "Famous Alfinities of History," when he found himself friend, and the husband, suddenly awakened to the situation by zealous acquaintances, forbidding them the house, made an appeal to the generosity and good sense of Mr. Brookfield in a letter which has never been published. But though the terms of this appeal are not known, the results are familiar to all. The novel, continued his friendship with both man and wife, and in all his multitudinous letters to Mrs. Brookfield never wrote a word which her husband would have resented. In the story of Cosima Wagner there was no such restrain of the emotions. In his account of "the widow of Bayreuth" Willis Steell tells how, when the wife of Von Buelow met the great composer—then poor and scorned by the critics—their attraction fell to each other with irresistible nature. They needed each other, and they did not desire themselves: there was a divorce, and Cosima became the life-long comrade and helper of Richard Wagner. But the three, being civilized beings, continued friends, and Von Buelow was a friend visitor at the house of his former wife. Both articles, which are well written and vivid, are suggestive of the value of good manners in the important crises of life as well as at the dinner table.
Accounts of trips through the Yosemite, and the links, usually sound—and with their photographic illustrations, decidedly literature. In "Camping Above the Yosemite," harried Magazine for May, Miss Harriet Monroe achieves a difference. Her enthusiasm over the "sense of intimacy with the grand old earth," while a bit rhetorical, rings genuine. She wisely devotes much of her comment to personal matter, rather than to the overdescribed natural objects of the valley. It is good to read: "We grew accustomed to nights in a sleeping-bag, with only tree tops between us and river stars. . . . We bathed in the icy river at sunrise, and informed into our clothes, there in the women's camp, behind any improvised curtain we could rig up out of a cloak or blanket fastened to the trees. . . . We found it no hardship to wash our dashable clothes in the running stream and dry them unironed, like Homer's ladies of long ago." But the writer's enthusiasm is not all rhetorical, sometimes it is foreseeably eloquent: "For a month we had possessed the earth in her grandeur, beheld her in all the glory of snowy peaks and soft green valleys and vaporous catacrasts. . . . And we were glad . . . that we had possessed it before its ways are made smooth for all the world." The spirit exhibited in this article goes a long way toward modifying one's impression that "sight-seeing" literature is banned.
The Bookman remarks that in the modern relations between the author and the publisher there are other points of contention besides the question of the division of the spoils. While there are of the course, exceptions, the general rule is that no author ever thinks that a publisher has done enough for his book, while every publisher cherishes a sneaking conviction that he has done too much. The high-water mark of protest was reached the other day. A certain author's book was published by a well-known firm who "pushed it hard." The result, however, was very disappointing to the author. He wrote the firm that he was very much familiar and went on to say: "If your dissatisfaction and the rebellion would have been no Christian Ribling."
"It needs quality now." So the clientele of the Sketch Book is permitted to commune with the ravishing beauty of 28,435 bales of cotton, in a three-foot-long art work entitled "Little Rock Contrast Scene." Again, Arkansas is to be congratulated on the manner in which its aesthetic development is being looked after.
Disinterested outsiders often get the impression that "walking clubs" are organized for the cursos of riding forty miles on the air and then elaborately walking four. However, it may be different in towns where the "country" is not so hopelessly far from the postfolio. Mr. Martyn Life, asks the question: "Is there a traveling club in your town?" and gives his reasons for thinking there ought to be. The history of the "Saturday Afternoon Hikers" of Chicago he recounts in detail, but neglects to state what—that a most encouraging circumstance—is that the railroad companies are here among the most enthusiastic supporters of this "pedestrian" movement.
The young people that William Dean Howells saw in the Gallery of Fine Arts in Liverpool "frankly looked at one another instead of the pictures." Not that Mr. Howells blamed them—he said, rather, that "in any case those young couples could men and women; but now they had one another in a moment of half-holiday which could not last forever." But not all people are young and in love with each other: and of their need for amusement Mr. Edward S. Martin deals suggestively in an article in the same number of Harper's Monthly Magazine which contains Mr. Howell's interesting comments on "Three English Capitals of Industry." That it is not a mere frivolous or orgiastic performance which eccurs "When the City Amuses Itself," but the fulfillment of a sociologic need, Mr. Martin well knows. "It is immensely important, this matter of the amusements of a great city; important to health, sanity, energy, order; to everything that makes for efficiency and happiness, and you might even say, for salvation." Alcohol ranks high in its use among that class of amusements which are expensive; newspapers even higher among those that cost little; while "the great provision," in the class which costs nothing, is People. For "man, including women, is the most interesting thing in the universe, and the provision of man in New York is exceedingly liberal." Nevertheless, Mr. Martin agrees for amusement ought to be widely and intelligently extended. But he strikes his own characteristic note in his remarks on People—and as usual he indicates the pleasant possibilities of life.
As some one has pointed remarked, while the philosophers were quoting Aristotle in regard to the function of the heart, the scientists were discovering the circumstance of the blood-spleening of the clorophosphers were discussing the resolution of the sun around the earth the scientists were demonstrating that the earth revolved around the sun. The philosophers, according to this view, have been very much up in the air. Their theories have rather to the logical formulas rather than to empirically ascertained facts. And so, now that we are warned against the "mechanical" theory of life and told that while scientists generally accept it, there is "no teacher of pure philosophy," of any prominence who is a philosopher, we should not drop the idea with a shudder on that account. The one who issues the warning is Professor Robert Kennedy Duncan, whose article in the current Harper's Monthly Magazine, "On the Chemical Interpretation of Life," at the same time furnishes a mechanical theory. When metals can be tickled, electrocelled, anaesthetized and poisoned, "just like folks," the barrier between organic and inorganic life seems to have been broken down and the contention justified that there is no such informing en