Judge — December 19, 1914 — page 13: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

«« ABROAD AT HOME”: Wallace Morgan and I crossed the U. S. together, saw a lot of interesting people and places, had a fine time, and have made a big, fat, red-covered holiday book out of our adventures. I like Morgan's sixty pictures, he likes my forty chap- ters, and we both like the way the Cen- tury Company brought the volume out, I think they might have got $3 a copy for it instead of $2.50, but even at $2,501 prefer it to any other book of mine, because the royalty is larger. —Julian Street. 0-DAY Jupce descends from his seat of justice and p mits six authors to occupy it, so that each may do justice may be. to himself or herself, as the case and se contempt of court, but I as court crier in 1 asked each of the authors except one to judge his or is what happened. of them Noah Webstet her own, saying that womanwise she just had to have the last 5 words, supposing that I didn’t And I should say non, of two facts, my French great-great-grandfather and my French about it. her book in 35 words, and thi ton Cooke used up 36 words word. Mrs, Atherton wrote mean real German literalness. Passing Senten ‘ «CALIFORNIA: AN INTIMATE HISTORY"’: A memoir beginning some 150,000 years ago and ending with the Graft Prosecution. I have been sat- urated since childhood with California traditions and anecdotes, and geology is my favorite study.—Gertrude Atherton. ‘ « ALTOGETHER JANE,” from ‘** What sort of a child was I?’’ to the amen of philosophically accepted experi- ence, mirrors every human emotion. It is present-day life—your life and mine— an optimistic book that ministers.—Jane. It may be st upon telling all help to prove the rule, jorie Ben= and one Ma of ‘‘Pendennis."’ n view set himself, some people recognize under the name of Society. deed write about men and women—no one has yet gone so far as todeny that—but he also made them, with a few exceptions which of character and manner: ces ««QCNE CLEAR CALL": Carrying and fetching. Represents a fight be- tween the author and her principal char- acter as to how life’s S. 0. S. call shall be answered, with character (man, of course) stubborn to finish. — Frances Nimmo Greene. o ««RAMBI": I think that ‘Bambi’’ is quite the gayest, wisest, most re- freshing book of the season, because—I wrote it and I know it is! Besides, I haven't read the other books of the sea- son.—Marjorie Benton Cooke. He did in- ladies and gentlemen, and that appears to be considered by some authorities as an unworthy achievement. To illuminate their point of view, let some person equally brave and discreet find out what Mr. Jack London, for instance, thinks What Thackeray would have thought of ‘‘John Barleycorn’’ defeats the imagination. Yet it was not, after all, the easiest of tasks that Thackeray To begin with, it takes courage to write a novel and to write about ladies and gen- cook! Jane, the author of the janeonymous “Altogether Jane,’” did the distance in 35 flat, while Julian Street, doubtless in need of change, wondered how it would feel to be a certain fellow author, T. Roosevelt, who once wrote at $ per word. Seeing that nothing was said about counting repeated a’s and I’s and dollar marks and figures, Street stopped one short of 91, according to my method of figuring, which counts his two tlemen as they are in real life is not a slight thing todo. Wit- ness the failures, the grotesque and horrific failures. Nobody wants to represent the gentlemanly interest nowadays. Even if well done, it would be almost certain to be unpopular, largely because few readers would know exactly what you were driv- ing at. If Society were nothing but noise and champagne $2.50’s as two words instead of a V. The prize for brevity goes to Frances Nimmo Greene—really I don’t know what her Nimmo is—and Mary S. Watts, whose words follow these words, receives the prize for modesty. Certain circumstances known to Mrs. Watts and me led to her escaping the 35-word limit when I was passing sen- tences, and she for some reason known only to herself advertises only ‘‘Pen- dennis” and ‘‘John Barleycern.’’ She wrote neither one of them, I am pleased to announce that the following is apropos of Mrs. Watts’s new novel, “The Rise of Jennie Cushing’: Mary S. Watts: Somebody once said of Thackeray that he represented in literature the ‘‘gentlemanly inter- est,’’ and in that phrase or in the re- marks accompanying it one detected a flavor of amiable disapproval, as if representing the gentlemanly interest were not wholly creditable to Thack- eray either as an author or a man. Translated into less figurative lan- guage, it seems to mean that he wrote novels which had to do almost exclu- sively with ‘hig’ lif’, with what JULIAN STREET AND WALLACE MORGAN SEEIN Taper weer oniey TAGE G AMERICA and divorces, there would be no trou- ble about the noise-money-cham- pagne version of it flourishes and is received with applause, especially in those quarters where the other name for Society is ‘‘the dress-suit crowd."” The spectacle reduces the rest of us to a state of inarticulate protest. Why should it be easier to image a couple of desperadoes plotting in aslum alley than half a dozen ladies and gentlemen talking with good breeding and good taste and ordinary cleverness in some- body’s drawing-room? Impossible to say, but such is the fact; and if the average novelist were to be asked which he would rather ‘‘do,”’ a dinner party or a dynamiting, nine times out of ten he would choose the latter. If we do pluck up spirit enough to point out that, notwithstanding the breadth and accuracy of some or these flam- boyant pictures, there still exists in Society a gentlemanly interest which has not been adequately represented, the retort is obvious: Do it yourself, then! The inexperienced writer will find, to his astonishment and chagrin, that it needs a Thackeray to do it. comicbooks.com