Life — September 3, 1896 — page 7: what you’re looking at

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

A SEASIDE idealist in style and matter. He believes that a beautiful phrase or sentence is its own justification; and he spins his melodious prose with evident delight in its rhythm. Sometimes he does not say much, and knows it; at other times he says a great deal and is probably equally conscious of it. An example of the first, in this volume, is ‘Brown Roses,” devoted to the shearing of a poct’s curly locks; an example of the second is ‘‘On Loving One's Enemies,” which is a bit of sound, wordly phi- losophy, sententiously put. The clever Sun reviewer has shown that very good fun can be made out of the ‘sausages " in the ‘‘ Seventh Heaven Story that opens the volume. Sausages and prose idyls heretofore have not been considered con- genial comrades. But that is exactly where Mr. Le Gal- lienne shows his originality and the saving grace of common humanity. Instead of the sausage dragging down his style, he has elevated the zxsthetic possibilities of the sausage. He has put most of his philosophy in a very effective paragraph: After all its talk, science has done little more than correct the misprints of re- ligion, Essentially the old spiritualistic and poetic theories of life are seen, not merely weakly to satisfy the cravings of man’s nature, but to be mostly in har- mony with certain strange and moving factsin his constitution, which the ma- terialists unscientifically ignore. At a time when the ugly, the grewsome, the half-savage, and the wholly vicious are considered as the only proper subjects for exhibiting literary force and orig- inality in fiction, it is refreshing to 4 PLASTER ON come across a book that, is content The Smaller of the Tew: What! you Lick me? YOU WOULDN'T BE IN ITI! IF 1 WUZ ON'Y TER STRIKE YER WUNST, YER'D HAVE TER WEAR A YER STUMMICK AN’ CHEW COUGH DROPS FUR DE REST OF YER LIFE! FANTASIA. to devote itself to the frills of beauty in thought. style and . . . N contrast with it is the translation of D'Annunzio's “‘Episcopo & Co.” (H. S. Stone). This young author represents in Italy the literary methods of Ibsen and Maeterlinck, and acknowledges his debt to many others of the same school. As is to be expected the story is sordid, depressing, horrible, and calculated to make one doubt the sanity of his fellowman. It is a piece of excellent, often surprising, workmanship ex- pended on hopeless material. He represents the most advanced ‘literary move- ment,” but with Populism to play with, we don’t need it over here. One set of freaks at a time! Droch, BEWARE of the woman who carefully thinks out her impulses beforehand. FROM ANOTHER WORLD. AIDSO: Do you recognize that spirit photograph ? Herpso: It looks familiar. “That's Smithers, who moved to Brooklyn.” T is said that Li Hung Chang has not brought his $50,000 coffin with him, as he concluded before leaving England, that it would not be worth while to cart italong. Our distinguished guest evidently does not contemplate riding on the trolley or taking a trip on the cable cars, comicbooks.com