Life — October 29, 1896 — page 6: what you’re looking at

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

CAN A CLEVER WIFE LIVE HAPPILY IN THE SUBURBS? MONG the younger English writers who have recently come into prominence, W. Pett Ridge has the somewhat unusual distinction of being both bright and decent. He has not shown, as yet, any of the ear- marks of genius, but he has written a novel or two that is entertaining, cheerful, and touched with’sincerity of feeling. ‘‘A Clever Wife” (Harper's) deals with the old problem of a man who draws marrying a woman who writes, In romance and in real life the combination is believed to spell Unhappiness. The reasoning which leads up to that con- clusion is logical. The pursuit of Art is a selfish business; you can't have two selfish people in the same family; therefore two people engaged in the pursuit of Art should not marry. Of course many writers have taken the other side of the question, and have advo- cated the “sympathy of souls" that follows from the marriage of two people with artistic temperaments. There is probably no word so misused as sympathy. What the people who demand it usually want 1s a kind of sauce to their vanity—a consolation for disappointment in the shape of exaggerated expressions of per- sonal appreciation and affection, Now the artist or writer who really succeeds is a per- FROM LIFE’S RECENT DISCOVERIES OF *> LIFE: son of self-centred enthusiasm and capacity for concentrated effort. He gets his *‘sym- pathy" from the work itself. The joy of achieving something better than he ever ac- complished before warms his heart; ,and if he does not do it, no amount of coddling can deceive the man of real talent into believing that he deserves success. The real artist has insight, and he can see what he is after bet- Yer than any outside soul, even if she has also the artistic temperament. Suppose she has* Then she also has insight, and sees some other phase of art clearer than he does. The very acuteness of her insight stands in the way of her ‘‘ putting herself in his place.” No. What the artistic temperament de- mands for itself, in fiction and real life, is a buffer from the world, a reservoir of good spirits and good sense, and a houseful of practicability. Mr. Pett Ridge takes 298 pages to prove this, but breaks down on the last two pages and advances the agreeable doctrine that Love is all-powerful and paves the way for living in domestic happiness, even jn the suburbs, with a clever wife. The unrepentant realist will, however, still insist that it is going to be pretty stupid for both of them bye-and-bye, and that they will probably quarrel and make up a score of times before old age has taught them the advisability of making the best of a blunder. There are few fates reserved for men in fic- tion worse than banishment to the suburbs with a woman who writes! * ° * HE fate allotted to “Artie” (Stone & Co.) by his clever creator, George Ade, ST. PATRICK'S DAY. A GREEK FRET. is a much kinder one. The marriage of Artie, a Chicago clerk, to Mamie, who works in a printing-house, has all the elements of success back of it. They are both simple, direct, crude creatures, who take their pleas- ure from day to day enérgetically, and ask no odds of fate. Artie isthe Chimmie Fadden of Chicago, but—as he would say—“‘ several cuts” higher in society. His slang is said to be a “care- ful transcript from real life,” which probably means that it was picked up in music halls and bar-rooms. There is really nothing more artiGcial than this sort of ‘‘tough” dialect, which, though spoken by real people, is for the most part acquired by them at cheap shows and out of flash novels, or papers with a half-million circulation, Artie is, however, a well-elaborated char acter, and most amusing for book or stage EARLY EGYPTIAN JOKES, comicbooks.com