Life — June 6, 1907 — page 8: what you’re looking at

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

A Ae ee = jimea) The ollyerTours ie Tours for JAPAN in APAN in June and October ROUND THE WORLD A TOURS SHORT AND LONG; LIMITED TO TEN MEMBERS Exceptional in every detail THE COLLVER IDEA IS DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHERS Send for the BLUE BOOK THE COLLVER TOURS COMPANY 370 Boylston Street, Boston Offices and Agents all Around the World ‘The Collver Tours Company has the only American ‘Tourist Offices in Japan > p ? RICHELIEU MURRAY NIAGARA TO THE SEA The pander in Amr fo eth and ln, The Thun Mand, apis Metal Coe, Wrad the famed Soquenay River wth ts stupendous Capes" Teaaiy eed Ean * Send 6c. postage for illustrated guide to THOS. HENRY, Trafic naiee Montreal, Can. Private Stable OR SALE—On Fifty-second Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, a new thoroughly equipped private stable 25 fect wide; accommodations for seven horses; with two box stalls. Up to date in every particular; clec- tricity, gas, telephone, etc. The best lighted stable in the city. Address J. EDGAR LEAYCRAFT & CO., 19 West 42d Street, New York ne MARES 55 ume.” (What space writer could not afford to be tolerant in exchange for so much “copy”?) As he embroiders his justifiable rebuke—which our Young Per sons wili do well to ponder—with the cun- ning needle of his analysis, we can almost in fancy hear the teacups clink, and detect the low-murmured applause of the intellec- tual Four Hundred. * 8 & NCIDENTALLY, and with decorous concealment, Mr. James pays the femi- nine readers of the Bazara tremendous com- pliment. Whatever he may think of their manners, his implied respect for their men- tality is something more than considerable. “Many persons,” says Dr. William Hanna Thomson, in his recent work on “Brain and Personality,” “not only cannot think long by will, that is, think efferently, but they catinot even think long afferently by will, as, for example, in the passive mental exercise of listening.” Now, the capacity to “think long afferently” is a prerequisite of the readers who would follow Mr. James through the labyrinth of his loquacity. As an exercise in sustained attention we recall nothing in polite literature more compel- ling than the four or five pages in the April Bazar. * * TT! later style of Mr. James, as exem- plified in his recent writings, may be made to serve a disciplinary purpose far removed from the intent of the literary essay. To tum Browning’s poetry into simple prose is a familiar task in the schools. We believe this practice in Eng- lish composition might, with advantage, be varied for the American young woman through the endeavor to condense a page of Mr. James’s prose into a few crisp sen- tences, in which nothing of the idea should be lost. To paraphrase Mr. James, it is inconceivable that any literary body co- erced to communicate with him should not have organized for reprisals, for some des- perate game of repaying him—not “hor ribly, in kind,” but kindly, in contrast. * k * OUBERT, we are told, spent a lifetime in compressing a book into a chapter, a chapter into a page, a page into a para- graph. By reversing that process Mr. James makes a poor bid to posterity. * & * IFE’S” brevity forbids the quoting of so much as a paragraph from Mr. James’s ample essay; a sentence must suffice. Exit the giggling girls ; enter the curt conductor—of a train from Boston, be it noted. Mr. James, it appears, har- bored a vague fear that he had passed his destination: “The conductor making his way, however, a minute later, through the aisle, I put my little question from my pew? Would my station (which I named) be our Next arrest ?”” comicbooks.com a a a