Life — November 7, 1907 — page 9: what you’re looking at

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

G. B. at our d will stters, our- $ lies it lit- meal le of vous mus f im: posi- mos- ence rtist vrote p has pro- ot— f the y in- We | on eck with ele: tity or: Fai aMar KAAS Moll 6 he Lierers) Zoo 45 Qe C9 RG who has been turned down by posterity in consequence, But—verbum sap-head. We are content to clinch our admonition with un epigram: Never sneer at a literary mollycoddle because of his boutonnitre; the weakling’s esthetic idiosyncrasy may but symbolize the blossoming of what Dr. Holmes has called “the Macaulay-flowers of literature.” W.T. L. A Recent Diagnosis HAT’S the matter with the American novelist?—(Mr. White, of Kansas, you are out of order.) That courteous and gentle critic of our statesmanship and literary style, the learned London Saturday Review, has put the question for the mere pleasure of answering it. Having felt the pulse of the American fiction maker, looked down his literary throat, and ap- plied the tests of auscultation and per- cussion, the British doctor of letters de- livers his diagnosis in a word—“‘excess of vitality.”. The American author—so the verdict runs—“ writes always at the top of his voice. The reader can almost see the swollen veins on his forehead.” We confess to a sense of profound discouragement. Only lately, Professor Scrap, of the Peck Book—or was it Dr. Munsey, of the Bookman? (Our memory is sadly muddled in its attempts to evoke these questionable, protean shapes.) No matter. Somebody with a college degree, who knows all about these things, has been telling us that Hawthorne was anemic. And now comes this transatlantic authority with the opposing opinion that our army of contemporary authors—treading, as everybody knows, in the trail of the Hawthorne traditions—is in need of leeches and lozenges. , * * ERSONALLY, we could stomach the verdict of overmuch vitality. We could say to the Saturday Review, without consulting our “Great Orations”—‘Sir, the atrocious crime of being a young nation is something that we shall attempt neither to palliate nor deny.” But youth, it seems, is not our only fault. Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Henry James, at sundry timesand through various literary mediums, have caustically criticized the American conversational voice. We have listened with humility (we once heard our voice reproduced by a phonograph), and have tried to do better; we have attended with patience when even the American woman was assailed.* But to say that we always shriek when we write is a little too much. It is, as Mrs. Malaprop would say, an aspersion of our parts of speech, and comes with mighty poor grace from a Londoner who consults a Yankee authority every time he takes down Worcester’s dictionary—and we venture to say that is tolerably often. The Matheson is standardized. The few changes for 1908 are unim- portant refinements. As a matter of fact, most of these were incorporated in mid-season, in our ‘07 cars. This is the Matheson policy. We do not “save up” new features till the beginning of a new selling season. We neither expect nor desire Matheson owners to buy a new car every year, nor every other year. We are building to-day 1908 Mathesons, 1909, 1910, 1912 Mathesons and he who invests will have, years hence, a car which will, after the hardest use, be running as strongly, as reliably, giving as efficient and as economical road service as any high class car then offered for sale. A 1906 Matheson stock touring car still holds the world’s record for having carried seven passen- gers a mile in 50 1-5 seconds. Most cars are bought; Matheson cars are invested in. The salient Matheson features are those of the greatest foreign cars. The Matheson differs from these in one important respect — it's better, ‘The great string of Matheson victories during the past season, its new speed records, hill climbing records, endurance records, its perfect scores galore in reliability contests, made, not only without need of repairs, but without even adjustments, all these have repeatedly proven to us that there is no room for improvement in the Matheson. We have sought in vain for records of performance that would direct the improvement of a single feature. Feature for feature through the world’s output of high powered cars, not excepting the best of the foreign makes, there is nothing that can compare with the Matheson for performance over American roads, Write for our new booklet, “I Drove My Matbeon," by Matheson ewoners, some of whom have made thousands of miles without even an adjustment, ome of whom bave gone through an entire seaion swith a repair bill of but five cents Better sill, visit our exbibit, Space No, 25, in the gallery at the Madison Square Garden Soow, The Mathewon sets a standard by which you may judge otber bigh powered cars. PALMER & SINGER MFG. 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