Life, 1915-04-29 · page 9 of 44
Life — April 29, 1915 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two distinct items: **Top illustration**: A satirical cartoon titled "Hints to Singers: Don't Engage a Too Charming Accompanist." It depicts a musical performance where an attractive female accompanist at the piano has distracted the male singer—he's gazing at her rather than performing. The gathered audience observes this awkward situation. The joke concerns romantic distraction undermining professional performance. **Bottom poem**: "To the Cave Men" by Arthur L. Salmon is a mock-serious verse addressing prehistoric humans. It ironically praises their simplicity while suggesting modern civilization has introduced unnecessary complexity—"craft and vice and slaying"—that primitive people avoided. The tone is satirical commentary on modern society's complications versus imagined primitive authenticity.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
HINTS TO SINGERS DON'T ENGAGE A TOO CHARMING ACCOMPANIST To the Cave Men ROGENITORS and sires, ancestral sources, Groping in caverns that were damp and draughty, We hail you, fathers of primeval forces, Illiterate yet crafty. You fought with beasts for bones of juicy marrow, Wrestled with elk and bear for ribs and shoulders; Not having yet invented spear or arrow, You struck with flints and boulders. You were not nice in personal condition; No chefs had taught you culinary culture; You had peculiar notions of nutrition , And fancies of sepulture. No doubt you were indifferently moral, Guiltless of pacts and diplomatic lying; Breaking of heads was your idea of quarrel— Plain living and quick dying. We look upon you now with envious wonder— No longer we contemn your young conditions, Your downright single aims, your naked plunder, Your limited ambitions. Not to learn ways of craft and vice and slaying— These are the things in which we far outreach you— But greater skill of strife and mutual preying Are what we long to teach you. Primitive men that loom of vague dimensions, Much may you learn from us humanitarians— Letters and guile and devilish inventions Unknown to you pre-Aryans, Arthur L. Salmon, comicbooks.com