Colored inlay on the cover, decorative borders, headpieces, thumb-nail
sketches, and tail-pieces. Frontispiece and three full-page
illustrations. 12mo. Ornamental Cloth, $1.25.
Does anybody remember the opera of The Inca, and that heart-breaking
episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his
professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his
middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the sake of practice?
If I recollect, his dismal confession runs something like this:
“It was in bleak November
When I slew them, I remember,
As I caught them unawares
Drinking tea in rocking-chairs.”
And so he talked them to death, the subject being “What Really Is Art?”
Afterward he was sorry—
“The squeak of a door,
The creak of a floor,
My horrors and fears enhance;
And I wake with a scream
As I hear in my dream
The shrieks of my maiden aunts!”
Now it is a very dreadful thing to suggest that those highly respectable
pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their
polygamous chastity (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to
be wedded to his particular art)—I repeat, it is very dreadful to suggest
that these impeccable old ladies are in danger of being talked to death.
But the talkers are talking and Art Nouveau rockers are rocking, and the
trousers of the prophet are patched with stained glass, and it is a day
of dinkiness and of thumbs.
Let us find comfort in the ancient proverb: “Art talked to death shall
rise again.” Let us also recollect that “Dinky is as dinky does;” that
“All is not Shaw that Bernards;” that “Better Yeates than Clever;” that
words are so inexpensive that there is no moral crime in robbing Henry to
pay James.
Firmly believing all this, abjuring all atom-pickers, slab furniture, and
woodchuck literature—save only the immortal verse:
“And there the wooden-chuck doth tread;
While from the oak trees’ tops
The red, red squirrel on the head
The frequent acorn drops.”
Abjuring, as I say, dinkiness in all its forms, we may still hope that
those cleanly and respectable spinsters, the Sister Arts, will continue
throughout the ages, rocking and drinking tea unterrified by the
million-tongued clamor in the back yard and below stairs, where thumb and
forefinger continue the question demanded by intellectual exhaustion:
“L’arr! Kesker say l’arr?”