and pass on to the next paragraph.
The more a colyumist is out on the streets, making himself the reporter
of the moods and oddities of men, the better his stuff will be. It seems
to me that his job ought to be good training for a novelist, as it
teaches him a habit of human sensitiveness. He becomes filled with an
extraordinary curiosity about the motives and purposes of the people he
sees. The other afternoon I was very much struck by the unconscious
pathos of a little, gentle-eyed old man who was standing on Chestnut
Street studying a pocket notebook. His umbrella leaned against a
shop-window, on the sill of which he had laid a carefully rolled-up
newspaper. By his feet was a neat leather brief-case, plumply filled
with contents not discernible. There he stood (a sort of unsuccessful
Cyrus Curtis), very diminutive, his gray hair rather long abaft his
neck, his yellowish straw hat (with curly brim) tilted backward as
though in perplexity, his timid and absorbed blue eyes poring over his
memorandum-book which was full of pencilled notes. He had a slightly
unkempt, brief beard and whiskers, his cheek-bones pinkish, his linen a
little frayed. There was something strangely pathetic about him, and I
would have given much to have been able to speak to him. I halted at a
window farther down the street and studied him; then returned to pass
him again, and watched him patiently. He stood quite absorbed, and was
still there when I went on.
That is just one of the thousands of vivid little pictures one sees on
the city streets day by day. To catch some hint of the meaning of all
this, to present a few scrawled notes of the amazing interest and colour
of the city's life, this is the colyumist's task as I see it. It is a
task not a whit less worthy, less painful, or less baffling than that of
the most conscientious novelist. And it is carried on in surroundings of
extraordinary stimulation and difficulty. It is heart-racking to
struggle day by day, amid incessant interruption and melee, to snatch
out of the hurly-burly some shreds of humour or pathos or (dare one
say?) beauty, and phrase them intelligibly.
But it is fun. One never buys a package of tobacco, crosses a city
square, enters a trolley car or studies a shop-window without trying, in
a baffled, hopeless way, to peer through the frontage of the experience,
to find some glimmer of the thoughts, emotions, and meanings behind. And
in the long run such a habit of inquiry must bear fruit in understanding
and sympathy. Joseph Conrad (who seems, by the way, to be more read by
newspaper men than any other writer) put very nobly the pinnacle of all
scribblers' dreams when he said that human affairs deserve the tribute
of "a sigh which is not a sob, a smile which is not a grin."
So much, with apology, for the ideals of the colyumist, if he be
permitted to speak truth without fear of mockery. Of course in the
actual process and travail of his job you will find him far different.
You may know him by a sunken, brooding eye; clothing marred by much
tobacco, and a chafed and tetchy humour toward the hour of five P. M.
Having bitterly schooled himself to see men as paragraphs walking, he
finds that his most august musings have a habit of stewing themselves
down to some ferocious or jocular three-line comment. He may yearn
desperately to compose a really thrilling poem that will speak his
passionate soul; to churn up from the typewriter some lyric that will
rock with blue seas and frantic hearts; he finds himself allaying the
frenzy with some jovial sneer at Henry Ford or a yell about the High
Cost of Living. Poor soul, he is like one condemned to harangue the
vast, idiotic world through a keyhole, whence his anguish issues thin
and faint. Yet who will say that all his labour is wholly vain? Perhaps
some day the government will crown a Colyumist Laureate, some majestic
sage with ancient patient blue eyes and a snowy beard nobly stained with
nicotine, whose utterances will be heeded with shuddering respect. All
minor colyumists will wear robes and sandals; they will be an order of
scoffing friars; people will run to them on crowded streets to lay
before them the sorrows and absurdities of men. And in that day
The meanest paragraph that blows will give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for sneers.