Imaginary Interviews
W.D. Howells
[Illustration: See page 130
AT THE OPERA]
IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS
W.D. HOWELLS
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1910
Copyright, 1910, by HARPER & BROTHERS
Published October, 1910
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 1
II. A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH 13
III. SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES 22
IV. THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE 32
V. INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA 44
VI. THE SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS 57
VII. UNIMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN REPUBLICS 67
VIII. HAVING JUST GOT HOME 77
IX. NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE 87
X. CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH 97
XI. WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK 107
XII. THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY OF NEW YORK 117
XIII. THE WHIRL OF LIFE IN OUR FIRST CIRCLES 127
XIV. THE MAGAZINE MUSE 137
XV. COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL 146
XVI. QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS 156
XVII. A WASTED OPPORTUNITY 166
XVIII. A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE 176
XIX. A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY 184
XX. PRACTICAL IMMORTALITY ON EARTH 194
XXI. AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 204
XXII. THE ADVANTAGES OF QUOTATIONAL CRITICISM 216
XXIII. READING FOR A GRANDFATHER 226
XXIV. SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE 236
XXV. A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK 244
OTHER ESSAYS
Table of contents (by pages)
- 1: Imaginary Interviews by William Dean Howells
- 2: Not bent on choosing mere gossip
- 3: The Easy Chair softly murmured again
- 4: But I think optimism is as wise and true as pessimism
- 5: The Christmas of the Timminses and the Tiny Tims
- 6: Christmas is always full of inspiration
- 7: Send it back to Franklin Square
- 8: The first deathful thrilling snowfall
- 9: If spring were absorbed into summer
- 10: You can say it is all very painty
- 11: But quite as far as in Central Park
- 12: He was now merely looking the part of a veteran observer
- 13: Is hardly an infectious disease Ah
- 14: Our popular failure as a critic is notorious
- 15: After shunning Anthony Trollope for fifty years
- 16: It is only in bits that authors survive
- 17: On the decline of the vaudeville
- 18: I am an inveterate vaudeville goer
- 19: A tradition unbroken from the dawn of civilization
- 20: ' Guildenstern ought to have said 'Much
- 21: The influence of the vaudeville has
- 22: But about the decline of vaudeville
- 23: There will be the racial disappointment to count with
- 24: And I arrived at the theatre in a gondola
- 25: Worn out notion of a love philter
- 26: These all want time to denationalize themselves
- 27: Nemorino would have done just as Caruso did
- 28: And catches the prima ballerina at the waist
- 29: In order to have a milk room with dairymaids in it
- 30: Of course they were not American dairymaids
- 31: They do look so confoundedly alike
- 32: Why should you respect butlers
- 33: The masters and mistresses may not
- 34: Whatever became of our metaphors
- 35: For they were the heads of monarchies and not of despotisms
- 36: Were men naturally more republican than women
- 37: At the most she will be emulous of her in civic virtue
- 38: The fresh sky scrapers are not so bad
- 39: Jocosely levied thirty per cent
- 40: And it was of an irony truly caressing
- 41: They mistake our incivility for our liberty
- 42: And vulgarer than the untravelled
- 43: Like our sky scrapered New York
- 44: There is that supreme sky scraper
- 45: It is the taxicabs that now turn my heart to water
- 46: In the mighty music of the Avenue
- 47: When the reasons for Europe are growing fewer and fewer
- 48: Flats are much dearer than houses
- 49: With a pot of blameless Souchong or Ceylon tea
- 50: Marketing is undoubtedly cheaper with us
- 51: XIWAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK The Howadji
- 52: Some of the studio apartments are equipped with restaurants
- 53: The ten or twenty girl housekeepers
- 54: The tea of the tea room means lunch
- 55: They require a rental of fifteen or twenty thousand
- 56: It wouldn't make me such a Bostonian if I did
- 57: But half Boston is the work of man
- 58: For the finest work of the civic spirit
- 59: When we have got a sky scraper line
- 60: To accost us with this inquiry
- 61: Pulitzer studies it in the glass of fashion
- 62: If Curtis once represented it rightly
- 63: Pulitzer says as much outright
- 64: The cheapest are not offensive to the eye altogether
- 65: And opened first that magazine
- 66: Which naturally implied a poem
- 67: The elder poet brought the younger sharply to book
- 68: Nobody remembers the magazine poems of that time
- 69: And doubtless would be in a Pullman if there were any
- 70: Old fashioned Pullman sleeper at a third the money
- 71: On the express between Salisbury and Exeter
- 72: Or even a bicycle built for two
- 73: I don't remember about the Stoics exactly
- 74: Anybody's Stoics did it by self denial
- 75: You won't get any peanuts out of us
- 76: Perhaps they disobeyed the voice provisionally
- 77: Instead of having my pampered menial spurn him from my door
- 78: I think you can get along without your overcoat
- 79: Undoubtedly he had been in the penitentiary
- 80: The prisoner would disrupt society
- 81: I'm not sure that herdsmen is what they call them
- 82: The Veteran Novelist exclaimed
- 83: The Veteran Novelist tried to think
- 84: And then I found myself worse disqualified than ever
- 85: I knew you were not thinking of my nonsense
- 86: And asks that the typewritten author
- 87: In order to meet the demands of the current editors
- 88: And what is technical training
- 89: Here the prominent author rose
- 90: What are your personal objections to immortality
- 91: The closest listener put this playfulness by
- 92: The coming man may be scientifically resigned if he prefers
- 93: And leave Metchnikoff in the lurch
- 94: As you he turned to the light skirmisher suggest
- 95: The matinee class was as large as ever larger
- 96: As for this vast new reading public
- 97: The degradation of authorship as a calling
- 98: And boldly addressed the new fiction to it
- 99: Why despise the new reading public
- 100: The power of apt quotation had died
- 101: Rehabilitated the English public
- 102: Like Hazlitt or perhaps like De Quincey
- 103: The more quotational the critics were
- 104: What I like is being spontaneous
- 105: When we were reading Henry Esmond
- 106: I can't stand Ben Jonson at all
- 107: That you were rather deficient in fiction
- 108: But not childhood in general merely because it is childhood
- 109: Poetry was static in its nature
- 110: Shunning those silly elisions like ne'er and o'er
- 111: The sophistication of the English mind
- 112: For a girl to speak grammatically
- 113: The authoresses are quite as inconsistent
- 114: They've been using the abnormal
- 115: On first returning to it in the autumn
- 116: But they are ghosts rather in the meaning of revenants
- 117: The most penetrating expression of the New York temperament
- 118: And the next day it rains and rains
- 119: Smythe Johnes with all those Mr
- 120: If one of them happens to be the Earl of Tolloller
- 121: Johnes as Comrade Smythe Johnes
- 122: Julius Caesar to his correspondents
- 123: Short of the adoption of Citizen and Citizenne
- 124: In the exclusiveness supplied them
- 125: But there was obvious riches aplenty
- 126: Art must refine and re refine upon itself
- 127: That always caused Eugenio to blush
- 128: If he counselled his correspondents otherwise
- 129: They could have only the results that Eugenio saw around him
- 130: Eugenio was less and less dismayed by that
- 131: The stylists are not the greatest artists
- 132: As Eugenio very well perceived
- 133: Rather than a cumulative offence
- 134: And they recognize his book as that of a veteran
- 135: Eugenio did not say a veteran author like himself
- 136: Examined the work he reported upon
- 137: An author wrote for his readers and not for his critics
- 138: But it is far more fixed than age in its aspirations
- 139: In such hazardous unions the junior partner is
- 140: And which exist even where there are no such disparities
- 141: As after it endless being is unthinkable
- 142: Or a magazine of its stated essay
- 143: The situation was something like this
- 144: Even the poor magazine essayist
- 145: The essayist certainly has no such obligation or necessity
- 146: Florindo and Lindora are a married pair
- 147: Florindo came up twice during the summer
- 148: The trouble was all with Florindo
- 149: So that some Lindoras have been known
- 150: Florindo and Lindora are not spoiled
- 151: Lindora was too vexed with him to make any answer
- 152: Especially if he is a comic speaker
- 153: With his mouth propped open for the taffy
- 154: And so he must render back taffy for taffy
- 155: Diogenes with his lantern approached Themistocles
- 156: In calling the speakers successively up
- 157: Almost nobody else was in the park
- 158: Illustration ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS
- 159: Their fares did not refuse to share their mood
- 160: Meek mother that the child must not lean out of the window