THE SENIOR WRANGLER

NEWSPAPER "SOCIETY"

IN an amusing paper on "The society you read about," Harrison Rhodes wonders why it is that, according to the newspapers, all the blessings and misfortunes of life fall only on people who are "in society." The woman who is divorced, run over, kidnapped, or dismembered and sewed up in a bag, is, from the newspaper account, always "in society." Let any spinster of Centerville be injured in a railway accident, and she is immediately described as a leader in Centerville "society." "Is it true," he asks, "that the only fact which interests us in our citizens is that they are 'in society'?" And he becomes severe, and wants to know why in Heaven's name they print such "arrant nonsense." Finally he asks, "If we are not all snobs, why try so hard to make us so?"

It is not at all like Mr. Rhodes, whom I know in private life for an amiable and easygoing person, to wind up with these fierce and heated inquiries. Can it be that he has been edited by an uplifter? Of course our country is full of climbers. No one here is content with that station in life to which it has pleased God to call him; and if he were, some female relative would surely shove him along. And since we are all trying to "get on," with a pretty fair chance of it, for mediocrity is always at the top, it is not strange that we should value all the little symbols of on-getting, and being "in society" is one of them. What if "society" does stretch as far as two plumbers at one luncheon? What if the term itself fades into a mere newspaper gesture or habit and a society reporter at a scene of South African carnage would probably, by mere reflex action, write, "Hottentot Society Girl Spears Five"? That does not turn readers into snobs. On the contrary, it confuses the snobbery they had before, and leaves them without a social chart or compass. A snob cannot tell from an American newspaper what to be snobbish about. The acreage of our newspaper snobbery is of course enormous. Even England, the Sinai of top-hat commandments, land of Turveydrop, George Osborne, and Sir Willoughby Patterne, England herself shows not so wide and foolish an expanse of newspaper snobbery. But the true measure of snobbery is not in area, but in depth. At the bottom of a true snob his snobbery is united with his religion. Respectable British papers do not, like our own, mix up all sorts of people under "society" and chatter about them every day; to them it is a real thing and holy. Our papers confound snobbery; theirs treat it with respect. Try as we will, we cannot really tell who 's who; we know that we are guessing. At the root of American snobbery is the cruel canker of distrust. "Society," as a newspaper concept, includes any member of the Caucasian race not

bjojo

"STRANGE, WILD DOINGS . . . IN BROOKLYN "

necessarily rich or even well-to-do, but better off than somebody else somewhere. If interest in it is snobbish, it is one of the broadest, least invidious forms of snobbishness ever known, approximating, one might say, a pretty general brotherly love; for it draws the mind to a Harlem sociable and attracts the human soul to the strange, wild doings of Aldermen's wives, possibly clad in goatskins, at their tea-tables in Brooklyn. Is it not, in this aspect of the thing, almost hopeful?

"AND WHEN MUSIC AROSE WITH ITS VOLUPTUOUS SWELL"

THE STEWARD: "Beg pardon, sir. The chairman of the ship's concert presents his com-
pliments, sir. He says that everybody is waiting for you to sing your French songs, sir."
FIGURE ON THE BUNK: "Thank him very kindly, steward. I'm extremely sorry to
disappoint him, but tell him I'm really-er-tell him I'm really not in voice to-night."

IN

THE PROMISED EXTINCTION OF D'ANNUNZIO

wane, he would employ a novel and heretofore undreamed-of means of suicide. He admitted that, as far as originality goes, his contemplated means of self-destruction leaves nothing to be desired. It differs from poison, gas, and pistols in so far as it leaves no visible trace of a body whatever-no hair, no waxed mustaches, no feet, no personal jewelry. He said that the moment to employ his invention would arrive in two years' time.

Na recent (and much quoted and discussed) interview with Gabriele d'Annunzio, the pale Italian apostle of passion admitted that for him there was but one life, the life of violent, turbulent, volcanic feeling. The secret of happiness, he said, was to overdo, to push sensation to its remotest limits. No philosophical calm for him, no Nirvana, no rest upon the crimson bosom of the poppies. D'Annunzio went on to say that he had long ago decided that, when his ability to feel vol- "Lighter Vein" has nothing but apcanically, to erupt emotionally, to strug-proval for the novelty and potency of his gle and to love desperately had begun to invention, but why this terrible delay?

But even now, and it is some time after Christmas, I cannot account for

the fact that the pretty little
hand-carved candlestick, mod-
eled after Giotto's Tower, which
I received this year from little
Mrs. Brown, is the same one
that I myself sent last year to
poor Mrs. Higgins.

४

PICTURE BY T. M. BEVAN

Dolly: Don't you just love Bob Chambers' stories? His girlies are such dead-game sports!

Pamela: No; since I 've joined the "Greater Glories,"
Brieux with my mind more comports.

Dolly: How can you read those awful creatures?
Their stuff is simply Greek to me.

Pamela: Well, Sudermann has puzzling features,
But think of his modernity!

Dolly: Gouverneur Morris is a screamer,
But writes less shockingly of late.

Pamela: I read Strindberg without a tremor;

One should not blink at soul-rays straight.

Dolly McCutcheon 's gay! He's not flubdubbish. Pamela: Schnitzler's engagingly advanced.

Dolly: We had a club to read that rubbish,

But soon we broke it up-and danced!

1 Note. Subject for discussion: Which is Dolly?