Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1880-07-18
BETWEEN OURSELVES.

BETWEEN OURSELVES. |
The consciousness and severity of some
people are verworked--especiallya about trifies.
Some individualities are always impertinent.
When you hear persons gravely descanting on
the PIRATES of Penzance," and deploring that
the delightful absurdity isn't quite up to I'll
Pirata'' of Bellini, you are sorry that the ludi-
crous can never have any perfection to them.
The perfection of fun is standard, and Menus
is god as well as the rest But they don't ace
it, and their peculiar vision is an added dash
of the comical when they authoritatlvely bring
matters to their focus.
A Welsh newspaper in announcing new ora
torio entitled Emmanuel dubs the COM
poser, Mr.. Parry, the Welsh
Beethoven, and greater than Bee
thoven because Beethoven never
took Doctors degree" Mr.. Parry's effort
ought to have a peculiar precipitation after this
| send-off. olook at a purely ludicrous matter
gravely, and vice versa, is akin to color blind
ness, and the incongruity is delightfully."- IL
Illustrated and elaborated in the
essays Of Ella, under the appro-
pirate title, Imperfect Sympathies." The
delicate humorist tells us in his felicitous way
of people who take every statement and SEN
timent literally, making no allowance for hui
mors, fancies, jokes, antiquities, and whim-
whams. To them between the affirmative and
negative there is no border-land. They are
like children whose minds have never enlarged
Every parent knows there is a period in
childhood when its mission seems to be in
watching every faintest variation from the
literal truth on the part of elders. and correct
ing them with unsparing candor
on every occasion. There is
no lodging the infantile Ithuriels. Their
pertinacious following up by question and ci-
tation only ceases when the intellectual struc-
ture knows of "surmises, guesses, misgivings,
half intuitions, partial illuminations, dim in
stincts and embryo conceptions When the
mind becomes enlarged like that of Humboldt.
and man is able to place in focus more and
more of the cosmos of which he forms a part,
the things he at the outset of his life regards
as the largest, get smaller and smaller, till at
last his immense and overwhelmingly import
ant self becomes SO insignificant that it is only
| through process of mental microscopy he can
| discern his little identity among the animal
cule that float, swim or wriggle across the field
| of view. Then the Humboldtian intelligence
asks with due humility, how big is man,
/ anyway?
He is smaller than an elephant, and an ele-
plant is smaller than mountain, and noun
tain is smaller than the world, and the world is
| mustard seed compared with theisun, and the
| sun itself is mere mote in the dust cloud of
| spheres that stretches out through the universe
| beyond the reach of thought. Such an answer
may be salutary-but it isn't pleasant,
| and when man wants to relax at the dinner
table into the chitchat of the time it is awfully
| inapposite to be met as the London Standards
old fogy was, (who is by the way the most be-
quilting contributor any newspaper ever had).
He took young lady down to dinner, and when
| they were seated at the table he asked her if
she had been very gay during the season.
Sc said freezingly "Oh, nop' We went to
hear Professor Allman's opening address at the
| meeting of the British Association.
Indeed said old foggy, ''did you like it,"
II don't know what you mean by like it,"
said his fair compsnion, coldly; but Thought
| it most interesting and valuable"
Prof. Altman agrees with Huxley as to pro-
toplasm being the physical basis of life, and
he endorses Hackel's views as to the reality of
Bathybius. Of course, this young lady is
rather uncommon, but as an illustration of the
| inapposite, it is good. On such occasions it
would be convenience to have q dog like the
Ettrick Shepherds. He could send him to
church and the minister "kent nae difference"
When he was asked how he liked the sermon
he says Hector and me gied ane anither sic
look, and was afeared Mr.. Patton would
| hae observed it. But the dog leaped
over hedge into potato field,
pretendin' to have scented cartridges.
We say literature is the expression
of society, because society makes the literature
| it demands.
So we may remark of society" columns in
| the newspapers. People sneer, but they read
! them. They affect to despise the nonsense, but
| the rush for it iusti6es its constant reproduce
| ton. There is a general hypocrisy that the
| same valuable space might be devoted to
| more substantial reading, ETC.: yet, if by any
accident the gay world is deprived of its stipu-
| lated news there is exceeding disappointment
and dissatisfaction. We manage these things
better than they did formerly. We get the
budget of society gossip served up every week
| in many of our best journals, without having
to wait years, as our ancestors did, for memoirs
of the witty, wise, noble, scandalous, extrava-
CANT, well dressed, and brilliant personages of
| the time. Then society was chronicled with
vengeance by such envenomed observers as DIR.
Grammont, Horace Walpole, and Nine. de-
Remusat, and only posterity is the
gamer. Altogether our lalligagging literature
| in the same channel is relishable to the actual
| actors on the 'world's'' stage. Instead of the
free acid which imns imperishable features of
high life on the sparkling pages of these i'm
mortal annalists we have soft traceries of
select persons and events given. as Figaro says,
with un orai partuna d elegance.
This lalligagging literature requires talent
| and a preparation which can find reader mar
ket nowadays than Henry Carey's or Horace
Binney Wallace's.
Lalligagging is essentially Greek from zatein
to talk lightly, and agein to do. Who can
| write airily, and do the graceful kotous of ele-
ront iDif;otion eouo those four