The times., 1899-09-17
The work of George AIDE.

The Work of George AIDE.
Some generations hence when the histo-
rian is gathering material for descriptions
of Chicago as it was in it's first half-cen-
tury, he may come upon the work OF
George Ade and revel in it. AIDES pictures
of a certain stratum OF Chicago life are
absolutely perfect. and though they do not
go much beneath the surface that is prin-
cipally because there is nothing but the
surface to be had. The ordinary man does
not act melodramas, or even pastoral plays,
in his daily life, and it is the daily life of
the ordinary Chicago person with which
Mr.. Ade has to do
His first piece of work was "Artie" who
was Chimmie Fadden without the limelight
and paint. His next was Pink Marsh, .
( the town negro as he is in the Windy City.
Pink was bootblack with views on life,
love, and the pursuit of happiness, and he
eventually graduated into the career of a
Pullman porter The latest book OF this
clever Chicago writer is '' Doe Horne, tn :
oracle of the Alfalfa European Hotel; and
anyone who has ever been to an Alfalfa or
Hygeia, or ST. Cloud hotel, in a West
eTn city, Will know the type. There are
several other characters in the loosely
strung collection of sketches, but they all
revolve more CT less about Doc, Horne"
There are dentist, a race-track man, a
freckle- faced boy, a constitutional drunk
ard, and some other people-all irredeema-
bly, common and matter of course shaken
together in this big, nondescript hotel of a
big, bustling city, like so many pieces of
/ furniture in an auction room.
None of them belongs Just where he is
! except Doc" The dentist ought to have
been in a fiat of his own, with plush fur
niture and lace curtains, and crayon por-
traits on the wall; the race-track man
should have been in a sumptuoas suite o.
apartments. with snowy wife; the lush
( ought 10 have been at a Kelley cure, an l
the freckle-faced boy on farm; but
Doc could never have existed in his
old age anywhere but in q hotel lobby. In
the family circle his exuberant remini-
SCIENCES would have been frownad upon,
and he would have been brought sternly
to book when he told about the floods in
| the Mississippi Valley or the beautiful
Brazilian girl to whom he was once almost
! engaged; he wonld not have been an
oracle at all, and the glimpses OF finer
/ feeling of delicate honor, and subtle wis
! dom, which he displays now and then.
would have been crushed in the imperative
! necessity of earning a living But in the
| Alfalfa Hotel Doc shone. He was in
/ his right place, and of course the other
! homeless ones drifted around him, as flot-
! sam gathers around stump in the middle
| of a stream.
To those who do not care for the middle
| class American this book will be an object
| of supreme contempt. To those who insist
on poetry in their fiction it will be source
| of sadness and disillusion. But the fact re-
mains that il is photographically correct,
with all the passionless and pitiless exact
ness of the ordinary American photograph
quality which differentiates Mr.. Ade's
! work from that of other writer's on the
I same topics is that he never talks down to
! his subjects. He has never the attitude
of the artist looking on. He forms no opin-
ion; he shapes no scenes. He is entirely
4 impersonal and unconcerned He is not
the literary man drawing out the loafers in
( the lobby, but one of them for the time
being He never betrays a consciousness
of the tawdriness and absurdity of the
love affairs of the lightning dentist from
! the interior of Indiana nor does he sit in
] judgment on the lush" because he is a
'lush." He takes the facts as they are
and lets you think what you are naturally
inclined to think
This impersonal attitude may come to be
characteristic of American fiction. in time.
and ii would be very good thing if it did
For while all that We wrote struck the
personal note with an intensity of self
consciousness that was both absurd and
wearisome. People asked not so much
whether a book was good as who wrote
il, and the public concerned itself most i'm
pertinentIy with the history and private
lives of all authors, good, bad, and indiffer-
ent This condition of things was helped
along by the rabid Philistinism which in
sisted that an author could not write good
books unless his theological opinions were
correct. Nowadays We are getting pas.
that Some of our authors are still intense
Iy self-conscious, and write with a pur-
pose but more have adopted the artistic
attitude which is catholic enough TO set
aside self when art is in question. How
ellis has probably done as much toward es-
tablishing this standard as any other writer
In four or five of Howells best novels it is
absolutely impossible TO find out what he
thinks of any given character, without
much study. This is considerable artis-
tic improvement over the oldfashioned now
el of the Arthur Bonnicastle type. The
younger writer's are feeling this and adopt
ing the impartial method
The work of AIDE shares another char
acteristically American quality, which is
more Gallo than English. He has an air
of thinking his work hardly worth doing.
certainly not worth parading. His ''Sto-
ries of the Streets and of the Town.
which have appeared in the Chicago Rec
ord, and from WHICH MS DOCKS are large
ly made up, have the true newspaper at
mosphere. The newspaper man knows
that his work will be read remembered
for an hour, and then thrown aside He
has definitely given UP the idea that it will
be printed in editions de luxe and kept
on the parlor table. In a word he does
not look forward to imperishable fame.
He is shy of touching the deeper facts of
life for fear of being sentimental and
when he does touch them he covers them
up with cheap rhetoric. There is this Gu
rious mixture of openness and reserve in
the work of Ade, as there is in the char
ecter of the average American. The man
who shares your seat in the railway car
NAV tell you all about his intimate family
affairs. but he does not use the studied
language of the Latin in doing so. He
does not exhaust adjectiyes in speaking of
his wife. but he will say without reserve
that she is 1.-The best little woman in the
world and then he Will stop The Eng
lishman would have stopped before that
II there is to be developed an American
school of novelists-and We certainly have
nothing of that kind yet-it will be made
up of two types, both Enthusiastically
American and broad minded. in exactly op-
nosite ways. We.shall have the writer who
strikes the personal note continually, who
frankly judges everything in its relation
TO himself. and is as openly interested in
human nature; and the quiet observant,
salf-a -affaaing looker-on, who makes no at