Los Angeles herald., 1905-11-05
Clam Pie Dished Up for Intellectual Digestion

There is to eyes that see normally
quite as much poetry and beauty in the
half frozen carafe, sparkling under the
pink candle shade, as in the old oaken
bucket of song, for the mind traces the
water from it's spring in the woods and
hears the ripple of the brook in the
music of the orchestra. To dwellers un-
der town roofs complexity is simpler
| than simplicity represented by unfa-
maliar landscapes that we grow to
know best at picture exhibitions in gold
frames and we are heartily disap-
| pointed when nature fails to come up
to Corot evenings and Daubigny morn
| ings. at
| Truth only is simple and the point of
view makes the difference. 1t is not
most natural that fiat born moderns
should best love the stars that shine
on the city roofs over the humanity
| that we best understand. What need
have we to peer into froggy pools for
reflection of quiet country skies that
know nothing of this divine comedy and
tragedy that we call life?
For us the life beats that sob up
from the city's heart under the crowns
of electric light that CLEAN out at night
against the sky. There is no nightin-
gale to sing our lullaby and no birds
call to wake us to the morning, but
rather the postman's whistle, that
signal that sounds for us the note of the
days canticle.
Nature is very much overdone and as
sociated too enthusiastically with the
truly rural. Who is to say that a tad
| pole is more simple than a French bull
pup? AS for simplicity, who more
simple than we that choose to dwell
among the bright lights and the tele-
phones rather than seek the fields where
the crullers bloom and the universal
rolling towel hangs, the banner of the
simple life?
We wear no plumes in these days and
cross no swords, nor touch we Tyres
under ladies' easements, but under our
| thin skins the same fevers and languorS
dwell as in those uphoisted days gone
by, and in city and in town, under all
suns, souls and brains and bodies re-
main intrinsically the same, except that
imagination develops with education
and ambition burns with knowledge
and life refines in the consciousness of
art that makes all things beautiful.
AS for the quaint and wholesome
peoples in our rural districts. let us give
them all that is their due in song and
story, and their share is no small one
when the beauties that dwell in green
fields and those that dwell worthily
among white hawthorn hedges are
made clear to us as in pages that we
| tuih ioNihSAJ ONSi anu dBdlH.
But it is this making of the real
clam pie stand for the whole thing,
as 1t were that makes our lip curl even
as the lover of the horny hand in fiction
sneers at the we'll tubbed school, reek-
ing of pink tea and gardenias rather
than of cider and dandelions.
No people on earth, even those who
read the magazines, can fail to be the
better for having something to be true
to, so let us try to keep romance out
of the custard pie and the cabbage
patch. A little of one school goes a great
way, and it is a triffle tiresome to feel
that we must hereafter look for literary
recreation in a continual gamut of hay
seed loves and hates and smiles and
tears.
Whether we play the game of life in
marbled halls or four-roomed flats or
carry on exquisite existences amid the
milk pals and the hop toads, we are
all so tired at times that we fall to sleep
lulled on the breast of the universal
mother and fancying that we hear in
the roar Of our elevated trains and the
chug of our motors those internally
beautiful cadences of the frog, the
} cricket and the katydid, natures or
chestra-as bad sometimes as those OF
lour fashionable hotels.