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Show THE CITIZEN 8 OBSERVATION PLANE Humbugs Of Europe And Our Own nationalism Benjamin de Casseres wittily, cleverly and trenchantly discusses Easy Mark America, urging a sort of tariff wall around the country to protect native originality by excluding foreign lecturers, authors, mystics, and atom sleuths playwrights, ghost netters. This is an astonishing puritanism. It is like resolving to exclude all thoughts except our own. Perhaps American originality is not as important as the protagonist of literary nationalism imagines. TN an excess of . By protecting American originality against foreign thought we should be sentencing ourselves to some horrible conditions. Think, for example, of being unable to escape into foreign fields from the short stories of the Saturday Evening Post or the novels of Harold Bell Wright. We can share the writers indignation and disgust at the importation of alien geniuses who come among us eager to ladel out any kind of literary broth that can be exchanged for American cash. We view with an amazement equal to his the spectacle of that genuine poet and immoral mystic Maeterlinck becoming a vassal of movie managers. We are astonished to see him bundled into the movie companys private car Mayflower and rushed across the country to Hollywood, California, to leap through a hoop or run around in circles like Fido as a tribute to the exceedingly pagan god of publicity. We are today the waste basket of Europe, economically and culturally, We are a says Mr. De Casseres. sounding board, an echo, a soap box, a brawling tavern of European eccen- trics. It is a truth that is apt to make us too morose. It is true that we welcome the humbugs of Europe to our shores with a jingling of coins that P-1 1 Ws EEE can be heard across the Atlantic. And that jingling has such an insidious effect that sincere geniuses who come to us intent upon an honest message sometimes end by throwing to us a saccharine sop of insincerity. AH this is melancholy, but the remedy is inexpressibly awful. Carried to its extreme we should be bound logically to exclude all the writers, mystics, teachers and poets of the past. But we have learned that good can come out of Nazareth and are not willing to part with Shakespeare or Robert Louis Stevenson, or even with Maeterlinck, when he is a poet and not a mystical humbug twittering to us about bees and Blue Birds. But, horror of horrors, think of being limited in our search for originality to American eccentrics, like the late Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who also was a poet and a bunco-mystiThink how terrible it would be if domestic tryants should try to make us swallow Walt Hhitman after our literary stomachs had rejected him again and again. c. Think of being confined in our lonely cell with the host of magazine writers who are paid, not to tell the truth, not to hold the mirror up to nature, not to visualize life, but to devise happy endings. The happy ending literature is not original, but it is just about as original as most things in the American literature of our day. The happy ending is as old as the first fairy stories and as false. For pay, some of our original geniuses would write a happy ending for the life of Christ and proclaim it authentic. This suggests the theory of someone, whose name we have forgotten, that the happy ending has become an American institution because the American wishes to combine this life with the future life. He argues logically enough that this life is not all and that there is nothing unreasonable about stealing a little happiness Why risk those of doubtful pedigree and growth when you can secure Our Vigorous Mountain Grown Seeds and Trees. Our Big Free Catalog gives full details. Write for it Today. PORTER-WALTE- R COMPANY Salt Lake City 5lllllllllllllllllllllllllltllllltllllllIIIIIIMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIItlltlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllillllJ lar. If we had a national board of censors or a nationalistic board of censors who, after the Europeans had been excluded, could exclude also the commercialized native writer, we might set forth once more the streams of originality on which Hawthorne and Poe so delightfully disported themselves. But so long as we ourselves are attained with the sin and curse of slush-writinso long as we dam up the springs of originality, so long as we will measure all our stories and plays by the canting canon of the happy ending; so long as we try to dodge the truth of life or exchange so long, in a word, it for sugar-sopas we make children of ourselves in our literary likes and dislikes, we deserve to be treated as juveniles by the Europeans. j You Can Get Any g, s; You Want Mr. and Mrs. De Witt Knox will leave early next week for San Francisco, where they will spend a couple of weeks. Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Waters and two sons, James Holman Waters, Jr., and Richard Emerson Waters, have returned from a two months tour of southern California. Mountain Grown and TKEES from the other world to crown the sordiness and sadness of this world. Perhaps there is something to that theory. In most of our stories, novels and plays, good fortune must be the ultimate, lot of hero and heroine. The girl marries the millionaire she thought a pauper. Theoretically, the poor young man is quite good enough for such hussies as our writers take for heroines, but that would not be a According to the happy ending. theory we have just sketched the resurrection into riches is a symbol of going to heaven. Laying, up riches on this earth is like the happy ending of laying up riches in heaven. Mr. de Casseres, we fear, did not stop to think of what a lamentable thing American literary production has come to be. Once the American was a fellow of infinite wit, of most excellent fancy genuinely original. Today he abandons originality and cuts his literary coat according to the measurements of the magazines. The American writer, mystic and atom sleuth is just as susceptible as the European to the allurment of the dol- Keith-OBrie- n's Mrs. George D. Alder is visiting her daughter, Mrs. Van V. Midgley, in Alameda, Cal. THIS IS STIFLING. The Aurora club was entertained Thursday afternoon by Mrs. Oscar Van Cott, 1728 South Main street. Mrs. W. J. McCoy gave an address. Liberty Review No. 9 gave a card party and social Thursday afternoon in the I. O. O. F. hall. Friend: "Where do you get your jokes? Out of the air, so to Humorist: speak. Why do you ask? Friend: "Nothing. I would merely suggest that you go where there Is some fresh air. |