the more a colyumist is out on the streets, making himself the reporter of the moods and oddities of men, the better his stuff will be. it seems to me that his job ought to be good training for a novelist, as it teaches him a habit of human sensitiveness. he becomes filled with an extraordinary curiosity about the motives and purposes of the people he sees. the other afternoon i was very much struck by the unconscious pathos of a little, gentle-eyed old man who was standing on chestnut street studying a pocket notebook. his umbrella leaned against a shop-window, on the sill of which he had laid a carefully rolled-up newspaper. by his feet was a neat leather brief-case, plumply filled with contents not discernible. there he stood (a sort of unsuccessful cyrus curtis), very diminutive, his gray hair rather long abaft his neck, his yellowish straw hat (with curly brim) tilted backward as though in perplexity, his timid and absorbed blue eyes poring over his memorandum-book which was full of pencilled notes. he had a slightly unkempt, brief beard and whiskers, his cheek-bones pinkish, his linen a little frayed. there was something strangely pathetic about him, and i would have given much to have been able to speak to him. i halted at a window farther down the street and studied him; then returned to pass him again, and watched him patiently. he stood quite absorbed, and was still there when i went on.[pg 40]
that is just one of the thousands of vivid little pictures one sees on the city streets day by day. to catch some hint of the meaning of all this, to present a few scrawled notes of the amazing interest and colour of the city's life, this is the colyumist's task as i see it. it is a task not a whit less worthy, less painful, or less baffling than that of the most conscientious novelist. and it is carried on in surroundings of extraordinary stimulation and difficulty. it is heart-racking to struggle day by day, amid incessant interruption and melee, to snatch out of the hurly-burly some shreds of humour or pathos or (dare one say?) beauty, and phrase them intelligibly.
but it is fun. one never buys a package of tobacco, crosses a city square, enters a trolley-car or studies a shop-window without trying, in a baffled, hopeless way, to peer through the frontage of the experience, to find some glimmer of the thoughts, emotions, and meanings behind. and in the long run such a habit of inquiry must bear fruit in understanding and sympathy. joseph conrad (who seems, by the way, to be more read by newspaper men than any other writer) put very nobly the pinnacle of all scribblers' dreams when he said that human affairs deserve the tribute of “a sigh which is not a sob, a smile which is not a grin.”
so much, with apology, for the ideals of the colyumist, if he be permitted to speak truth without[pg 41] fear of mockery. of course in the actual process and travail of his job you will find him far different. you may know him by a sunken, brooding eye; clothing marred by much tobacco, and a chafed and tetchy humour toward the hour of five p. m. having bitterly schooled himself to see men as paragraphs walking, he finds that his most august musings have a habit of stewing themselves down to some ferocious or jocular three-line comment. he may yearn desperately to compose a really thrilling poem that will speak his passionate soul; to churn up from the typewriter some lyric that will rock with blue seas and frantic hearts; he finds himself allaying the frenzy with some jovial sneer at henry ford or a yell about the high cost of living. poor soul, he is like one condemned to harangue the vast, idiotic world through a keyhole, whence his anguish issues thin and faint. yet who will say that all his labour is wholly vain? perhaps some day the government will crown a colyumist laureate, some majestic sage with ancient patient blue eyes and a snowy beard nobly stained with nicotine, whose utterances will be heeded with shuddering respect. all minor colyumists will wear robes and sandals; they will be an order of scoffing friars; people will run to them on crowded streets to lay before them the sorrows and absurdities of men. and in that day
the meanest paragraph that blows will give
thoughts that do often lie too deep for sneers.
