Neither Here nor There

Oliver Herford, and American humorist, writer, and illustrator here gives us short vignettes from topics as seemingly insignificant things as the creases in trouser, several pieces on cats, and societal mores and foibles. Each piece is filled with humorous barbs and insights into the human condition.


By : Oliver Herford (1863 - 1935)

01 - The Secret



02 - Our Leisure Class



03 - Concerning Revolving Doors



04 - Bolshevism for Babies



05 - The Tutti-Frutti Tree



06 - Those Bill Boards



07 - The Lure of the “Ad”



08 - Look Before She Leaps



09 - The Low Cost of Cabbing



10 - The Great Match Box Mystery



11 - Are Cats People?



12 - Mlle. Fauteuil



13 - Money and Fireflies



14 - Concerning the Trouser-Crease



15 - An Old-Fashioned Heaven



16 - Another Lost Art



17 - Mr. Chesterton and the Soliloquy



18 - Bunk



19 - The Cost of a Pyramid



20 - Waltzing Mice and Dancing Men



21 - The Hobgoblin



22 - The Voice of the Pussy-Willow



23 - Pernicious Peaches



24 - Second Childhood’s Happy Hour



25 - Pity the Poor Guest of Honour



26 - A New Monroe Doctrine



27 - Do Cats Come Back?



28 - The Ruthlessness of Mr. Cobb



29 - My Lake



30 - The Hundredth Amendment



31 - Say It with Asterisks


The Secret

Eve was bored. She confided the fact to the Serpent.

“Tell me something new!” she wailed, and the Serpent—he had never seen a lady cry before—was deeply moved (the Serpent has always been misjudged) and—there being no National Board of Censors—told her everything he knew.

When he had finished, Eve yawned and looked boreder than ever. “Is that all?” she said.

The Dramatic Critic asks the same question on the first night of a new Play—“Will there never be an end to these Dormitory Farces,” he moans, pondering darkly the while how he may transmute its leaden dullness to the precious gold of a scintillating paragraph.

Father Time has nothing to say on the matter. If you ask him to show you a new thing, he shrugs his wings and growls, “You can search me.” Things old and things new are all alike to Father Time.

Peradventure, in the uttermost recess of the Great Pyramid lies a hair of an unknown color, or a blueprint of the fourth dimension, or better still the ms. of a new play, or a joke that has never been cracked.

When a Roman bath is unearthed in Kent or a milliner’s shop in Pompeii we wait breathless to hear of the discovery of a new story, or a new dress pattern, but always it is the same old skull, the same old amphora.

Even the newness of Fashion is a jest of antiquity.

In an Italian book printed in the sixteenth century is a story of a fool “who went about the streets naked, carrying a piece of cloth upon his shoulders. He was asked by some one why he did not dress himself, since he had the materials. ‘Because’ replied he, ‘I wait to see in what manner the fashions will end. I do not like to use my cloth for a dress which in a little time will be of no use to me, on account of some new fashion.’”

There may be a newer version of this story in the ashes of the Alexandrian library or beneath the ruins of Babylon, but this has at least the freshness and luster of its four-hundred years. Also it throws a light, a very searchlight, on the translucent demoiselles of today (see them shyly run to cover at the mere mention of a searchlight.)

Now we know their guilty secret. Each of them has, hoarded away in a secret drawer (as money in panicky times) a roll of fine silk or voile, or panne velvet, or crepe de chine which she is sparing from the scissors till the Wheel of Fashion shall oscillate with less fury. Then she will put away the skimpy, flimsy makeshift garments of transformed window curtains and bath towels, converted robes de nuit and remnants of net or chiffon she has been vainly trying to hide behind—and then—then alas, we shall see her no more!

Comments

Random Post