The So-called Human Race

Bert Taylor

Bert Leston Taylor

The So-called Human Race

WORLD WITHOUT END

Once upon a summer’s night

Mused a mischief-making sprite,

Underneath the leafy hood

Of a fairy-haunted wood.

Here and there, in light and shade,

Ill-assorted couples strayed:

“Lord,” said Puck, in elfish glee,

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Now he sings the self-same tune

Underneath an older moon.

Life to him is, plain enough,

Still a game of blind man’s buff.

If we listen we may hear

Puckish laughter always near,

And the elf’s apostrophe,

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

В В В В B.В L.В T.

Foreword

By Henry B. Fuller

Bert Leston Taylor (known the country over as “B. L. T.”) was the first of our day’s “colyumists” – first in point of time, and first in point of merit. For nearly twenty years, with some interruptions, he conducted “A Line-o’-Type or Two” on the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune. His broad column – broad by measurement, broad in scope, and a bit broad, now and again, in its tone – cheered hundreds of thousands at the breakfast-tables of the Middle West, and on its trains and trolleys. As the “Column” grew in reputation, “making the Line” became almost a national sport. Whoever had a happy thought, whoever could handily turn a humorous paragraph or tune a pointed jingle, was only too glad to attempt collaboration with B. L. T. Others, possessing no literary knack, chanced it with brief reports on the follies or ineptitudes of the “so-called human race.” Some of them picked up their matter on their travels – these were the “Gadders.” Others culled oddities from the provincial press, and so gave further scope to “The Enraptured Reporter,” or offered selected gems of gaucherie from private correspondence, and thus added to the rich yield of “The Second Post.” Still humbler helpers chipped in with queer bits of nomenclature, thereby aiding the formation of an “Academy of Immortals” – an organization fully officered by people with droll names and always tending, as will become apparent in the following pages, to enlarge and vary its roster.

All these contributors, as well as many other persons who existed independently of the “Line,” lived in the corrective fear of the “Cannery,” that capacious receptacle which yawned for the trite word and the stereotyped phrase. Our language, to B. L. T., was an honest, living growth: deadwood, whether in thought or in the expression of thought, never got by, but was marked for the burning. The “Cannery,” with its numbered shelves and jars, was a deterrent indeed, and anyone who ventured to relieve himself as “Vox Populi” or as a conventional versifier, did well to walk with care.

Over all these aids, would-be or actual, presided the Conductor himself, furnishing a steady framework by his own quips, jingles and philosophizings, and bringing each day’s exhibit to an ordered unity. The Column was more than the sum of its contributors. It was the sum of units, original or contributed, that had been manipulated and brought to high effectiveness by a skilled hand and a nature wide in its sympathies and in its range of interests.

Taylor had the gift of opening new roads and of inviting a willing public to follow. Or, to put it another way, he had the faculty of making new moulds, into which his helpers were only too glad to pour their material. Some of these “leads” lasted for weeks; some for months; others persisted through the years. The lifted wand evoked, marshalled, vivified, and the daily miracle came to its regular accomplishment.

Taylor hewed his Line in precise accord with his own taste and fancy. All was on the basis of personal preference. His chiefs learned early that so rare an organism was best left alone to function in harmony with its own nature. The Column had not only its own philosophy and its own Г¦sthetics, but its own politics: if it seemed to contravene other and more representative departments of the