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About The courier. (Lincoln, Neb.) 1894-1903 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 20, 1900)
q THE COURIER. tlie cause of the Boers was the cause of the Puritan fathers is without his-, torical basis. If the Puritans, under George Washington, a hundred and twenty-fiva years ago, had fought England becauce the boat-loads of emigrants that came over after the Mayflower had deposited her first load, desired representation,' and de- sired it in vain, they might be com pared to tlie Boers now, who began erary salvation will not visit the bot toms in tlie next century. If placed further down town a few waifs from the submerged district might stray in and be dazzled and diverted by the sight of books and the comfortable interior. As the drunkards are said to lay all their degeneration to their first glass-many as aged scholar at tributes his accumulation of learning and his love of literature to the first be unhitches horses and hitches him self between the poles of an athlete's carriage has not arrived. .The breadth of his horizon and the heritage, of bis ancestors who broke the virgin sod and struggled barehanded with the the fight after an ultimatum refusing devotee who extorted him to drink forces of nature may keep him from the request for representation. Our deep of the Pierian spring and dive the man-worship which has rotted the forefathers were obstinate, but they keepers have the sense to plant their fibre of Oxford. Cambridge and some traps in the paths and near the of the older schools in this country. offensive sentimentality and lack of lege colors tied to his cane, and tooted common sense that seems to have a fish horn and talked about college broken out in Princeton. A rough spirit even after the gray hairs had reserve and bluotness characterizes begun to come, and he might even the wesjern student. That day when have sunk to the device of "posting' were English and it is an undeserved calumny to compare them to the Boers of the Transvaal. homes of the game they hunt. Church vestrys and library boards build their lures to a higher life just as far away from the ignorant, wick ed and poverty stricken as they can get. And that is one reason why the saloons and dives are so much more The Carnegie Library. While the library site is still co quetting with O, Eleventh, N and J streets, it is well enough to remember that there is only one thing to be con- POP"'" and accomplish so much dis- cent a'ccep.a ce of 8toris and truction. They are very close to the men that Christ surrounded himself with. College settlements were start ed by someone who said there was not a carpenter in the Carpenter's church and their influence has been as immediate as the saloons. The Carnegie library is a rich man's offering to tlie poor. We have no right to place that gift where the poor cannot conveniently use it. Sophomorical Stories. Miss Willa Catber's review of "The Gentleman from Indiana' by Booth Tarkington in this edition of The Courier has given name and form to the distasteful hero worship that earthly characterizes most of the stories of to the college men. The three or four control Princeton men to whom the pages of Miss Other. The long struggle for recognition which discourages so many young writers has not dismayed Miss Cather, though she may have grown tired wait ing f:r congenial employment Re- a poem by three well known publishers is very gratifying to her many friends in Ne braska. The very clever and in teresting letters which Miss Cather contributes to The Courier have serv ed besides, the purpose of a weekly message to the hundreds of people who believe in the integrity of Miss Cath er's inspiration and culture. Even Mr. Walt Mason of Beatrice who commonly objects to Miss Catb er's measuring books and plays by an art rule will rejoice that the nose of one member of his fraternity, a nose so long tightly pressed to the grind stone, is to be lifted out of our sphere into one more congenial, rarer and more worth while to breath. sidered and that is the greatest con Tenienceof the greatest number of people. The donor, Mr. Carnegie, is not giving this library for the pur pose of increasing the value of con tiguous real estate.il is intention is to give books to the bookless and a read ing room to the homeless, to offer tudents the free and continuous use of a rich man's library to give to the wretched, the aspiring and the hope less a place to read. And in the rich man's list of blessings if he be not painfully limited, the chief of bis possessions is books and a place to read them in. Friends are exacting, disappointing and easily mislaid. They will not be put aside without apology and the best of friends are not responsive moods which occasionally even the best disciplined tempera- the magazines and the valves of the meat. But a book can be selected book publisher's heart are mysterious for the occasion and the mood. A ly open, are prolific but rather tire- 1 w I LLA CATHER man need not possess more than three some writers. Nothing is so tiresome wj oe suppueu wmi tucuest cuiuiuit, tu uulsiucis oa uioumru eutiiusiaaiu the highest beauty and the most pro- vociferously and repeatedly expressed found learning there is in the world, and insisted upon. Undergraduates And one of these may be spared and are always under the influence of still leave the man comfort, beauty, 6ome enthusiasm or some emotion knowledge and inspiration. unintelligible to the rest of the world That Mr. Carnegie lias discovered which has won a diploma of sang- that money will not buy much for a froid and can walk the streets and man, after all, is apparent by his giv- attend the theatre in company with ing it away. That bis experiments friends quite unobtrusively. in spending money have further The football hero exploited by Mr. taught him that books bring the Tarkington, and the other two largest returns and most lasting sat- Princeton men I have in mind, whose isfaction is also evident in his dona- names are not yet of quite househo'd tions for the erection of libraries. familiarity are popular writers just iiiomiwiimiMimiiimmiMiwi : THE PASSING SHOW: IMMMOIMMIIMM From the days of the monastical library, where only the monks read the books, nutil today wherein the li braries are being thrown open to the people to select their own books from the shelves, books have been jealously, guarded, then by church officers new by boards of various degrees of gener osity and humanity. I have several good reasons for be lieving that the Lincoln library board is composed of an unusually intelli gent and devoted body of men and women, who will decide upon a site in the same spirit that Mr. Carnegie gave the library. A site, like that selected by the Boston library board, in the midst of the aristocratic part of the city where every householder bas a large library of bis own, is not the place for a library. The bookless need to be entreated, need to have objections like those of distance and Inconvenience removed before they will consent to accept the salvation of books. Those who have formed the reading habit are like the ninety and nine it is not necessary to coo. suit their convenience. They are saved, and speaking from a literary point of view, they do not need a shepherd's care. If the library is erected in the heart of the south of O street resi dence district, it is certain that lit because there are two or three hun dred thousand undergraduates in this country ready to bawl themselves hoarse and the neighborhood deaf, and who are always ready to perform any sort of feudal hereditary service for the few distinguished men in their college who can kick or run or throw a curved ball. Ihe homage offered and accepted is out of propor tion to the merits and achievements of the boy it is offered to. But this does not signify. He is carried on shoulders and ranks everybody in the college world and undergaduates know no other. For and to these worshippers the college yarns of the deeds, poses, favorite drinks, sacred oaths and costumes of a football Sala din are written. It is a large and tempting clientele, wbicli if the pub lisher can secure, means large profits. The rest of the world which has got beyond skittles and beer, but reads the news books is still obliged to listen to the college boy in literature and make one of his audience. It is particularly gratifying that the undergraduate body of the uni versity of Nebraska is not given to lopping over in the Princeton style. Although the students of this uni versity are frequently charged with bad manners in public places, they cannot justly be charged with the A Popular Western NoveL "You may cut him clean of his foot-ball hair, An' lock his toys away, But you can't make a man of a college star If you try till his dyin' day.' "The Gentleman From Indiana" is a lucky book: it has been much talked about and it bas bad a large sale. I believe that Mr. Booth Tark ington, the author, was graduated from Princeton in '93, and that he bas since been employed with this novel in which he wished to trans- in the hope that callow Freshmen would still point him out as the man who used to be "tlie great Harkless." Have we not of old time seen them thus in Lincoln, these remarkable students who somehow fail to make any deep impression in wider fields, and who drift back to post and culti vate a standing with lower classmen and passionately insist upon being "great." Probably Mr. Tarkington would not agree with my opinion of his hero, but he must admit that his hero hungered after all these things as a boarding school girl does after the chum who used to eat caramels with her and curl her front hair and sew, bows on her slippers. Well. "Harkless" worried through some seven years of this kind of life, and then a girl came to Plattville whom he had known when she was a child; in the days when be went yachting with Mrs. "Van Skuyf who either wore or carried roses hab itually I am unable to discover which and when tlie band always played "Hail the Conquering Hero" when he approached, and he couldn't even walk out with a lady that im passioned freshmen did not snatch him up and bear him off on their shoulders, shouting "Skal to the Vik ing!' Naturally this young lady brought back many pleasant mem ories of better days, and she was the cousin of his college chum "Tom Meredith," and she sang Schubert's Serenade and looked like a marquise, and "Harkless' made enterprising love to her just the first chance he got. When the Marquise, whose everyday name was "Helen," slightly discouraged him, he rushed wildly, madly out into the storm at least I think that is the way be did it, and let the Whitecaps get him. Now the Whitecaps had been after him for a long time because of the lofty moral tone of the Carlow County "Herald,'' aud when they got him they left as little of him as possible. For days he was missing and could not be located anywhere, and the good citizens of Plattville did nothing but stand on the street corners and wring their hands and weep for their beloved young editor. Country editors are so beloved! Finally Harkless was found shot to pieces in a hospital in a neighboring cribe that part of the Comedie Hu- maine which transpires in a little town, and in his delirium he sang col town in the middle west. He takes lege songs and "heard the seniors "John Harkless," who had been a great man at college, and sets him down in Plattville, Indiana, to work out his destiny as the editor of a small country newspaper. "Harkless" apparently had been one of those perennial college stars of whom "great things" are expected Lincoln hasknownafew of them, and con cerning most of them it is still "ex pecting." He had been surrounded by that luster wutch occasionally in capacitates a man for usefulness in active life, so he went off into the wilderness where he could hide his halo and be comfortable. But even then be was not comfortable, his col lege popularity having spoiled him for any sort of gron-up living. In deed, he was a most uncomfortable young man, and bad he not im poverished himself by buying a per fectly worthless newspaper from a Chicago agent at a fancy price, he would never have stuck it. out in Plattville, but would have returned singing on the stairs,"' and was always trying to steal the clapper from the college bell, which childish trend of thought shows how little seven years of the world had done for him. "While he was ill the Marquise from the Philadelphia finishing school ran his paper for him and wrote political editorials and leaders on the petrol eum possibilities of Indiana, which craft it is the especial aim of all finishing schools to impart, and when he recovered she recompensed him for his sufferings with her affections, and because of the wide influence of the aforesaid finishing school edi torials, political honors were heaped upon him. The first few chapters of Mr. Tark ington's novel are exceedingly well written. Tlie wide-streeled prairie town with its low framed buildings, jtsside walk loafers and store box whi tiers who, when the sun got hot, slouched over to the court house yard and wbitled at the fence under the to the country where he was con- trees where the farmers tied their sidered a great man, and would have horses, are well done. But as Mr: attended fraternity banquets and Kipling once remarked, local color is gone to football games with his col- a dangerous thing in the hands of a ' T : A
