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About The courier. (Lincoln, Neb.) 1894-1903 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 28, 1901)
w THE COURIER n m BOOK REVIEWS BY SARAH B. HARRIS The Craftsman GIMLET and chl"l, a new-venture Its name is The Craftsman, hall Ins from Eastwood, N.Y.,Iaunchl the first of October. 1901. "Loner life to the captain and the crew." The literary freight of the Craftsman: William Morris, some thoughts upon his life, art and influence. William Morris, his career as a socialist. The firm of William Morris & Co., decora tors. The opera of Patience and the aesthetic movement. Two friends, Morris and Burne Jones. With the initial number of the Craftsman the united crafts of East wood, N. J., begin a work for which they hope to gain the sympathy of a wide public The new association la a guild of cabinet makers, metal and leather workers, which has been re cently formed for the production of household furnishings. The guild rises upon thoe foundations into which the genius of William Morris and Burne Jones is built and the united crafts will endeavor to extend the principles established by Morris In both the ar tistic and socialistic sense. They seek to substitute the luxury of taste for the luxury of costliness. They teach that beauty does not Imply elaboration. They employ only those forms and ma terials which make for simplicity and dignity of effect und they hope to unite in one person the designer and the workman. Morris, the master, put this principle In practice. He executed with his own hands what his brain had conceived, and his apprentices followed his ex ample to the limit of their power. Morris direct aim was to perfect the art of the artisan. This aim the United Crafts" declares is theirs also. To make known their existence and ob ject. The Craftsman, the monthly periodical, has been established. Its issues will be devoted to the consideration of the rela tion of art to labor, and to pleas for an art developed by the people for the people. The first number contains an excellent likeness of the noble head and face of Morris and eight illustrations of furniture and rooms filled with the simple, strong furniture such as Mor ris made to last through generations. The desks, chairs, sofas and tables are parts of squares. They are simple in line and many of the chairs and tables are pegged together so that the strength and simplicity of their con struction is fully shown. There are no whorls of decoration to afford baffling caves of dust, no veneering, no slender spindles to break at an unwary touch, no spidery legs to be carefully avoided by one's portly grandfather. The lines are neat, strong, clean and above all, secure. Such furniture Is a lesson in sincerity and frankness and the lasting and wearing qualities of these virtues. The subconscious influence of furni ture and the familiar objects of the home upon a child Is being pointed out by students of the department of child culture. While the world of the child is rmall and contains few objects and while the mind of the child Is most plastic and retains, after age has ob scured the Impressions of middle life, distinct recollections of youth, It Is apparent that furniture which teaches a It soon of sincerity, strength, and simplicity plays no unimportant part in the formation of standards of char acter value. The Old Town Nebraska City is not the metropolis of Nebraska, nor the cite where the most business It done, but it Is one of the oldest towns of the state, slt unted on the Missouri, that slow creeping shallow river that capricious ly drops out of sight nnd reappears again, that occupies a wider bed than It can fill most of the year, so that in the spring it can have room to stretch when the melting snows broaden and deepen It to more than four times Its usual volume. Around Nebraska City the land that is rolling swales in other parts of the state is roughened into hills gullied by the little streams that hurry to the river and shaded by bird-planted and hand-planted trees. Nebraska City and Brownvllle are the only towns in the state with a visible, brooding past that a noisy, bustling present does not Interrupt, overshadow and dispute. Nebraska City has at mosphere. Miss Bullock's prose poem celebrating the beauty and charm of the Old Town, has Just been repub lished by the Morton Press of Ne braska City. It is finely illustrated with views of the town and country, printed on heavily enameled paper and bound in green and white with the sign-post pointing the way to the Old Town and the Jeering crows perched upon it. This book with Miss Morton's volume of poetry and William Reed Dunroy's Corn-Tassels and Tumble Weeds are the most picturesque and soil-fragrant volumes yet published of Nebraska. Two of these books have been published In and celebrate Ne braska City, showing that the atmos phere is favorable to poetry and fer tile reflection. People living In the west are Just now looking about for something distinctively western to send their friends in the east. These three volumes, by three Nebraska poets are breezy as the plains; they have the wide horizons of Nebraska and the unfettered spirit of those who settled here from old time. They are fitting souvenirs of the land of shal low water. - Rosalynde's Lovers Rosalynde, Mr. Thompson's new heroine, wears thin summer dresses and suggests a dainty spring day filled with whiffs of cherry and apple blos soms, but she suggests just spring and the odors and colors and freshness that come into one's mind when the image of sprinng occurs to It. Rosalynde Is girlhood, but she lacks individualiza tion. She can represent any good and pretty girl, but she cannot readily be identified with any girl of one's ac quaintance. And her lovers are Just young men. One has "curly short hair with a glint of gold where the ends turn up under the rim of his cap, and his face has a Norwegian suggestion In its fairness, strengthened somewhat by a peculiar yet not uncomely for ward thrust of his rather heavy chin, which bore a rimpled yellow beard, short, fine and not very thick, running thence up to his ears; and his mus taches but half veiled his mouth." The other lover was dark. "Ills face was of a dusky olive, while his eyes, hair brows and mustache were nut-brown, with a dark-yellowish gloom hovering about them." This Is quite in the style of the fortune-teller, who always tells her young lady customer, after she has crossed her palm with silver, that there are two lovers disputing for her favor, one dark and the other fair. One a son of mystery, dark-browed and gloomy, the other fair, a very mother's son of Joy. These descriptions will fit any dark and any fair young man, so the fortune-teller Is perfectly safe Most any girl knows two young men of contrasting complexions who are potentially her lovers. Mr. Thomp son's use of the word mustaches for the ornament of one young man's countenance and mustache to describe the over-lip decoration of the other is puzzling. There Is probably a differ ence which escapes the interpretation of a feminine reader or reviewer. It is by no means a bad quality, this of universality, but I think Mr. Thompson wrote this story some time ago, before the success of Alice of Old Vlncennes. Alice was a nice young girl, too, but she was of a more distinct type; she was of the variety piquant and saucy. One might not recognize her In a. rencontre, but the least ana lytic gentleman would recognize her type. Rosalynde belongs Just to the young girl variety; there is nothing in what Mr. Thompson tells us to distin guished her or help us to classify her. And. this Is an age of analysis wherein those who read books are accustomed to be given the parts. Then they can do the rest of the work and press the specimen into the volume and the page of the herbarium where It belongs. Notwithstanding that Rosalynde's Lovers Is distinctly not so clever a book as Alice of Old Vincennes, it Is a pleasant love story and ends as it. should. The dreams of young girls and of young men have no especially literary flavor. The girl. If she hap pens to be fair, dreams of a dark young man, but she could not describe him any more definitely or satisfacto rily. She would not know him herself should she meet him, although she Is always looking for him. He is dark and young and strong and chivalrous and wealthy. Sometimes she Imagines him painting pictures, sometimes he has a melting tenor voice and some times he plays the piano like Pade rewski. The halo of her own desire and Imagination dazzles her eyes so that she never sees his features nor could she describe his clothes If It should become necessary. Thus Mr. Thompson. His hero will be plain enough to the girls who read his story, and Rosalynde Is sufficiently identified to the young men. For she was "brown-haired, brown-eyed, berry lipped, she had a bright and lissome figure and she flitted to and fro tilling the air with a suggestion of heliotrope and violet." What unattached young man whose dreams of women have not crystallized Into the face and figure of her who Is to be his legal mate would not be satisfied with this description? The story Is as Innocuous as a bunch of heliotrope. It is doubtless a pleas ure to Mr. Thompson to reflect that the young man who reads It will say to himself, "My girl," and every young girl will say of Breyton, who had all the virtues and had besides an In come of half a million dollars a year, "I am going to marry a man like that." The book is bound in grey linen. Issued by the Bowen-Merrill Co., of In dianapolis, and is profusely illustrated with etchings and half-tones by G. Al- den Pelrson. Little Mm To bend above the pages which ab sorbed one as a child and to find the charm fled Is an uncomfortable ex perience. It discredits the standards of our childhood and lowers confidence In our contemporary judgment a most unfortunate consequence of disil lusionment. Little Men, Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl have illuminated the childhood of many little girls, and thousands, grown-up, have read the stories to their own children. To have one's Juvenile judgment confirmed by one's mature Judgment and by one's children, too. is flattering to the author whose works are being tried by such widely different standards. Miss Alcott's books have been tested thus and the verdict Is still favorable. The new editions of these old favorites have been given to the children of the little girls who read about Demi and Daisy, about Laurie, Jo, Beth, Amy and Mr. Bhaer. And as the mother or aunt reads the Christmas present to the children she recalls her own child hood and in its most exciting incidents the children share. An old book, in a new edition, has the charm of the old and the new. The old book, besides telling its own story, is lnextrlcabFy tangled with the life of many lives. The new edition of Little Men Issued by Little, Brown & Co., is printed in large type and Illustrated by Mr. Reg inald D. Birch, who first won a de served popularity by his pictures of Little Lord Fauntleroy and by his work on the pages of St. Nicholas. DR. BENJ. F, BAILEY, Residence, Sanatorium. TeL617 At office, 2 to 1, and Sundays, 12 to 1 p i DR. MAY L. PLANA' x, Residence, 821 So. Hth. T- a At office, 10 to 12 a.m.; 4 to -Sundays, 4 to 4:30 p. m Office, Zehrung Block, 141 So. 12tn. t. ii DR. J. B. TRICKEY. Practicing Optician OFFICE, 1035 O STREET Hours, 9 to 12 a. m.; 2 to 4 p m LOUIS X. WEXTE, D. D OFFICE, BOOMS 28, 27, 1, BROWN EI. L BLOCK, 137 South Eleventh street. Telephone, Office, 530. DR. RUTH 3L WOOD 612 SOUTH SIXTEENTH STREET. Phone L1042. Hours, 10 to 12 a. m.; 2 to 4 p. m. M. B. Jvetchum, M.D., Phar D. Practice limited to EYE. EAR. NfiSE. THROAT, CATARRH, AND FITTINi, SPECTACLES. Phone 848. Hours, 9 to 5; Sunday, I to 250. Rooms 313-314 Third Floor Richards Block, Lincoln, Neb. J. R. HAGGARD, 3T. D LINCOLN, NEB. Office, 1100 O street Rooms 212, 213. ill. Richards Block; Telephone 535 Residence, 1310 G street; Telephone K9M Prof. E. L, Richcson, " Academy, lastractor of Dancing 1133 X b . Residence, 904 K St Member Normal School Acscxrn of Master of Dancing, Supervisor of Nebraska. Ordeit taken for Music. Beginners' class opv Wednesday, December 4. "KXl-r. T Inn'.nmt t Studio, KOOffi 'J MlSS LippinCOtt t BrowneU Blot i Lessons in Drawing, Paint.ng Wood Carring. Improved hina Kiln, China decorated or flr-ti Stndlo open Monday .Tuesday. Thursday .and Friday afternoon 2 to 5 o'clock. Saturday mora- lngsStolZ r A Wise Landlord Gets the best talent that can be secured in placing his order for inside decora tions for his houses. He desires the best material used, and something t'at will stand the wear and tear of 1 1 tenant. My experience of twei ty eight years has taught me how, when. nnrl TrTioi-i tn nci Mnnnmr Mv DneeS are reasonable. Estimates cheeriVly (j J furnished. Carl Myrer, 2612 Q. Street. Phone i2;2 THE. First National Bank OF LINCOLN, NEBRASKA Capital l200.000.tW Surplus and Profits, . 54.253.0s Deposits, 2.4S0.252.13 S. H. Bubnham, A. J. Sawyer, President Vice-Pre-idei H. S. Fbeeman, Cashier. H. B. Evans, Feank Pabks. Ass't Cashier. Ass't Cashier United States Depositor -2S