PS 3539 
 .P87 Z6 
 Copy 1 
 
 
 
 .1. or. 
 
IN MEMORY OF B. L. T. 
 
A LINE 0' TYPE OR TWO 
 
 Hew to the Line, let the 
 quips fall where they may. 
 
 The East Window. 
 When I am bidden to the journey through the 
 Narrow Vale, I hope the message will come, not 
 in the summer, but in the spring, the season of 
 lairth in death. The idea of Resurrection was man's 
 greatest inspiration — a divine inspiration, if you 
 •wish. The idea has never lost its freshness, though 
 the phrases we use to describe it are worn to 
 threads. As we sit in the darkened room, and the 
 preacher reads the service for the dead, we feel 
 the triteness of the phrases and listen with a casual 
 ear; but the idea of Resurrection takes entire pos- 
 session of our thoughts, to which the preacher's 
 words are but a droning accompaniment. 
 
 SUNDOWN. 
 
 When my sun of life is low, 
 
 When the dewy shadows creep. 
 Say for me before I go, 
 
 " Now I lay me down to sleep." 
 
 I arn at the journey's end, 
 
 I have sown and I must reap; 
 There are no more ways to mend — 
 
 Now I lay me down to sleep. 
 
 Nothing more to doubt or dare. 
 
 Nothing more to give or keep; 
 Say for me the children's prayer. 
 
 " Now I lay me down to sleep." 
 
 Who has learned along the way — 
 
 Primrose path or stony steep — 
 More of wisdom than to say, 
 
 " Now I lay me down to sleep "? 
 
 What have you more wise to tell 
 
 When the shadows round me creep? . . . 
 
 All is over, all is well . . . 
 
 Now I lay me down to sleep. 
 
 [The Last Line of AH.] 
 You know the infallible sign of spring: father 
 on the back porch, cleaning last fall's mud from 
 his golf shoes. B. L. T. 
 
In Memory 
 
 of 
 
 Bert Leston Taylor 
 
 (B. L. T.) 
 
 Program and Records of a Public Meeting 
 
 Held in the Blackstone Theatre 
 
 March 27, 1921 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 THE CLIFF DWELLERS 
 
 1921 
 
^\ 
 
 
 COPTBIGHT, 1921, 
 BY 
 
 The Cliff Dwellers 
 
 JUL -9 '2 
 
 'CI,A617628 
 
Sfrt SiPHtnn Saglor 
 
 HUMORIST • SATIRIST • JOURNALIST 
 
 PARAGRAPHER • POET 
 
 MAN OF LETTERS AND OF LAUGHTER 
 
 EDITOR FOR FOURTEEN YEARS 
 
 OF THE 
 "LINE O' TYPE OR TWO" COLUMN 
 IN 
 THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE 
 AUTHOR OF 
 THE WELL IN THE WOOD, THE CHARLATANS, 
 A LINE O' VERSE OR TWO, THE PIPE- 
 SMOKE CARRY, MOTLEY MEASURES 
 
 mntmbn IX IBBB fllarr!? 13, 1921 
 
MEETING IN MEMORY 
 
 OF 
 
 BERT LESTON TAYLOR 
 
 The Blackstone Theatre, Chicago, March 27, 1921 
 
 Under the auspices of 
 
 The Cliff Dwellers and The Chicago Tribune 
 
 Karleton Hackett, Presiding 
 
 C MINOR QUARTET, ronmnza and allegretto Brahms 
 
 The Flonzaley Quartet 
 
 B. L. T. : THE MAN Karleton Hackett 
 
 VERSES TO B. L. T Franklin P, Adams 
 
 Reading by Donald Robertson 
 
 B. L. T. IN JOURNALISM Joseph Medill Patterson 
 
 B. L. T. AS MAN OF LETTBRS....Henry Kitchell Webster 
 
 B. L. T.'S work and GENIUS Horace J. Bridges 
 
 POEMS BY B. L. T Donald Robertson 
 
 The Road to Anywhere. Canopus. 
 Battle Song. Invocation. 
 
 Committee on Memorial Arrangements : Henry Kitchell 
 Webster, Guy Hardy, Charles Collins, Arthur Bissell, 
 Ashton Stevens, Karleton Hackett, Payson S. Wild, Karl 
 Edwin Harriman, Tififany Blake, Clifford S. Raymond. ' 
 
 Ushers : Arthur Bissell, Muri-y Nelson, Andrew N. Rebori, 
 Henri C. E. David, Thomas E. Tallmadge, Allen Spencer, 
 Wallace Rice, Frederick J. Wessels, Payson S. Wild, 
 R. R. Jarvie, L. C. Woodworth. 
 
B. L. T. : THE MAN 
 By Karleton Hackett 
 
 When the Flonzaley Quartet gave their last concert 
 in this theatre a few weeks ago they played Brahms' 
 C Minor Quartet, which contains the romanza and alle- 
 gretto to which we have just Hstened; and Bert Taylor 
 was in his seat, as he always was for the concerts of the 
 Flonzaley Quartetj, bathing his soul in the ineffable 
 beauty of the music, even as have we today. 
 
 Music was to him an essential element. He lived un- 
 
 1 der an mtense nervous strain, his whole heart bound up 
 
 m the "Line" which was never absent from his thoughts 
 
 day or night ; and as he gave of himself without stint so 
 
 he constantly had recourse to the restorative powers of 
 
 j music as necessary to his well-being. 
 
 ( He was a tonic. When he drew his chair up to the 
 
 '' luncheon table you could feel a bracing of the fibres all 
 
 about, our slack speech drew taut, the man with the 
 
 j platitude on the tip of his tongue swallowed hard and 
 
 I gazed out of the window, and there was talk, a play of 
 
 wit upon wit ; at times there was a flash ; out came Bert's 
 
 1 little book; he would make a pencil jotting; and we knew 
 
 I that some one had **made the line." 
 
 His mind was an alembic in which banalities, "flub- 
 idub," dissolved, and yet so simply, so inevitably, that 
 I there was no sediment of bitterness left behind, but what 
 j there was of truth or of wit came forth purged to be 
 I capped by him with an all-illuminating head. 
 1 He loved words, but not as a purist, for cant as to 
 [words was as foreign to his nature as cant in any other 
 
form; but the melody of the beautiful line, the vigor of 
 accurate expression, the apt usage, the happy turn of a 
 phrase and even the mere sound of the word. 
 
 For years he was fascinated with the name Saskatche- 
 wan. He used to speak it aloud that others might sense 
 its charm. He knew the region well, and planned many 
 long trips there, since he was convinced that any land 
 which had gained for itself such a name must be of 
 wondrous charm. 
 
 His eyes were ever turning towards the north, to the 
 cool silences of the woods, for there was in his nature a 
 something shy, aloof, that found itself most at home out 
 in the open, under the great pines. 
 
 It was the forest primeval that he loved; to wrestle 
 with it in all its moods, with pack on back twenty-five 
 miles a day along the Indian trails, over the lakes, across 
 the carries, down the streams, and then at night bed him- 
 self on balsam boughs and breathe in their balm. 
 
 There his spirit expanded and he opened his heart, 
 revealing the man within, as was not possible for him 
 amid bricks and mortar. Thence he returned, revived 
 and invigorated, to grapple with the great riddle, and in 
 his fight for right to enshrine himself in our hearts. 
 
 Something that was Bert Taylor has become a part of 
 the best that there is in all of us. 
 
VERSES TO B. L. T. 
 
 Friend, through a blurring mist of tears 
 That with the days but faster flow, 
 Contribute I, as twenty years 
 Ago; 
 
 When with your gentle hand you showed 
 A faltering, but adoring youth 
 ^The road — the straight and shining road 
 Of Truth. 
 
 With you ahead as loving guide 
 To light the road for me, you know — 
 And only you — how I have tried 
 To go. 
 
 Dark now the way ; the road unfair, 
 Where now the guide from whom to learn 
 The Path? . . . O Friend, I don't know where 
 To turn! 
 
 And yet you left the path so true 
 That not the blindest cannot trace 
 His kinship to the so-called hu- 
 Man race. 
 
 Sweet friend, to whom I have revealed 
 The heart within me through the years. 
 You know how poorly IVe concealed 
 My tears. 
 
 Light is my threnody and crude ; 
 I might have made it heavier, were it 
 Not that I knew this is how you'd 
 Prefer it. 
 
 Franklin P. Adams 
 
B. L. T. IN JOURNALISM 
 By Joseph Medill Patterson 
 
 I was asked to speak briefly on B. L. T. as a news- 
 paper man. There are a number of his other co-workers 
 who are better fitted to speak on this subject than I am 
 because they knew him more intimately than I did. In 
 other words, there were the "gentlemen at the adjacent 
 desks" to whom he talked so often — people who were 
 with him more than I was, any one of whom could have 
 been chosen for this, and who would be better qualified 
 to do it than I. 
 
 The manager of a newspaper is something like a 
 trouble squad — that is, his attention goes to the place 
 where inefficiency, failure and trouble are found. Where 
 everything is going all right, that is one of the places he 
 never visits. He spends much of his time in departments 
 where things are not going as they should, and that is 
 one of the reasons why I did not know Mr. Taylor bet- 
 ter — simply because there was never any trouble in his 
 department. 
 
 Some geniuses, newspaper geniuses as well as others. 
 are temperamental. They are frequently disturbed, per- 
 haps by a happening in a distant city, and they call up 
 to say that they cannot report for work on this day or 
 that. That was not true of Mr. Taylor. The possibility 
 that his column would not be prepared never entered into 
 our calculations. 
 
 I do not recall the contracts that were made with him 
 from time to time. I don't remember, but I don't think 
 it was stipulated that he should have absolute independ- 
 ence of expression, but whether it was stipulated or not. 
 he did have it. He took it. and whatever effort was 
 made to restrain him was made at the beginning of our 
 
 10 
 
association, so that he was, you might say, a newspaper 
 within a newspaper. He had the swing of the space, and 
 he filled it as he wanted. We have to judge of his effi- 
 ciency from that. His column was one column long, and 
 it was supposed to be written up to standard every day, 
 and it was so written every day. 
 
 I have spoken of making contracts with him. I am 
 talking about those things of which I happen to know 
 something. I wasn't an intimate friend of his. He knew 
 he was good ; that his value was high ; and he placed a 
 high value on his services. He was the most business- 
 like person to deal with I have ever known. I mean to 
 say this, that if he had gone into the business of buying 
 or selling any commodity, I feel sure that he would have 
 been very successful, for his mind was accurate and 
 quick. 
 
 And his word: As has often been said, his word was 
 as good as his bond. In his case it was better than any- 
 body's bond could be. If a question like a contract came 
 up you would talk with him for three minutes ; he would 
 tell you what his terms would be ; and he would say, "I 
 will take it" or *1 will not take it." That is all there was 
 to it, and you might wait for three months until the thing 
 was written up. 
 
 I am not talking about the way he wrote because you 
 who read it know as much as I do about it. All I knew 
 about what he wrote was when it was in print. I never 
 read it before that. 
 
 These are some of the experiences I had with him, and 
 such as I can tell you. As a newspaper man he was 
 peculiarly expert because he was a printer as well as a 
 writer. His early life was spent on several small-town 
 newspapers, where he learned to set type, and thus he 
 learned the t3^pographical effect of certain printing, and 
 was aware of its value. He knew when to put something 
 
 11 
 
in italics, and he knew when to use the smaller or the 
 larger type. There is a real art about it, and he knew how 
 to bring out the more pungent paragraphs, surrounding 
 them with two sets of different type to give the different 
 meanings, and he did this. 
 
 He was an informed spirit, and he was a leader. I will 
 say this in closing: I think at the time of his death he 
 was the greatest newspaper man in America. I think 
 that is what he was — ^the best all-round journalist we had 
 in this country at the time he died. 
 
 12 
 
B. L. T. AS MAN OF LETTERS 
 By Henry Kitchell Webster 
 
 Bert Leston Taylor was, among men of letters the first, 
 I think, of a new species. He was not, though he wrote 
 many essays, an essayist. He was not, primarily, a poet, 
 although his two volumes of verse, if there were nothing 
 else, would entitle him to rank as one, and a good one. 
 He was a columnist. And the column is, it seems to me, 
 a new art form, holding no lineal relation to the products 
 of the epigrammatists and occasional versifiers of times 
 past. For the column as Taylor achieved it was no arith- 
 metical sum of its component parts. It was an organ- 
 ized thing. It had form much as the sonata has form, 
 and like the sonata form it was capable in his skillful 
 hands of almost infinite variation. This was, perhaps, 
 why time could not wither it, nor custom stale. 
 
 I doubt very much whether the amazing technical skill 
 and the loving labor which he so lavishly devoted to it are 
 generally appreciated. And, indeed, it is a compliment 
 to his art that they should not be. We took it year after 
 year as a sort of natural phenomenon, as a blessed thing 
 that was somehow always there, fair weather or foul, to 
 begin the day with — a pinch of Attic salt from an inex- 
 haustible supply to flavor the varying moods in which we 
 came to the breakfast table. We are bewildered now that 
 it is gone. It is as if the spring were not come back this 
 year. 
 
 This is not the time to attempt a technical analysis of 
 the column, but it may be noted that one of the elements 
 of it was its mere appeal to the eye. B. L. T. was an 
 expert typographer and the column was, in the technical 
 sense of the word, composed with the utmost concern. 
 
 13 
 
His uncanny genius for writing captions to the work 
 ot his contnbs has been, of course, our wonder and our 
 despair. But there is a mystery about the column deeper 
 than this, and perhaps less widely noted. Every column 
 whether it contained of his actual writing only the three 
 per cent he sometimes playfully avowed or a great deal 
 more, became, by some miracle of transubstantiation, 
 himself. It had many brilliant contributors whose ini- 
 tials or pen-names we learned to look for— Pan, Ponti- 
 fex, P. D. S., Riquarius— but the column, the whole col- 
 umn, from Its ornamental heading to its justly celebrated 
 last hne, was B. L. T. The grain and texture of his mind 
 and spirit impenetrated every line of it. It figured forth 
 with such perfection of line and color, high light and 
 shadow the personality of the man who created it, that 
 the half million of his readers who never saw him nor 
 heard him speak knew him almost as well as the handful 
 of cronies who sat at table with him three or four times 
 every week. 
 
 I am finding it hard to confine myself to my subject. 
 
 old coat which he put on when he sat down at his desk 
 ^u^ 1° • " ^^'■•ao'-dinary degree, the man himself 
 
 to wnrH^^ T^"^ r^ ^i'.=""' ^^'^ ^ fastidious Sensitiveness 
 to words. They hved for him; they were as individual 
 as h,s fnends. He loved the bold outspoken clean-edged 
 ones, words which could be precise without being preten- 
 tious_ He was no snob about them. Many an impudent 
 new-hatched gamin of a word that came gnnning fo him 
 from the streets, the shops, the bleachers or the links h^ 
 welcomed with whole-hearted joy and introduced among 
 the grandees of h,s vocabulary. But mincing words af 
 fected words, bastards of pedantry and ignorance, were 
 h.s predestmed prey. He marked them down and trans- 
 fixed them with the golden shafts of his wit. as Phoebus 
 
Apollo transfixed, one by one, with his golden shafts, the 
 sons of Poseidon. I will not say he hated them. I can- 
 not remember that B. L. T. ever hated anything. Why 
 should he hate that at which he could always laugh ? But 
 I think the Line might almost have gone Republican 
 along with the rest of his newspaper had the candidate 
 restrained his tongue from that abortive monster, nor- 
 malcy. 
 
 He was a connoisseur of life. He savored its humors 
 delicately, thoughtfully. He enjoyed a sense of adventure 
 and discovery. The side of a question which everybody 
 took, the phrase that everybody used, the play that had 
 run fifty weeks and the novel that had sold a hundred 
 thousand copies were all suspect — a little — with him. 
 They must show cause, sustain the burden of proof. 
 
 Yet he was as little precious as he was vulgar — and 
 vulgarity would have been impossible to him. He had a 
 robust sense of Hfe and of humor. He could laugh at 
 anything that Rabelais could have laughed at. And this, 
 I think, is one of the great debts we owe him. He taught 
 us to laugh, again, without shame, over many of the rich, 
 common, elemental jests which the prurient-prudish 
 would attempt to deny out of existence. 
 
 I spoke of him as beginning a new species among men 
 of letters. Yet his spirit, among the shades of the masters 
 of his language, will find some boon companions. Two, 
 in particular, I would name, Thomas Gray and Edward 
 FitzGerald. Both are catalogued in the public mind as 
 poets, yet of Gray's poems all that live today are the 
 Elegy in the Country Churchvard. Eton College, and the 
 Cat browned in a Bowl of Goldfish ; and of FitzGerald, 
 outside his translations of Omar Khayyam and Calderon, 
 all that remains is the little poem about the meadows in 
 spring, which, by internal evidence merely, he beguiled 
 the editor of the Athenaeum into believing to be the Avork 
 
of Charles Lamb. Yet the position of Gray and Fitz- 
 Gerald as classics is utterly secure. 
 
 The explanation is that they were two of the greatest 
 and most inspired letter-writers that ever lived. Both 
 were immensely learned men. Gray was the greatest 
 scholar of his age. Both enjoyed the friendship of the 
 finest spirits of their respective times. Both were touched 
 by the magic wand of irony ; restrained from putting 
 their backs into things, from getting things done which 
 seemed but dubiously worth doing. And both found self- 
 expression in writing letters to their friends. 
 
 They put into these letters gossip, criticism, irrespon- 
 sible nonsense — frequently ribald — bits of verse. Gray 
 addressed to his college at Cambridge an ode to ignorance. 
 FitzGerald played with a project for compiling a Gazette 
 of Useless Information. And these volumes of letters, 
 one nearly a hundred years old and the other well into its 
 second century, are as fresh to tlie reader today as if they 
 had come to him in his morning's mail. 
 
 Well, in spirit B. L. T. was a letter-writer, too. He 
 wrote a letter just a column long every day. It came as 
 personally from him, put us as much in possession of him, 
 as if he had sent it to each of us in a sealed envelope. 
 Whether the form in which they are written will lend 
 itself practicably to collection and publication for pos- 
 terity, I don't know. In our living memory the man is 
 imperishable. 
 
 But, Thomas Gray and Edward FitzGerald, I felicitate 
 you both. For, rare souls as you are, there has joined 
 your company a kindred spirit. 
 
 16 
 
B. L. T.'S WORK AND GENIUS 
 By Horace J. Bridges 
 
 One is often tempted to suspect that the besetting sin 
 natural to a large and youthful community is the error 
 of confounding bigness with greatness. Certainly in this 
 hustling American life of ours we find that grave error 
 often committed, and it is necessary at times for us to 
 pause and remind ourselves of the fact that the com- 
 munity which mistakes largeness for greatness will never 
 become great. 
 
 If we want to know what this Chicago of ours really 
 is and is capable of becoming, we should resolutely close 
 our ears to the braggarts ; to those who urge us to "boost" 
 our community by swaggering about numbers and valua- 
 tions. Never mind the money and the statistics. Forget 
 them, and forget the growth of population, and look for 
 the material of a true judgment about Chicago to its 
 artists, its men of letters, its poets, thinkers, creative 
 minds, and reformers; to those who are self-sacrificingly 
 working for the good of others and the betterment of 
 posterity ; for it is by such men and their work that 
 posterity will judge of Chicago. 
 
 This is a large city. We are told it often, far too often. 
 It is vastly larger than, say, the Athens of Pericles. And 
 yet, when one compares the Athens of Pericles with the 
 Chicago of today and its present political leaders, one 
 feels that perhaps the comparison might prove less 
 favorable to Chicago if it were drawn with regard to 
 other matters than mere size and numbers. The question 
 of questions — the question by which the future is going 
 to judge us — is whether we can produce men less un- 
 
 17 
 
worthy to compare with Aeschylus and Sophocles and 
 Euripides, with Socrates and Plato, than some of our 
 pohtical leaders to compare with Pericles. That will 
 be the test, mark you ; that and nothing else. 
 
 I venture to think that when this judgment of posterity 
 comes to be rendered it will run somewhat to the effect 
 tiiat in our first century, under difficulties, very great and 
 in some cases insuperable, we haven't done so badly. 
 And one of the clearest reasons that posterity will have 
 for delivering (if it docs deliver) so favorable a judg- 
 ment will be the personality and the achievement of the 
 man whose completed life and work we arc celebrating 
 here today. 
 
 Note, if you please, that word completed. One of the 
 mistakes we make about the thing we call death, and one 
 of the reasons why we fall into an exaggerated grieving 
 over it, is our habit of using the word "end," instead of 
 the word "completion." We think of something chopped 
 off, catastrophically interrupted and maimed, instead of 
 something rounded off to a fitting close. 
 
 When you remember that life is great in terms only of 
 quality, valuable only for its intrinsic excellence, you then 
 realize that any worthy life — any life that has achieved 
 this quality of inner, essential worth — is complete at any 
 moment, and does not depend for its fulfillment on dura- 
 tion. So that when I share, as I do. not only the general 
 grief of this community, the grief of those who have lost 
 a valued writer, thinker and humorist, but that more 
 poignant grief of those who have lost a personal friend, 
 a comrade they had learned to love, my mood is con- 
 trolled by the thought of the completion of a fine life. It 
 is a mood not wholly of sorrow, but tempered with a 
 certain restrained triumph. 
 
 Taylor has been spoken of here this afternoon as a 
 music-lover, as a newspaper man, and as a man of letters. 
 
 18 
 
You have heard the judgment of those who knew and 
 could competently estimate his rare distinction in these 
 departments. Let us now think of him for a moment as 
 a dispenser of sunshine. One woman in a distant town, 
 writing in on some purely business matter, added a post- 
 script expressing her regret on hearing of the news of 
 his death, and asked, "What are we going to do without 
 our daily smile?" 
 
 Our daily smile! That is what Bert Taylor's work 
 meant to people by thousands, by tens and hundreds of 
 thousands. One cannot but recall in connection with him 
 that lovely comment of Dr. Johnson on the death of 
 Garrick. What could be more truly applied to our friend 
 Bert Taylor? "I am disappointed," said Johnson, "by 
 that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gayety of 
 nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless 
 pleasure." The gayety, if not of nations at least of 
 states and cities and wide countrysides, has been eclipsed 
 by the passing of our friend. Surely, in a world so 
 troubled as this world of ours has been these last few 
 years, and is today, it is a very great thing to have given 
 to countless thousands "a daily smile." Throughout those 
 days when there was little to smile at, in times when the 
 things we value more than life were in jeopardy in the 
 world, Taylor was able not only to keep his soul serene 
 above the tumult, but to impart an infectious gayety to 
 all of us, even in the darkest hours. It was the religious 
 yearning of George Eliot that she might — 
 
 Beget the smiles that have no cruelty; 
 Be the sweet presence of a good diffused. 
 And in diffusion ever more intense. 
 So shall we join the Choir Invisible 
 Whose music is the gladness of the world. 
 
 How literally Taylor's work and genius enabled him 
 
 19 
 
to fulfill this aspiration ! He was, in very fact, to hundreds 
 of thousands, the sweet presence of a good diffused, and 
 the smiles that he begot were always devoid of cruelty. 
 
 He had, as Mr. Webster has reminded us, in a high 
 and rare degree, the gift of irony. He was eminent as a 
 satirist. But note that he escaped what seems to be the 
 besetting danger of the satirist — that of turning pessimist 
 and cynic. For examples of this peril of the satirist one 
 needs look no further than to Swift and Mark Twain. 
 (Remember the Fourth Part of "Gulliver," and "What 
 Is Man?" and "The Mysterious Stranger.") Taylor's 
 humor was as considerate at the end as at the beginning, 
 his satire as kindly, his last smile as humane as his first. 
 He was like Elia. What higher praise could be given him 
 than to say that he has written pages worthy of rank 
 with Elia's? Yet this we can justly give. 
 
 To laugh with men rather than at them ; to set them 
 laughing at themselves ; never to raise a laugh against 
 innocence, against honest simplicity, against any worthy 
 quality; to sting nothing but vice, humbug, false pre- 
 tenses, arrogant ignorance, snobbery or pretentious phil- 
 istinism — this was his rule of life. To live up to such a 
 rule, to the extent he did, through long years of incessant 
 work, was great grace. 
 
 Mr. Patterson has told us this afternoon of the fact 
 that in the early days — that is, when they did not know 
 him — the authorities of the Tribune made some tentative 
 efforts to restrain his independence of utterance. I am 
 glad to hear that these eflPorts were made. I did not know 
 that any body had ever been rash enough to attempt any- 
 thing of the kind. The utter and hopeless failure of these 
 efforts, which Mr. Patterson admits, will prove to the 
 world what never needed proving to Taylor's friends — 
 that there was in him a certain high quality that now- 
 adays is all too rare. I mean that absolute, unqualified, 
 
 20 
 
unpurchasable self-respect and independence that made 
 him care less for anything in the world than he cared for 
 the integrity of his own mind and conscience. That, 
 friends, is why he was a great newspaper man. He did 
 not exemplify that strange coincidence, so frequently to 
 be observed, by which the opinions of journalists are 
 found to agree with those of the persons who employ 
 them. We all valued him, first and foremost, because 
 we knew that the opinions he expressed were his own. 
 What that meant to some of us during the early years of 
 the war, I can hardly trust myself to say. Taylor was 
 one of those who from the beginning could see what was 
 at stake in the conflict. In a community where it wasn't 
 always easy to express one's 'self freely on that subject, 
 and under circumstances where it must sometimes have 
 been particularly difficult, he always did it. He always 
 said what he believed, and let others say freely what they 
 believed. 
 
 His standards were high ones. Only the best in litera- 
 ture, poetry, music and thought appealed to him. He had 
 those two great qualifications that are the conditions of 
 citizenship in the republic of letters — catholicity combined 
 with discrimination ; the capacity to value a writer for 
 what he was and could do, and a discrimination that pre- 
 vented him from falling into the idolatry of sham taste, 
 and crediting men with being what they were not, and 
 doing what they could not. He had the inevitable ex- 
 clusiveness of all trained taste, yet without snobbery. He 
 could laugh and enjoy with the *'high-brow," yet he could 
 laugh and enjoy with the **low-brow" without condescen- 
 sion. 
 
 You have, of course, noticed in his column occasional 
 references, overt or faintly veiled, to his children. In these 
 he displayed a delicate, yearning tenderness, aflfectionate 
 w^ithout sentimentaHty, showing its depth by its very 
 
 21 
 
restraint. I take the liberty' of referring to this matter 
 because he did thus put himself on record, and also be- 
 cause in these personal utterances, these more intimate 
 notes in what Mr. Webster has called his daily letter, he 
 disclosed the spirit which informed his attitude to the 
 whole of the "so-called human race." It was a spirit of 
 kindly regard even for people who were absurd. He recog- 
 nized that there was somewhat worth while in those he 
 criticized. This is why even the victims of iiis shafts 
 could and did enjoy and praise his work. 
 
 And as to his humor, who shall attempt to characterize 
 it? And who can rival it? Who is now going to read 
 for us the "signs of the times"? Who now will put our 
 small towns on the map, and civilize them with laughter, 
 as he did? Who will develop our humor and our urbanity 
 by making us alert to detect and to avoid the absurdities 
 into which we are prone to fall? 
 
 There is no greater need in any community — and 
 especially in a young and heterogeneous community like 
 ours — than the need for an unofficial but acceptable censor 
 of manners and mannerism. Socrates was called the 
 gadfly of Athens because he made people recognize their 
 ignorance, their pretentiousness, the absurdity of their 
 "false conceit of wisdom." Taylor was a gadfly in that 
 sense. His sting was as painless as it was pointed. He 
 not only set a standard, he zcas a living standard, to which 
 we had to live up. below which we dared not fall. 
 
 In the middle ages there flourished that important 
 functionary, the Court Jester. Now the Court Jester — 
 when he was worthy of the job — was there to protect the 
 King from his worst enemies, his flatterers. Today 
 Demos is King, a many-headed sovereign of uncertain 
 mood and wavering intelligence, surrounded, assailed, 
 and led astray by a sickening swarm of flatterers. Those 
 flatterers never received any mercy from Taylor. He was 
 
 22 
 
an effective antidote to the subtlest and most dangerous 
 vice that afflicts our system. 
 
 We have learned much in this nation — and especially in 
 that part of the country from which Taylor came — of the 
 power of the preacher. But today the press, for good or 
 ill, has a more far-reaching and potent influence than any 
 preacher can hope to have. Yet the journalist too is a 
 preacher, and preaching is preaching even if it is done in 
 cap and bells. So done, it is often more effective than 
 preaching in stole and surplice. No preacher can hope 
 for so wide a congregation as Taylor had, and few can 
 hope to attain, on the whole, higher standards. 
 
 Taylor's thoroughness was one of the secrets of his 
 great success. I recall a remark of his which when he 
 made it, I absurdly misunderstood. Some three years ago 
 he said in his column something to the effect that the third 
 stanza of Keats' "Grecian Urn" ode would have been 
 much better if Keats had worked longer over it. I thought 
 he was joking, and that he was inviting his contributors 
 to try their hand at parodies of the stanza in question. 
 Under this impression I perpetrated a parody of it, which 
 he printed. But in a subsequent conversation he told me 
 that his remark was serious. It is a fact that the third 
 stanza is very inferior to the rest of that bewilderingly 
 beautiful poem. This criticism I quote for the light it 
 throws on Taylor. His work seldom betrayed the lack of 
 that extra twenty minutes' concentration which so often 
 creates the greatest of all differences, — the difference be- 
 tween the good and the excellent. 
 
 What a following he had ! How multitudinous were his 
 admirers ! One of the most charming evidences of this 
 was told me by a friend who was present at his funeral 
 the other day. There he met a man who said he was a 
 plasterer by trade, that he had three times "made the 
 Line," and he had taken a day off and lost a day's wages 
 
 ■23 
 
to come to Taylor's funeral. I hope that man is here this 
 afternoon. I should like to meet him. 
 
 Mr. Hackett, in language as felicitous as his thought, 
 has told us that something that was Bert Taylor has be- 
 come a part of the best in us. I believe this. I believe that 
 Mr. Hackett did not use a mere figure of speech, but 
 spoke what is actually true. 
 
 That the essential life in a man is immortal and in- 
 destructible is evidenced by this, that his spirit goes on 
 bearing fruit and producing effects in and through the 
 spirits of those in whom it has quickened some degree of 
 a life like to its own. It is not so much what one does, 
 but what one is (whereof one's achievements are but the 
 revealing evidence) which gleams through the flesh and 
 through the conquered circumstances of one's life. 
 
 Taylor was a many-sided man : citizen, husband, father, 
 thinker, poet, humorist, nature-lover. And now the na- 
 ture-lover is ''made one with nature." "He is a presence 
 to be felt and known, in darkness and in light, from herb 
 and stone." Thus living "in lives made better by his 
 presence" — not only in individual lives, but in the collec- 
 tive life of his city — "he is not dead ; he doth not sleep ; he 
 has awakened from the dream of life." 
 
 24 
 
THE ROAD TO ANYWHERE 
 
 Across the places deep and dim, 
 And places brown and bare, 
 
 It reaches to the planet's rim — 
 The Road to Anywhere. 
 
 Now east is east, and west is west, 
 
 But north lies in between. 
 And he is blest whose feet have prest 
 
 The road that's cool and green. 
 
 The road of roads for them that dare 
 
 The lightest whim obey. 
 To follow where the moose or bear 
 
 Has brushed his headlong way. 
 
 The secrets that these tangles house 
 Are step by step revealed, 
 
 While to the sun the grass and boughs 
 A store of odors yield. 
 
 More sweet these odors in the sun 
 Than swim in chemist's jars ; 
 
 And when the fragrant day is done, 
 Night — and a shoal of stars. 
 
 Oh, east is east, and west is west, 
 But north Hes full and fair; 
 
 And blest is he ^^ho follows free 
 The Road to Anywhere. 
 
 B. L. T. 
 
 25 
 
CANOPUS 
 
 When quacks with pills political would dope us, 
 When politics absorbs the livelong day, 
 
 1 like to think about the star Canopus, 
 So far, so far away. 
 
 Greatest of visioned suns, they say who list *em ; 
 
 To weigh it science always must despair. 
 Its shell would hold our whole dinged solar system, 
 
 Nor ever know 'twas there. 
 
 When temporary chairmen utter speeches. 
 
 And frenzied henchmen howl their battle hymns, 
 
 My thoughts float out across the cosmic reaches 
 To where Canopus swims. 
 
 When men are calling names and making faces, 
 And all the world's ajangle and ajar, 
 
 I meditate on interstellar spaces 
 And smoke a mild seegar. 
 
 For after one has had about a week of 
 
 The argimients of friends as well as foes, 
 
 A star that has no parallax to speak of 
 Conduces to repose. 
 
 B. L. T. 
 
 2C 
 
BATTLE SONG 
 
 We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord, 
 And all we ask to stead us is a blessing on each sword ; 
 And tribes and factions mingle in one great fighting clan 
 Who issue forth to battle behind a fighing man. 
 
 We stand at Armageddon, where men have stood before, 
 And whatso be the cost of it our voice is still for war. 
 Now let the traitor truckle, the falterer go fawn. 
 We only ask to follow where the battle line is drawn. 
 
 We stand at Armageddon, where fighting men have stood. 
 And creeds and races mingle in one great brotherhood; 
 And here from dawn to darkness we battle for the Lord ; — 
 Thy blessing, great Jehovah, on each impatient sword ! 
 
 B. L. T. 
 
 27 
 
INVOCATION 
 
 O Comic Spirit, hovering overhead, 
 With sage's brows and finely-tempered smile, 
 From whose bowed lips a silvery laugh is sped 
 At pedantry, stupidity, and guile, — 
 
 So visioned by that sage on whom you bent 
 Always a look of perfect sympathy. 
 Whose laugh, like yours, was never idly spent, — 
 Look, Spirit, sometimes f ellowly on me ! 
 
 Instruct and guide me in the gentle art 
 Of thoughtful laughter — once satyric noise; 
 Vouchsafe to me, I humbly ask, some part, 
 However little, of your perfect poise. 
 
 Keep me from bitterness, contempt, and scorn, 
 From anger, pride, impatience, and disdain. 
 When I am self-deceived your smile shall warn, 
 Your volleyed laughter set me right again. 
 
 Am I inspired to mirth or mockery. 
 Grant, Spirit, that it be not overdrawn ; 
 And am I moved to malice, let it be 
 Only "the sunny malice of a faun." 
 
 B. L. T. 
 
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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