Whittlers

...They contrasted them with the stolidity of the home-born peasant, content, under similar circumstances, to sit carving a similar piece of wood, slowly and laboriously, into goats, sheep, chess-men, or something else that bore a groveling likeness to life...

...I am my world," is to taste a joy the whittler never knew, but only because Mr...

...But then his was a careless, pioneering life, out-of-doors and out-at-elbows, and the amount of untutored genius he squandered for lack of critics, still unborn, who could have told him how good it all was, is the scandal of our present frugal age...

...Munson's authority, American literature "lacked a dandy," will learn, or in all probability has already learned, that "no one has more carefully observed to the letter the restrictions of the art-master, or more perfectly observed the virtue of impeccable form," than he...

...Wallace Stevens, the author of the immortal couplet just quoted, is tasting it this month, as he peruses his marked copy of the November Dial...

...I am the personal...

...They remarked the nervous movements of his lean, powerful hands, the hands of a free man, whittling, whittling away with a magnificent gesture till nothing at all was left...

...No one, it seems to us, need share Mr...

...The restlessness of the whittler, of course, had the benighted traveler but realized it, was merely racial art-impulse, waiting till something more worth while than wood should offer on which to expend it...

...Stevens, before whose arrival, on Mr...

...To slice the language into splinters and curls, to watch them fall, with the haphazardness that we know now is art, into such happy wreaths and designs as "Fat...

...At a lecture held lately under the auspices of the American Literary Association, Mr...

...Gorham Munson, or some critic of equal calibre and perception was not at hand to help him...

...On barn thresholds, store steps, or, if nothing better offered, on a fallen log, it was his joy and pleasure to sit for many golden hours at a time, paring a billet of soft wood into slivers and spirals of uneven length but exquisite thinness, and catching a joy that was mystic and inward as the fragile and fragrant splinters, plentifully bedewed from time to time with tobacco juice, heaped themselves about his cow-hide soles...

...Visitors from Europe seldom failed to take note of him in their journals and diaries...

...In justice to the old Yankee whittler, it might be added that he let his shavings lie where they fell, and that the idea of tying them up into ribboned bunches to decorate his parlor walls, far less of asking his intimates what they thought about it all, never occurred to him...

...And that is that...

...He went so far as to criticize a certain "poetry course" which is not content with setting a pace of twenty to two hundred poems per week per poet, but recommends their publication in book form when the course is over and the fees of Pegasus have been settled for...

...The Yankee whittler was an authentic and much commented figure...

...Wood's perplexity who will keep the figure of the Yankee whittler firmly in mind...

...WHITTLERS A T the present crisis in our literature, when a new ** ^ curiosity as to his aesthetic background is beginning to seize upon the young intellectual, it might be worth someone's while to take a retrospective glance at the old-time Yankee whittler, and to see if something or other could not be done with him...

...Clement Wood, its national president, lifted his voice to bewail "the welter of mediocre verse that is coming off the printing-presses month by month," and trying to find some good and sufficient reason for it...

...Your world is you...

...Something better now seems to have arrived...