The Press: Harper’s

The Old Man sat in his old armchair

With Tabs on his ears and soot in his hair

And he winked, and he said with a comical air:

“She’ll win in a walk, by Judas,”

If that irreverent but optimistic curmudgeon famed in race-track ballad has now attained the age of 100, he was a stripling of 25 when the first issue of Harper’s Magazine was published. If it is a fact, as some aver, that his quaint prophesy concerned, not the speed of a horse, but the future of that publication, he has been amply justified.

Last week Harper’s celebrated its 76th Anniversary. It appeared in a new cover of orange and black —a cover as suavely lurid as a tiger rug. It abandoned s practice of reproducing, under its title-head, a portrait, by some substantial master—folowed instead the example of The Dial, The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review by printing there its table of contents. There was little to remind the twitching ear-tabbed centenarian of the cover familiar to his halcyon days — the two roco pedestals that framed a page made acceptable for mid-centry boudoirs with a trinity of cherubs, two scattering flowers while the third his little round buttocks eclipsing the north pole of a small world wafted soapbubbles above the legend:

HARPERS

New MONTHLY MAGAZINE

Published by

HARPER & BROTHERS

Sold by the Trade Generally.

Little did the contents itself remind him of that old-time miscellany of reprints from the works of Englishmen. In the new magazine his rheumy eyes encountered first, an article by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick entitled Religion and Life, Moral Autonomy or Downfall. It was a searching article, highly civilized, passionately logical, but little to the old man’s ribald taste. He skipped it to peruse the first installment of Christopher MORLEY’S Thunder on the Left.

This story should have concerned the old man intimately since it devoted its comment to the cycle of reactions through which that dotard had just passed — the chemistry of the human spirit in the alembic of time. Outlined against the movement of the writing — a writing informed, under its cool, low laughter, with an unforgettable emotion — moved phantoms the old man knew, ghosts that had shared and lost with him the long war of innocence against the lie of actuality. Sometimes the clear words seemed about to utter the unutterable, to shape the secret that everyone knows and no one can tell of the anger of childhood, the bewilderment of middle life. The old man groped furiously to remember something. . . failed. . . . put down the magazine.

“Fiddle-faddle,” he said.

He turned the page once more, read a witty article, These American Men, by Rebecca West; a short story by Aldous Huxley, whose briefer fiction is always an obvious extemporization because of the fact that he is more interested in ideas than in life; far better tales by Wilbur Daniel Steele, Harold W. Brecht; two exquisite sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay; articles by Gamaliel Bradford, Katharine Fullerton Gerould; a snip of Stephen Leacock’s flippery:—altogether a remarkable issue, perhaps one of the finest numbers, not merely of Harper’s, but of any magazine, that has ever been published in the U. S. But the old man, dreaming of the authors of his youth, exclaimed:

“Flubdub.”

Subscribers who heard that dictum were enchanted. They knew that what displeased the old man would inevitably please them. “But an anniversary number is one thing,” they reasoned, “it is another to maintain for an indefinite period, the high standard of an exceptional issue. How long will all the material in Harper’s continue to irritate the old man? How long before he — Old Man Splutter, effigy of stodginess, decayed relique of a vanished taste — will find a paragraph he can enjoy?”