Fith Avenue

EDGAR SALTUS

PEOPLE who went away for the summer are coming back and others are coming with them. Only philosophers realize how charming New York can be when all New York is away, but, otherwise, the more the merrier. Particularly for landlords. Landlords are handy about the house. They rent you quarters at a thousand a month or, if you prefer, they rent by the month at four thousand quarters. That is both versatile and liberal. Besides the rooms are always what they affectionately describe as cosy. Yet were our advice asked, which it never is, we would recommend you to avoid them. Not that hotels are better, for there the servants will pull you - out of bed in order to make it up, but because cosy quarters are diminutive and people who live in small rooms are bound to have small thoughts. From samples of the conversation with which occasionally we are gratified, we fancy that the apartments which most people occupy are not perhaps enormous.

AMONG the samples is a rumor, which is perhaps untrue and therefore all the more interesting, that Patti, who recently resurrected at Covent Garden, is to favor us with another final farewell. Practise makes perfect. But, to the present generation, the farewell will be a d£but. To the gilded gang, the diva is as unknown as her first husband who was a marquis, or her second who was a maestro, or her third who was a masseur. The last she still retains. Without knowing more than the law allows we may assume that he has known how to treat her.

IN THE music maddened nights, when this Boadicea of the upper register first entranced New York, there were chariots for her, with footmen standing on the tailboard. Yet not for her alone. These things were usual among the scrumptuous. They went, as all things must. In their place, occasionally, was the daumont, a phaeton drawn by two horses on one of which was a postilion. That also disappeared. It was perhaps too democratic. Then came the tandem and the four-in-hand with its yard of brass tooting up and down the Avenue. Generally these things have also gone. They were too simple. Now we take our airing m the subway. That is progress.

IN DANCING we have taken another step. There are men yet living and women still lively who can recall an epoch when the waltz was considered immodest. As a corrective, a man suggested to his partner that they should sit while he put his arm about her. The suggestion was not thought suggestive. Women admire the brave and prefer the audacious, some of them at least, and in that preference is perhaps the origin of the trots and the tango. Considered as forms of exercise these exoticisms are probably hygienic. But there are others. There is the flamenco which is danced on the table; there is the St. Vitus which is danced alone and there is the tanza which is not danced at all. The tanza is a sort of waltz in which instead, of dipping about with the lady, you both stand still. That would never do in a go-a-head land like this. Here, if you please, is something less dilatory. At Palm Beach this winter, go galloping in bathing on a prancing cob. That is the proper caper.

ANOTHER guitar is the "Perfumed Death." In this play, with an adaptation of which Broadway is threatened, the heroine is smothered with flowers. The play is by d'Annunzio, who, of course did not invent the smothering which equally of course is quite obviously imperial and Roman. But otherwise d'Annunzio is a great inventor. One of his best edisonisms is a burglar. The burglar woke him up, or d'Annunzio said he did, which naturally amounts to the same thing. Thereat, instead of pulling a pistol, giving the alarm, calling his servants, summoning the police, making a fuss and getting his name in the papers, the pyjama'd poet appeared and said, and sternly enough, " Behold me, I am d'Annunzio!" "Not the d'Annunzio," the startled burglar stuttered, "not the author of Etcetera Andsoforth." "In person," the poet severely replied. Whereupon the burglar, overwhelmed, undone, fell at the novelist's feet and sobbed his contrition. That is a very good story, better we think than that other masterpiece Etcetera or even Andsoforth.

CONSIDERED merely as an abstract science, burglary is not all that it is cracked up to be. The business of writing novels is not either. There is too much fiction about the one and too little about the other. Highwayry is a much better trade. Formerly there may have been a prejudice against it but that must have been before it became a local specialty. Hereabouts, nowadays, you are everywhere made to stand and deliver. A custom so general can hardly lack public approval. But then highwayry is certainly uplifting. Moreover it develops nerve, energy, perspicacity, patience, and perseverance. Some of these attributes are among the cardinal virtues. Because of them Alexander, who was deeply religious, found so many things before they were lost that, in despair of doing better or even worse, Caesar wept and Napoleon fell. A bandit who could have given these brigands visiting cards and Harvester common — that is if, barring the deuce, he could have given anybody anything—was Attila. To-day in Hungary he is a saint. As you may see, highwayry can take you anywhere, even to paradise. No wonder the prejudice against it has gone. And just look at the men here who are what is called higher up. They are fine chaps and most diverting. You may say that it is other people's money that they divert. But other people's money is what everybody higher up and lower down, everybody not dead or demented, every man hereabouts who is not a woman, is after.

ANOTHER local specialty is the production of idols. This specialty, which we had thought was known to everybody, we recently found in a religious periodical, head lined as a discovery and editorially denounced. Our reverend friend said that it was heathen. But, with every deference, so far from being heathen, it seems to us human. Moreover, without being as old as the Palisades, it is by no means new. For a long time past, throughout Europe generally, and particularly in its superselect circles, there has been an increasing inquiry, a growing demand forthe idols that are here produced. We have but one objection, it is a shame to let them go. The open door is all very well, but not where they are concerned. These idols are not, as our reverend friend imagines, fabulous fiends fashioned for mystical cults and even if there were it is perhaps more urbane to bow to something than to stoop at nothing. But these idols stimulate a higher worship. They are claret and cream, flesh and blood, the glowing goddesses that emerge from Manhattan nurseries and who supremely rule the heart of man. In other specialties, Europe may do better. England may excell us in one thing, France in another, Germany in something else. It is with these idols that we beat the world. At no time, anywhere, even on Olympus, has any bloom of bliss appeared that could touch the New York girl.

IN PRESUMABLE shandygaffs of chic and caprice, a poet has evolved for her, or thinks he has, a new idea. It is that of garments handpainted after the manner of certain fans. The idea is gracious as old things often are. We forget whether it originated with Circe or Semiramis, but we do remember that it was quite the thing among the Babylonians who, as everybody knows, wore gauze made gaudy with futhsias. A few years later a certain Miss Varden appeared. Her gowns were not painted perhaps, though she herself was a picture. Moralists generally are agreed that when a girl can contrive to be that, she has fulfilled every duty in life.

THOUGH it is now three months and over since Doctor Bridges became laureate, no one knows why the appointment was made. What is more reprehensible, no one cares. But it was the same thing in the case of the last incumbent. No one knew why Austin was made laureate until it was understood that he lived on very good terms with his wife and that that pleased the Queen. As a title to supremacy in verse, what better reason could there be?