Heard a high even monotone that tickles the ear like a dynamo—It made me think of a great locomotive in the yards at Altamont—steam shut off (perhaps) and the high small ear-tickling dynamic noise they make.
Tuesday—December 2, 1924:
Young mannered voice of Harvard johnny: "Oh! Simply priceless! Don’t you l-o-o-ve that?
… Marvellous!" etc.—telling what Oscar said to Whistler, and what Whistler answered him.
A certain kind of mind collects these—pale, feeble, rootless, arty, hopeless, lost—Joel Pierce tells them, too. First time I heard them at Harvard what sophisticated raconteurs I thought them!—God, how green I was! “You will, Oscar, you will,” and all the rest of it!—Today, sitting on terrace at Taverne Royale, I made some of my own. Here they are:
One day as Whistler was standing before a window in St. James’s Street observing some prints of Battersea Bridge, he was accosted by Oscar Wilde coming in the opposite direction. “You will, James, you will,” said Wilde with generous impulsiveness.
“Gad,” remarked the inimitable James, imperturbably adjusting his monocle, “I wish I had said that!”
One day in June, Anatole France went to Rodin’s studio for luncheon. The talk having turned to early Greek primitives, Rodin remarked:
“Some writers have a great deal to say and an atrocious style. But you, dear Master, have a delicious style.”
“And you, Master?” queried France ironically, allowing his eyes to rest upon the torso of The Thinker, “since when did you become a critic?”
In the burst of laughter that followed the thrust, Rodin had to admit himself floored for once.
A young actor who had, it must be confessed, more ambition than talent, one day rushed excitedly up to Sir Henry Irving during the rehearsal of “Hamlet”:
“It seems to me, sir,” he burst out without preliminaries, “that some actors ruin their parts by overplaying them.”
“And some,” remarked Sir Henry, after an awful pause, “don’t.”
